#s13x14

Welp, should have written that Cas meta SO IT COULD ALL BE WRONG.

...okay so maybe not wrong maybe just incomplete.

First of all, talk about visual distance separating Castiel from Sam and Dean. It starts out right there in the promo, but we see it right at the beginning of the episode, when Cas it looking in through the laptop, when Cas is standing further away from Dean than usual. The whole ep is distance, and Dean’s metaphorical angel blade even shatters into dust.

Look at this. Look at how small Cas is in the frame. Distance: 

“I’m a soldier” Castiel declares, explaining his actions at the end of 13x14.

 Earlier in the episode, I had said much the same thing. “Castiel is a soldier”, but immediately thereafter I reminded myself that that wasn’t true. Castiel was a soldier. Trust me, I’ve had just as difficult a time with that as anyone; I, who have been longing for Castiel to be pure badass again. It’s hot, but it’s not good for him. Castiel returning to soldiering is the equivalent of Oliver Queen going back to killing people. It’s easy, it’s what he’s trained to do, but that’s not him, and Misha makes it very clear in his representation of Castiel in this episode how hard being “a soldier” is to him, how difficult it is to carry out what he believes must be done, especially when – in the process – he breaks rules that he has made for himself.

“I am going to do something that I promised that I would never do to a human being without their permission. I’m going to strip the spell from your mind.”

A recent promo for the backend of this season asks us to consider the bad sides of our main characters. I knew when I saw it that we were in trouble, things were going to get rough and rocky for a while. This is about what the boys are willing to do, how far they’re willing to go, and remember, just last episode, Dean was talking about setting Ketch on fire and then burning the ashes.

This is war. It’s so important, he’s so certain, that he says it twice.

So let’s start there, since Castiel was the first one to reach that point. What led him to that declaration? All he has is Lucifer’s word for it that Michael is coming. The boys don’t know that Jack was being held by Michael, for example, so all they’re aware of is that an archangel has a spell that can send one person through a rift. Terrifying. If Michael used his grace – he doesn’t have any other archangels – to open it, he will be weakened, powered down, like Lucifer. There’s no canon suggestion that he could march through with an army.

But it’s WAR, says Castiel. That’s a bold declaration. It’s not been war for a very long time. A war requires soldiers, of course, and Cas – who feels like he must explain everything, and has no better explanation, places his return in the hands of external powers. That he was brought back for emotional reasons, and not practical ones, is something he fails to grip. Why? Because he has not been needed emotionally. For Cas, his requirement to exist is a practical one, a role to play in some grand scheme. He is still yearning for structure and meaning that hasn’t existed in his life for some time, not when that structure and meaning ought to have moved to an emotional one.

This is Castiel clinging to the familiar, even though he’s visibly struggling with it, even though he’s breaking rules he’s even made for himself. He is, to be perfectly fair, the one person on Team Free Will who’s been torn apart completely, physically, by both archangels involved in this dispute. Lucifer has killed him twice, and Michael has ripped him apart and had him tortured and reprogrammed. It’s only fair that the language of his conversation with Lucifer, that the fact that the words “Lucifer” and “Michael” being brought up so often has a psychological effect on an angel who believed that that battle was behind him. This is still Castiel’s depression talking, his angel PTSD as it were, from breaking out of the system.

Michael and Lucifer means war, that is the middle and both ends for it. Castiel’s angelic programming drags him back to what he knows: he’s a soldier in that war, he was made to be that soldier.

But he is not that soldier any more.

I love badass Cas. I love him when he does the flippy flip and the angel boop and the dom brow. I’m here for all that. I’ve been, like everyone, longing for him to get rid of the icky striped depression tie and take off his tan coat. I’ve been getting what I wanted, but repeatedly this season and last, I’ve been shown that what I wanted isn’t necessarily what’s good for me. Take Mary for example. So Cas does take his coat off in this episode, but it’s so that he can break the rule he set for himself after invading Sam’s mind. I’ve been wanting Cas to remind Dean that he’s a soldier and can handle himself, but here it is. I’ve been given what I wanted, and it isn’t what I wanted after all. Interesting? I think so.

Castiel is not that angel any more. He’s not the angel with the blue tie. He’s not the soldier. He’s putting on that mantle because he thinks it’s what he has to do, because it’s what he’s good at – and sure, it’s jumped us a lot further forward in the plot – but what is the cost of that? War destroys people. Soldiering isn’t about free will, it’s about following orders, but Castiel has none. Moreover, he’s breaking rules he laid out for himself. It’s no coincidence, then, that in this episode his dialogue directly mirrors Lucifer’s in Hammer of the Gods.

Maybe this is the cost of doing his tie up straight for years. Of faking it.

An answer to the puzzle that I’ve been struggling with for weeks, then, slots into place: Lucifer’s tan coat, what’s with that? Why is Lucifer being presented as a Cas mirror? But I’ve been looking at it the wrong way round. Lucifer wasn’t mirroring Castiel—Castiel is mirroring Lucifer.

He doesn’t have the right, he takes it.

As I said last night: YIKES.

We’ve been down this path before, of course. We’ve seen how far Cas can go when he thinks he’s acting in people’s best interests, when he’s fighting for a cause. In this case it’s supposedly Jack, but he’s identifying his own needs to, the things he wants, protecting the ones he loves – and there was that word again, unhesitating. Angels do not love, they don’t feel emotion, right? So Castiel surely is not an angel, ergo, he is also not a soldier. He was a soldier, but that’s different.

But the motivation of love, outright stated as his motivation? That’s a powerful statement for Supernatural to make. Words like that are reserved for the biggest of the big moments, but Castiel is snowballing with them. The emotion he feels contradicts his actions. Yes, he is acting out of love, but he is acting out of fear as well—fear of Michael and Lucifer, fear of losing the people he loves. Just the mention of the possibility that Michael might come to our world and wreak havoc, and that love/fear terrifies him.

He isn’t a soldier. But he is clinging to it because it is how he makes his world seem controllable. It’s a difficult choice to pick up his blade again, to do what he feels has to be done, to push aside the actual honest to God FREE WILL choices he made about what he would be, and how he could live with himself. But love will make you do crazy things. In some ways, love is a new old cause, except this time Castiel loves his family rather than his maker. Becoming a soldier for your family is, perhaps, the hardest choice Cas could make. A noble one, too, but painful if it sacrifices his relationship with Sam and Dean that much more.

That’s how Castiel differs from Lucifer, though. Lucifer’s actions aren’t about love, and the sooner that Cas realizes that his cause is an emotional one and not the will of the universe, the healthier he will be. But this is Supernatural, so I doubt healthiness really comes into it. Good intentions, then, are the difference, because Lucifer’s intentions are always self serving, and Castiel is always acting for someone else. Or is he? Either way, it’s certain that Castiel’s depression lead him to seeking purpose. Clearly he decided that Jack was that purpose. His escape from the Empty confirmed this supposition.

But we know it isn’t true. We know emotional need is what brought Castiel back. And the key thing is that he doesn’t.

So back to the title: Castiel is the great pretender? Damn right he is. Misha plays it up with broken eye contact, swallowing, shifting on his feet. When he declares he is a soldier, he makes it clear through his body language that it’s a role he’s playing and no longer the truth. Yes, he’s still badass, and yes he’s strong – those things can never be taken away from him – but a soldier follows orders, and Cas is trying to find the universe’s orders for him when it has none, truly, to give. That’s why he’s uncertain. He’s on his own, and yet also teetering on the edge of being a part of the team – look how fluidly he worked with Sam and Dean against Ketch – and yet with the old language come the old patterns – not just the BAMF Cas that we love, but the desperate Cas, the obedient Cas, the Cas who makes mistakes, the Cas who makes questionable choices.

Things none of us want.

That is the price of war. That’s the true cost, if Michael’s efforts aren’t stopped—and we know they can’t be, because we’ve already been teased that Michael will be interested in Dean. It’s only a matter of time, then, and things will inevitably be far darker for our angel before they get better. But once again, that scene where Cas locks himself in with Donatello evokes Dean stripping off his jacket before he picks up instruments of torture. War makes us do things we don’t want, and being capable of doing these things doesn’t mean we should. It is, however, the cost; the price we pay.

Cas is right. War is coming. And he will have to pretend to be that soldier again whether he likes it or not. And that’s so sad, so terrible. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news and all that. But on the other hand Cas is fighting for love, and that’s a hell of a thing for an angel to be fighting for.