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demetriandelibinaryboyfriends · 2 years

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Season 4, Episode 4: An Extremely Chaotic and Incoherent Review

OKAY DEADASS MY SECOND FAVORITE EPISODE IN THE SEASON, GET HYPED

The Good:

My GOD. This episode fucks so HARD. I think it added back the 15 years that all-nighters in college chopped off my lifespan.

First of all, this episode said NateBert rights and I’m losing my mind

THEIR LITTLE SECRET HANDSHAKE OH MY GOD

They’re so happy to be together again!!!

Also they’re like “we’re gonna be catty and cause problems on purpose, but now we’re gonna do it together”

Anyone else notice that Hawk lowkey decided he's Bert and Nate's bodyguard in this episode??? Like Kenny's about to start shit with Bert and Nate in the bathroom? BAM, here is our favorite avian edgelord to the rescue! Kenny looks at Bert and Nate the wrong way for two (2) seconds? BOOM here comes a wild bird, swooping in to spill our boy's snacks like a vengeful seagull! Like not only did Hawk re-adopt Bert, he saw him hanging with Nate and was like "okay fuck it, this one's my son too now"

And remember how Demetri protected Nate and Bert in the S3 Christmas fight??? HOW ABOUT THAT

PARALLELS

I can't believe I said Demetri and Hawk should adopt Nate and Bert as their nerd sons and then it became canon

Apollo gave me the gift of prophecy

"Word of advice, kid? Get out of Cobra Kai while you still can." is...oddly heartwarming??? Like yes Hawk is trying to be a smug evil bastard when he says it but he's tryna (albeit evilly) warn Kenny not to get sucked down the same dark path he did. Pretty neat!

DEMETRI LITERALLY LETS HIMSELF BE A PUNCHING BAG, like he doesn't even try to argue he just resigns himself like "I guess this is my life now" it's so fucking funny

Good boi Johnny Lawrence giving Demetri some padding so he doesn't break his ribs, excellent

Johnny actually checking in on Demetri after he gets kicked in the balls is wholesome as hell, like I'm pretty sure that's the first time in the entire series he's actually shown concern for Dem??? I fucking love it, my boy Johnny Lawrence is a softie for these kids and will never admit it

And Demetri is SO blase about it too??? Says he's fine while literally limping and clearly in extreme pain???

"You sure you're okay?" "Oh yeah, no, they're starting to turn back to their normal color" I LOVE THIS CONVERSATION, MY GOD

Demetri has toughened up so much it's insane, like imagine the bitch fit he'd throw over this punching bag business in season 1??? And now he can take a kick to the nuts like it's only a mild inconvenience, I'M SO PROUD OF HIM

Hey so Miguel and Daniel still have my ENTIRE HEART ACTUALLY

Oh shit, I forgot they also both grew up with single moms!!! Will the parallels ever end???

Gotta love how patient Daniel is with him, like mentally Miguel is already his son-in-law, it's great

"How do I tell my student that I'm banging his mom?" ICONIC

Classic Johnny Lawrence, straight to the point

DAAAAAAMN Sam is being highkey shitty to Tory in this episode, but like...I actually love that for her??? Like one of my favorite aspects of Sam has always been how flawed and realistic she is, and she wouldn't be any fun if she was a total saint who was always the "bigger person." I love that she's giving into her inner asshole to the point where people have to call her out for it.

Like I love when characters aren't enough of a jerk to lose sympathy for them but enough of a jerk to spice things up

I also genuinely felt awful for Tory when Sam made that dig at her singing, so like...congrats, show, for actually making me feel bad for Tory??? I've always kind of disliked her up until this point, but she's in a tricky situation for sure and I can actually see myself starting to warm up to her this season.

Also I'll grudgingly admit that Tory is adorable with kids ;___;

I do gotta say that Sam is a SAVAGE for smooching Miguel in front of her, like it's so petty but I kind of love it. Big Misery Business energy.

Love that Amanda is trying to mediate somewhat. I definitely didn't expect that, but it's nice to see someone try and reach out to Tory, after everything she's been through. I wonder if she sees any of a younger Daniel in Tory--a poor kid growing up with anger issues and limited resources to address them.

Fuckin love Robby and Kenny's relationship. Like the way Robby tries to protect him from the rougher parts of Cobra Kai??? Top tier content. I was frustrated with Robby last season, but him being such a sweet big karate bro is endearing him to me, I'll admit.

Also it's making me even more of a Shawbby truther. Between Kenny's buff older brother and his hardcore karate boyfriend literally no one would ever be able to bully Kenny again, it's great!!!

AUGH AUGH AUGH AUGH we got a wholesome Daniel-Miguel relationship, but at what cost??? IT'S OKAY JOHNNY YOU'RE STILL HIS KARATE DAD TOO I PROMISE

Tory x Robby is actually not bad at all. Disaster bi 4 disaster bi energy. I kinda fuck with it.

OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT the way Hawk's buddies IMMEDIATELY came to back him up

SAM WAS THE FIRST ONE EVEN THOUGH HE WAS A SHIT TO HER LAST SEASON

Highkey love how protective Sam is of her dojomates, and how willing she is to forgive Hawk doing so much fuckery last season. My theory is that both Miguel and Demetri put in a good word for Hawk, and because Miggy and Dem mean a lot to her, she's willing to let her and Hawk's beef be water under the bridge for their sakes. Like a "well, I trust both of you, and if you trust Hawk, then so do I" type of deal. Like ultimately Sam cares for Demetri and Miguel enough that any friend of theirs must deserve a second chance, and I think that's pretty neat.

Ngl I did NOT think Hawk and Sam would make friends that fast, but I'm not complaining. They have excellent chaotic besties potential.

Anyways what I was trying to say is that BY GOD, DEMETRI WAS RIGHT, HAWK DOES HAVE FRIENDS WATCHING HIS BACK FOR HIM

THE PROPHECY IS FULFILLED

AUGHAUGHAUGHAUGHAUGH HAWK MIGUEL DEMETRI AND SAM SQUADDING OUT IN THE CAR BY THE BASEBALL DIAMOND AND BEING BROS IS EVERYTHING I HAVE EVER WANTED AND MORE

LIKE I'VE ALWAYS WANTED SO BADLY FOR THEM TO BE A POWER SQUAD YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND

THE STRAIGHT KARATE POWER COUPLE AND THE GAY KARATE POWER COUPLE

I'M LOSING MY ENTIRE SHIT

Demetri gives Miguel a little congratulatory shoulder slap and I'm gonna fucking SOB

YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND I MISSED THEIR FRIENDSHIP SO GOTDAM MUCH

Anyone who says that people "don't appreciate male friendships" when they ship mlm pairings have CLEARLY never seen me gushing at great length and sobbing on the floor about the absolute masterpiece that is Demetri and Miguel's platonic bond

SO SUBTLE AND UNDERSTATED BUT SO GODDAMN GOOD

Also, if anyone is wondering where I am, from now on I will be living mentally and emotionally in the "Henceforth, Miguel Diaz shall be known as the rainmaker!" "EL DIABLO DE LA LLUVIA!" *Miguel grinning* scene

What do you get when you combine Miguel's wholesomeness, Hawk's hamminess, and Demetri's wordy dramatics??? The best scene in television history, that's fucking what.

GOD I missed the OG loser nerd trio so bad it HURT

Have I mentioned how much I love Miguel's two best friends being proud as hell of his sprinkler prank??? Like he sat at their pathetic little lunch table one (1) time and they both decided to hype this man up and be his personal cheer squad until the end of time

I get it though, it was a pretty epic sprinkler prank

And did you notice??? Demetri and Hawk??? ARE MATCHING???

gay

Anyways, in summary, THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWNNNNN

The Bad:

I would prefer that Nate and Bert would not be talking about a girl as I would like for them to be home of sexuals

Ngl, as much as I do love Sam and Hawk becoming friends as quickly as they do, I was hoping for a bit more cattiness and tension between them at first. Like a full-blown "enemies/rivals to best friends" arc.

Also Hawk was still a fucker to her last season and I wanted to see that apology scene??? I guess it happened off-screen and I think that's a bummer. Someone wanna write a "missing scenes" fic of it?

I feel like they're building up to a plotline about Johnny's dad, but like...I don't think I care??? Like he's already had two toxic-ass father figures with Sid and Kreese, and his bio father will probably be a dick too For The Drama, so it seems like it'll be nothing new lol

KENNY GETTING BULLIED BY MY FAVES IS MAKING MY HEART HURT

Yes I understand why, but my sweet little gamer son didn't know there was an insane dojo turf war going on D:

Already bracing myself for Kenny becoming an evil little meow meow but I am not enthused about it

The Johnny-Carmen chemistry was a bit lacking for me, like...I actually thought they were cute as hell last season, but now it seems like Carmen's entire character is going to be tied into being a love interest and a mom and that sucks

Get ready because I have MANY thoughts on Episode 5!

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popculturebuffet · 3 years

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Ducktales Reviews: The Battle for Castle McDuck!

How to sum up how I feel about this episode....

Yeah that’ll do it. This wasn’t a BAD episode. It flowed nicely, had two great new additions to the cast.. but after weeks of really good episodes, warts and all.. this one was just.. okay. Part of the problem isn’t the episode’s fault as I went in expecting the answers to scrooge’s immortality, the answers to hortense we didn’t get last week, and you know donald and della actually getting to interact with their grandparents. I got.. pretty much none of that, though I did get some answer as to how Hortense lived long enough to have donald. But we’ll get to that. Point is part of the episodes baggage is on setting my expectations too high, the same happened with “Astro B.O.Y.D.” earlier this season and in hindsight, that one is really excellent even if it wasn’t the fenton episode I was hoping for, it’s still really damn good. THis one... even if it’s not what I was hoping ofr, while not bad it’s still pretty medicore. Let’s get into why shall we? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- We open at Castle McDuck, where Webby’s narrating for people who didn’t see the last episode set here and aren’t obsessive about watching the show like you or I. And also because this time she’s not so starstruck that she can’t actually speak or function, so she can actually get all the lore she wants in. The family is here because while the Druid stones seem to be working, the mists protecting the castle, and keeping it out of lockstep with reality every 5 years, have suddenly vanished. Naturally Fergus blames Scrooge for that. I’m mixed on this version of Fergus. While i’m fine with chanigng things up from life and times, having him live and having him resent scrooge on some level, it worked better last time as there was emotional weight and a reason behind it: Scrooge and him didn’t get along becasue Fergus missed his boy and resented that his sucess lost him a son and made him cold and bitter like Fergus himself. It fit both men to just be too damn proud to talk it out. So while Fergus being a bit crotchety still isn’t ENITRELY out of character him still being a dick to his son for no real reason and given no new one for being an asshole to him just annoys me. The character last time was three dimensional, understandable and likeable. This one is just a bitter old man constantly yelling at his son and doting on his daughter. More on that bit in a bit.

Downy meanwhile is just as lovely as last time: Since she lived long enough to see her grand children this time, I love seeing her as a wonderful doting grandmother to her great grandbabies. She’s wonderful and I’m thrilled to see her again. It does however bring up one of this episodes biggest issues: Donald and Della are absent and this time for no good reason. Last time, it was fair enough to exclude Donald as there was no real space for him in the narrative, and he likely , even if he loved grandma and grandpa, didn’t want to have to explain his estrangment with scrooge to them and break his poor gram-gram’s heart. That’s fair. This time though? Their not there because.. frank didn’t want to use them. That’s.. literally it. They could’ve fit fine into the family fued narrative epseically since we’ve seen them sibling squabble, and unlike other adventures they’ve been absent, where they clearly just wanted scrooge to have time with the kids, or in the case of rumble for ragnarok scrooge had valid reason for not using them, this time? There’s no good excuse. Della would want to see her grandparents, Donald would get drug along. They only appear every 5 years. WHy the hell wouldn’t they be here?! I get trying to have character ballance but we’ve had several episodes this season of just scrooge and the kids. We DIDN’T need it this time and the lack of characters dosen’t really change anything. It instead wastes plots like getting to see what Donald and Della’s relationships with their grandparents is like, or their aunt, or finding out how their mother died or at least fucking MENTIONING hortense outside of one word and a photo. YOu think the fact their sister is dead would be important to Scrooge and Matilda but it just.. never comes up. Their niece and nephew never come up and my patince comes up short. I’m fine with character ballance but i’m not fine with wasting a golden opportunity for character interactions we haven’t gotten. I get we just had two weeks of donald and della I do, but it dosen’t make this any less frustrating or nonsensical. Having characters appear two episodes in a row dosen’t magically make them irrelevant or we’d be seeing less of Huey or Louie or Dewey and outside of last week, we REALLY haven’t. If they can show up once an episode why can’t their parents?

Point is a mystery’s afoot, and so is THE PHANTOM BLOT.. to no one’s suprise as he was both in the episode’s description and frankly magic being drained is his mo, this time using a portable generator. Webby dosen’t catch on to this.. but I let it slide as while she’s the only one to have really met and fought the blot.. she’s also busy with mc duck family stuff and frankly while a missing mystery is here, given how deep the mcduck rouge’s gallery goes, it’s not a stretch to say it could be any one of them. Especially Glomgold, who while not magic is willing to pay for rediculous shit why would “dispersing scrooge’s family castle’s mists to bug his parents” be any diffrent. Or possibly replace them as their son because he’s kind of nuts and entirely made of stupid and that’s why we love him. And Magica has the obvious motives of revenge on scrooge, as this isn’t her first set of dead parents, and a castle full of mystic wonders. It’s plausable to wait and see who it is first instead of just assuming it’s one guy.

And yup there’s a mysterin town:A set of mystical bagpipes of the clan mcduck that can bring life to where there is none. We don’t know if they can raise the dead but they can bring inanimate objects to life so there’s that. But seriously Donald should take them to his parents graves just to be safe. But before we can get to duck necormancy we have to find them so we get... (checks notes) a Louie and Huey team up again where Louie is an abrasive jackass to his brother for planning ahead, despite the fact he’s been proven wrong on that front twice now, and is entirely insufferable and has learned nothing about trying to find a quick and easy way of doing things depsit elearning this lesson 80 times already.

As you can tell I hate this subplot and am getting it out of the way NOW because it’s not good and treads ground we’ve tread THREE TIMES ALREADY. and you did it right the first time, you did it okay if sloppiily with let’s get dangerous. Why this ? Louie learns nothing, Huey learns nothing and it’s not funny.The two just search for the mystery, and Louie is impatient. Though talking with a friend in a ducktales server, i’m in one now and it actually really helps with these, did make me realize that Louie’s character development has stalled like I thought... it’s simply a Marco Diaz situation. Like the third season of star vs the forces of evil, it’s basically a coin flip if your getting a well developed verison of the character that’s been built up over multiple seasons.. or a jackass whose learned nothing and treats other people badly. Their different FLAVORS of jackass but jackass still tastes awful no matter who it is. It’s not as BAD as it was there as while it’s not helpign the character, it’s not actively having him do the worst things possible, but it still makes Louie’s plots a chore to sit through at times as when he’s not well written like with split sword, rumble for ragnarok or tickening, he’s just a 2 dimensional greedy jerkhole and I don’t want to spend time with him. And the other brothers have had times of being written one dimensional, not going to lie, but all I get from Louie in these plots is this:

After almost getting his family killed, after getting scrooge’s fortune overnight with minimal effort and having everything he wanted only to learn, suprise, it takes a lot of work to maintain.. and he still just dosent’ get that the easy way isn’t always the way, and after the trickining and let’s get dangerous hasn’t learned his brother is usually right when he’s being anal retentive. This was fine in the last 2 seasons but too much has happened for him to get away with this shit and not come off as obnoxious. It just drags any episode it’s in down with it. I”ll leave the rest of the review under the cut.

One more subplot before we dig into the main one: The Phantom Blot and his new partner, Pepper! If you don’t remember her it’s fine as she wasn’t named but she was the egghead voiced by Amy Sedaris who showed up for one scene back in the Blot’s first apperance and who frank said they had more plans for. Well we see those plans now as Pepper has been paired with the Blot for this mission as Bradford’s policy for missing mystery missions now is the buddy system. No going solo, despite the Blot really not liking any of this. Which honestly both fits Bradford, as he’s endlessly practical, and is just a good idea: most of his agents are kind of wild cards and have their own agends so forcing them to work together not only gives them better odds with scrooge, but prevents them from working their own angles against FOWLS better instrests. IN this case having the peppy, energetic and talkative pepper go with the closed off and dogmatic blot keeps him from going overboard, as Castle McDuck is basically one large magical nightmare for him to destroy and Blot keeps pepper on task and on stealth since, as we learn now we get to know her, she’s a bit overly excitable and not all that subtle, if not to dewey or della levels. She can stealth when necessary. She’s also DETERMINED to get the blot to bond with her and work with her, and is delighted to work with him, getting the job because.. no one else wanted it becasue the blot scares people and puts them off with his intensity, which he’s shocked about but really shoudln’t be.

IT’s just a nice dynamic, he helps her be a better agent and she helps him realize he can’t do EVERYTHING alone and that blindly destroying all magic in his path, as much as he’d like to isn’t the option, using some runes to track them. Sure pepper makes their presence obvious once or twice, btu she’s also essential to the mission more often than not and by the end, even if they loose, we’ll get to that, Blot has fully accepted his partner. It’s.. honestly heartwarming when you think about it: The blot’s probably closed him off from personal relationships of any kind because A) his family got brutally murdered by the person he’s hutning and B), he has a mission he can never rest in. He likely wanted to work alone because it’s how he rolls nad i’t sonly through seeing someone who genuinely WANTS to be around him and wants his missiong ot succeed that he realizes he dosen’t have to push everyone away and allies are more useful than none. It’s a warped way of thinking but for someone with as much baggage as blotty, it’s progresss and it’s a really sweet story. HOpefully this relationship will go farther.. I mean strange relationships have happened than a dogmatic dog who hates magic and a peppy go getter both working for an obliviously evil businessman.

So onto the main plot: Turns out Scrooge wasn’t the first person Fergus called this episode as we meet the DT17 version of Matilda! Horay! She’s voice by Michelle Gomez who like David Tennant and Catherine Tate before her is a doctor who alumnus.. though this time she’s past my time watching the show. I really gotta get on catching up. She played Missy, the female regneration of the master. Gomez is spectacular in the part here, and while I have no past experince with her I certainly want to see more of her work as she’s a delight. Matilda is Scrooge’s sister. In the comics she was the duitful sister who looked up to her big brother as he left Scotland to make his fortune, sending money and mementio’s back she scrapbooked. She eventually went with Scrooge to america with him... but this didn’t end well as Scrooge took advantage of his sisters as help and when he finally did take them along on an adventure, it was his lowest point, going from an honest buisness man to a cruel robber baron for one moment and left him and his company. She and Hortense TRIED building a bridge with a suprise party.. but by that point while Scrooge had backed away from being a monster, he was still such a dick things blew up. As far as we know he never saw hortense alive again, and he only saw matilda in her old age with the two reconcliing. I’ll get more into ALL of this when I get to those pieces of life and times obviously. Point is she’s a good character. And so is her reboot version.. but the reboot version did catch me off guard as, much like her dad she’s not really much like the sensible sweet woman from the comics. But given DT17 tends to really play fast and loose with previous versions of characters, and it often works out i’m not going to gripe about it: what they did here works. As for what EXACTLY they did here, this version of Matilda is more flighty: not incomptient or lacking in charm, but due to sort of bouncing from one improable venture to the next and staying at her parents between ventures. She’s sort of a female version of Jubal Pomp, an itallian duck comics character who modelded himself after Scrooge, but dosen’t have the common sense or work ethic scrooge does. That’s really matilda here minus the looking up to scrooge part: she dosen’t seem untalented, just a bit footloose. She also likes needling her brother and is unsuprisingly her dad’s faviorite since she’s around more. The two naturally get under each others skin, and we get our main conflict... not just because of their fighting.. but because Webby can’t help but mettle. She’s what makes this plot work: Webby can’t help but try to interfere because she dosen’t get siblings sometimes fight and have long standing resentments, something I relate to, and that stepping in or trying to end it sometimes just makes it worse. Granted sometimes’ it’s necessary, but in this casey Dewey, whose trying to inch her away is right on the money and after the awful plot with these two in SPlit Sword, it’s nice to see Dewey be in the right, but for actually good reason instead of just because the episode says so. Here he’s right that her getting involved will only escalate and her attempt to do so only reveals Matilda kidnapped scrooge’s pet hair clump and died it. She also has something resembling an emu. This only makes things worse and starts to escalate tensions leading to some between both sides, as Fergus takes Matilda’s and Downy takes scrooges. Again REALLY could’ve used the twins. We do get a nice bit where Webby coaxe Dewey, who understandably dosen’t want to help her further spiral into her own issues by helping mend family issues she really isn’t qualified to solve.. because she’s you know... 13. I mean granted Steven Universe did this sort of thing at her age.. but given he eventually repressed his issues so much he had a mental breakdown and turned into a giant angst monster, and only got better with therapy.. maybe get some therapy instead Webby. Just saying. Therapy everyone? Therapy? But yeah she coaxes Dewey with a statdew, and yes she says that exactly. This gets the family breifly united, as Dewey fakes an injury.. but finding out it’s fakkkke combined with Huey and Louie coming in just causes the enitre family to spiral into squabbling and webby to shut down a bit, with Scrooge planning to form his own clan after bickering iwth his parents and sister. Oh and it only gets worse when Pepper accidently brings some statues to life, and they get in on it too while Webby’s convinced the families over and she just wanted a place in it. And even if this isnt’ the BEST episdoe the show’s ever done, i’ll get to why in a second, I do like this. Webby’s nearly LOST this family once, way back at the end of season 1 when no one but beakly thought of her feelings about her best friends and surrogate uncle all leaving her after her other surrogate uncle you know.. said some pretty unforgivable things. She’s trying SO hard to force it to fit, so hard to fix things because she can’t stand them being broken, something I PAINFULLY relate to given my own personal issues with not being able to stand people being upset with me. She just wanted a family and i’ts gone. Of course it isn’t and webby’s sad words coupled with some house crashers get the clan mcduck statues included to kick Blot and Pepper out and get the bagpipes back, while Scrooge points out it’s the good families that can withstand a squabble. So the mystery’’s gotten, Scrooge and Matilda are squareish... and this episodes thankfully over. Happy day! Final Thoughts: This episode is okay. I very clearly have my problems with it.. but it’s a fine half hour of television and funny enough to bounce through it with some good character stuff. It’s just after the last few weeks, and really this whole season.. I expect more. There was no real emotional core besides webby this episode and her issues wer eboiled down to “Families fight but it’s fine”.. which itself is a pretty uncomplicated message when family dyanmics can be complciated messy and painful. My family is thankfully fairly stable, if not without issues because hey no one is, but given other people watching might come from far worse homes where the bickering is far worse and far more toxic.. yeah maybe have some nuance here. And this is from a show that usualy does that WELL: We saw it with Fergus last time before he was hollowed out for this episode and reduced to an angry dick. We’ve seen it with Donald and Scrooge’s estrangment or Donald and Della’s relationship: Family is complicated , messy and even good ones have problems. That should’ve been the message: family can squabble or even have serious issues but they come back together. Instead we just got a bunch of bickering for a cheesy message that dosen’t quite fit with what the series done. It fits for thanksgiving: family , the good kind, can last arugments and is there for you regardless.. and I know my family is. I just feel they could’ve done the message better. Basically the episode was fine... it just wasn’t up to the high standard this season has set even in it’s down turn and is easily the weakest epseically since Matilda really dosen’t feel all that fleshed out even though what we got of her was great. Basically not a BAD episode.. but it could’ve been a great one, and i’m disapointed the series didn’t try harder. NEXT TIME: regular coverage for the year concludes as we go back a few months chronlogically to find out why Santa and Scrooge hate each other. IT’s christmas time ya’ll! Until then if there’s an episode of ducktales or another disney series you’d like me to take a look at, suggest it in the comments or comission it outright for give bucks via my direct messages on here or send an ask for my discord. Until we meet agian, there’s always another rainbow.

#the battle for castle mcduck!#ducktales spoilers #ducktales #scrooge mcduck #matilda mcduck #webby vanderquack #huey duck #louie duck #dewey duck #fergus mcduck #downy mcduck #the phantom blot #pepper

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incorrect-spiderson · 4 years

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Prompt 6 and 31 with Peter and Harley being brothers and dork 💜 and I wanted to know for how you have been writing? 💕

My boysssss!!! Anyways I have been writing for about 5 years?? It’s always been a passion of mine and I’m just now getting pretty good at it! So yeah!

Also, I wanted to explain a nickname that Harley uses for Peter! He calls him Peanut Butter because of his initials! P. B. P. I just thought it would be cute. Aaanyways enjoy!

🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁

If it was up to Pepper, they would be having date night on Christmas Eve. Just her and Tony, doing adult things. Though, she can’t ignore her momma bear instincts. She doesn’t want the kids alone on Christmas. Or ever, for that matter.

“HARLEY DID YOU PUT HAIR DYE IN MY SHAMPOO!”

That was her cue.

Pepper sets down her wine glass and starts towards the stairs. She drops the blanket off of her shoulders and goes after her boys. With each step she can more clearly hear their fighting.

“Pink looks good on you Peanut Butter.”

“Harley you absolute ass!”

“Oh it’s not that bad.”

“You’re the reason Santa even has a naughty list!”

“Really is that the best-”

As soon as Pepper opens the door, both boys freeze. Harley smirks triumphantly, leaning against the boys’ shared bunk bed. His ugly sweater reads “Santa’s favorite Ho”. Pepper turns to Peter and bites her lip. Her eyes widen and she tries (and fails) to hold back a chuckle. Peter is only wearing Morgan’s bright yellow banana towel. His pink curls clings to his face as he scowls at Harley.

Peter perks up a little bit and points to Harley. “Mom he dyed my hair pink! He is so, so lucky I’m going to pride in a few weeks otherwise I totally would have-”

Harley scoffs and pushes off of the bed. “Petey-Pie you wouldn’t’ve hurt a fly. Also, last week you filled my pillow with whipped cream.”

“The fly didn’t dye my hair pink! And the week before that you-”

Pepper holds up her hand and raises an eyebrow. The boys continue to go back and forth. Every few seconds, Pepper drops a finger. Peter catches on first and instantly stops.

“What? You ready to finally admit defeat PB?”

Peter slaps Harley’s arm and points to Pepper. Harley moves to hit him back but freezes. Once Harley realizes she’s on her last finger, he instead drops his hand and sighs. “Sorry Mom.”

Pepper smirks. “Okay, now that that’s settled, Harley go and check on dinner for me. Maybe start making the gravy. Peter go and help your dad set up the Christmas tree. He’s too short to get the star on the top without a ladder and you can walk on walls.”

Both boys sigh but mumble out agreements. Before Pepper leaves she peaks back through the door. “Oh and Petey... put on some clothes. It’s cold outside.”

Peter’s face instantly turns red as he sputters. Harley sprints out of the room in a fit of giggles, narrowly avoiding the pillow thrown at his head.

Pepper chuckles and shuts the door. Her boys truly are... something.

When May had passed away, they took Peter instantly. She can clearly remember the night when Peter showed up on their doorstep. It was storming outside, rain had been pounding against the window so hard she almost missed the knock at the door. Tony had been upstairs with Morgan, so she naturally answered it. What she hadn’t been expecting was the red, tear stained, soaking wet face of Peter Parker. Who had been clutching a familiar green sweater and a pair of circular glasses like his life depended on it.

To say the least, it had been a very, very long night.

Harley’s situation hadn’t been much better. Her and Tony had been watching Deadpool late at night when he got the call. Pepper couldn’t quite hear what was being said, but she could tell by the worry creases forming on Tony’s face that something was wrong. Suddenly, Tony had shoved the phone towards her while he pinched his nose to fight back tears. When she answered, to say she was surprised would be an understatement.

Harley had been in hysterics. She could barely tell what he was saying over his sobs. Until suddenly, his words had become crystal clear.

The Keeners were dead. Harley had been out with friends while his parents and little sister were grabbing ice cream. His family never made it home. In the same night Tony had gotten on a jet, flown to Tennessee at breakneck speeds, and only two hours after the call Harley was in her arms crying his heart out.

They’d both been through so damn much. Through things that teenage boys should never have to go through. Horrible, terrible things that people only hear about on the news and then never think of again. Every day she marvels at how much strength they both have.

“HARLEY KEENER I KNOW YOU DID NOT JUST STEAL MY COOKIE! GET BACK HERE YOU LITTLE-”

Pepper smiles. She couldn’t be happier that they’re here. The tragedies were awful and she wishes every day that they would have never happened. But now, she wouldn’t have it any other way.

She loves her two boys with her entire being.

Pepper starts down the stairs, lazily sighing at the thought of getting back into her book and taking a sip of wine. She’s about half way down the stairs before she freezes.

Two boys.

Two of three kids.

Shit... where’s Morgan?

Pepper jogs back up the stairs and opens the door to her daughter’s room. She scans it quickly and then frantically moves on. She searches every room upstairs twice. Pepper gets ready to call for Tony when it hits her.

Literally.

“Ow! Shit..”

Pepper rubs her head where the Ironman action figure hit her. She gives a pained smile down to her little girl and shakes her head. “Sweetheart, if you throw things, please make sure they’re soft? Okay?”

Morgan’s face screws up in confusion. “But Momma, Ironman was wearing a tutu! Tutu’s are soft!”

Pepper glances down at the toy and realizes. Yes. Ironman is wearing a tutu. A bright pink tutu with little yellow and red sequins on it. Pepper picks up the toy and hands it back to Morgan. The little girl takes the toy and then wraps her arms around her mother’s neck.

Pepper sighs and lifts her daughter into her arms. “You’re lucky that you, little gremlin, happen to be acting more mature than your brothers right now.”

Morgan giggles and taps the action figure on Pepper’s shoulder. “Momma I always act more mature-er than them. They’re teenagers.”

Pepper laughs and starts down the stairs. “You aren’t wrong, gremlin. I think-”

“Oh god.. OH GOD! MOM HELP!”

Suddenly, everything else falls away. Pepper’s instincts take over and she’s racing down the stairs. She grips Morgan a little tighter and as soon as she hits the bottom of the stairs she sprints towards the living room. She’s .2 seconds away from calling her suit, then she pauses.

She had been expecting a lot of things. Burglars, Aliens, Ultron reincarnated. Hell, evil snowmen wouldn’t have been too surprising.

What she wasn’t expecting was her husband to be tangled up in tinsel while her son (who is stuck to the ceiling) is keeping the tree from falling on top of her tinsel-ified husband. Peter looks up (or is it down?) from his perch and sheepishly smiles.

“So uh... we had a slight problem.”

Pepper let’s out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding. She puts Morgan on the ground and moves towards her husband. Tony smiles up at her mischievously.

“Hey hot stuff. All I need is a bow and-”

“Shush and let me get you out of there.”

After a few minutes of light bickering and un-tinseling, Tony is free. She helps put the tree back in place and turns back to Morgan.

“Sweetheart, it seems like you’re also more mature-er than daddy too.”

Tony’s face morphs into fake disgust. “Are you feeding our daughter lies? Pepper Potts-Stark, I thought you were better than that.”

Pepper just waves him off and starts towards the kitchen. “Whatever honey! Just try not to...”

Once again, Pepper freezes.

Harley is standing over the gravy. With green food dye. He spins to face her and his eyes widen. He glances back and forth from her to green gravy.

Once again, Pepper takes a deep breath. “Harley... Keener. Please. Please tell me you did not dye the gravy green.”

Harley purses his lips. “Well, I was raised not to lie-”

“BULLCRAP”, Peter chirps from the living room.

“- but yes. The gravy is now green.”

Pepper blinks. It’s just one thing after another with her family. “Okay, well... everyone come eat. Food is ready.”

Within two minutes the entire family is seated at the table with their plates piled high with food. Pepper sets the gravy on the table with a sigh.

Peter snickers. “Harley I knew you liked Green Eggs and Ham but this is a bit overboard.”

Harley rolls his eyes. “Coming from Pinkie Pie-”

“Harley I swear-”

Pepper sighs. “Boys. Do I have to start counting?”

Both freeze. They look at each other and then at the ground. “No mom.”

The table falls silent as everyone digs in. The peace doesn’t last long though. Does it ever?

“Oh.. oh god. Bleh! That’s nasty.. Pep what did you put in this?”

Pepper holds up her hands in surrender. “I went by the recipe. Harley on the other hand...”

Harley gasps in feign innocence. “Mom! How dare you accuse me of-”

Pepper raises an eyebrow. Harley pauses for a moment, then sighs. “Okay fine I may or may not have accidentally dropped the cinnamon and it may or may not have gotten on the food.”

Peter tips back his chair and groans. “Harley are you trying to kill me?”

“Not yet.”

“Well don’t feel bad,” Tony sighs, “you didn’t completely ruin Christmas dinner. There’s still this... jello stuff.”

“Yeah!” Morgan squeals. “It’s got marshmallows and fruit and everything in it!”

Pepper takes in the laughing faces of each family member and smiles. Their family is far from perfect. Very, very far.

But, even though they might be the strangest family on the planet, she wouldn’t change a single thing.

🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁

Bonus:

🎶 “DECK THE HALLS WITH WEBS FROM SPIDEY”

“Peter, I beg you, stop. You’re hurting my poor Tennessee ears.”

🎶”THWIP THWIP THWIP THWIP THWIP, TWIP TWIP, THWIP THWIP”

“Mom make it stoooop.”

“Harley he’s expressing himself”

“I don’t think expressing yourself through torture is a good thing”

🎶 “DON WE NOW OUR BI APPAREL”

“I give up. Morgan, wake me up when I leave hell.”

“Okay.... What’s hell?”

🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌🎁🦌

AHHHH THIS WAS SO FUN!!

I would love and appreciate some feedback from y’all! Hope you love this!!

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filthyjanuary · 3 years

Note

7-12 and 16-20 for the asks!

7. What do you dislike about your favourite season?

i think season 2 is the best, but as i’ve said before, my favourite is 4 solely because the first few eps i watched were from s4. i think season 4 is very solid and even though it’s a season that HURTS BAD because of everything happening between sam and dean, i think the show earns the conflict for the most part. the literal only thing that still haunts me is that the STUPID VOICEMAIL THAT GETS ALTERED IS NEVER ADDRESSED. like i hate more than anything that sam still thinks dean said those things. like i know jared’s said that sam knows dean loves him but i don’t care!!! sam /and/ dean deserve to know the voicemail was changed.

OH also literally everything with anna milton. she deserved better <3 sorry the fridged you and gave part of your arc to a man, queen.

also sam and dean should’ve found out cas let sam out of the panic room.

8. Thoughts on Sam’s demon blood arc

i love sam’s demon blood arc. his hot girl summer! in all seriousness, it makes perfect sense. mystery spot sets it up that sam goes dark when he doesn’t have dean, and s4 is the natural progression of that. i love sam being hellbent on revenge, and the blood drinking was hot sorry not sorry. like obviously the end result wasn’t stellar and the handling of the demon blood as an addiction was handled rather shittily in the show, but overall this arc is near and dear to me and if i couldn’t have the boy king, i’m glad i got this instead. and it brings up some really interesting concepts that get explored really well in fic.

9. Thoughts on the Moc arc

i hate this arc mostly because like dean was terrible...which makes sense, but even after the mark was gone it’s like... he never /really/ pulls himself out of that place. it also just dragged on for FAR too long. like it didn’t need to be like 30 episodes or however long. i do like that it gave us demon!dean being like sexythreatening, and that scene of sam cradling dean’s face and begging him to tell him that he had to kill all those people and just the general sam is dean’s colette of it all. also the end of s10 with sam on his knees and dean telling him to close his eyes is deeply fucked up and i love it for that reason and obviously that happened bc of the MOC storyline.

10. Fave underrated ep

i am highkey obsessed with 1x04 phantom traveller, 2x07 the usual suspects and 4x19 jump the shark and i feel like most people don’t really care about those episodes or bring them up much. phantom traveller is just interesting bc i think the character moments are fun and i am obsessed with plane crashes for some reason. the usual suspects i just adore because it’s really a great exploration of HOW WELL sam and dean know each other and just how alike they are. and unfortunately i really like the cop lady in this one. jump the shark was the second episode of supernatural i ever saw and for some reason something in my brain latched onto adam and never let go. i love him so much (i know it’s not really him in the ep but ukno) and i love how much you learn about sam and dean through it too.

11. Thoughts on BMOL

boring. like...the actors were not good at their accents. they wanted what bela talbot had in s3. i just didn’t find ‘the british are evil’ a compelling storyline in a supernatural show.... like girl i live in real life you don’t need to preach to me about the british. also like they set up ketch to be evil like worse than toni who i already hate because she tortures/sexually assaults sam by having him kill magda i guess? but then they end up redeeming him and he survives longer than both mick (affectionate) and toni (derogatory), like seriously one of the worst Big Bads they’ve ever had.

12. Thoughts on Mary

to be honest, i think bringing her back was kind of a stupid idea in the sense that the ENTIRE SHOW starts because of her death. but i felt like HAVING DONE THAT, trying to deconstruct her image as like this nuclear housewife was compelling and the whole clash of sam and dean who just want their mom versus mary who left her kids as a an infant and a small child and now has these grown men who are older than her needing things she doesn’t know how to give was very interesting. and i wish they’d done more with that.

16. Any criticisms of their world building/lore

well i think everyone’s said it better than me that they can’t seem to get their stance on monsters straight at all and the show suffers for it. i also hate how like the later seasons especially just blatantly retcon so much. the prime example is the garden of eden in s5 vs s15.... the s5 version was so much more interesting and i hate that they brought it back just to destroy their own lore. the whole concept of the abrahamic god being like the ‘real’ god vs other gods just being minor annoyances didn’t like...make sense or feel good either. i also would’ve loved more exploration of like what the fuck it means to be a vessel and also exploration of other monsters/urban legends. like ok we get it ghosts/demons/vampires/werewolves sure w/e but there’s so much to pull from. it got repetitive and there’s so many other things they could’ve tried. hell the SECOND EPISODE of the show mentions black dogs and we never actually encounter one. or like chimeras... like there’s just plenty to dig into and they just get lazy.

17. What did you like about s15?

15x20 <3 also just...jack....that’s my son! MICHAEL/ADAM IN 15X08!!!! i think there were a couple moments i liked in like...the gambler and last holiday, and i thought belphagor was funny. oh! also sam’s nightmare visions were kinda fun even tho they led back to lucifer :/

18. Thoughts on Lucifer

he was a really excellent and intimidating villain in s5.... and frankly i enjoyed hallucifer as well because sure he was presented comedically but he was a deeply dark presence hanging over sam as a reminder of what he suffered. everything after that...sucked!!! it sucked!!!!! overstayed his welcome, letting him out of the cage again totally nullifies sam’s sacrifice and frankly he lost every smidge of intimidation factor he ever had. he was just annoying and whiny and pointless and sam should’ve killed him <3 fuck that guy.

19. Most uncomfortable moments throughout the show for you?

answered here

20. Define the different eras in a few lines or words (s1-5, s6-7, s8-11, s12-15)

this was meant to be short... and then it wasnt... sorry.

kripke: PEAK SUPERNATURAL. racist AND sexist but like i frankly do not care because the actually storytelling is so GOOD. COHERENT. i long for what could’ve been had the strike not kneecapped s3 and we’d gotten boyking, but hell the arc we DID get... so good. so fulfilling. aesthetics go off the charts. character dynamics so good!!! conflicts are earned!!!! there was a fucking vision here and it was unique and interesting and the show was COMMITTED TO IT. literally iconic television i love her so much. eric kripke needs a therapist but i’m glad he wrote this show instead of going to see one.

gamble: sera THEE gamble.... overarching storylines kinda weak, but SO FUN! i had fucking fun! soulless sam is a comedian, godstiel was the last time cas was remotely interesting, like!!!! she gave us everything!!!!! gets slandered way too much by this hell fandom like yes the leviathans were stupid but the were FUN and the character moments in s6-s7!!! so good!!!! lots of excellent MOTW eps as well, which... as we know...i love. when the show lost gamble, it lost something great, i’ll die on this hill. i love u #girlboss.

carver: there’s a lot of good here and a lot i despise. dean steadily grows darker throughout the show but there’s like a real VEER into being awful in s9 that the show never recovers from. it makes dean very unlikeable for the rest of its run, mostly by virtue of the show not realizing how unlikeable it’s made dean because it needs him to always be right so the fact that he’s basically turned into john is never like....addressed in any meaningful way. some storylines (MOC!!) dragged on for too long, while others were way too short (TRIALS!!!) but ultimately i think there were some good ideas here and moments i’m fond of. season 11 is Beautiful. i love her so much. there’s some really excellent eps in s11 and the character moments are good.

dabb: i literally hate it here (jack sweetie you are not included in this assessment you’re doing great). it was just stupid. the characterizations of EVERYBODY sucked and fell flat. way too obsessed with pandering to the loudest faction on twitter. took the wreckage of dean that carver left and full destroyed him. like straight up could’ve done something meaningful if they’d bothered to address it at all but they literally didn’t ever make dean be accountable for his actions??? can’t tell u what cas was doing it was so forgettable he obviously had no purpose literally the only scenes i remember were a couple where he’s being cute with jack and that one ep where he and sam go to that old-timey town and sam gets brainwashed. sam like... exists, and his character is intact but it’s only intact because the writers that were left didn’t want to bother giving him anything meaty to do to so the were like *spins wheel* leadership arc that goes nowhere, and he just exists being kind and compassionate and putting up with too much shit. BUT HE HAD REALLY FUCKING EXCELLENT MOMENTS WITH JACK and that alone is why i think it’s worth the slog. sam/jack is my favourite dynamic on the show following sam/dean so...unfortunately based on that.... i can’t just burn the whole dabb era but seriously... way to make every character a hollow, one-dimensional shell.

send me supernatural asks

#ALLISON THANK U I LOVE U #asks #spn #long post #so-excuse-my-tantrum

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elizabethrobertajones · 5 years

Text

14x08 watching notes

This episode is the Worst I had to lie to my mum when I came downstairs trembling and tear-stained to get a cup of tea to recover, and play it all off as cold symptoms, and now I feel complicit in some sort of deceit with the episode and like Meredith broke the fourth wall through sheer pain.

Good morning, I slept in until seven after they started digging up the road outside at 9pm at night, so I still kinda have a lingering headache from that, but I'm pretty sure Meredith is about to make good on the Dean n Jack murder pact or something else of that level of awfulness so... *deep breath*

YAY it is Lily!! I mean it was pretty obvious from the costuming because wow she's a distinct person but idk maybe some people thought it was her mom?

Anyway getting a recap just of how terribly Jack is doing and then also a reminder of Lily Sunder is just.. Good recap. *kisses fingers*

(*curls up in agony*)

In all the drama I never noticed Rowena being among those who yelled "Jack!" when he went down and to be honest she knew him five minutes and I'm crediting all that panic in her voice to his absolutely ridiculous powers of being the most adoptable creature in the cosmos. You take one look at him and you want to make sure his shoelaces are tied properly and he has a glass of milk.

Anyway he totally caught Rowena off her guard and made her express an Emotion(TM) that was not spite and a good chunk of that is new and improved Rowena of the last year or so, but also just... She bonded HARD :P

Ironically I left the spoon in my coffee in my haste to get up here and start watching so now I will drink it like that and possibly exit the episode also wearing an eye patch

I watched a second and tucked the largest, most comforting stuffed toy this family owns under my arm. Yes, not my personal stash of friends, the family heirloom squishy guy who has been with us through all the worst stuff D:

The framing is Sam sitting at Jack's bedside, Dad no.1 as season 13 firmly established for us, and the dad with the closest traditional relationship of father/son to Jack. Then Cas hovers nearby, struggling to be as close but still Dad no.2 with the ongoing and uncomplicated connection to Jack in the sense that both just sort of accept they're now father and son without any debate or internal wrangling, and that's always been Jack's in with the family and the way he inadvertently got Cas to vouch for him from beyond the grave when he said Castiel was his father and Sam immediately just flipped to Team Jack, not, of course, that he'd not been giving him a huge chance and trying to reach out to him already, but that was his "oh shit this is now my son because Cas is dead" moment.

Finally, Dean fills the foreground, face in shadow, the conflicted Dad no.3 who can't even face his dying son, taking it personally because this is literally the fourth smol child he's taken under his wing who he then lost, from Sam, Ben, Emma, a truly tragic collection of lost children. He resisted adopting Jack because he couldn't be a parent again, not after what Sam put him through as a parent, and yet Jack, the most adoptable boy in the cosmos, eventually wormed his way under Dean's skin too, and by the end of season 13 Dean was acting fatherly towards him and by this season Dean's been opening up the doors and letting Jack be his son. And. Whoops. As SOON as you took him on a hunt for one on one father son bonding time, look what happened.

And so Dean will lurk in the foreground, not looking at Jack, peering moodily into some dark empty box that metaphorically is his soul or his remaining ability to cope with losing children or some such nonsense. The pandora's box of parenthood. He's full on dark romantic hero brooding.

OH NO IT IS A RECORD PLAYER NOT A BOX

I need our family to retroactively adopt a larger, squishier friend to hug in this trying time

Having archived every single one of my watching notes ever between last episode and this episode, I'm more than usually pained by Dean's "not meant to be crap" line because he's been resisting it the entire frikkin time, when Sam kept, even long long long before they knew their real destinies, musing if HIS own personal angst was meant to be and Dean was like don't give me that destiny crap. I swear there's lines about this back in season 2 or 3 when Sam is musing on his powers and the grim lot fate had dealt them. This is a callback line to Dean dealing with his own sense of unravelling control and pure panic about what was happening to Sam, back when that was a thing in the very early seasons and he was having to face the kid he raised from a baby amongst all that tragedy now recklessly declaring all sorts of horrific things about not being able to resist his destiny. Oh, also, in season 2, while under a murder pact from John about killing him if he couldn't save him.

Honestly, it's barely a relationship worth mentioning if you don't have a murder pact going with Dean. Ben is literally the only one of all 4 children AND CLAIRE who hasn't had one with Dean.

If this episode involves Dean bringing any of his records in to play for Jack I'm gonna go out in my pyjamas and take a long walk to the sea and then keep walking once I reach it

Dean you did not walk nearly far enough for Jack to not hear you thump the wall outside his room

PS: totally figured the promo scene was an early emotional beat between Dean and Cas which utterly delights me because the earlier that came in the episode the better as it meant less and less chance it was about anything other than Dean and Cas having an intense relationship over this whole thing.

Jack is the absolute worst about dying. He's this saintly angelic little boy from like, no later than 1900s literature, who exists only to bravely suffer and love with his whole heart. He's snatched out of an era when kids needed morality tales about how to die politely of consumption with the least amount of fuss for their parents and 300 siblings.

How dare you fucking die selflessly. Humanity is at its Bithc This Isn't Fair stage. Throw a fit. Go walk into the sea out of protest.

Okay you're in Kansas I understand how that is an unrelastic option and I grew up spoiled by the immediate location of the sea should I ever need to walk into it.

This show has never made me cry before the title card before.

This is the Pippin and Gandalf scene from Return of the King with the whole Into the West thing that they wrote for a sick fan who died before the movie came out and literally Annie Lennox sings what would be Jack's THEME for this scene.

Sam is horrified that Jack didn't even live long enough for a LotR marathon to explain the reference that's making him bawl.

I LOVE that this scene with Dean n Cas is just about Dean being a wuss about watching his son die because that's so much worse than Jack having asked for a mercy kill or anything. And this all before the title card. Cas tearing Dean a new one about going in and watching your son die smiling beautifully like a little cherub who can't wait to find out what happens next.

Jack's gonna be dead before the title card, isn't he?

Oof.

Hey, Dean, one more reason to hate yourself :) :) :)

Also robbed Cas of watching him go.

But I think tbh they could have done this if Dean wasn't being a coward about watching Jack die that they would leave Sam to sit at this side in the last moment.

Ugh, my eyes are leaking too much to type. What the hell is all this wet stuff coming out of them.

I've never seen a TFW shot where Sam was the shortest but he is slumped over like someone cut all his strings.

"Your brother's in pain" AND WE'RE NOT? YOU'RE NOT? CAS ISN'T?

Dean stopping Cas going after Sam with just a catch of his shoulder... Ugh. The two of them are still connected through all this in a way where Cas and Dean are connected whether Dean's in the most obvious pain or Sam is.

Cas, pls be selfish and in the most obvious pain at some point this episode.

Oh please don't make me watch Dean telling his mom that Jack died

please

I beg you

They put a photo of Kelly next to Jack's bed D: Or has he always had that?

That's not even the photo that Cas had pinned to his board in 12x10 and yes I went and checked, I'm leaking tears too much to watch because Cas is standing over him and this is going to be the worst while Dean's answerphone message lays over the top.

I'm so not here to watch TFW mourn their son.

They had him for like a WEEK this SUCKS.

ALso I said "please don't make me watch" so they cut away to Cas mourning silently while Dean talks to Mary's answerphone because Meredith is an evil fairy who whimsically takes your wishes and twists them into even worse options.

*takes my glasses off and throws them aside angrily when Sam emerges carrying a duffel over his shoulder and wearing the fucking orange jacket he first met Jack in*

God, I don't even wear them for focus, just lack of headaches. Why was I bothering.

7x10 and this episode are probably going to be unholy companions in this show's canon

"She's come down with acute Tear Duct Blockage. The only option is head amputation or we make her cry, NOW" "Don't worry, I have just the thing."

Dean this answerphone message huuuurts

Also explains the Buckleming issue of not calling Mary, to just say, yeah, it escalated, rapidly.

Your brother is storming off and Cas is broken.

If I have to see Cas see a set of PB&J crusts and a glass of milk identical to what Dean saw in 9x10 I'm - well, I'm still here instead of walking off into the sea so my threats are starting to look a bit performative. BUT I'M THINKING IT.

Cas watches Sam go, while Dean is being dwarfed by the bunker and obfuscated by its maze of corridors.

*presses my hands over my eyeballs* STOP. STOP IT. GOD. You're not even sobbing or anything you're just lEAKING. This is so annoying! I'm gonna dehydrate and they'll find a shrivelled skellington here and I'll go with just a few quiet sniffs and a dumb smile on my face like fucking Jack did.

Now I'm just distraught about the first time ever in canon we see Cas drive, it's in his dumb blue car and Dean's broken and not up for driving even if Sam presumably hadn't stolen the car for his errand/driving until he finds the sea and walking off into it mission. All my myriad fantasies about Cas behind the wheel of the impala and Dean grinning at him like yeah that's my baby (which one is he talking about?), and nope we're getting Cas's little partymobile and Dean's mute expression of grief.

NEVER MIND THEY SHOWED ME SAM CURLED UP ON THE GROUND USING THE IMPALA AS A BELOVED FAMILY HEIRLOOM TO HUG AND I SOBBED OUT LOUD FUCK YOU MEREDITH FUCK YOU

I need the tissues why were they not here in preparation for this episode

I need to avoid my mum all day on the ground of spoilers because my face is a walking spoiler

"TELL ME YOU DIDN'T MAKE A DEAL" "wha- no, I'm trying to make a pyre"

Making a pyre doesn't usually involve curling up on the floor.

Cas is getting an accidental glimpse of 13x01's emotional landscape, not that anyone will tell him this was what it was like for Dean, that we now have Sam in the spot of. We're getting some mirror image missing moments, like we just saw Dean get the axe out but did see him begging God... in this one we see Sam go take it out on a tree.

Incidentally I re-read all of Terrible Coffee AU two days ago for Reasons and the scene where Sam is whaling on a tree while screaming into the sky is pretty much this. Which is fucking hilarious that 2 years ago I decided Sam taking out his feelings on the local trees was a Thing when he was depressed.

(I wrote that scene the day Eileen was murdered on the show and honestly at the time he was mostly just angry on canon!Sam's behalf and I figured I'd come up with plot reasons later.)

Oh, they weren't driving the party!mobile, they were driving something else. I'm not even gonna ask where they get these vehicles

Yeah I'm harping on Dabb vs cars because Cas is talking about Jack's story ending like this and certainty of death for angels and this is just... the worst.

the story line - Cas deciding how their stories go. Dean resisting the how it's supposed to be of Jack's death. TFW want to take the narrative into their own hands. We KNOW in this world deaths are stored in notebooks, potential ways to pass that you skate past until one claims you. They're free to write their own stories but the ending is always pre-written for them... It's just a matter of which one. But Cas especially... Jack was supposed to bring paradise, and maybe the emotional landscape between season 12 and 14 is a gulf of difference in their openness and bonds, largely facilitated by Jack's presence in the narrative and relentless open love for everyone who was nice to him and even those who weren't in Dean's case. He breezed through their lives, manic pixie dream girl'd them to emotional health, and mayfly'd out. But that's THEIR stories. That's not JACK's story. That's not the epic destiny something as cosmically powerful as him was due, and the potential he was shown to have... It abruptly gets into the territory of Dany having her whole Stallion That Mounts the World prophecy for the son she lost... I've not watched the TV show since it diverged so wildly I couldn't hack it any more, but the books with everyone wondering if, like, Jon Snow was this guy instead, etc, picking this that and the other guy... what if Dany's lost child WAS the only one it applied to and the prophecy just fizzled out? ASoIaF looms over Jack's narrative... He's literally been framed against an Iron Throne in the past, and his character arc for parts of season 13 was a sort of anti-Joffrey in many ways. And then in death, GRRM's unromantic look at fairytales and heroic narratives comes for him too, that maybe it doesn't always happen like the stories say...

... but of course, he also has LotR coding, and in THAT regard, Sam Gamgee has his good old speech about the heroes in the stories and how we relate to them and are inspired by them and become them. The stories that matter. And Jack's was supposed to be one of those. In a way, their lives have been so epic that Jack mostly having a personal impact rather than a cosmic one seems wrong to them. That he didn't become the great hero of his own story, but was a tragic hero who ran a dramatic but personal arc and burned out because his asshole father killed him and his asshole uncle presumably finished him off with an experiment in grace transfusion. At least if my dashboard is to be believed :P It's inconcievable to TFW, the "making it up as we go" people who tore up the script and threw away the pages, that they can't just make this happen or that Jack didn't serve some great purpose. Even men as weary of Destiny as they are, struggle. Just because that was their lives, so how could the son of all three of them not follow in all his fathers' footsteps?

"Jack being taken before his time... Being taken before *me*" Cas shut the fuck up.

But that is the speech from Theoden, and once again Sam is Gandalf, which is fucking hilarious that Sam's been Gandalf TWICE this episode.

Ever it's grown on the tombs of my forebears...

you have four bears???

God dammit that joke didn't stop me crying as they go knock their glasses together and hold Jack's lil 3 dads wake

3 Dads Wake is a great name for a whiskey

God, Cas is drinking.

CAS.

They need to give him like one bottle to every finger of whiskey they drink but dammit if they don't get Cas loaded.

Letting them talk privately about how aweomse Jack was and not letting us hear it is a crime

Listen you don't even know me if you didn't think as soon as the nougat appeared on screen I didn't hit pause and sob for a whole minute with my hands over my face

Officially worse than bobby and the goddamn licorice conversation

Cas laughing with caramel hanging out of his mouth is the worst thing the sho whas ever done and I'm suing for emotional damage

Imagine being one of the bitter stans who hates one or more of TFW or Jack right now watching this scene. God, are you even human. They're eating Jack's secret nougat stash they all pretended they didn't know he had.

I can't believe I'm now thinking that Lily showing up will probably be a lighthearted way to bring up the mood of the episode.

Cas is offficially wobbly! We have Cas tipsyness!!

Sam tapping out first. Oh no. Don't leave. Don't.

Fuck you Sam Winchester how dare you canonically be the most lightweight of TFW consistently for the entire show and need to go crash off the side of your bed and sleep on the floor while Dean n Cas are still drinking together.

Did Dean seriously outdrink Cas.

Well that's... something.

I am gonna cling to that like a rock in the churning sea I have walked out into.

Also I managed to calm myself down with walking around my room taking deep breaths so I could go downstairs pretending not to be a wreck, so I could get tea, and my mum made me finish the sudoku for her. I don't have the heart to show her this episode. She loves Jack more than anyone in this god damn fandom and maybe more than Cas does. Maybe I'll lie to her and say the show ended last episode and Jack was fine hahahahaaaa

OH FUCK I hit play and there was a single line of dialogue for the whole wake. Dean drunkenly slurring to Cas, I think, you know we did everything we could, right?

I'm...

*walks further out into the ocean*

"Here's to you Jack, wherever you are" I am not okay.

Oh fork you Meredith we did not need to see the boy in Heaven eating burgers.

Oh fork you Meredith we did not need to see the boy in Heaven eating burgers while on a case with all of his dads.

OH SON OF A BENCH THIS IS THE DODGE CITY CASE AKA 13x06 MEREDITH YOU DINK.

Oh dear, Heaven is broken. Who was the ashhole who was saying that Jack should die so that he can go to Heaven so he's well-placed to help deal with all this nonsense.

LOL Jack would be the sort of person who goes to Heaven and doesn't need more than a second of prompting to be like oh wait I am dead and in Heaven, and just, like... Go open the door. Just pop his head out like cooee I wanna hang with my dads anyone here to replace the bulb in the sun so I can carry on hanging out here for eternity?

Like, seriously, I'm dead, this is when I am supposed to catch a break.

Let The Boy Say Fork.

Listen, secondary to his power to be adopted by everyone on sight, Jack is uncanny also with just walking into trouble.

And to try and be clam for a moment, this is Jack getting pulled back into the story, but not just by unfortunate happenstance, because he was the one with the sharpness, the cosmic awareness even on this level that Heaven just doesn't quiiiiite work for him in the way it's supposed to even if say it was at full power, that he is the one who voluntarily not just understands instantly that something is wrong, but then is fully snapped back to his old self, and chooses to open the door, and that is the moment of choosing to continue his story, at least for now.

It's like how the last time we saw Bobby chronologically was in Inside Man and Cas and Sam woke him from his repose and got the fighting spirit back into him enough to open his own door and rejoin the story for one last hurrah... And it was a choice there too, a moment of once more telling the natural order to screw itself, Bobby could step outside the proscribed ending of his narrative one last time.

Unless Jack finds him and is adopted on sight today.

Sam looks way too healthy.

Invigorated by having a Plan

Lils. Finally getting to see the Bunker filled with all her stolen research notes.

And no that wasn't canon before, but boy am I hoping she recognises her research amongst all the bunker's angel lore.

Men stealing fuckin everything

"We've never looked through Kevin's angel tablet translations"

HAVEN'T WE?

WE HAVEN'T

THEY HAVE BEEN THERE

FIVE

FUCKING

YEARS

And every forking time something comes up where they might be useful I say, HEY WHAT ABOUT KEVIN'S ANGEL TABLET TRANSLATIONS?

and the show says

hey so we don't have the angel tablet but we do have the demon tablet

and I'm like I'm sure that won't have any dumb side effects that could be avoided by having the angel tablet translation just on hand in your archive

did Meredith hear me screeching

because I screeched very very loud after 13x14

13x13 sorry

that was Bucklemming handing her the wrong fucking tablet

this is bitter vindication but feels even better than her and Bobo remembering the grace extracting needle in 12x19

Glynn is a fucking gift.

On the other hand this episode now is pulling on 9x06 and 12x10 at once and that makes me feel woozy

I can't deal with a Glockeybo combo

Also waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah Kevin's handwriting. I can't deal with that AND Bobby memories AND FUCKING NOUGAT DEATH

Which I mean I do feel instantly better about once he opened the door and let himself back into the story and I stopped crying at once and cheered up and Lily is indeed providing much needed relief, wild as that all sounds.

Lily trying to explain her soul magic to Sam and Dean, rubes who haven't done a single enochian calculation in their lives.

Wait, no, Sam has done one, in ... 12x19 ...

But yeah, a rube and a completely self-taught asshole who knows like one thing about it.

And she's like oh yeah just use his soul and they're like AAH WTF LILY and she's like er this is the most obvious thing in the world what is the problem here

where are my cas reaction shots

Jack wearing an eyepatch for the rest of the show would be adorable and hilarious

"it won't cost much... he'll never miss it" trust me his soul is enormous and boated with sweet nougat love, he can spare it, guys.

Dean being able to say "Jack's dead" one day later, when he couldn't say it about Cas practically until he was BACK

Nice trade. TECHNICALLY nothing dodgy about it at all, at least in the sense that aside from resurrection consent issues from Jack, once he's back the choice is still on him to choose to grow old and die as Lily has done, or even to stop using the magic to sustain himself and die again immediately if he is squicked out by it... Or it all comes from trading on his OWN soul power.

Definitely better than demon deals or having any favours looming over them etc

And with Heaven in the state it's in, honestly sending Lily there might be easier than they think if NO ONE IS LEFT TO RUN IT.

Er, imminent ghostpocalypse issues aside.

We're in ghostpocalypse territory as of a minute ago show time, btw.

Cas has quietly observed all this chatter and we get back to him when he says, "Don't you think Jack should decide for himself" so honestly Cas is right there with me, and I always like when me and Cas are the ones agreeing on a thing in the episode.

Obligatory reminder that Sam is more aware than most about soul stuff

*takes another piece of coal off the pile I was going to send Meredith for ruining christmas*

HEY, ANUBIS.

Don't tell him about what they did to Osiris

Unless that would amuse him

Wait never mind Meredith is literally throwing in amusing snark about 7x04 which I think when Adam Glass disowned that episode (despite how I actually think it's really good and he was too hard on it) he never expected anyone would ever want to throw in amused references about it in canon ever again.

"When God left - sorry, long story - " Lily is one of the few people who seems able to conceptually roll with the nonsense TFW deals in all day.

She should join the squad. Always room for a 100 year old badass with deep enochian lore knowledge.

I'm sorry has Jack crashed Kelly's heaven or is this a rando little girl. I immediately thought she was Kelly in the long shot and they substituted a lil girl for POV when we got closer and actually had to go back and look again and she was the little girl all along.

This also conceptually looks so much like Cas's eternal tuesday afternoon.. A rainy, flower-filled garden.

Roosevelt looks SO much like the doggie in 11x20 aside from anything else

IT IS KELLY

This is horrifying since they never ever got to meet ever until now and I'm suing Meredith

I mean I'm already suing her but I'm just adding this to the list of complaints. My laywers are working overtime on this episode.

FORK!! THEY GOT HER BACK FROM LEGENDS OF TOMORROW FOR A DAY!!!!

Can Kelly and Jack go on a rampage around Heaven to fix things?

Her hair is suspiciously darker from the back which I think is her Legends look from the gifs I've seen

Wait, Bobby had a forking dog called Rumsfeld, and Kelly has Roosevelt.

"Hi mom you're dead"

".......................................................... NOooOoOooooOOoo No no no baby no"

Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

Dean resisting the spell and complainging "gotta happen, no other way" is making me feel like the Heaven Drama is going to smack them right before they can get it all done and give them a LOT MORE to worry about than Jack but also give them a roundabout way to see him again and also, of course, mean Lily might be useful for an entirely other purpose while she's here...

Dean right now is rationalising this through the lens of that all their terrible deals have been terrible and that this is just one more step on the Winchester life and death merry-go-round, and of course that Jack is about to get the full family treatment he deserves. But that's the Winchester lens of looking at things that even when deaths are brutal and lives cut unfairly short, there's going to be a way to bring them back if they haven't finished their stories. John finished his, in 2x22 seeing Dean get the revenge he needed to be at peace, but everyone else...

Is it ethically right to put Jack on that merry-go-round when he smiled sweetly and died with as much enthusiasm as he gave pretty much everything in his life?

The table lamps are out in the bunker D: them being dark is so ominous

And Cas shows up like shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit something worse going on guys

They're so casual about just summoning gods into their front room these days

Of course they're doing it in the spot in front of the door with the war room behind in one direction... The opposite end of the library to where they opened the rift.

Sam picks his way through the wet paint but Dean stands right in the centre of this circle for SUMMONING THE GOD WHO DECIDES WHO LIVES AND DIES AND WHERE THEY GO to have this lil chat with Lil?

And now Dean steps out of it and corners her with the obvious question - what's wrong with your magic and why are you risking going to Hell to stop using it entirely?

I'm so sorry you have to look at more dead angels, Cas

I'm also so sorry they were killed by black slime because wow after season 7 that was a laugh and a half for you

... Can you swear in the hallways of Heaven?

DUMA LIVES

(probably "for now" though hopefully longer than that)

Ma'am are you aware you have a Nougat on the loose too

I'd love it if Cas is like hi what's happening also have you seen my son

This actress needs to come back for a 3rd time to follow Dean around in a crisis moment.

OH NO now Cas is coming to the heaven memory and seeing what Jack considered his best memory

YEAH. I knew Naomi would show up, I just didn't know when :D

(She wasn't in the credits as far as I could tell but I already sort of knew they were leaving people off? Or maybe I was thinking lol I bet Amanda Tapping is in this episode and they won't tell us... On the other hand she mAY have been in the credits but I was WEEPING MY EYES OUT so didn't clock her despite my efforts to hold myself together and see who was coming up on screen)

Naomi doesn't have the most dramatic entrance on the show but she sure is racking up points for good entrances one at a time each time she appears. She never just, like... toddles onto screen normally.

"Perhaps the angel side of him knew he was in Heaven" honestly the most tragic thing I was trying not to think about is that he knew the entire time but he was willing to play along and enjoy hanging with his dads for eternity despite that.

Oh man it's another dispute over who owns Jack. Is this kid never going to be allowed to just sit and eat burgers and nougat? (Hopefully not at the same time)

Also based on last episode where it seemed like the Empty was awakening but had Lucifer's eyes and we were all NOOO fork that!! is there some more complicated forked up aspect to what's going on or is it just itself and awake and coming for Jack?

I love how Naomi just casually knows how many people are in Heaven

"What's one nephilim boy against all that?" "But he's MY nephilim boy!!"

OH NO NAOMI

NOT LIKE THIIIIIS

We better get an answer on her state by the end of the episode because she's my fave villain bar Metatron on the entire show and devouring her in shadow is just... yikes.

"give it a sec" *POOF* Anubis is prompt, okay.

He probably honestly is somewhat slighted that they're 14 years into their career and he hasn't clapped eyes on them.

"Yeah, we've died." "A LOT."

I honestly, at this point, do not blame them for their lax attitude towards the permanence of death. They need a lot of counselling they're not getting and until they do they really are going to always be terrible at this.

A brief moment where Anubis is like, am I going to get Flirty Banter with Dean Winchester?? and he looks at him and Dean's eyes are all dead and "my son is dead" and Anubis sighs like welp not today oh well better luck next time, if I survive this...

Getting flirty banter with Dean is a sign of high honour and takes you to some very interesting places.

Into Dean if you stick with it like Crowley did

And Lily's been standing there this whole time like wow these boys suck up all the attention in the room and I kinda hate them

Oh I LOVE this abacus. Is this some nerdy ass research that meredith did to know better than most what to expect here? Even I haven't heard this one, though I haven't really revisited Egypt lore after the expected Egyptology phase as a kid...

Anyway the half white half black beads are super interesting in a wider show symbolism way.

Oh deeear, Lily.

Of course that instantly makes you fascinated about what would happen if TFW stuck their hands over it.

What a good line on the show's philosophy about making your own fate - it's not destiny or a choice from above or anything like that. Your individual actions get you sent to Heaven or Hell in the natural course of things and it's weighed in such a way all he can do is use his equipment to read which way you're going... Everything else is down to you. Free Will, write your own story.

Of course, if Lily did some huge sacrifice I bet she could change things.

CAS LAUGHED

ugh this episode should be banned.

If you hug Kelly I'm rioting.

Everyone who ever hugs Cas slaps their hands firmly on Misha's broad shoulders like it's law and digs in and I don't know if it's because Cas has this wonderful presence about him that even when you're around Misha acting him in the moment you get swept up in it, or you just want to hug Misha like that, but Cas hugs look like the most amazing hugs in the universe and everyone just GOES for it.

Also I am typing this nonsense because I literally used up my box of tissues earlier and the next option is stealing a roll of toilet paper. So I will snark and try and ward off the sobbing.

"I'm so sorry. I failed you." Kelly, who has spent about 5 minutes in Jack's presence and understands his nature even beyond her blind faith in him from before but now gets to see the evidence of it: "You didn't. You didn't."

Yes, please can more characters tell Cas that he did a good job even when things don't quite go to plan. Dean's drunken slurring about how they did the best they could, this...

Kelly tells Cas how wonderful Jack is like Cas doesn't know and Cas breaks up.

And you know what this looks like and I'm not going to survive typing this and can already feel my eyeballs filling up with water... 10x20 and Jimmy and Amelia talking about Claire at the end of the episode oh god I hate it take it away from me.

Oh good Cas telling Jack we need you alive to fix Heaven but just in a passive way where you not being dead means the Empty backs the fuck off rather than you having to DO anything

Ooops the Empty is here as Dumas. I suspect she's not surviving this episode but MAYBE Naomi survives.

I am saying with full wishful thinking after seeing her completely consumed by black goo

I do like the concept of "THERE ARE MAJOR STAKES TO RESURRECT THE BOY. BRING HIM BACK THIS INSTANT. LITERALLY SAVE THE UNIVERSE BY BRINGING THE NOUGAT SON BACK TO EARTH." because that makes it so much different from "hey bring me back and maybe accidentally unleash some terrible evil in the process but we'll deal with it later because that's what we do"

"HE'S OUR KID" Sam snaps

I hate it, thanks

For the love of god appeal to her more as a fellow parent.

Dean DIRECTLY EQUATES Jack and May

Hold me

Equating no soul to not being human in front of Sam aka our no soul test case. Owie. Another reminder of just how hard Dean took it in season 6 until he got Sam back, all that skin crawling feeling of being around him...

You know what? Jack reminds me of the sort of example nice ensoulled Sam stuff we saw in 6x12 when Jared was allowed to play over the top sweet and uncomplicted for a few scenes, just to be a total contrast to how he'd been acting thus far in the season. Of course, we saw him for like 3 scenes of Dean smiling in pure relief when Sam did Nice Things before it all got complicated again, and Jack's been a long-time character :P But Sam does have a sweet street that when it emerges in the rare times it can be uncomplicated, is I think the closest equivalent to where Jack's innocent sweetness is drawn from. He's the son of Sam's puppy dog eyes specifically.

But yeah I think Lily just needs to have this resistance and anger about it all to make it so much more of a flip if she were to decide to do the spell, so that it counts as an even gooder good deed to MAYBE flip her chances. By giving her a good work to do.

And hey maybe if she meets Jack for a minute she'll love him and then be changed by the experience and go out and do more good things etc etc.

DUMAS IS SO GOOD AT BEING CREEPY!!

Misha hammed the FORK out of being the Empty and now she has to live up to it and she IS.

CAS don't fight the Empty by trying to stab it, fight the Empty by humming this is the song that never ends.

*makes a disgruntled sad noise about being forced to see Jack laid out on a table in his cute lil PJs with his cute lil socks*

Wait, if Lily does this spell does this mean she's using up the last of her soul to do it and going to the Empty anyway?

ANGRY LIONESS KELLY COMING TO YELL AT THE EMPTY AND GIVE IT A PIECE OF HER MIND

I've just paused after her yelling "STOP" but whatever happens next, she leaped in when Cas was getting kicked around and that's BAD ASS.

Hitting Kelly is like... probably a rage button Jack didn't even know he had so I would like to see how that goes over, but we cut to them trying to resurrect him.

I forking love how this is 2 seasons in a row where the message seems to be that you live to spite nihilism and the bitter end of death.

D'aw even though Sam said they'd pray it was Dean who used prayer to reach out to Cas in Heaven to give him that heads up. Like, totally practical rather than the sort of prayer he's made before to Cas that was all emotional appeal, but, let's save our son, huh?

CAS NO DON'T SAY THAT

The Empty might also really want to think about that because it knows you forking suck to keep around so trading yourself for Jack is like... really? do I really want that? :P

"Not for years. EONS, MAYBE." Cas, bud. I love you. I want you to stay alive that long. Do you really forking think that with the life you lead you have eons left? I mean it's really heartening to hear you talk about yourself this way. But I have to ask.

The Empty telling Cas that it'll come for him when he finally lets himself be happy is forking hilarious. Cas hasn't been happy once in his life and he doesn't plan to start now. Eons, maybe.

Just like that, he's unlocked eternal, grumpy life. Take notes, Lily.

I mean on a practical level this is basically like, yeah, this is why Destiel isn't canon, because as soon as Cas allows himself to be happy, he's ALWAYS known he gets punished for it. In 4x20 he rebelled for Dean and was instantly dragged back by Naomi... This sense of another mission, never belonging, always being on the outside and not getting the emotional resolution he needs, and actively running from it at times or throwing himself in the way of danger to make Dean be happy without him... it's interesting honestly that the Empty is here as Duma and not Naomi as she's been the agent of hoiking him back from happiness enough times in canon... And that fear of losing everything as soon as you're happy? That's what first kept Dean from Jack and then as soon as he really truly fathered Jack, happened to him. Like, that's Team Free Will's entire life story, starting with Jess, to date, here with the Empty making this threat.

Duma survived!!

Cas... really could have just bought a few minutes to do the spell rather than given himself that burden >.>

But he's determined to make a more lasting sacrifice, one that ensures this won't happen again with Jack, that he can always die whenever he wants and go to Heaven and not be bothered here.

Oops Jack's angry now. Now he's seen a dad sacrifice for him, he's suddenly got a case of the Winchester Angsts. Dean in season 2, for starters. Not a good place to be D: Dean in season 2 is proportionately his worst season.

I'm not crying because I think I already died earlier in the episode, but that was... truly awful... to watch Cas tell Jack he's at peace with it and he loves him and everyone loves him and then Kelly butts in like I LOVE YOU TOO and mom him a bit with straightening his jacket and hugging him and... UGH.

Lily has either the start of a heart attack or loses her soul entirely in the background and wanders into a corner to die? Er.

OH HEY WE ALSO MANAGED TO GET THE WORST DEAN HUG SINCE 2x22 WHEN HE GRABS JACK. NEVER SEEN HIM HUG LIKE THAT BEFORE, DON'T WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN THANKS

Nope, she just dieded.

Let's hope she went to heaven and we get a super corny young Lily surprise Alicia Witt return moment at the end since this episode is just throwing everything at it.

It's Anubis' office!!!

Wow, that's a noisy annoying place to work

Still, I LOVE these visualisations of where the cosmic forces of the universe work

I called it super corny but I'm DYING to see Lily's fate change.

"Say hello to your daughter for me" DOn't make me cry about Lily please I beg you I am run dry

OH THANK GOD NAOMI SURVIVED. Hooooooraaaaay!!!!!!! Oh this is a wonderful ending to a perfect episode to not have to deal with her having being consumed and left dead off-screen somewhere.

LOL that slam as he realises what's up and even though she obviously can do what she wants, he's still protectively closing Kelly's door to put a barrier between her and Naomi.

"I'm here to thank you"

Oldest trope in the book, but I love when they look over their shoulder to see if "you" is someone else, and Cas, unflappable Cas, in Naomi's presence, still checks the infinite empty corridor.

*double checks*

"...... you're welcome?"

Wheee unlocked new plot for altrusim!

Ahahaaaahaaaaaaaaa Jack wrapped in a fluffy grey robe. Listen. I am

not

okay.

Jack with his burger and Dean's dead guy robe, spitefully living...

I bet Dean made the burger

WHY did I type that when I knew how likely it was to make my eyes burn.

I did not cry at the last scene of them all at the table so I am going to eat extra cookies at lunch as a reward.

And Jack and Cas sharing a little glance, knowing what Cas did. Father and Son's first dire family secret! :')

And gently roll the camera away to credits to leave them to their happy little scene.

Presumably with a slow fade so you can fumble for some more tissues.

Gyah.

#14x08 #season 14 spoilers #I am angry about how in the last 3 seasons multiple episodes have wandered around like hi I am the new best episode of the series #make up your MIND #remember when Baby felt weird like it was the first in years that had smashed the season 5 barrier of where all the Best Episodes were #and like aside from 6x11 and 7x10 we'd long passed the episodes that were utter stand outs in their field?#and now you have a like 50:50 gamble you're just going to walk into the Best Episode of the Show #it's fucking annoying #my stuff

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jbuffyangel · 6 years

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Mid Life Crisis: Arrow 6x20 Review (Shifting Allegiances)

“Shifting Allegiances” is a step up from “The Dragon.” A small step, but a step none the less. I’m coping with back to back bad episodes by viewing them as the filler stepping stones to 6x21-6x23 that they are. Who’s with me?

We’ll make this short & hopefully painless. Let’s dig in…

Diggle and The Noobs

I will stop calling the Noobs the Noobs when they stop acting link dinkleheads. This is not that episode.

Rene is back and it makes me sad because I did not miss him at all. Curtis and Dinah can say what they want, but it’s not a “hero’s welcome” when the hero tried to kill another hero with an axe.

Annnd… then a bunch of stuff happens. Listen, I tried to pay attention. Really I did. I just couldn’t because I was so bored.

The Noobs go up against The Quadrant, but all that matters is a Quadrant flunkie has a rocket launcher and it’s nifty. I have all the Buffy feels.

Rene has some form of PTSD and is now afraid to go into the field because he might die. I guess? Is this PTSD from Oliver kicking him in the chest? Listen up Hoss, you went all Jack Torrance on Oliver.

Actually, I think Jack may have been more reasonable. There’s a very linear cause and effect line to draw. So, here’s some tips:

1. Don’t swing an axe at Oliver.

2. Then Oliver won’t kick you in the chest.

3. Thus avoiding accidental near death experiences.

Follow this simple three step process and you’ll be fine Rene.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to Rene before this that he could die in the field, but I can assure him it won’t be at Oliver’s hand – as long as Rene PUTS DOWN THE FUCKING AXE. I am a little bitter. I doubt that will be fading.

Diggle spends the majority of the episode saving the Noobs’ ass, so really nothing has changed by switching from Team Arrow to A.R.G.U.S. Can we please talk about that uniform? I’ve seen flight attendants with better uniforms than that. How is this “suit” any better than SPARTAN? For god sake Diggle, you switched from Kevlar leather to polyester. The fashion alone points to what a colossal error this is.

Diggle also apologizes to the Noobs. Just insert all my screaming about Felicity apologizing to Curtis in my 6x19 review here.

Of course, the Noobs say absolutely NOTHING in return because they are the most petulant toddlers to ever exist. Where is Super Nanny when you need her?!!!

I don’t mind that Diggle and Felicity apologize. They are the bigger people. They always have been. This is not a shock or out of character. They were the bigger and better people weeks ago when they apologized with Oliver and tried to squash this beef. OTA has always been on the high road.

However, I do mind that the Noobs haven’t apologized in return yet. No one apologizes to John for messing with his chip and putting his life in danger. So, the Noobs can suck it. SO. MUCH. SUCK. IT.

There’s a significantly pregnant pause from Rene after John’s apology. It’s the perfect time to apologize and he just… doesn’t. Yet, this pause highlights how necessary it is for Rene to apologize even more and how awful it is he hasn’t. It feels intentional because the same thing happened with Curtis when Felicity apologized.

So, my only conclusion is the Noobs haven’t apologized yet because their spiral into toddlerdom is a 23-episode arc and they will remove head from ass by the finale. Or at least that’s my hope.

The other possibility is the Arrow writers have forgotten how apologies work and someone will need to reintroduce them to the rules we all learned in kindergarten. The massive pregnant pause does offer a glimmer this is not the case though.

Diggle decides he’s going to trust the Noobs (the same people who messed with his chip and put his life in danger) more than Oliver Queen, his best friend and brother of six years.

You know what? Imma gonna cut Diggle some slack because Diggle is not Diggle right now. This version of John Diggle is having a midlife crisis.

His boy is all done and grow’d up. This has sent John into a tailspin. He is asking the questions we all ask when we inevitably hit the midpoint of life. What is the meaning of all of this? What is my purpose? WHO AM I?

Has Oliver gone to Diggle for advice this season? I honestly can’t think of one time. In fact, Oliver has been giving Diggle advice. We’ve all had the major case of the wiggins from Oliver’s whole and healed routine. We’re more annoyed with John than Oliver right now. This season is just really unnerving.

Sure, Oliver finally married Felicity – something Diggle told him to do three years ago. So, John can chalk that up to Oliver finally doing what he’s told. But I bet John was banking on some colossal fuck ups parenting William, but Oliver went to FELICITY for that.

Diggle, as first wife, graciously steps aside for the second wife. Then, Oliver gives him the Green Arrow mantle and suddenly John has a new lease on life. The nagging question of “How am I needed?” is answered with a new purpose. Rather than raising the Green Arrow, Diggle will be the Green Arrow. But then Oliver asks for the hood back and Diggle is back to square one. Those questions come rushing back.

So I’m equating this break up with Team Arrow and his alliance with the Noobs to Diggle buying a sports car. At least he didn’t lose his mind completely and cheat on Lyla. Although, technically speaking Oliver is his second wife (Lyla is one and three), so we could make the argument that’s exactly what Diggle did in “Shifting Allegiances.”

Never mind Diggle still has a son to raise. Never mind he’s a crucial and integral member of Team Arrow as Spartan. Never mind Oliver Queen will always need John (even if he needs him in a different way now.) These are all details Diggle can’t see right now because he’s taking a big swig from the Crazy Jar. It happens to the best of us. My dad bought a really big boat. My mother bought a new house. I’m almost 37. When I round 40 I’ll probably buy some obscenely expensive jewelry because sparkly things make me happy. We all cope with our inevitable and looming demise, and the meaning of life questions that come with it, differently. For Diggle, it’s breaking up with his bromance partner and wearing really bad polyester.

Oliver Queen

Oliver is still on his “I work alone” mantra. He tries to get Anatoly’s position back in the Bratva… I think? I am mostly annoyed Oliver went to Russia without Felicity and we were cheated yet again from a Russian rendezvous love scene.

Anatoly doesn’t want the Bratva anymore, which then begs the question then why is he still mad at Oliver? Nobody is really here for logic though right? Right.

When Anatoly asks about Oliver’s friends he responds

Source: @olivergifs

See, this is what I love about Oliver Queen. John Diggle dumps him and life ceases to have meaning – friendship wise. What about Felicity or Lance? Hell, I’ll even toss in William! Nope. Oliver has no friends. Not without John.

Anatoly kidnaps Oliver and brings him to Diaz, except Oliver wants to get kidnapped so it’s not really kidnapping. Dragon agrees to leave Star City if Oliver can kick his ass. I am happy to report Arrow has not completely lost their damn mind. Oliver promptly kicks Dragon’s ass. However, Oliver is still a bowl full of rainbows and gives Ricardo the chance to yield before snapping his neck. Season 1 Oliver did have his good points. Ricardo pulls a knife out and stabs Oliver.

I can accept the only way Ricardo Diaz can win a fight with Oliver Queen is by cheating. What I cannot accept is Oliver “I was trained by Slade, Shado, Maseo, The Bratva and Ra's Al Ghul" Queen didn't see it coming.

Source: @olivergifs

He did THANK GOD. The point was to show Anatoly which man has honor. It’s Oliver.

Whatever. Oliver could prove the same point by drinking Diaz under the table with Russian vodka. It’d be a whole lot more fun and less messy. Well… more fun at least.

Source: @olivergifs

Anyways, enough of the filler. Diaz decides to speed up Oliver’s court date and we’re off to the races. Literally, the only thing keeping me holding on during this episode is we will see THIS FACE next week.

Source: the-scarlet-archer

Bl*ck S*ren

Arrow continually telling me Diaz is the biggest bad we've ever faced and is all the evil that evil can be every five minutes doesn't equate to the character actually BEING those things.

Bl*ck S*ren’s behavior towards Diaz shines a glaring light on this issue. BS is a meta human. She can scream until a person’s blood vessels pop. We’ve seen her do it several times. So all of this “Diaz is so cruel. He burned a man,” is a bunch of bullshit and really insulting to Bl*ck S*ren.

LL fans were ready to tear the writers apart when Felicity knocked BS on her ass with one punch. *excuse to use this gif again*

But DIAZ they are okay with? I have yet to see Diaz do anything that would put him in the same league as Merlyn, Slade, Ra’s Al Ghul, Damien Darhk and Prometheus. Honestly, what does it say about BS that she’s afraid of him? Nothing good my friends! If Diaz is Arrow’s lamest Big Bad then this fear shtick automatically makes BS even lamer than Diaz. That’s just maths.

Sadly, BS is the ball in the ping pong game between Diaz and Lance. Either Diaz is teaching her how to villain or Lance is teaching BS how to be low level human. She can pretend she’s the toughest baddie in town, but BS basically sits around waiting for a man to tell her what to do. No thanks. I’d like to order a strong female character with a side of agency, please.

This is also the reason why her “redemption” is feeling unearned. BS flip flops back and forth so many times it’s hard to believe she’s truly invested in good or evil. She’s just hitching her ride to the man who fits her mood.

I’ve probably said this before, but I would have preferred that the writers go balls to the wall with BS and make her the season’s Big Bad versus the season’s Big Bad’s girlfriend. It just feels like a lot of untapped potential. It’d be a hell of a lot more interesting for Team Arrow to fight with the woman wearing their friend’s face, but is intent on destroying the city. Rather than watch this substandard goon clunking around and BS kowtowing to him. THY NAME IS AGENCY.

At least Lance grew a pair for half a second this episode. More evidence he’s going to die. I guess we’re supposed to infer Bl*ck S*ren’s fear while Diaz pawed her like a kitty in front of Lance, but the whole scene is just off putting. The idea of these two people snogging gives me no joy, but I was never under the impression BS was banging this bag of dicks because she was scared of him. When did we get to sex under duress? I feel like we missed a step. Ugh. I’m trying to logic my way through this and there’s just no point.

The one thing I can always count on in any version of L*urel L*nce’s character are the inconsistencies. I wear them like a warm blanket.

Stray Thoughts

Amell was really wearing that black coat.

The blood really brings out his eyes. Pretty. Source: @olivergifs

“Where in the ever loving fuck is Felicity?” – Me 15 minutes into the episode.

Disclaimer: Any gifs on the blog are not mine. If you would like a gif removed from my reviews, please message me. 6x20 gifs credited.

#arrow #john diggle #arrow 6x20 #anti newbies #oliver queen #anti laurel lance #anti black siren #anti ricardo diaz #anti rene ramirez #arrow spoilers #arrow reviews #arrow season 6 reviews #season 6 episode review #season 6 episode reviews

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pinksweatergettingbetter · 6 years

Text

warning, the following has mainly snarky (and possibly furious) opinions on Spirit of Justice. Reader discretion is advised.

alright. part two, here we go

“she’s safe”

“I’m afraid you’ve lost me”

the words ‘maya’ and ‘safe’ do not go together in phoenix’s dictionary

...Phoenix’s phone has caller ID??

ooh a phone vocal-blip. cute

ok fuck you how is the Benefactor keeping tabs on them?? Did Atishon use his One Phone Call to report to headquarters or something???

“I admit, I didn’t see that coming”

well spoilers guys I know who the benefactor is, and they have to be pretty fucking stupid not to know that a spirit medium is needed for this.

“its your friendly neighbourhood dragon”

no dhurke, youre not cool enough to be spiderman.

“you cant lay a hand on maya fey, and i mean literally”

>foreboding

[sighs deeply]

guys. just. fucking call edgeworth. he’s chief prosecutor of america and his sister is part of INTERPOL. call edgeworth and just. fix the fucking problem. right now.

“No time to explain”

ggghhghghhghghgh

...oh. there’s edgeworth

...............now watch him be completely fucking useless

.......ARE YOU KIDDING ME

PHOENIX /DID/ CALL EDGEWORTH THE MOMENT MAYA WAS KIDNAPPED AND HE STILL WENT THROUGH HIS FUCKING “DUHHH BETTER DEFEND THIS OBVIOUS CRIMINAL” SHIT??

oh edgeworth. you and your chartered planes.

whenever he does that i like to imagine he hired MJN air.

Edgeworth...

A) Why are you letting Dhurke be involved? Just cut him out, send Franziska and Lang in with a team of guys and kick the shit out of the enemy

B) You don’t need to conceal someone on a charter jet. You chartered it. You can do whatever the fuck you want with it. Besides, Dhurke got into the country p easily, he can get out the same way.

C) Dhurke is a criminal. Depending on what he’s done as a rebel, he could be as guilty in your country as his home country. Why are you acting like he’s innocent? Aren't you kind of by-the-book?

oh yeah and despite the fact that they’ve updated Phoenix’s sprite, Miles still looks like a frozen plank of wood. Thanks :\

Apollo: Sorry Trucy, guess you have to hold all the unnecessary evidence and hold down the fort and be LEFT BEHIND FOR A CHANGE AAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

oh. this is a really nice garden.

the drama theme is kinda harshing the mellow tho

o hai rayfa

um. what the fuck. that mask must make it pretty difficult to do shit pal

Garan, whilst ordering her henchmen online: drama queen or king preferred

UR DIARRHOEA, GAH-RAHN

cool theme, love the use of the royal “we”.

“what about those guards over there”

“ohh, just prepared to fuck shit u–– iii mean help you haha.”

yeahhh... I'm not buying her super calm “my husband is a kidnapper” attitude.

UIGSFILGFLIS DHURKE YOU FUCKING MORON

god he’s such a useless piece of shit. unless he’s trying to get taken so that he can be taken to... idk, wherever Maya is held in some sort of Gambit, he’s a real moron for just up and outing himself like that.

BAAAAARBED HEAD. YOU HAVE SOME SPLAAAAAAAAININ TO DOOOO

man why do they even give us other options if we can’t use them???

“Dhurke... I sure hope he’s alright”

hey apollo wanna hear a secret

i dont

Phoenix externally: Patience, Apollo, patience.

Phoenix internally: we are so screwed at any moment the queen could be all “OFF WITH YOUR HEAD” and i’ll never see trucy or maya again jesus holy mother buddha help me

i love that Garananana is kinda just chilling with them. You got more important shit to do, queenie. like being evil

also open your goddamn mouth once in a while, sheesh

Apollo: I hope no one gets hurt

The entire series of ace attorney as a whole: oh honey

wait ... INGA HAD A RATTAIL?!

ohhh yesss listen to those punches

why couldn’t they have animated it too ;w;

phew. im glad Maya’s ok.

yeesh... poor Rayfa.

i love that even apollo’s like “fuck dad, you didn't kill him, did you?????”

its a beautiful contrast to how adamant he was about Trucy not killing Manov.

um, soundtrack, now is not the time for Grand Revival. I know Edgeworth is on screen but the shit he’s saying is far, far from uplifting.

“it seems prosecutor sahdmadhi has grown quite fond of her”

nooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

“they’ve almost become a team of sorts”

ok so mark Ema down on the list of AJ characters who will never be seen again after this game.

fuck man i’d even take Klema over this

can you imagine if they'd split up Apollo/Phoenix Edgeworth/Athena instead

i really wonder how Athena and Edgeworth would interact. Athena’s spunky enough to be a bit like Kay I suppose, so maybe similar to that.

again, Kooraheen’s detention centre theme is really quite pretty

too bad i have to look at Dhurke’s face while listening to it

...a tasty... hash house

oh apollo’s up for that

well tbh if i was him i could use some hash after all this shit

yEAH YOU TELL’IM APOLLO

SMARTEN THAT BASTARD UP

god apollo he’s not worth it. i’d say leave the fucker to his fate but i guess it is important to find the real killer... sigh

apparently queen Amara liked insensitive fuckbags with masculinity issues

oh well. to each their own.

>:( don’t compare Dhurke’s story to Phoenix’s, Apollo

“you ran?! but why?!!”

oh i dunno, athena, maybe the fucking death penalty?????

hang the fuck on

are you telling me that Dhurke started making trips to his shitty abandoned law office via sewer... while Apollo was still with him?!

Like what fucking reason would he have to drag him down there?! The place is an archive/resistance base, but Apollo and Sadmad lived in the mountains as children; why the fuck would he take his /kids/ into town at the risk of having them all arrested at once?!

WHAT THE FUCK IS YOUR PROBLEM, DHURKE

that orb better be a fucking laser or some shit cause I'm really tired of hearing about it

oh......... hi sadmad..................... what a pleasure to see you........... again................

just as fucking pleasant as ever

i love that Dhurke is like “what happened to fighting the man, son??”

like even if he is a double agent he can’t very well just be like “psst I'm still on your side!!!!” in front of the fucking guard

i hate that dhurke’s face is so placid during this too.

“Son, why did you betray me? Also how was the sports game?”

“The Nahyuta you knew exists no more”

yeah sure sadblackworth, whatever you say

oh well that was abrupt

meh, onwards to the tomb

“No, that’s the holy mother. She’s the one who brought spirit channeling to Khura’in”

oh so you mean Ami Fey.

oh ema... i’ll miss you while youre off being Sadmad’s lapdog

“You mean His Ephemeral Holiness?”

Yes, Ema, fight it!!! Fight it!!!!!!

“But when he manages a smile and compliments my work, it’s hard to say no.”

...nuts.

wait what do you mean the defendant is someone you know

you met Dhurke like once a day ago

aw apollo took the locked-room-mystery words right out of my mouth. i love him so. why are they going to take him away?

alrihgt back to this shit after like a 3 month hiatus or something

i love how chill everyone is talking about Maya’s kidnapping

“oh yeah he brought her here to the tomb so nobody would see. sensible thing to do. oh also maya almost died but i guess that’s nbd”

casually opens a tomb

casually opens the sarcophagus hangings

casually tries to open the sarcophagus when told there’s a mummy inside

apollo, you're contracting douche-itis from everyone else. this old family of yours is a bad influence.

...we’re gonna yeet this sarcophagus arent we

i love that Amara’s just kinda. depicted standing there as she’s burned to death. i mean i guess theyre trying to preserve her beauty and dignity in death but it also makes her look like an idiot who didnt try to escape the flames.

ooh i like that last one though

pff thats a pretty well-equipped corpse line

“Where’d the other three bullets go?”

“Maybe Dhurke ate them?”

if he did they'd better have a VERY good explanation

“the poor guy”

EMA

HE WAS HOLDING MAYA HOSTAGE

“the cuffs of justice”

love it

“just one of those traditions people do and they dont know the reason why”

“like rolling up your sleeves?”

“or your psychology, if we’re going there” HE FUCKING WENT THERE

OOOOOOOOOOO I LOVE YOU APOLLO

“he said grape juice has something in it that helps you relax”

are we going into grape juice lore here

"Really? ...Um, are you sure he was talking about regular, plain old grape juice?”

Yes, actually, Athena. It’s canonical that it is /actual off-the-vine welsh’s good ol’ sippy cup grape juice/. It’s not a metaphor or a censoring for kids, it’s just juice.

Of course, this is written by the DDSOJ staff. And considering the intense, dark n’ gritty action makeover the series got, I wouldn’t put it past them to retcon the juice into the... “fermented variety”. thanks Athena.

Yayyy not only do they write shitty dads, but they have to retroactively en-shitten Phoenix as an alcoholic father. Gosh, I sure do love these guys.

(obviously this isn’t a dig at anyone who head canons gj as wine, there’s a difference between head canons and malicious retconning.)

hmm interesting mechanic for this chair. i guess since you can’t stuff it in your inventory you cant do the ‘look all over’ thing. but on the other hand, they REALLY wanted to impress you with that hidden blood.

Ema: [performs a blood test in 2 seconds] I didn’t get a match!

Well probably not in that time, babe

i have to commend them on the little cutscene though that was nice.

again, i guess Amara really liked emotionally stunted fuckwads

the devil horns are a bit much, though.

oh damn.

thats a nice ass pendant

...oh thats blood

well, it sets off the pink and gold quite nicely. and its a butterfly... seems like something Dahlia would wear

“speak of the devil...”

speak of the devil indeed. hiiiiiii sadmad... its been a while.

oh ok he didnt say anything

also i find it funny that apollos like “Wait!! wait!! damnit, after him!”

and then you just. go back into the talk menu with Ema. bit of a moment killer, there.

“why does everything have to be so difficult with you?”

cause hes a prosecutor, apollo. thats just how it is on this bitch of an earth

“the law is the law. placing personal feelings above it is beyond reprieve”

ah but placing religion above it is totally fine. gotcha yuts

“And the winner is... prosecutor Sahdmadi!”

helpful, athena

“it’s like he’s trying to cover something up with his pretty words!”

oh did you mean the inevitable reveal that he's actually a good guy and we have to forgive him for being a shitwad?

oh wow. that joke post about sadmad developing generalized anxiety was actually based on a legit thing that happened

is it ok if i hate him even more for it? i mean how did he figure it out? he didn’t let apollo use it in court so where would he have gained the knowledge? unless he knows about Thalassa’s abilities...

...also, how /is/ he doing this? the way Perceive works isn’t just “i can sense that you’re uncomfortable”, it’s that people who can use it have extremely good eye-sight and see tiny little movements in other people. If they’re smart about it, they can tell that the movements mean the enemy is lying. Apollo just happens to get tense when he notices this, most likely because he’s kind of straining his eyes.

But then again that brings up the fact that his power would act up CONSTANTLY, either because EVERYBODY FIDGETS, or Apollo himself could just be stressed and making the bracelet squeeze on its own.

So thanks, SOJ. Not content with ruining Apollo’s canon, you’ve also got to ruin his cool lawyer power. Gosh, you’re just the gift that keeps on giving, aren’t you?

“Powerless in the face of the Holy Mother’s blessings”

SOJ team is now nicknamed the Holy Mother. Or possibly the Unholy Mother.

“Looks like your power won’t work against Sadmadhi. Guess we’ll have to try something else.”

“Yeah, let’s ask Dhurke...”

Yeah. Because you obviously don’t have someone with you RIGHT NOW who ALSo has a special power. You dont even have TWO POEPLE with you with a special power. Guess we’d better talk to the man who birthed this shiteater.

“I won against Mr. Wright”

yeah in a completely rigged trial where losing would be the worst option. thats not really something to brag about, you know.

“...doomed to be reborn as something lower than a bug or a vegetable”

you heard it here first folks Sadmad hates sustaining agriculture and the bees.

>Lang’s scrolls and dickfuckery

>Edgeworth’s by-the-bookishness

>Franziska’s catchphrase

>Blackquill’s backstory twist

These were the ingredients chosen to make the perfect prosecutor. But the SOJ writers accidentally added an extra ingredient to the concoction: BAD WRITING

THUS UNINSPIRED ASSHOLE WAS BORN!

apollo you don’t matter to anyone anymore youre getting the boot. do as your foster pop said when you were a drowning 5 y/o and suck those pussy baby tears back into your skull.

welp thats it for part one of investigation day 2. now (i think) we’re headed over to the delicious pandering of Phoenix and Edgeworth, back together. Will it bring me solace despite being an obvious ratings grab?

good god, i hope so.

till next time.

#sulking over SOJ #im gonna do this; I'm gonna finish it. i swear.]

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

Text

13x04 watching notes

TBH that is my exact strategy when I am tired and want to go home.

it's 2am and I just woke up after a lengthy power nap/full REM cycle because going to bed at 9 is for cool kids so uh I'm watching the episode but also it's 2am. I didn't do it deliberately but here I aaaam.

Getting right in there with Dean telling the the truth in the recap - is he really gonna spill it all to a therapist? experts have been awaiting it ever since 1x10 so

"experts" being me, I am an independent judiciary body

*grief grief grief* *Jack angst*

Oh yeah Cas recap because Cas is back

Should I even write expectations for this episode? I'm a bit late since I already started watching :P Blah blah Glynn blah blah probably going to be fine, blah blah swear I saw someone say she's "never written Cas before" but uh we just had recaps from 12x19 so I mean who wrote that?

this guy has a weird reaction to the dead wife coming back

like, oh, okay, that happened. guess we say hello

Is this the "understated" reaction when Cas comes back

Oh we're doing regular old stabbing? Is this a shapeshifter thing or a revenge curse thing? Is it all going to be romantic couples? because lol pls don't

Also the recap did expressly list off 2 dead moms and a dead crowley along with a dead Cas who is also a brother and father to active main characters

Sam like "hey"

Dean like >.> Are you trying to be friends after I yelled at you?

Sam being remarkably cool about Dean's netflix and holy oil suggestion

Dean being extremely less cool about Sam's suggestion

They're sort of recapping the argument from the end of last episode for us, which is good because it wasn't in the recap unless it was but it's 2am and my brain randomly discarded that

oh my god it was

okay these are not meta notes

Sam's trying to play at grief counsellor and it's super not working because he's using it as their fight. You don't get in a snappy comeback about "oh so you want to move on"

Dean looks extremely murderously done with all this because How Dare etc

"For me"

God damn puppy dog eyes.

awww Jack's watching The Clone Wars. Because he is a wee new baby and this is his star wars generation I guess.

mittensmorgul pffft. (I have never seen Clone Wars so I have no idea what that even means)

elizabethrobertajones It's the adventures *drum roll* of Darth Vader when he was still Anakin, before he went evil Ashoka or however you spell it is his Padawan

mittensmorgul aahhh

elizabethrobertajones Jack's identifying with her and not with the pre-evil but still getting the Imperial March music layered over his bad decisions Anakin the entire show is 10000 episodes just an endless "we can't make him go evil because that happens in the movie but we can tease basically everything up to that" stuff

mittensmorgul At least he's iffy about Anakin...

elizabethrobertajones yeah good choice, basically it's also brand new he found the non-dinosaur version of Star Wars of the previous generation :P and it's less political than the prequels I think The Clone Wars is generally well-liked whereas nerd rage dictates the Prequels are the Worst and I guess it's Too Soon to get into the newer Star Wars films since we don't know how the arcs of the new kids pay off

[side note: I haven't watched it per se because there's tons of it but I've been in the same room as my brother watching it, and seen a lot of pop culture general knowledge that I've sponged up so I could be wrong about some little details as I mostly know how it's been described to me]

Also Jack's identifying with the female character, because fuck off toxic masculinity, she seems awesome and he has no idea he isn't “”supposed”” to. She also is one of the aliens with the huge tentacle things on her head so idk if it's a good idea for him to get too into this without meeting more of the general population - Sam's probably right

Uhoh, Jack kinda does a snarky eyebrow about "you're the good guys" - Did Sam fail to sell it or is Jack really just starting to have trust issues now he's watching TV with black or white morality (literally a dark side and a light side - hrm.) and given his experience of the Winchesters yelling their very shades of grey takes on him at each other

Well he hasn't learned to be cagey about overhearing that

*blink blink blink* *sigh*

"You're *using* me"

Oh no, poor Jack :(

He also implicitly trusts Dean's judgement more than Sam's bonding, despite how Sam has made all the movements towards him. As people have been meta'ing, Dean's being extremely honest and Jack's setting his markers by that, even if it's horrific to the point of deciding he has to be evil because Dean thinks so.

Sam says he, Dean and CAS closed the rift - hey, Cas got knocked out by Lucifer in round 1 of that as a distraction and Crowley helped you close it.

They probably have not explained Crowley to him at all.

At least Sam is being honest now about what happened with the rift, and that it's their mom

and Jack speaks the language of lost moms. Now HE looks at SAM with sympathy.

Probably also explains Dean...

I think Jack is defaulting back to thinking about Dean way more than Sam's opinion of him, although perhaps he may like Sam more now he was upfront and some of why "so uh yeah I was KINDA using you" is on the table

Jack was wearing a darker henley, which tbh with Dean wearing them again all of a sudden makes it blurry to me if this is not about his Dean-alignment more than colour coding his feelings on being evil (like how Amara's nail polish started off black and got right down to light grey by the end of the season). Now he's swapped to being the Cas Intern.

Ow.

and aww all the fake IDs. There's a lot to take in about these guys :P

Oh no Dean said "loony toons" on the episode which may or may not be an exact use of 8x08 for Cas, for Jack. Jack's a bit more of a trial run about wanting to BE a hunter since he is mostly just curious. Also amused Dean has to rephrase for Jack because he actually knows he's a week old or so, and he's not going to enjoy repeating himself or explaining, while he always found it kind of funny to just say a whole string of incomprehensible pop culture at Cas without slowing for a breath.

Not funny now, is it Dean?

Wait have they never actually fought a revenant aka, idk, it sounds like a naturally occurring zombie? They mention it from time to time but as far as I remember they've never actually called zombies revenants because they're one of the shows where they just embrace the horror movie tradition about zombies completely, so it always seemed like revenants were something slightly different, at least, in the sense that they get named like a different category. And they just lumped them in with ghosts here, as restless spirits but i guess this time *with* the body?

Dean tells Jack to sit, like he was a dog being kept in the car.

Unlike dogs he knows how to work the door handle.

Jack no don't touch the blood

oh good Dean stopped him

Aw no he's still wearing the dark henley under the tan jacket. That's awful :D

Pfft Dean's like immediately "it's a revenant" because they know what those are really well after a billion years hunting and we've never watched them ever name anything on screen a revenant before with that vocab, and they're really sticking with not crossing them over with zombies exactly...

I mean Dean said he wasn't a revenant after he got back from hell and I think they've chattered about them before

if I check this on superwiki it's way too early for there to be a spoilery "so it's not a revenant" line from later in this episode highlighted when I hit the search :P

Oh good, I'm glad I'm right.

A revenant is a visible ghost or animated corpse that returns to terrorize the living, usually people it knew in life. Unlike the zombie, a revenant is not under another person's control, and has returned from the grave on its own for a specific and often personal purpose. In 4.01 Lazarus Rising, Bobby accuses Dean of being a shapeshifter or a revenant. Dean proves he's neither by cutting himself with a silver knife. In 8.06 Southern Comfort Garth takes a call from a hunter asking how to deal with a revenant. Garth tells him to get a casket and some silver spikes, then nail it in and bury it. He also warns that getting bit will hurt like hell, but will not turn you into one.

I wonder if those were revenants in 4x07 and I only ask because it was like almost exactly an anniversary to it in OUR time :P It's still May or maybe June for them in-show

Okay Dean left Jack to dig but Sam chased after Dean rather than it being a synchronised Winchester ditching of Jack :P

Little on the nose about "You're starting to sound like dad!" :P

"Is that a bad thing" Oh Dean, no.

Fortunately the theme of this season is fathers so I suspect you're gonna have to deal with this at some point or another

Sam like "the drill sergent thing won't work on Jack" to the sound of Jack merrily digging in the background because Dean told him to

I really hope that wasn't an on-set hazing that they actually left him to dig :P

I love my smol gravedigger son

I love how Jack did all the digging anyway because Sam's still not actually dirty and Jack's still standing in the hole

Lol not a revenant, well there's a surprise. I'm glad I double-checked the lore anyway because I have the time to so I'm not going to spend the rest of the episode like "wait what IS the difference between them and zombies anyway and why have we never seen one?"

I mean it's not gonna be a ghost either, we're 9 minutes in and they're salting and burning because it makes more sense to Dean to do that than not to - I guess a precaution for accidentally angering her spirit for digging her up...?? :P I mean no he still thinks she's a ghost but I mean maybe it's not a total waste of salt.

OH NO Jack don't ask about if Kelly is a ghost, that's very painful.

OH NO I thought he was going to ask about Cas but instead Dean said "what gets burned, stays dead" and that hurts a lot

FORTUNATELY for me the viewer as opposed to Dean the grieving ball of angst over there, I can go check up on Cas immediately.

He doesn't seem to be doing too good but more in an existential way since he's at least up and walking about.

I like how Jack woke him up but it's probably got to be like a baby bird has to hatch itself.

He's using up all his "hellos" on the void. Save one for Dean.

You know if the MotW is imitating dead loved ones I have to say I am not exactly looking forward to this :P I didn't say earlier but the cold open gave me 11x13 vibes and honestly I don't want a repeat of the stress of waiting for Cas to show up for Dean but it not happening... Okay, belatedly 10 minutes in, there's a baseline expectation for the episode that that doesn’t happen. Then again I forgot to check the names at the bottom of the screen except for being happy to see Misha's there so they could spring anyone on us

Throw a real curveball in just like bring some random dead loved one from the first 3 seasons back :P

Or waste Jim Beaver's season 13 appearance on it and he's never even in the AU with Mary :P

Anyway Jack is waiting patiently in the car.

(or, well, not so patiently.. He's starting to get an idea of how the job works, and that Dean is usually repeatedly wrong about everything as he throws spaghetti at the wall about the case...)

Anyway, dead son, dead wife, so that's quite a neutral combination.

Asking what they had in common probably means the grief counsellor, but Dean says that and then we go back to Cas right when I've been musing on the loved ones coming back for them thing and honestly it's like Dean's words are just summoning Cas right now.

....... 8x08 used flashbacks to summon Amelia for Sam, just saying

I hope Cas finds Billie and hopefully a bar immediately and they can become drinking buddies.

I don't even think she's in this one?

I like those assertive footsteps though. "I have no clue where I am, I am just going to walk in this direction like I mean it"

Lol they're in Madison i was KIDDING about bringing back a dead loved one from like season 2 or something. Oh well, if it's her, it's her. I'm still bitter about Sarah because I only just re-watched it with my mum the other day.

I should probably stop bringing up Sam's dead or lost girlfriends because it's just bumming me out on his behalf.

Teehee "he's not our intern"

well

"I asked you to keep an eye on him" "I can see him"

It's amazing Dean didn't volunteer just to get away from Jack

Sort of weird existing in a post That Declaration world where I can just canonically know Dean staring at Jack is making him think sad things about Cas without any fear whatsoever

Oh boy killer grief counsellor probably. "Mia is promising to provide the catharsis I've been craving for so long" and then she gets ripped to shreds by her son.

I feel a little bad reading this woman's diary, but the first line is about not "getting over" it and learning to live with it. Blah blah heal and rebuild yourself, blah blah whole again but never the same

"Shrinks... Snake oil for the mind." "Or how healthy people deal" Pfft

Jack being baffled by the issues of customer vs hot dog guy without understanding it's an ancient war fought across the world

Dean equates "catharsis" to "happy ending" - I can't tell if he's innuendo-ing or accidentally revealing too much and being mournful about it.

The house has a great fence - its parts are all misaligned. Very visually uncomfortable :D

Awww someone said "hello" to Jack and Jack was like !!!!! another person!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HELLO! :D :D :D

how can you possibly think he's bad

Anyway I was about to type that Dean hates it because of course he feels the most vulnerable talking about his feelings all the time, either for performing Dean reasons about needing to keep up a facade of strength (LET YOURSELF CRY, MAN) or because feelings for Cas being inconvenient to him

UHoh Dean grabbed Jack's shoulder - he did it to Mick to be threatening last year in a Glynn episode, while Mick was wearing a long tan coat. And called Jack "Spock" which is not really accurate characterisation at all. Jack's pretty much nothing but a bundle of emotions, he's just not used to using them around other people. Now CAS on the other hand.....

I do like that Mia decided to see them because Jack is sweet and was upfront about losing his mother and he's just adorable.

They bluff their way in by losing a collective mother, Sam once again lining them up as family and siblings.

Play it cool, man. You’ll scare Jack off.

I'm starting to think we haven't seen Cas between scenes for a while because Dean hasn't said anything angsty enough

But idk if we trust her or not. She has a lot of alcohol stashed on that shelf.

Jack wisely doesn't sit on the sofa with them all.

"Oh well Mom was great and now she's dead so what's the deal with catharsis" Dean, no.

Sam continues with what should be the pre-arranged plan of spill closed truths like well we don't journal but our dad did

also I am so annoyed that confirms they don't keep hunter journals??? grarghgh

Google has ruined this generation

And Dean makes fun of journaling as being for little girls, even though Sam literally just said that about John. Last year in 12x04 he said he was a 13 year old girl when trying to text Mary so he's actually regressed even further backwards at losing her again >.>

"I'm good with death, closure, the whole friggin bottle of Jack"

it's a shame he would never put a bumper sticker on Baby, because that...

Oh boy we're still having this fight. "My brother's delusional..." yeah oh dear.

Is this going to be one of those things where I basically just want to transcribe the whole thing?

Dean calls out Sam for not being able to even admit that Mary's gone so he hasn't even moved past denial - which to be fair, Sam IS right she's not dead and that they DO have a means of getting her back and everything... Was thinking about how last season was a "Dean is right about everything" season and this time is clearly a Sam is right about everything one... but of course both only to a certain degree, and in this case it's much blurrier about approach and how these fights are going because of course Sam's not being a perfect Saint Sammy that Dean is being unfairly awful to in the entirety of what's going on here. Sam IS struggling and resisting confronting things in his own way and adopting Jack as a pet project is definitely a form of avoidance or at least wanting to get concrete closure on Mary's death before he will fully mourn. Which makes Sam and Dean existing in the same place terrible because they're only in the same physical location

anyway Dean's about to yell about how hard this all is for him too so I better unpause once I'm holding a stuffed toy again

"At least you had a relationship with mom" WAHEY

I mean that was awful but I'm delighted Sam yelled that because there's ALWAYS something else going on underneath Sam, and I've been waiting for more Sam and Mary angst, since I spent so much time on them last season and at least obliquely referred to this... Talked a lot about how hard Sam had it to reconnect with Mary... That Words with Friends scene from 12x07 was basically floating along waiting to come back up at some point or another, but it took Sam a long time to reach out to Mary personally, and really only in 12x14 (hi Berens, I just accept you and Glynn are brain twins these days) did he pick a side in THAT fight and picked Mary. And we said it was to get closer to Mary but he made it all about the BMoL instead of just confronting that he wanted a relationship with her, and the BMoL ended up just keeping them apart ANYWAY and tl;dr am I going to have to write the reverse version of A World Without Monsters from Sam's POV or can we just agree that my subtext in that fic was exactly what just bubbled up here? :P

I just spent the entire length of that paragraph trying to work out when I wrote the meta about how Sam felt about Mary and it took me until that last point to realise it was not a meta, it was a fic where I roundly abused poor Sam for the sake of making that point.

Dean's like hey therapy is great! *eyebrows at Jack* *snarky smile at the doc*

Sam is like *anger-drinks water*

*refuses to cry as well*

BLOOD

(CRY, DAMMIT, SAM.)

That sign was down earlier

is this the poor receptionist?

Or... ew, shifter gunk?

LOL Dean just takes a flask out of his pocket in the middle of their appointment

Mia asks him to look at Jack, which is the last thing he wants to do, but blah blah meta about 12x22 and how he needs to "see" Jack, and she's pointing out that Jack is terrified which is exactly what Dean needs to see about him

subtle

She actually points out his anger issues as well so I think Dean's getting homework whether he has to write it in a journal or not :P

*suddenly everyone is pointing guns*

Hey if she's a a shapeshifter why does she live in an all-white house when shifting makes bloody goo stains everywhere?

Or her assistant, I guess. They haven't had eyes on him :P

Ooh that explains why the guy was not surprised to see his wife. Well, kind of surprised, but not nearly horrified enough.

Sadly if she is telling the truth that means someone else is using her method to get their guard down to kill them for kicks...

Also shades of 9x13 because they had that spa where the monster would use their unique skills to help, but then of course another of their kind - a sibling - had to go and ruin it...

Oh hey, it's Cas! I guess the time ran out on a good transition from Dean, so we go over here on "I'm telling you the truth"

Lol it's another Cas... Who ever would have expected it. /Misha being the worst at spoilers

Or something with a very silly voice. "Friendly neighbourhood cosmic entity" that sounds like that and won't show its face is either someone pranking Cas or about to go very bad.

Cas is like "do I look like that" "I'm getting a new coat as soon as I'm alive again"

if this thing is The Empty itself it's probably kinda crazy after eons being nothing

Oh NO Cas's face when he says "every angel that ever died is here?" because oh boy did you put like 90% of them in here yourself. There's about 3 faces you'd be happy to see again of the entire lot. Hey, it's never too late to give Cas that guilt all over again that made him stay in Purgatory out of penance.

I mean among other things but it's probably worth mentioning there are a whole bunch of lil purgatory parallels here in the loosest sense of it being a hostile other realm, and the way Cas is basically Dean in Purgatory in here.

Cas has been back for like 5 minutes of screen time and I want to protect him and wrap him in blankets

there's no need to be mean, The Empty, just because you got woken up... I say... at nearly 4am... because I woke up when I didn't want to...

you know what, The Empty's being mean to Cas probably kind of justifiably, even if it's a dick.

pretty clever to use a shifter as the motw in this episode too

oh, poor Cas is horrified to think Sam and Dean made some sort of deal for him

he says "I don't know" which is ironically what Jack's saying all the time

like father like son

LEAVE HIM ALONE

last episode we had James keeping memories of Missouri, who he had cut out of his life, in a box. Now Mia has a box still dedicated to "Buddy" her asshole ex who hurt her, and good on her for leaving him. He's another shifter, we're halfway through the episode, so we probably need to find him now, and also have a good 10 minutes more of whatever's going on with Cas. :P

She also owns up to have done much worse things in her past with Buddy, although presumably not killing people, and probably because they were super toxic together, and she had the sense to get out and try and help people now.

Jack said "I'll come with" which is adorable. He's learning to be like them :D

Wheeeee he's riding shotgun! Guess Dean couldn't make him stay in the back without Sam around.

Sam's plan's don't always work out :< Oh no, Dean, you still don't have much faith in Sam's ability to handle himself.

Fortunately this does seem to be a mostly Sam is right season, and I think of all the overwhelming reasons why you don't trust Jack, not trusting Sam to trust Jack is probably relatively low on the list underneath the Cas stuff or you'd have just yelled that at Sam the other day instead.

Uh, why do I feel like the shifter just phoned Sam and somewhere between here and there something went really wrong?

Oh god I'm going to have to watch the face peeling scene with my own two eyes at 4 in the morning, aren't I?

Meanwhile Mia explains why her catharsis works to Sam - I hope he doesn't sneak back at the end of the episode for a chat with "Mary" because that would be AWFUL.

Oh it was that other guy - wait, also, Sam was already doing this before Dean phoned? Seems like he doesn't trust Dean's methods either :P

CAAAAAAAAAS

I love how Cas is so practical like, "will you pay me $200 to stop annoying you and go away?"

UHOH guess we're getting right into it. "You don't want to go back" "Sam and Dean need me" You don't want to be needed, you want to be wanted!

Wheeee text on that and also wheee over on the other side of the story last week Dean finally made the i/we distinction about Cas. Now we just need to get them alive and well and actually dealing with crap

oh boy I shouldn't have paused there except that i suppose for the sake of meta-ing remotely clearly it was probably a good idea not to watch straight through from that into the empty accusing Cas of having feeeeelings and "I know *what* you hate, I know *who* you love, what you fear." especially since Cas hates being needed but not wanted and uh Dean made the i/we distinction at long last over on the other side of the story so um does Cas fear something related to all that?

I mean to be fair Cas has been through this exact thing before with "he's in love... with humanity" / "all of it for one man" which was an "i/we" distinction of planetary proportions :P Of course he just mutely responded to it there because he was sad Dean was dead, and had no idea Metatron had accused him of being in love in any form, so that was Metatron's private joke to himself.

The Empty telling Cas there's "nothing for him back there" also makes like next to no sense if you take season 12's family read at surface value and has the bonus of being, I'm pretty sure, a line Elrond tells Arwen in the movie when he's trying to make her leave Aragorn and go across the waters to the undying lands.

I know they're just starting with it in a long selection of terrible things that happened to Cas but starting with his grace being stolen really sucks :P

Especially when I am still daily haunted by his season 9 arc.

See above: Metatron and "in love with humanity"

More miscommunication of the "didn't bother to call you" variety (I hope this doesn't blow up in Sam's face, although of course trying to nurture Jack is slow mo doing that, especially if he and Dean are meant to swap stances on the kid >.>)

The intern pulls Mia aside for a chat.

OH NO Jack wants to see his mom. OH NO OH NO

I will be so upset if that happens...

Oh nooooooo

he's crying.

Who can say no?

This is extremely awful.

I guess Glynn didn't want to let Kelly go like that. I'm glad if Mia was going to do this for anyone it would be for Jack and not Sam and Dean's cycles of nonsense.

I REALLY hope the bad shifter doesn't burst in here and try to/actually kill Mia right now. Jack doesn't need that in his life.

In the mean time, Mia better friggin HUG Jack even if it's technically hollow and he would know it.

Also did she do the whole disgusting skin thing or can she transform on the spot?

HUGS FOR THE NOUGAT BOY

They look so much alike :')

Oh no Jack you probably don't feel anything because they made you horribly depressed within 2 days. Also you have angel grace. Historically not good for helping you feel things. You're sweet and cry about your mom and feel bad about stuff in other ways so I think you have a heart no matter what, like Cas does.

Mia gets some catharsis from getting to hug Jack and reassure him that even if he's a monster and what makes him in-human isn't letting him emote how he's supposed to, he can still be good. She's got a monster soul, after all. There's a lot of good monsters out there.

I was about to say lol is this now Sam not on the phone because he actually is a shifter now mostly to tease past!Me but then they panned down and Dean's unconscious, which makes sense because they probably still want to show us Dean tearing his own face off at some point and honestly I'd rather just get it over and done with because if it's still to come after this D:

"that was too friggin easy" though - Dean getting overwhelmed in another fight. He's really not had a great rate of success... He only beat the wraith last episode with Patience's warnings, and other than that it's been a terrible track record even if he fights back as hard as he can when he gets jumped

shifter!Dean2 better not go in and try and kill Jack

Not gonna have much luck, I just don't want to watch it :P

MORE HUGS FOR JACK

WAIT NO YOU CAN'T HUG HIM AND THEN HAVE HIM KNOCKED OUT IN THE SAME SCENE

I TYPE NOT LOOKING AT THE SCREEN BECAUSE DEAN'S RIPPING HIS FACE OFF

Shifters are gross

Oh no don't call Cas a disappointment, The Empty, we're so proud of him!

He just told him to "save yourself" which is probably going to have the direct opposite result to what he wants while I'd hope Cas goes and does exactly that

"I'm already saved" blah blah Cas insults The Empty and I love him, "because somehow I'm awake, and I'll stay awake" - exactly how many times can I use "i love him" as punctuation in one sentence?

Where is that gif of the woman banging the pots and pans about not getting any sleep so they're not getting any sleep

that's something I ought to have saved :P

Someone almost certainly has made a post already.

Cas is the literal embodiment of "fight me"

This Buddy guy is a total douche. He says in this world everyone uses everyone. Which is a theme of the season I guess - Cas feeling used, Jack feeling used... He's the villain with the most negative version of the theme in his mouth right now

Dean's got to pep talk Jack if he wants to save the day or Jack goes and saves the daaay - I'd prefer Jack does it

Look, Mia's getting hurt and she was kind to you and in the most literal use of character mirroring in 1000 miles is an actual stand in for your mom!

Ooh is Jack gonna save Sam instead? Dean just pep-talked him specifically about how Sam believed in him which was having to start to admit that Sam, well, believes in Jack. Which Dean couldn't even accept last episode when he was saying that he was just using Jack

Yay thanks Jack, kinda figured Sam wouldn't get shot :P Jack's powers are fascinating - he's definitely bending time... from Sam and Dean's perspectives last time they were caught in it they were at least sort of aware of things, but Jack pretty much works in bullet time.

I also like how he kind of had a ridiculous "NooooO" because he's been watching Star Wars. I don't know if there's a "Nooooo" in the Clone Wars but I mean have you met a Star Wars

Anyway good riddance douchey ex with extra douchey powers.

I love the shot of them all standing together and Jack has that benign :3 face on again. He's really insufferably cute.

Ewww the Bunker sink is gross. I assume that's from decades of lying in disrepair and that those are stains Dean could not get out.

I guess Jack's getting a glass of water and Dean's midnight snacking. I have no other explanation for this encounter despite the fact it could theoretically happen at literally any point of the clock :P

Oh gosh, is he going to give Jack a beer

Yay, actions helped

Aw, the other beer is for Sam. Guess this doesn't have to be midnight after all. I thought he might have a longer chat with Jack

oops is this the beginning of the slide in the other direction? Sam's been undermined and even though he was proven right to Dean's eyes and Dean's had to grudgingly hand Jack the win in the case and admit it to Sam, Sam's like, "I guess"

And they don't know what Jack asked for from Mia because patient confidentiality! Argh!

Oh no Sam don't start wondering if Dean is right.

AAAH they're actually talking about things really well. Dean's like "don't say that" - even if he can't believe it he doesn't want to HURT Sam and rob him of his hope... Sometimes yelling about things does make them get better in the long run once you get it out there >.>

And Dean deputises to Sam for the feelings. And admits how HE has been feeling, because he believes in nothing, because all his faith has been taken away because there was only one thing he ever ended up believing in no i didn't see the next scene transition before i hit pause what are you talking about

Again, though, if this is Cas back in the mortal plane after annoying his way back to life (worrisome, since he's 2 episodes out of reuniting with them and where's Billie? Oh gosh is Billie back for reals too if he IS back? Whaaaat.) then that's another awfully convenient moment to transition scenes from. Dean finally using "i" instead of "we" about Cas and making it abundantly clear that he and sam didn't feel the same about that, was, whether the direct reason or just narrative karma they chose to bestow on Dean, what made Jack reach out to Cas. Now he admits out loud that he doesn't believe in anything with the implication when you look at Dean vs belief that this is about Cas, and we go over to Cas definitely at least in an improved situation.

Goddammit that's the new coat which means he didn't come back naked but wait! Lizzy's hope wasn't the same as everyone else's at all! Although that was a shallow moment of defeat :P Mwa ha ha, I was hoping Cas would come back and be gifted a whole new Cas get up and lo and behold unless he chose to manifest these clothes onto himself and there's noooo ulterior motive at all going on here (uh... probably not going to get more than 1 per show and we used it up on Mary :P) but he's confused and waking up and the last time we saw him he was in the clothes he died in... So of course if he's being sent back to earth then someone else chose the battle armour he'd be returned in. One Cas, fit for purpose.

Also, realising once he sat up more it was the new coat makes me pretty sure he is back on Earth.

Also he looks happy to be here and I think he can tell :P

Same, Cas. Same.

#13x04 #my stuff #season 13 spoilers #in which I am awake at 5:30am and the Empty is probably pissed at me

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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I'm behind on meta so please feel free to ignore this if it's been already talked about, but I thought it was interesting how - as weird or sort of unusual that fight scene was with dean and the demon, or at least i don't recall anything like it - by making it look sexual and obviously violent, it kinda parallelled Mary's struggle with that asshole hunter. What weirds me out is that it puts Sam & Lucifer in the same role of saviour which is never good, but maybe they just wanted to connect them

like that bc they both want a connection w/ Jack, maybe even see themselves in Jack, who knows lucifer;s side, since they were unable to provide dialogue 4 him besides repeating how Mary is weak bc she gets tired & is all humany and they need to get out and he might need her. ANYWAY, shitty writing aside, do u think it was a parallel and if so what are they trying to say? Was it to show that maybe Sam’s intentions aren’t the purest either, not in an evil way but like bc he’s so intent on gettingMary back that he might be blind - for different reasons than Dean - to Jack as a person? He’s trying so hard & almost doesn’t even entertain the thought that Jack might be corrupted by his power at some point, or by Hell which we see almost happens bc of lack of info. Sam seems to hold on to as much hope as he can, while Dean is at the opposite end of the spectrum (hmm I wonder who could balance it out?). But what do you think of Sam having been weirdly aligned w/ Hell like, he even unwittinglygave the info to Amodeous about how powerful Jack is, while Dean, without even trying, seems to be Jack’s role model for Good (& I love how Jack has a Dean decoder built in) and he even throws him a Bible to read (which, if presented without commentary can be risky, he’s better off reading the Supernatural books, but still, it’s the Holy Book).

Hi! What an ask :D Also I am ALSO so behind on meta so I’m just going to answer this like it’s all new to us, sorry everyone who has already been over this, me and anon are going through this together ;)

To go through chronologically because I’m super tired so I need to break this down…

Yeah, awesome weird fight scene. I loved it - Tink said something about them having a new fight coordinator? There’s been 2 incredible fights back to back for Dean so far and I’m loving it. This one was great I think with the director as well - I feel like he of all of them takes liberties with BL scripts and puts in extra nuance and missing implications that their writing didn’t pick up… He’s 99% responsible for the crypt scenes for example, and in 11x21 included ALL the nuance that made the longing retcon magic happen between Amara, Cas and Dean, just by visual implications. He also super digs the prison imagery and bunker porn and generally using the locations really well… I don’t know much about all the different directors but I’ve learned that seeing his name means it’s time to get excited and nerdy about what I’m going to SEE :D

So yeah, good combo. It made a great parallel with Mary’s fight which I liked first of all just for the Mary and Dean paralleling, especially as she needs connections back to the main storyline just for asserting she still exists, because as you say it was pretty bad writing especially around Mary in that episode, where she just dragged herself around after Lucifer and needed saving. Putting Dean in a parallel situation somewhat defuses it in overall handling of the nonsense, even if I don’t like that it was written this way in the first place. I have still not had time to explore my dash much but I hope people have been making posts about the parallels to female fight scenes, especially Black Widow in the marvel movies… In my notes I just commented he was straddling people to death and left it at that (even though that obviously wasn’t what he was doing - it was a shorthand for the fight style :P) but really it also mirrored 10x15 and Dean in that weirdly charged scenario with whatisface, where he got straddled and had the worm coming out Cole’s throat while leaning over him etc and it put Dean in a very submissive role to all that. In the same way, having Dean fight back by getting his legs around the guy and ending the fight literally *cowering* on a bed with the demon standing over him with the phallic knife, was a fascinating staging of power dynamics where he actually looked more vulnerable than Mary did.

I think Lucifer nice guy’d it - he said he needed Mary and when she wouldn’t go along with him, immediately started whining more and hurt Mary just to make her complacent and remind her that he was still in charge and more powerful than her. Sam of course has no such dynamic with Dean, but I think overall he’s going to be more assertive this season and carrying on - according to the PR - with having more of a leadership role in the dynamic. He’s definitely making the better choices right now while Dean urgently needs a personal day or six. So I think first and foremost it’s a compare and contrast rather than a direct parallel. There’s a great gifset I reblogged somewhere or other about Lucifer in 12x23 saying hurr blurr I can’t raise my son from a prison cell, and then Sam in the cell with Jack just captioned “HOLD MY BEER”, and Sam currently is the only positive father figure - and actually the ONLY father figure *on the board* for Jack, since the pool is Cas - dead, Lucifer - in the AU, Dean - not interested right now… Meaning Jack is pretty much Sam’s sole responsibility and the Lucifer vs Sam stuff may be being played as an oppositional thing. So Lucifer being a dick to Mary after saving her but doing it conditionally and in an attempt to make her go along with him (and that he only wants her to trade for Jack anyway) vs Sam just saving Dean because they love and trust each other already forevers and there being no terms and conditions except for not wanting his brother dead for well duh reasons is… nice.

But yeah it does also put Sam in a weird place where he’s being paralleled to Lucifer in any way and he has that long history with him. And I think by and large this is supposed to be positive for Sam and all but I agree with you that Sam can and maybe will fuck it up, and being oblivious to the dangers is the main way. In the “Donatello” conversation he doesn’t notice that Donatello switched from “Jack’s nature wins” to “let’s try moulding him” which was Asmodeus’s idea (and Sam’s) - but because Asmodeus was AGREEING with Sam and Sam was assuming he meant for the better, then he didn’t notice that Donatello was suddenly agreeing with him.

I think it’s pretty inevitable Jack’s going to have some sort of wobble - we’ve seen Lucifer is a tiny bit in his head even if he already picked Cas as his father and it’s clear he has a good heart, Asmodeus showed how easily some trickery and the path of good intentions can open a portal to hell (aww season 4 Sam) and that is something Sam himself has to deal with and his his hugest character thing overall - his arc led to that, and then on the other side of it has been about repenting for it and feeling awful that this was what he was basically raised to do >.> He should hopefully be a good influence on Jack to guide him away from repeating his mistakes but only if he can see the problem in the first place.

(Also yeah I love Sam and I’m excited and positive for his relationship with Jack but like you I think we do need to think about the problems, Sam’s lack of experience, this being a complicated time for him to take charge of a thing when historically almost every time he has been in a position of responsibility or strength he’s fucked it up when handling things himself, or else gone down some really dark paths… I think he CAN help Jack and ultimately WILL but that doesn’t mean it might not be rough along the way and I think people need to be prepared for that if they’re getting invested in it… Maybe even more so than the people who want Dean to be good with Jack and are getting upset about how hard it is because in a way that is a much more obvious problem and we were warned about it from the start, while Sam and Jack seems like such a good and pure thing it might be easy to let your guard down that the show can easily insert trouble and darkness into it…)

I wonder if there will be some tension to come between Sam and Dean about Jack kinda latching onto Dean though? Because I’ve wondered before that he is the moral centre of the show and Jack was mimicking him because he’s sort of needing Dean’s approval too, not just in a survival way but because Dean is so SURE of what is right, so being like Dean is default being right. (I think Sam has said something similar in 3x07 about always following Dean around trying to be like him when he was young? In that “i know when you’re scared” argument) And of course Dean being so sure of what is right and Jack not meeting that standard by default has been a massive part of why Jack levelled up in Winchester self-doubt and self-hatred in just a few days. Took less than a week to ruin him and Dean’s standards are probably a large part of it >.> So yeah, I hope Sam understands all the nuance of why Jack might have been mimicking/idolising Dean when Sam is the one trying to be the positive role model to Jack, just because he knows the force of Dean’s personality. I hope he doesn’t take it as a bad reflection on himself, ESPECIALLY if/when Jack fucks up as I feel will inevitably happen.

I think it does sort of reflect Sam and Dean’s long-standing alignments though… I just remember the season 6 poster where Sam has the snake and Dean has a literal freakin’ halo because subtlety? What is that? :P

#Asks #13x02 #nougat winchester #sam analysis #dean analysis

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

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12x17 watching notes

(Finally :P)

expectations - well, I had pretty low ones before this episode came out but while I was mucking around waiting for it to become available through some channel or another, a couple of people have expressed actual excitement to me about it so now I'm confused, especially as they didn't offer any qualifiers about that, aside from that the Crowley and Lucifer stuff would be pretty boring, which was a lesser problem on my list of things to worry about.

Let's see what happens :P

The recap starts with the Crowley and Lucifer stuff. Yay.

Blah blah Dagon and Kelly... EILEEN HI

Okay interesting BMoL recap - starting with Mick and his character development so far, then sliding over to Ketch, punchy punchy Mary hitting things in time with him. So they're linked (see also: gloomy expectations :P) and actually doesn't tell us anything else about Mary in that moment, but keeps on recapping Sam and Dean's issues with the BMoL - Mary's been swallowed up into them.

Kendricks! With their creepy motto about being stronger together. Which is I guess what Sam accidentally echoed about the better the MoL are the better they are

(Mittens just told me the crossed keys on there are a symbol of heaven too which *anvils*

It is never a good sign when you're called into an office and they put plastic sheeting down. I guess one of these kids isn't coming out alive... I don't think they've said names yet but I think the pale dark haired one is Mick because duh

odds are they make him murder his friend for shits and giggles

I can't visuale "Michael" being Mick because that name just doesn't fit :P Also anvils again the whole Michael thing - we had his lance not too long ago. He's LURKING.

LOL the Headmistress pauses with horns behind her head. Not ominous about her being evil at aaaall.

LOL they are Michael and Lucifer parallels

And Michael wins. Obviously. Since we know Mick kinda makes it out of there. :P

So Headmistress with her codes is God, Mick actually wins the damn fight which is NOT good because the only other repetition of the entire cycle to win the fight was Cain and that ended *so well* for him.

All the Cas mirroring just got blown out of the water though. I guess he now gets to carry the weirdly dubious honour of dealing with the Michael mirroring... Michael who would not back down from the apocalypse because God Said So and he was going to be a good son and do what was destined of him, no matter if it meant killing his brother. Of course we've had that exact conflict remembered earlier this season with Ramiel musing on how Michael made his spear to kill Lucifer slowly and painfully. Cain mirrored down the line to Dean - Mick mirrors back up to it Michael. Interesting that they want to address this again even just thematically with parallels like this... I'm so not convinced ever at any point that Michael will actually come back, if nothing than for the show to dig in its heels and enjoy the "You forgot Adam" jokes to the end of time, but Michael IS a loose end narratively in that he's so heavily NOT been involved in the story again, and carries a real, terrifying weight that Lucifer does not, and tbh never really did, since he popped up in 5x01 all like hey I'm the villain, but Michael had a much more insidious awfulness to him... And with 2 appearances ever, remains far more mysterious and powerful in the story than the now over-blown cartoon villain Lucifer's been since, well, honestly, season 7, though obviously Hallucifer was not meant to be the real deal...

Anyway I should maybe not take forever to watch the thing because I always do and I started so late thanks to download links being terrible >.>

Wait

Mick is alone and drinking in the office at the BMoL compound remembering all this (yay alcoholism all of a sudden out of nowhere - he really has utterly switched gears to the Michael-Cain-Dean thread)

and now Sam n Dean are driving off to meet him

when the hell was the promo scene and was it even in this episode :P

EILEEN IMMEDIATELY

Yesssssss

I am immediately also upset that she loves Sam so much but doesn't tell him to not let Dean talk to her while he's driving if it means he has to keep looking down at the ipad to make it clear what he's saying to her >.> EYES ON THE ROAD. Sam's no good to you dead.

I am mostly admiring Eileen's hair because Kelly stuff is like... okay.

Aw she said goodbye to Sam specially. My heart.

Dean thinks it's cute too.

Sam's like "come on" oh god he's in love too.

Sammy, this is how it feels to be in the hot seat when people mock you for having an adorable crush. Leap behind denial and pretending there was nothing special about that "bye Sam" :3

And you should know you've seen it happen to Dean enough :P

Dean ships it.

And he always knows what's true and good :3

"He stole my line" says Crowley somewhere or other. I love how Dean was literally just saying not to call Crowley, and there's Mick in the library with the whiskey, "hello boys" and suuuuper ominous music, because he just let himself in. Does he know about Kelly? Sam and Dean are coordinating all the other hunters they know on this, but it's their resources. And they actually have other hunters they know and trust and are good, working with them.

And of course, the whole thing with the BMoL imposing on them - no privacy, the keys giving him full access to their lives, and, I think, assuming in a way they're their superiors because Sam n Dean are hunters, but Mick has the desk job and the education...

Sam and Dean present a united front stomping towards Mick, who has come to hang out. Now HE is on the case of Kelly, and of course it comes out that they were keeping it a secret...

Mick mentions cosmic shockwave but it's not Cas's cosmic consequences. I think we need to limit the word cosmic to one per season relevant things.

Anyway as with 12x14 showing the BMoL are playing on their stage but are tragically behind and under informed. I was recently musing on if they had the same technology as a start point as the Bunker and that detected the angel fall, they would have obviously a lot more time to develop it and would have equipment sensitive enough to detect all sorts of big events (I was wondering about the seals breaking in that context, but a Nephilim being conceived counts)

Now I have to listen to Dean recapping 12x08...

I feel like I should just leave a blank space for watching them arguing about killing Kelly or making her get an abortion. Just because... Buckleming, no, why are you even handling this subject. Why.

Mick takes the far more hardline approach that they should have killed her, but I mean, Sam and Dean start from the point of, we thought she agreed to get an abortion (are you not allowed to say abortion on American TV?)

I do love Sam and Dean sitting on the table side by side like this KNOWING they're like, the most intimidating men Mick will ever meet and if they play up the double act, he's so much more likely to crack from the pressure :')

This is rapidly turning into Buckleming's favourite trope of Sam n Dean judging you together, which I can't remember how often they do it but it is a Thing and 9x21 is not the only example though it’s the only one I can think of, and none of the other writers ever make them do exactly this.

I think part of why it stands out to me is just because while Sam n Dean are great and can be united against a mock-worthy foe, they actually aren't usually *united* and even when things are great, they play to their strengths, but often moments of unity highlight their differences, especially current conflicts or whatever. Moments of inward reflection occur and so on.

Here, they're just a block on this table which says "exposition: Winchester POV" while Mick is over there like "exposition: drop more anvils" (he just called the nephilim an "abomination" out of the blue)

"Until then, we drink" - I think Dean is distracting Mick more than anything - he already showed up in the Bunker, drinking, and Dean knows they have a lead thanks to Eileen. If they can get Mick trashed, who knows, maybe he'll forget, maybe this will all seem less urgent in the morning, maybe he can be reasoned with differently when the plan is he has the hangover and Dean is doing dishes noisily in the kitchen, if, you know, Mick had not out-drunk them

wait why is Lucifer back in that chair - did Buckleming literally not watch 12x15? It's so pointless to chain him up... he should be like, sitting in the corner of Crowley's room or whatever, LOOKING free and suffering.

The fact you could fade out from 12x13 and into 12x16 for the Lucifer stuff makes me think that Perez did the best he could and bless his cotton socks but you just can't un-fuck Buckleming writing when they're on a roll, because if they think Lucifer should be chained up in this chair like they wanted him, then here he is.

I mean aside from anything it's yet more complete disrespect for canon - that they clearly didn't do any homework for 12x13 because holy crap the Gavin stuff was badly handled, and that was their own story so you'd think they'd know how follow on from their OWN writing - and now they're not even playing ball with the other writers on current stuff >.>

As I said in an ask I answered a little before this episode, they have their own canon running adjacent to main canon, where all their mad plot stuff happens, and everyone else just has to deal with it as a sort of weird fever dream that happens in the background of the Winchesters' lives. You can't reason with it when they aren't listening. Or they just do not understand the point of what someone else wrote.

Anyway I guess Dagon feels like she failed Lucifer over something or other, which makes her a kid desperately trying to prove herself to her father.

Sounds ominous about Kelly "lasting" and that the pregnancy will probably include all sorts of body horror and then kill her - I suppose more burning up like the vessels or something in that vein.

So I suppose now we have the whole do you let the baby get born at the expense of the mother dying stuff - I really really hope this is not some wacky anti-abortion message but actually makes this look WRONG. I mean you'd think Lucifer and a trusted underling not valuing the mother over the baby would be a good start that this is a bad POV on abortion because it's again choosing for the mother what's "best" and which life to value more, but, well.

I also just don't trust the writers because the message was so bad in 12x08 with all the men arguing over what to do about her baby and Kelly's characterisation to not even consider abortion seriously despite having a baby from rape, before we even get into the ethical horror show of what it may or may not be intentionally saying about aborting babies with problems you just don't think you can deal with as a parent regardless of their potential

I mean fucking hell can we just not have this story arc?

Wait if we're having more Mick flashbacks did he actually kill his friend or are we just wallowing on this

I can't tell with these writers if I should expect a plot twist or just over-writing :P

the Headmistress has a chessboard in front of her, currently all set up and not played. But in the actual game, her chess pieces are all over the board. Does she think she has them in neat lines, but they're actually running everywhere?

Who knows - Mick tries to complain he's still cleaning up after Toni's mess while the Headmistress thinks that they're hopeless because Toni said so. She doesn't want chess pieces she can't get neatly in line.

Not how the game works, ma'am

She seems to think so - "assimilate or eliminate" - she really does not understand the Winchesters and their role in the whole... cosmic order. You work around them, or with them, not over them. :P

Blah blah Kelly and Dagon - Dagon doing the bare minimum to keep Kelly alive while off the radar of everyone looking for her, clearly not caring about Kelly... Kelly demands to see a doctor because of course we need her to make stupid decisions.

I bet the baby has like, little horns and a pitchfork in there and the weird pains are because it's poking the inside of her tummy with the pitchfork.

Cackling comes over the ultrasound, somehow.

Also, better odds the doctor is randomly an angel, maybe because they've possessed every single doctor in the country waiting for Kelly to drop by because she wants pics of Satan jr to share on Facebook to make all her schoolfriends jealous.

The hangover scene - Sam and Dean have their sleeves rolled the exact same way. They really are still being a unified front. Of course, the whole table thing - they're in their rightful places while confronting a cheery Mick hanging out in their kitchen. Last interloper to do that was God.

Of course this implies that Sam and Dean keep the resources to make Bloody Marys in their fridge in the first place.

Which is completely and utterly horrifying, that Mick comes in right as they're asking each other about Mary, and makes himself a Bloody Mary.

Binge drinking: a national sport and we're GOOD at it

I am disappointed that Dagon did not just roll with the fake relationship thing because that would have been hilarious and maybe actually made me interested in the character dynamics going on here. She's not exactly done anything to make her look like more than the standard standoffish demon with old school lucifer loyalties and not much interest in being nice except for what it gets her. Of course there's a Meg vibe going on but like... without all the oozing charisma and personality that in Meg 2.0 was just in one eyebrow all the time. I mean, she could just stand there and eyebrow slightly and... gah, Rachel Miner just has ridiculous stage presence :P I don’t DISLIKE Dagon but she’s trapped in this writing and has no room to do anything fun or challenging.

I just took a little break to come up with a much better way to write this story with Mittens, and we've concluded if Kelly's not going to be HORRIFIED by what's happening inside her, she should be intentionally stoned out of her mind with nephilim baby brain, which Dagon has to deal with like "UGH" and long story short, she has to throw Kelly a baby shower to keep her happy and they sit there crocheting booties together and AGAIN would give us real character dynamics - Kelly wavering between "what's happening to me?" and wandering around their dilapidated hide out of the week wondering where to put the nursery while singing to herself, and Dagon grinding her teeth and helping Kelly pick out names all sweetly :P

I just want these poor actresses to have something real to work with

Can't see horns on the nephilim

oh well

*slowly decays on my chair into a neat little pile of dust while Crowley is being boring with Lucifer* I was just watching 9x02 before this, and Crowley chained up in the dungeon there, playing Kevin for all its worth, and oh my god that was excellent writing

boring

... I do not remember typing that

Oh, Michael reference. Cool. Cool cool cool. Nothing new about him, but with his presence in the narrative I have to wonder if Lucifer is lying or exaggerating.

Giving Crowley what he "wants" in order to make him bored or unsatisfied or whatever Lucifer seems to be playing with seems to go back to a much less interesting version of Crowley than the one who seemed to have a lot more fun torturing Lucifer in 12x15 with a genuinely clever way to BREAK him but oh well

the "you win" obviously is really fake and Lucifer attempting to manipuate Crowley while under his control and ugh Crowley does it so much better. He broke Kevin in like 3 lines of dialogue

Ooh Mary

She has a bigass gun - ha, as I was typing that she added another attachment and made it bigger

I suppose that's not a metaphor about their relationship - "I've learned not to argue"

"Major in murder, minor in mayhem?" okay we've switched to whichever of Buckner and Ross-Leming is the quippy one :P I like these lines, to be clear. Mary is fun. Mary and Ketch fascinates me, if you didn't notice me writing a 6k fic where they were married in the aftermath of the world without monsters :P

Oh my god is she actually going to talk about her life with Ketch? I was hoping nearer the start of the season she'd open up to Cas but obviously that would be too positive for the both of them. And now it's part of Ketch seducing her, so I'm gonna cut off that thought right here, since it would have been for sweet family reasons with Cas but sooo not where it's going here :P

She's wearing the same shirt with the XOXOX pattern from 12x02 and we can see the chain with the ring on but it's not really obvious the ring is there

Oh NOW we can see the ring, after the "Mrs Winchester, I believe you're drawn to danger" line and the camera changes to a wider shot and you can see the ring finally, like, they parted her plaid a little.

I kind of want to be more emo about Mary talking about her life, and I am in other contexts but this episode has exhausted me, so her laughing sadly about her quiet normal life not happening was kind of a non-moment to me >.> I suppose she's sort of coming through to a state of acceptance if you apply the stages of grief, but she's still dealing with it all wrong by not talking to her family - even Cas - but bonding with the worst possible character to bond with this season. I mean, c'mon, if she'd started hanging out with Crowley he'd have got weirdly attached in a non-creepy way and kind of hate himself for giving her honest girl talk advice :P

Mick can't seem to move without ominous music following him

Pfft there's another, worse Brit here now who is the Poshest and even drinking tea while he comes to chat with Mick. Mick being all rough and stubble-y and pointing a gun at him is immediately looking like a more relatable character in terms of what we're asked to relate to with hunters and all - he's picking up their mannerisms

The posh boy talks about another set of hands - NOT a Cas parallel or at least the worst freakin Cas parallel ever. I think in a way, if that line does mean anything, then the parallels to Heaven here, have Mick as the Cas here, and posh boy as the Establishment Cas is up against.

Oooh the blood is on the floor there next to Mick, but last episode Dean was standing directly on top of it so I missed that detail. Now it's just casually in the frame with Mick, reminding us and I guess therefore telling us what's on his mind. And, you know, showing us Mick framed with what was a huge pool of blood.

Okay I guess the guy who just murdered the doctor is a demon despite no eyes flashing because he didn't use an angel blade and an angel might have been a bit more, sorry have to murder you hope you understand - no idea why he did that unless Dagon's commanding some demons to clear up Kelly's mess, knowing her little mind control thingy might not be permanent. Or Crowley also is looking for the nephilim on the side to pointlessly torturing Lucifer.

I mean without the eyes he could have just been a really proactive hunter or BMoL

Oh gosh no Dean's on the phone to Cas, listening to his terrible voicemail. Help.

OH NO EILEEN'S HERE AND SHE'S SITTING IN THE 'COME AND GET ME' POSE

Sam you need to take her on that table right now

Dean will clear the heck out, he understands and thinks you're cute together

I literally did not listen to a thing they said while screeching about that *rewinds for plot*

Also just the whole Cas n Dean thing on one side and Sam n Eileen in the other room

OH gosh they saved the demon reveal for Eileen having a badass fucking showdown with him both showing their cards with him doing the eyes, and her pulling out an ANGEL BLADE

I know they're a lot cheaper in the current economy but I have to think Sam gave it to her from their spares pile, because of the Asa Fox thing on the one hand, that they ARE rare for hunters to best and angel in any way but also just this way it's sweet

but oh boy the Cas/Dean Sam/Eileen stuff that happens when you show her pulling an angel blade

Ah, the demon did work for Dagon

(Which means Crowley is flagging in this race, if he's even in it >.>)

But anyway Dean third-wheeling Sam and Eileen is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Sam is awkward and smiling! Eileen is gorgeous and smiling! Dean likes Eileen a lot with respect as a hunter (thinks it's cool she stabbed a demon in the heart) but is totally cut out of the final moment where Sam and Eileen clink beer bottles, I mean, he just *vanishes*

and then I realise - this is how Sam feels all the time when he's stuck in a scene with Dean and Cas :P

What is Crowley even doing

I suppose this scene is very blatantly illustrating how 2 stories can happen at once - Crowley thinks he's showing ultimate dominance, and Lucifer is subverting it by using the words Crowley wants to hear for his own ends, with actual wink wink nod nod to how he's the one saying how it will be. The demons are confused and hesitant about what they're clapping for... Not entirely sure which power is ruling them and how it's going to turn out for them - who do you support in this race? Crowley is the surface text, presenting what he thinks is obvious from the visuals. But Lucifer is the subtext, with his back turned to Crowley he's free to convey what ever else he wants, even to the point of painting the exact opposite story to what's going on

discord between surface and subtext.

Kelly seems to be genuinely trying to be totally normal about her pregnancy... is this denial?

Literally did not recognise Sam's voice... I knew it had to be SOMEONE putting on a voice but what the heck Sam can ACT?

I mean I'm not complaining I love it but AAAH

Also me whenever Sam and Eileen are on screen together: hands over my mouth, eyes all big and anime shiny, faint squealing whistle escaping from between my fingers

Aw Mick no don't ruin this party

Eileen: "no one cares" *continues making heart eyes at her* *sam sends heart eyes at her*

Oh god we're all in love with Eileen, this is not going to end well, because I can't fight Sam for her. I am smol and he will kill me.

Anyway more class struggle between the BMoL and hunters... they have files on them but think they have no training, despite the fact they survived. I mean, Eileen has made it as a deaf hunter. Can they not appreciate how fucking badass she must be? :P Learning on the job with live monsters means any hunter who makes it so far has not been killed by literally every “class” or “test” they ever had.

Blah blah Sam gets handed the colt while standing in the shadow of a bridge blah blah 1x21 parallels. In 1x21 they did not get the shot they wanted. Although Dean was handed the Colt by John (who Mick is now standing in for) and gave it to Sam before he didn't make the shot. I wonder if Sam will give the gun to someone else.

(For no reason other than that she's here, I'd love to see Eileen do it, although of course it would take away some narrative impact from a major character parallel. But I love her so)

Well that was an easy kidnap

Kelly really is not coming out of this well. I'm going to blame as much as I can on baby brain. She's such a pawn in this narrative and it sucks on a grand scale.

*nyoom*

Is Dean just taking her straight to the others for them to maybe shoot her? I mean, what is the actual plan here

*Dean continues missing Cas out loud* *doesn't care about this other guy who showed up instead*

Anyway a whole bunch of blokes are here to talk to Kelly about it, though she's now too hugely preggers for take-backsies

Sam wants to help, Mick has the unsympathetic POV that the baby won't even love Kelly because it's a monster, Kelly actually gets to say out loud that she was used and is upset about the Lucifer thing (woah, a whole line of dialogue about it :P) and that she loves her baby anyway.

Blonde posh twat just wants to kill her immediately, which causes Dean to go into human shield mode to Kelly

Eileen's just like, not everyone is looking directly at me, what is going on

*individual reaction shots for literally everyone being thrown around*

*everyone shoots Dagon pointlessly*

elizabethrobertajones has anyone talked about how Kelly looked when Dagon came to get her

mittensmorgul Not that I've seen... How did she look?

elizabethrobertajones she has such muted reactions to everything but in this case Dagon walks right up to her and Kelly says nothing but is leaning away reluctantly and then Dagon grabs her hand and pulls her and the shot of her being led off screen is like this defeated school kid who was caught going truant

mittensmorgul She knows she's still being used...

elizabethrobertajones yeah NOW I feel sorry for her because she seems defeated and used and broken

mittensmorgul yeah.

elizabethrobertajones it's just sucky they didn't write her well enough before to build any of that up or like... actually make her look genuinely depressed and unwell

mittensmorgul yep they just made her seem like a flake

elizabethrobertajones that one little defeated kid being taken home moment where Dagon grabs her hand says EVERYTHING but they had like FOUR SCENES together already and I didn't see this!!

YES Eileen has the Colt!!!! GO GO EILEEN

I guess she shoots british blonde dickhead instead because he was gonna shoot Kelly or something

Colt slow mo! It really does slow down the flow of time every time it's shot.

Aw, crap, she shot the blonde loser instead but because Dagon did, well, the 1x21 thing, and we got to see how a Colt kills a human (which I ALWAYS wondered, because it can't just make you sort of die normally from gunshot wounds - you have to, you know, DIE of a kill anything gun wound, so messy, quick and awful :P)

Anyway Eileen NOOOO you look so horrified :( I was just saying to Mittens her Cas mirroring piles on and I can't even think what this is, just that she now feels like shit for things which aren't her fault but she has this death on her conscience, and it didn't even happen in defence of anyone, it was just he stood in the way like an idiot and Dagon didn't feel like getting shot today and knew exactly what was happening because Eileen hesitated just long enough to let her disappear.

... Does Dean actually know the Colt is in play because UGH we were robbed of that reveal

MICK NO

EILEEN IS PRECIOUS AND THIS IS DEFINITELY CROSSING A LINE. YOU LEAVE HER THE FUCK ALONE

I guess the Code IS brainwashing, and this is again a Cas parallel - this would be a crypt scene kind of moment for him except that the cute love story is between Sam and Eileen, and Mick's interloping on that with the brainwashedness and the whole... already killed his puppy because the Headmistress said so flashbacks, so what is random old hunter Eileen to do with anything, but even someone he openly disliked as much as whatsisface was a BMoL and should be defended

honestly he should remember Eileen's being defended by 2 legacies and she herself is a legacy and I think if I remember correctly was raised by a hunter with connections to the Irish chapter?

We're crossing over into the final 10 minutes of a Buckleming episode here

Sam argues for free will, which is a bit of a turn around when Dean's right there (not that Sam isn't about free will - they ARE Team Free Will after all, but Dean tends to lead the way on this while Sam has a much more interesting relationship with it for other reasons), but hey, it's a Buckleming episode - themes can bounce around pretty wildly and get connected to anyone. :P Sam's been all in the centre of attention and having a lot of big dramatic moments lately. Plus, crypt scene parallel and all, he had to talk the brainwashed person out of killing the one he loves so that at least the romance angle is in there somewhere. It's like, one step removed from the original, but allows Sam to interject himself into the scene, without getting tangled up in crypt scene stuff himself (don't think he's ever really done more than a few cursory I know you're in there moments, back and forth with being the one in there or the one saying it, which were MotW little things and not part of the big narrative, just the supporting mirrors :P).

Of course also parallels the subverted crypt scene, by the crypt scene obsessed director in 12x10, where again Ishim was used as an intermediary to break the back and forth-ing of the crypt scene repeats between Dean and Cas, and didn't need a I know you're in there, but again boiled it down simply to protecting a loved one in a particular framing playing off previous iterations (10x22, which was much more in the formula) - Sam gets this parallel where he can fight for his loved one without it being all twisted up and weird in possession that THEY have to deal with, just the attacker. So it looks nothing like the actual crypt scene, guy in a long tan coat and scruff trying to kill a loved one because brainwashing aside, but is still part of the organic growth of the way this subtext has gone.

Aaand Mary took off the ring. Do not want John to see this.

Ketch like, wow, I thought I'd just end up killing you.

Charming.

Flash some more of your excellent calves at her to make her forget you said that.

(I am personally offended by his calves as I made Mary practically gag over him having pallid calves in said fic where they were married. Dammit DHJ can you stop being amazing because I need to hate every aspect of your character down to his calves and you're like, hi, I'm going to sit in this ridiculous pose now so you can see my calves are indeed the same colour as all the rest of me and not the garish calves of the man who wears a suit all year until you drag him to the beach)

Anyway Ketch is like blah blah thanks for giving up your family and throwing yourself into hunting and my bed with no strings attached, isn't this grand, and Mary's like, uh, I like my family and I want to have it all, hunting and family, and Ketch is like wow I just started to like you and now I really have to kill you and oh dear.

Oh dearie dearie me.

Imminent attempt on her life by Ketch aside, I think Mary has a bit of a misunderstanding about hunting and family - 12x03 was them trying to show her how their life actually was, but she was too messed up to appreciate it and actually needed the space. But it was trying desperately to build a life where Mom comes along on hunts and that's cool because we hunt and Mom hunts and she's here, so... uh, this is what we do now.

But instead Mary split off from them entirely - 12x06 showed she hunted in secret away from her family in the past, and kept the two completely partitioned - I think something Sam also has issues with although he had been more open to the idea of marrying someone in the life, said in a Robbie episode before the Robbie episode where Eileen showed up and uh hey guess who's here right now... Uh, slightly sidetracked (slightly hit by a massive shipping container that is Sam and Eileen)... But yeah, Mary needs to reconcile that she has a hunting family, that that isn't a bad thing, and the two things can coexist perfectly normally. They don't NEED her to get rid of all the monsters and in a way she's talking to Ketch about two life choices, to hunt and have a family, ignoring the detail that she and Ketch are on an extermination run against all monsters, so eventually there won't BE hunting to define herself by so she won't be able to have it all because one part will be over... and of course, the more she goes on like this, the more precarious it seems for the other part too. Dean's worrying about not hearing from Mary although he's making a bigger fuss about not hearing from Cas. And their arcs are paralleled, though to obviously different ends that Cas is romantically estranged from Dean and Mary's estranged from being his mom.

Blah blah Lucifer, he's shirtless, exposition is still happening, Crowley's found himself a hacker to crack the spells on him. he just made it out of this scene but I suppose next Buckleming episode he's queued for untimely death of a black guy.

Him leaving and the sounds of the Bunker door overlap nicely.

Eileen <3

(She hasn't done anything yet, she just looks sad)

Sam and Dean agree with me. Dean says nice things, and then Sam gently touches her shoulder (I am officially, like, noped out of these DeanCas parallels I just can't) and turns her around and signs to her and and he's touchign her hairrrrr and aannanodsigrdoh epjddpawhtiwoeugipeow[pe[wkgo[rdf

I'm all overcome with emotions about Sam touching her hair all gently and her weeping into his chest and I can't deal with Kelly and Dagon scenes immediately after. Now Kelly really is the scolded child who tried to run away, and Dagon is showing Kelly FINALLY that she only cares about the baby in no uncertain terms (it seemed fairly obvious in their first scene but I guess it just wasn't obvious enough to Kelly, who has the worst case of baby brain ever, which I always thought was a thing where you put the kettle back in the fridge after you made tea or something, not trusting a Prince of Hell with your unborn nephilim baby and your own life)

okay now Kelly has a nearly appropriate horror level to what's going on with her baby

Oh noes Headmistress has shown up

More schoolboys getting scolded

Everyone is children

But Mick is our inside guy at least. He actually wants to argue against it because he passed a crypt scene test. I still don't know if he's gonna survive but I mean, at least he had this? Sometimes cool characters get an entire backstory right before they get murdered and I can honestly see this ending with Ketch being in the room because he's about to slice Mick's throat, probably with the same dagger he once killed his BFF with back in Kendricks because why not :P

Which means Mick softening up only serves a metaphorical purpose unless he left some inside way for the Winchesters, like idk his bottle of tomato juice and recipe for a Bloody Mary turns out to be the code or something

WHO KNOWS

Well me if I ever finished the episode

She asks if the hunters obey him, but Mick obeyed them >.>

Mick's chest hair is trying to get out of the room before him...

Dang, sir. I was gonna joke about it during last episode when he was hanging out in the back of the car, but I didn't feel like it was worth mentioning and i now regret that comment not happening completely; it's definitely actually heightening the tension here, with his half-open shirt.

Nooooo they can't kill Eileen... Why is she on their shitlist? I mean I know why but this is so unfair

MICK IS REBELLING

he is so gonna die because he's doing the Naomi Gadreel Metatron redemption moment

especially because they're all symbolic useless deaths; I think Gadreel was the only one who even made any sort of real difference

RIP Mick

Your scruff will be missed

Dean you can not sigh like that about Cas, with the big soulful heaving of shoulders and audibly wet breath and all I mean

someone might think you were in love with him or something, the way you're carrying on

Incidentally I thought there was something fishy about it and Mittens confirmed to me it's literally 2 days later and Sam and Dean appear not to have seen each other since shit went down, but Sam was the last person to talk to Eileen and know what she's doing, so I'm guessing Sam and Eileen spent 2 days in Sam's room rearranging the furniture.

I am beyond proud of my boy.

HEY Dean gets the Colt. I mean it's almost enough to fill the gap between Sam x Eileen and Dean x Colt and forget Destiel :P

It parallels him and Ketch again (he also had sweet talky words to the Colt, which mirrored back to Dean getting her in 6x18), so I'm starting to feel like he kills Ketch with it? Like, symbolically needing to use it on a human person instead of the monster big bad or something? I know Eileen already accidentally killed a dude with it, but I mean, Dean and Ketch seem to have a reckoning coming, whether Dean knows Ketch and Mary hooked up or not (although, narratively, ends up heaping on weirdass subtext whether he knows or not >.> Dean vs the step father kind of thing)... this would be sort of neat.

Poor Mick just laying there.

Oh I typed that thing about Dean and Ketch before the Headmistress threw down the files for the Winchesters with Dean's on top, so, yeah. That's their reckoning a'coming.

It's 1am and I really have not conclusive thoughts about this except that I am delighted Sam and Eileen hooked up and she fled the country instead of sticking around making me nervous about her getting the hit on her, and Sam did a bad Irish accent earlier because he's like, goofily in love with her, so I guess he might just like, randomly fly to Ireland in the season finale to help her and they get married while they're out there and -

Oh and also whenever Cas comes back Dean narratively has full permission to take him back to his room and not let him out for an entire two days.

#12x17 #season 12 spoilers #I loved a lot of this but #buckleming appropriate wank for ts #for all the bits that were like... hey pacing and characterisation are words in the dictionary #my stuff #rape mention cw #poor old Kelly >.>

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