Supernatural: On the Head of a Pin

Castiel(Misha Collins) reels from all the revelations he received this week.

Sorry for the delay; it’s been a hectic week.  I’ll be honest–after seeing the promo for this episode, I wasn’t looking forward it.  As I mentioned in the Heaven and Hell recap, torture isn’t my thing, and I wasn’t looking forward to a character I’m fond of participating in such things.  But while being sliced and diced with a knife is a pain I can at least imagine, being assaulted with holy water and rock salt seems a whole lot less threatening.  Then again, I’m not a demon.  Fortunately, there was also a great deal in the rest of the episode that balanced things out.

Starting with Castiel.  He appears at a scene of destruction–a variety of smashed and twisted vehicles in an otherwise empty parking lot–complete with about a dozen annoyingly blaring car alarms, which he silences with a simple wave of his hand.  If he could do nothing else as an angel, I would love him for that.  He kneels in the center of it all, by the dead body of blonde woman in white.  Bidding her farewell, he departs as the police arrive, and the lights on the helicopter overhead cut through the darkness to show us the imprint of wide-spread angel’s wings on the wet pavement where she lies.  It appears the war isn’t going so well for the heavenly host.  The angels should take note, though:  never possess blonde women wearing white.  They have a high mortality rate on this show.

On a dark highway somewhere in Wyoming, the Impala roars toward Cheyenne.  Sam is at the wheel, since Dean wouldn’t drive ten feet to meet up with Ruby, and that’s where they’re headed.  Dean’s weariness has only been compounded by Pamela’s death-he acts like a man who’s given up, despite Sam’s insistence he should be angry about the death and destruction they’ve been witness to recently.  He’s even depressed about their motel room, which he calls “home, crappy home.”  It doesn’t get any better when they flip on the lights, either, because Castiel and Uriel are waiting for them.  More specifically, they’re waiting for Dean.  They have work for him.  Now Dean gets angry–he’s sick of them being pushed around like chess pieces.  Aha, this is what I figured in the last recap.  But Uriel doesn’t care, because seven angels have been killed, presumably by a demon.  They have Alistair contained, but he’s not talking.  They need Dean’s expertise in “interrogation” to get the pertinent information.  Dean’s spent a lot of time thinking about his purpose in life since he returned from Hell, and he may not have figured it out yet, but he knows torture ain’t it.  Unfortunately, he doesn’t get a choice, as the angels make off with him, leaving Sam alone and pissed off. 

In an abandoned meat processing plant elsewhere, Alistair is caught six ways from Sunday in an elaborate devil’s trap, but it does nothing to change Dean’s mind.  When Uriel won’t allow him to leave, he asks to speak to Castiel alone.  He’s picked up on the shift in authority between the two angels, and Castiel explains that his superiors feel he’s gotten too close to Dean and fear he may be developing emotions that could impair his judgment.  Personally, he doesn’t want Dean to become a torturer again any more than Dean wants it.  That sympathy sways Dean just enough.  He collects his instruments of pain and enters Alistair’s torture chamber.  Alistair is quite amused at this turn of events, and taunts Dean, but doesn’t say who is killing angels.  He does, however, push Dean’s Daddy Issues Button, attempting to goad him into revenge for the torture John withstood in Hell.  Man, Christopher Heyerdahl makes this demon so creepy, that the annoying Brando accent actually turns into a menacingly definitive Alistair voice pattern.  Sam, meanwhile, is desperate to find Dean.  As he tells Ruby, Dean isn’t strong enough to go through with it, and those words stem from love and worry for his brother, not vindictiveness.  He knows Dean left a piece of himself in Hell, and he intends to step up and shoulder the burden in order to protect his big brother.  Aww, he really was listening to all Dean’s roadside confessionals.

Alistair continues his tale of John Winchester’s Hundred Years in Hell, and how the man never broke, although it only took thirty years for Dean to cave.  Forcing himself to remain calm, Dean begins with a syringe of holy water, that I assume he injects into the demon’s veins.  Whatever he does with it, Alistair starts making some very anguished and pained noises, which Castiel can hear clearly in the next room.  He looks quite pained himself, but in sympathy for the torturer, not the victim.  Back at the motel, Ruby is performing a spell over a map of Wyoming, and thank goodness the angels didn’t leave the state.  And have you noticed how the guys aren’t in Wyoming all that much, but when they are, it’s always the nastiest shit that’s going down?  It’s actually a very lovely place.  The spell reveals Dean’s location, but before Sam can go after him, he needs something from Ruby.  Something he’s been weeks without.  That something, it turns out, is the “it” he originally refused back at the magicians’ convention in Sioux City, Iowa.  It’s the reason his powers have grown in strength, and it’s the kick he feels he needs to defeat Alistair.  It’s Ruby’s demon blood.  He’s chomping at the bit as she slices her arm and offers it to him.  And as he eagerly laps it up like the addict he is, she smirks in such a way that finally satisfies me she’s playing Sam to her own ends, whatever they may be.

Dean moves on to Ruby’s knife doused in holy water in his interrogation, while Anna appears in the outer room to discuss the situation with Castiel.  She knows he has doubts about these orders, and she questions whether they could truly come from God.  Despite her words ringing true to him, he orders her away, and she departs.  As Sam races through the rainy night toward his brother(his eyes taking on an eerie black hue), Dean forces Alistair to gargle holy water, followed by copious amounts of rock salt.  Alistair chokes and hacks through that to my favorite line: “Something caught in my throat…I think it’s my throat.”  Heh.  He continues, and it becomes obvious that the torture here is reciprocal.  Dean’s is physical, Alistair’s is psychological.  And so much worse.  For he divulges that Dean becoming a torturer in Hell was the breaking of the first seal, the one necessary to make the breaking of other seals possible.  “And it is written, that the first seal shall be broken when a righteous man sheds blood in Hell.  As he breaks, so shall it break.”  This sends Dean into a massive tailspin, although the only evidence of it is his expression of fear and horror.  And what an expression it is–Jensen Ackles brought his A-game and then some.  Unbeknownst to Dean, however, a valve has been turned and a pipe been made to leak, so that a slow drip of water has eroded just enough of the devil’s trap to free Alistair.  When he turns to face his foe again, the demon is loose and proceeds to beat the living crap out of him.  Just as his eyes roll back as Alistair chokes the last dredges of life from him, Castiel enters the fray.  Alistair drops Dean to focus on the angel who just stuck a knife in his chest.  The angel doesn’t fare well, however, and soon Alistair is choking him, and reciting an incantation to send him back to Heaven.  Castiel’s angelic essence begins its blinding glow as it’s pulled from its vessel, but Alistair is suddenly gagging on his words, and is then thrown against a wall.  Well, look at that, Sam has arrived.  In less than a minute, he’s managed what Dean, Castiel, and Uriel could not-a straight answer from Alistair that the demons have nothing to do with the angel murders.  Sam is able to get at the demon’s core and control it, where Dean could only scratch the surface because of the physical limitations of this world, as Alistair hinted at earlier.  He’s come a long way from Cold Oak.  Oh wait, that’s not a good thing.  And yet I’m still cheering him on, go figure.  Even though his next scarily cold act is to kill Alistair instead of simply sending him back to Hell.  I don’t know how Padalecki manages to make Sam both frightening and sympathetic, but he can just keep on doing it.  Castiel can only stand to one side and watch in shock and amazement as Sam surpasses even what he can do, while fueling his doubts about what and who is right and good at the same time.  When it’s over, Sam looks satisfied, although a glance at Castiel gives him a moment of uncertainty.  He had to be wondering if Castiel was going to strike him down for using his powers, even if he did just save his hide.

It occurs to me at this point that Dean has done such an amazing job protecting Sam his entire life that we have never seen Sam admitted to a hospital.  But he’s sure spent a lot of time agonizing at the side of Dean’s hospital bed.  And here he is again.  This time Castiel stops by for a visit, as well.  But he’s unable to fulfill Sam’s request to pull a miracle out of his trenchcoat pocket and heal Dean.  Supremely frustrated, Sam goes off on him about how pointless the whole exercise was, and Castiel really can’t argue the point.  By the way, the light filtering through the blinds in this scene highlights both actors’ eyes in a very distracting way.  Anyway, Castiel is off to look for guidance from Uriel, who has been seeking revelation at an empty, snow-covered playground.  All they can do is theorize that something is wrong upstairs, adding to the pandemonium of the war in general.  Castiel wonders if perhaps God isn’t giving out the orders they’ve been receiving, and he’s hit the nail on the head, it’s just not the nail he thought he was holding.  He next seeks counsel from Anna, as he is utterly conflicted and wants someone to tell him what he should do next.  She refuses, insisting he needs to think for himself for a change. 

His first decision is to become a CSI: Wyoming investigator.  And he’s damn good at it, too, figuring that Uriel has something to do with Alistair getting free.  Uriel fesses up willingly, laying the whole story out for his brother angel as he displays the sword he’s been hiding up his sleeve.  Only an angel can kill another angel, and he’s the one who’s been killing the others in their garrison.  He also messed with the water pipe so the trap would break and Alistair would kill Dean.  For Uriel has stopped believing in God and so hates humanity that he’s doing what he can to bring about the rise of their fallen brother Lucifer, whom he admires.  He’s been converting angels to his cause, and killing those who refuse.  Preaching to a horrified Castiel does little good, as Castiel realizes all these orders he’s been questioning haven’t come from God, but Uriel.  While Uriel points out himself as proof God doesn’t care about them, Castiel is reaching the conclusion that this test of his faith can have only one outcome.  So he smashes Uriel through a brick wall.  Powerful fisticuffs ensue, presumably because budget constraints limit displays of angelic power.  Uriel eventually gets the upper hand, and it looks as if Castiel will meet his end, but this is averted by the timely appearance of Anna, who shoves Uriel’s own sword through his neck, killing him.  Kudos to the art department for recreating the wing imprint here, yet making the wing patterns distinct.  The nameless angel at the beginning had smooth, well-groomed wings, while Uriel’s are ragged and unkempt.  Great detail.

 Given the emotional gut-punch(and tremendous acting) of this last scene, it’s a wonder fans around the country weren’t calling in to work Friday morning with severe depression.  I know it stuck with me all weekend.  Castiel is at Dean’s bedside when he wakes, and asks if he’s okay.  Courtesy of his earlier choking, he croaks out, “No thanks to you.”  Dang, my throat hurts just listening to him.  Dean has to know if what Alistair said about the first seal is true, and Castiel confirms it.  When the angels learned of Lilith’s plan to use Dean to break the first seal, they laid siege to Hell(and I admit, I love how Misha Collins delivers that line with appropriate Biblical portent).  But they were too late.  The most they could do was raise Dean, in order to lay even more guilt and responsibility on him, because as it turns out, only the one who started the breaking of the seals can finish it.  So not only is Dean the one who began the apocalypse, he’s the one who has to stop it.  Understandably, this ends his tailspin by shattering him into teeny tiny pieces.  Ackles completely disappears here, and I can only see Dean Winchester, a repeatedly broken man at the end of his rope.  He tearily tells Castiel they’ll have to find someone else, because he can’t do it.  He doesn’t have the strength.  But Sam does, Dean.  If you two would just start working together again, I bet you could swing it.