SPN Ep Rxn 6.7: So Crowley is Cutler Beckett and Sam is Davy Jones and Dean is?
No blow-by-blow this time, just facts and musings - and a poll!
Anyway. Did Fandom call it, or what? Under the cut, fill out the spoily, spoily poll and pat yourself on the back. Or do some self-flagellation, whatever.
Poll Who called it?
The Story:
Check out emmram 's blow-by-blow here!
The Facts:
Castiel cannot see souls just by looking at someone, as fanon had it.
Sam has no soul, because Crowley has it on reserve. He's also lost all paranoia, not that he had much to begin with, and no longer resents it when people keep secrets from him, arguably the defining motive of his younger life.
Sam's soul is not in the Cage right now ("or I'll shove him right back in the hole.") I hope.
Camp Campbell mobilized at least four vehicles of hunters for the nest assault.
During the assault, a female vampire screamed, "Dean! Help!" before she was brutally slaughtered by hunters. Lenore, maybe?
Christian has been a demon for as long as we've known him. In a hunter compound. How did that work? He also avoided the notice of Sam and Castiel. Sam's demon-sniffing in MBV may have been soul-dependent or just Famine-induced, but Castiel should have detected the demon. My guess is that Crowley anticipated Castiel's involvement in anything Winchester-related, and made sure his moles knew how to camouflage their ethereal heat signatures.
Dead Man's Blood repels vampires from a distance. Vampires don't have to chew on the door or rub their open wounds against it to be repelled.
The Alpha Vampire has limited shapeshifting powers (grows fingernails at will), possible teleportation, and known telepathy. It takes a constant flow of Dead Man's Blood to keep one weak enough to confine in sturdy leather strap restraints. It's the first of all vampires. Its pain tolerance is extremely high. Though articulate and philosophical, it glories in its own bloodlust.
Alphas have Mothers.
Purgatory holds the souls of dead monsters. For some reason.
Okay, this makes zero sense. Dante had a place to put the souls of beings who never took responsibility for their actions: the Vestibule! People who mindlessly followed their instincts were pursued by enraged killer bees and Japanese hornets just beyond the mouth of Hell for all eternity! Or people who never had an opportunity for faith went to Limbo! Purgatory is for repentant Christian souls. It's a place where people have the opportunity to confront and overcome their sins to prepare themselves to look upon the glory of God and accept the fullness of His love (look at me, talking all Churchy).
Do monsters repent of following the instincts necessary for their survival? Do they seek God's love and accept his forgiveness?
If they do, it kind of turns our understanding of monsters upside down.
On the other hand, if human souls are going straight to Heaven without a chance at Purgatory, that could explain why they're just inserted into tiny individualized Earth-based Matrices instead of inducted into the fellowship and harmony of the Body of Christ in Heaven, and, oh, meeting Jesus. The SPN cosmos are screwed up. Heaven's not Heaven, because Angels are running it instead of God. Souls aren't meeting Him. Demons are allowed to make binding contracts with humans willy-nilly. Why not have monsters diverted into Purgatory, just as the icing on the cake?
One thing they did get right - Purgatory is Hell-adjacent. There's a tunnel at the center of Lake Cocytus, if I remember correctly, leading over the River Lethe, and into the gardens at the foot of the Mountain. There's supposed to be an angel guarding the place, but given the current organization of Heaven, I doubt anybody's on duty.
More interesting: Mount Purgatory reaches up toward Heaven. If you want to plan an assault, it'd be a good spot for a front-line base.
What's thematically interesting, is that Purgatory is where redemption happens. No matter how bad you screwed up in your life, in Purgatory you'd get the chance to excoriate your crimes.
The King of Hell has enough power to tamper with the Cage. This could mean something like cutting a tiny hole in the top and retrieving Sam's soul with a hook and some fishing line, or like constructing an extra compartment to the cage so that Michael and Lucifer could be separated from Sam like cattle being sorted in a chute, or like opening the door as wide as it goes, putting Michael and Lucifer in a headlock, and then scooping Sam out.
Samuel just lost Camp Campbell. If Gwen spills the dirt on him and the other Campbells believe her, Samuel might be reduced to a consulting position for his super-special knowledge of the uncanny, or he might have to go on the run and work for Crowley alone.
Closing Thoughts:
Sam has no soul. I'd imagine discovering this, for Castiel, felt a bit like the following:
Imagine you are rectally palpating a cow. Step one: anally penetrate the cow using your gloved, non-dominant hand. Step two: slowly advance your arm into the cow's descending colon. (Everything's warm and mushy and the colon keeps rippling and trying to push your arm back out. And she just flicked you in the eye with her tail.) Step three: grasp the cervix to retract the uterus. Grasp the cervix . . . graaasp it . . . keep feeling around in there . . . where the? What? There's? Cow's got no uterus. Well, that explains her infertility. (This is a valuable job skill for thousands of people around the world.)
"It's his soul. It's gone."
This is scary. Sam is scary enough with the soul. If life puts pressure on Sam, Sam doesn't crumble: he pushes back, and, good or bad, big, frightening things happen. Running away to college. Road-hauling terrified mentally-disabled ghosts. Killing possessed people. Demon blood. Suicide-to-Hell-with-Lucifer-in-his-brain. Once Sam gets the idea he wants to make something happen, he does what it takes to get it done. Now he doesn't have a soul to slow him down anymore.
Dean feels needed again. It's a little worrying how quickly being needed has fixed Dean up, at least in the short term: he's forcing himself to be confident, he's making plans, and he's no longer afraid to push Sam around, because he knows that Sam needs him to be the leader.
He's not happy - "Nothing's fine. You're not fine . . . " - but now he knows what the problem is, and he has a job to do.
Also, as we see from how Dean works with the Campbells, he is John Winchester's soldier and nobody else's. "You can trust me" for as long as you're watching. "You call the shots" if it makes you feel better.
Bald Samuel has stopped tripping my creep-o-meter, now that I know he's done something Winchestery like bargain with Crowley for some family member's life or soul. It's a perfectly reasonable excuse for all the kidnapping and torture of sentient humanoids. And now we can stop blaming him for Sam coming back wrong.
Or I just need my creep-o-meter adjusted.
I liked Christian. He spoke his mind. I'd just had him as a hyperprotective alpha male defending his territory, and he was clever and cocky and loyal to the Campbells, and he had this whole Red Right Hand thing going on, which I find irresistible onscreen. Everytime he came into a scene, it was like, hey! I know that guy! He and Dean have a running pissing contest!
But alas, no, he was just a demon. Dangit.
That explains why he didn't want Dean hanging around distracting Sam, though.
Also, anyone notice how "I've got your back" has come to mean "I'll be right behind you, holding a giant knife"?
Gwen is like the bratty little sister that Dean never wanted. Or self-righteous Season 1 Sam, take your pick. Any woman who can make Dean that uncomfortable ("You have surprisingly delicate features for a hunter") is fine by me!
Working with Sam is going to be like hunting with a 6'5" 250lb falcon, I'd guess. You can threaten, bribe, restrain, and compel it to work for you, as long as the work is in line with its natural behaviors, but when it comes down to it, a bird of prey doesn't need your approval, and if you get in its way, it might well gouge your eyes out when you least expect it.
Sam's animated soulless carcass might turn out to be more reliable than this, but not if SPN is going to play it straight. It all depends on where Sam's morals are. If they're all in his soul, Dean is screwed. If some of them are in his brain, too, well. We already know they've got serious limitations.
For the first time, Dean and Sam's relationship has become an almost pure power struggle. Sam establishes that Dean can't reasonably lock him away forever until they fix the soul thing. Dean tells Sam that Sam needs someone to tell him who to trust and what rules to follow. They both need to cooperate for the best chance of getting what they both want back. So they do. But to Dean, Sam is his responsibility, and to Sam, Dean is his current best ally.
Crowley has their brotherhood locked away in Hell or in his jacket pocket, wherever he put Sam's soul.
Crowley may present a serious, serious problem. I'd always figured him for the sane demon, the one who just wants to do deals and let the human world keep on turning as it will. But no, he's a game-changer. He wants to expand. He'd be one of those drug dealers pushing crack on school-kids. Maybe he'd start advertising, or facilitating horrific tragedies to gather more souls.
Imagine a modern egg farm with each chicken in a tiny individual cage, and swap souls for eggs and humans for chickens. This could be Crowley's dream, and he's dedicated enough to make it happen. Not good!
What does Crowley want with new real estate?
Maybe Hell is out of space.
Maybe access to conquerable territory would allow Crowley to increase his power by forming and exploiting colonies (he does have a British accent, after all).
Maybe he wants to create a nice fluffy new Hell that's less of a prison of blood and bone and fear, then sell one-way tickets to his enemies.
Maybe Purgatory has strategic advantages like different laws of "physics" or easier access to Heaven or Earth.
Do Sam's powers work without his soul? We know from Death Takes A Holiday that they don't work without his body, but if the soul is also necessary, then resurrecting Sam in the condition he's in was a very wise strategic decision for Crowley. Forget Heaven's Nukes: Sam killed Lilith, and if Famine was telling the truth and I'm understanding him right, Sam has some kind of infinite gas tank situation. In On The Head Of A Pin, Sam had Alistair rolling over and showing his belly after five seconds of Crucio. Sam can hurt demons in ways even demons aren't prepared to take: it's as if he can psychically crank the experience horrific agony switch all the way up to eleven and stand back. If anybody's going to go for the demon blood, it's Robo-Sam.
If I were Crowley, I'd deactivate the powers permanently before releasing Sam into the wild.
More whispers of redemption in this episode.
In the basic Christian sense of the word, getting Sam's soul back from the forces of darkness is redemption.
Repairing Sam and Dean's relationship would be redemption.
Purgatory is traditionally the place where souls have the opportunity to work out their own redemption.
Oh, and you know who traditionally takes care of demonically-induced soul loss? Shamans!
Anyway. Did Fandom call it, or what? Under the cut, fill out the spoily, spoily poll and pat yourself on the back. Or do some self-flagellation, whatever.
Poll Who called it?
The Story:
Check out emmram 's blow-by-blow here!
The Facts:
Castiel cannot see souls just by looking at someone, as fanon had it.
Sam has no soul, because Crowley has it on reserve. He's also lost all paranoia, not that he had much to begin with, and no longer resents it when people keep secrets from him, arguably the defining motive of his younger life.
Sam's soul is not in the Cage right now ("or I'll shove him right back in the hole.") I hope.
Camp Campbell mobilized at least four vehicles of hunters for the nest assault.
During the assault, a female vampire screamed, "Dean! Help!" before she was brutally slaughtered by hunters. Lenore, maybe?
Christian has been a demon for as long as we've known him. In a hunter compound. How did that work? He also avoided the notice of Sam and Castiel. Sam's demon-sniffing in MBV may have been soul-dependent or just Famine-induced, but Castiel should have detected the demon. My guess is that Crowley anticipated Castiel's involvement in anything Winchester-related, and made sure his moles knew how to camouflage their ethereal heat signatures.
Dead Man's Blood repels vampires from a distance. Vampires don't have to chew on the door or rub their open wounds against it to be repelled.
The Alpha Vampire has limited shapeshifting powers (grows fingernails at will), possible teleportation, and known telepathy. It takes a constant flow of Dead Man's Blood to keep one weak enough to confine in sturdy leather strap restraints. It's the first of all vampires. Its pain tolerance is extremely high. Though articulate and philosophical, it glories in its own bloodlust.
Alphas have Mothers.
Purgatory holds the souls of dead monsters. For some reason.
Okay, this makes zero sense. Dante had a place to put the souls of beings who never took responsibility for their actions: the Vestibule! People who mindlessly followed their instincts were pursued by enraged killer bees and Japanese hornets just beyond the mouth of Hell for all eternity! Or people who never had an opportunity for faith went to Limbo! Purgatory is for repentant Christian souls. It's a place where people have the opportunity to confront and overcome their sins to prepare themselves to look upon the glory of God and accept the fullness of His love (look at me, talking all Churchy).
Do monsters repent of following the instincts necessary for their survival? Do they seek God's love and accept his forgiveness?
If they do, it kind of turns our understanding of monsters upside down.
On the other hand, if human souls are going straight to Heaven without a chance at Purgatory, that could explain why they're just inserted into tiny individualized Earth-based Matrices instead of inducted into the fellowship and harmony of the Body of Christ in Heaven, and, oh, meeting Jesus. The SPN cosmos are screwed up. Heaven's not Heaven, because Angels are running it instead of God. Souls aren't meeting Him. Demons are allowed to make binding contracts with humans willy-nilly. Why not have monsters diverted into Purgatory, just as the icing on the cake?
One thing they did get right - Purgatory is Hell-adjacent. There's a tunnel at the center of Lake Cocytus, if I remember correctly, leading over the River Lethe, and into the gardens at the foot of the Mountain. There's supposed to be an angel guarding the place, but given the current organization of Heaven, I doubt anybody's on duty.
More interesting: Mount Purgatory reaches up toward Heaven. If you want to plan an assault, it'd be a good spot for a front-line base.
What's thematically interesting, is that Purgatory is where redemption happens. No matter how bad you screwed up in your life, in Purgatory you'd get the chance to excoriate your crimes.
The King of Hell has enough power to tamper with the Cage. This could mean something like cutting a tiny hole in the top and retrieving Sam's soul with a hook and some fishing line, or like constructing an extra compartment to the cage so that Michael and Lucifer could be separated from Sam like cattle being sorted in a chute, or like opening the door as wide as it goes, putting Michael and Lucifer in a headlock, and then scooping Sam out.
Samuel just lost Camp Campbell. If Gwen spills the dirt on him and the other Campbells believe her, Samuel might be reduced to a consulting position for his super-special knowledge of the uncanny, or he might have to go on the run and work for Crowley alone.
Closing Thoughts:
Sam has no soul. I'd imagine discovering this, for Castiel, felt a bit like the following:
Imagine you are rectally palpating a cow. Step one: anally penetrate the cow using your gloved, non-dominant hand. Step two: slowly advance your arm into the cow's descending colon. (Everything's warm and mushy and the colon keeps rippling and trying to push your arm back out. And she just flicked you in the eye with her tail.) Step three: grasp the cervix to retract the uterus. Grasp the cervix . . . graaasp it . . . keep feeling around in there . . . where the? What? There's? Cow's got no uterus. Well, that explains her infertility. (This is a valuable job skill for thousands of people around the world.)
"It's his soul. It's gone."
This is scary. Sam is scary enough with the soul. If life puts pressure on Sam, Sam doesn't crumble: he pushes back, and, good or bad, big, frightening things happen. Running away to college. Road-hauling terrified mentally-disabled ghosts. Killing possessed people. Demon blood. Suicide-to-Hell-with-Lucifer-in-his-brain. Once Sam gets the idea he wants to make something happen, he does what it takes to get it done. Now he doesn't have a soul to slow him down anymore.
Dean feels needed again. It's a little worrying how quickly being needed has fixed Dean up, at least in the short term: he's forcing himself to be confident, he's making plans, and he's no longer afraid to push Sam around, because he knows that Sam needs him to be the leader.
He's not happy - "Nothing's fine. You're not fine . . . " - but now he knows what the problem is, and he has a job to do.
Also, as we see from how Dean works with the Campbells, he is John Winchester's soldier and nobody else's. "You can trust me" for as long as you're watching. "You call the shots" if it makes you feel better.
Bald Samuel has stopped tripping my creep-o-meter, now that I know he's done something Winchestery like bargain with Crowley for some family member's life or soul. It's a perfectly reasonable excuse for all the kidnapping and torture of sentient humanoids. And now we can stop blaming him for Sam coming back wrong.
Or I just need my creep-o-meter adjusted.
I liked Christian. He spoke his mind. I'd just had him as a hyperprotective alpha male defending his territory, and he was clever and cocky and loyal to the Campbells, and he had this whole Red Right Hand thing going on, which I find irresistible onscreen. Everytime he came into a scene, it was like, hey! I know that guy! He and Dean have a running pissing contest!
But alas, no, he was just a demon. Dangit.
That explains why he didn't want Dean hanging around distracting Sam, though.
Also, anyone notice how "I've got your back" has come to mean "I'll be right behind you, holding a giant knife"?
Gwen is like the bratty little sister that Dean never wanted. Or self-righteous Season 1 Sam, take your pick. Any woman who can make Dean that uncomfortable ("You have surprisingly delicate features for a hunter") is fine by me!
Working with Sam is going to be like hunting with a 6'5" 250lb falcon, I'd guess. You can threaten, bribe, restrain, and compel it to work for you, as long as the work is in line with its natural behaviors, but when it comes down to it, a bird of prey doesn't need your approval, and if you get in its way, it might well gouge your eyes out when you least expect it.
Sam's animated soulless carcass might turn out to be more reliable than this, but not if SPN is going to play it straight. It all depends on where Sam's morals are. If they're all in his soul, Dean is screwed. If some of them are in his brain, too, well. We already know they've got serious limitations.
For the first time, Dean and Sam's relationship has become an almost pure power struggle. Sam establishes that Dean can't reasonably lock him away forever until they fix the soul thing. Dean tells Sam that Sam needs someone to tell him who to trust and what rules to follow. They both need to cooperate for the best chance of getting what they both want back. So they do. But to Dean, Sam is his responsibility, and to Sam, Dean is his current best ally.
Crowley has their brotherhood locked away in Hell or in his jacket pocket, wherever he put Sam's soul.
Crowley may present a serious, serious problem. I'd always figured him for the sane demon, the one who just wants to do deals and let the human world keep on turning as it will. But no, he's a game-changer. He wants to expand. He'd be one of those drug dealers pushing crack on school-kids. Maybe he'd start advertising, or facilitating horrific tragedies to gather more souls.
Imagine a modern egg farm with each chicken in a tiny individual cage, and swap souls for eggs and humans for chickens. This could be Crowley's dream, and he's dedicated enough to make it happen. Not good!
What does Crowley want with new real estate?
Maybe Hell is out of space.
Maybe access to conquerable territory would allow Crowley to increase his power by forming and exploiting colonies (he does have a British accent, after all).
Maybe he wants to create a nice fluffy new Hell that's less of a prison of blood and bone and fear, then sell one-way tickets to his enemies.
Maybe Purgatory has strategic advantages like different laws of "physics" or easier access to Heaven or Earth.
Do Sam's powers work without his soul? We know from Death Takes A Holiday that they don't work without his body, but if the soul is also necessary, then resurrecting Sam in the condition he's in was a very wise strategic decision for Crowley. Forget Heaven's Nukes: Sam killed Lilith, and if Famine was telling the truth and I'm understanding him right, Sam has some kind of infinite gas tank situation. In On The Head Of A Pin, Sam had Alistair rolling over and showing his belly after five seconds of Crucio. Sam can hurt demons in ways even demons aren't prepared to take: it's as if he can psychically crank the experience horrific agony switch all the way up to eleven and stand back. If anybody's going to go for the demon blood, it's Robo-Sam.
If I were Crowley, I'd deactivate the powers permanently before releasing Sam into the wild.
More whispers of redemption in this episode.
In the basic Christian sense of the word, getting Sam's soul back from the forces of darkness is redemption.
Repairing Sam and Dean's relationship would be redemption.
Purgatory is traditionally the place where souls have the opportunity to work out their own redemption.
Oh, and you know who traditionally takes care of demonically-induced soul loss? Shamans!