Dean!Michael continues to pursue his atrocities - and not just that hat - he’s experimenting on vampires. Playing with blood, grace and woo-woo to… kill them. One after the other they all die in vast numbers. So Michael is pretty heavy on test subjects
His massacres put him on the Winchester radar even if Bobby is duly surprised that anyone would go to Duluth. He doesn’t trust the angel hint they got (this could have caused grief with Castiel but Castiel pretty much agrees that, yes, Angels are dicks. It is known).
Mary, Bobby and Sam plan to go find MichaelDean (Dichael? Mean? This is not a useful compoundable name. Deachal?) leaving Castiel behind since Michael will likely sense him and because, in Castiel’s words, Jack and Nick need a babysitter. Which is… accurate… but also really really undiplomatic given how much this will hit their sore spots. Classic Castiel
But Jack is mature about this, he recognises in their last hunt he didn’t actually do a great job. He recognises he has to be better and improve.
That leaves Castiel dealing with the emotional ones which he… well… he isn ‘t really best placed to do. We shall return to this.
So the three go into action and we see Bobby in action again and it just makes me melt. Bobby is back. Bobby is back everyone. Bobby is here! And if you’re not happy about this you have no soul. Though several years of fighting the apocalypse has made him rusty at the whole imitating the FBI thing when they go to look at the bodies lying around.
Examining those bodies reveals… they’re vampires! Medical examiner, you poke these people in the mouth and they sprout fangs. I can’t imagine how many other physiological differences there are that she’s completely missed. Way to phone it in, lady!
They do learn that someone suspicious wanted to identify the bodies and then just ran off… which the police decided wasn’t worth investigating
Damn, law enforcement in Duluth is super lapse! Is a mass killing not worth investigating?
Of course the gang follows up and finds the surviving vampire who insists that a) her vampires are good people who only drink animal blood and b) Michael is evil and experimenting on them. They don’t really believe the whole good vampire thing but intimidate her to get some more information to track down Michael.
Michael is busy dropping the abomination hat, putting on a nice suit and looking… niiiiiceeee. Damn he cleans up well - including the hair. He manages to bring home a beautiful woman, which isn’t surprising. What is a little more surprising is that she’s a werewolf. She tries to eat him and that does not go according to plan because Archangel beats EVERYTHING
He manages to set up a meeting with her chief werewolf so he can lay out his master plan. It turns out that he really likes them because they kill people for food which is pure and good rather than humans who kill for whatever damn reason takes out fancy. Yes yes purity of the animal kingdom et al. It’s been done and generally misses a whole lot of awful out there. And cats, which are adorable evil little monsters. And it’s not like werewolves aren’t subject to all the same foibles that humans have. The fact he’s encouraging werewolves to slaughter all humans except a minority enslaved for food and labour… I mean, this is hardly the purity of the animal kingdom killing for necessity
Whatever, don’t look at the plot too closely.
He promises to use his vampire experimentation to improve them…. Because what works on vampires is going to just translate to werewolves? And he killed like a gazillion of them?
Don’t look at the plot too closely.
He also reveals he’s set a trap- killing all the vampires, letting one vampire go, in order to lure the Winchesters in. Well it does work… the Winchesters arrive and promptly massacre the werewolves - despite the fact these enhanced wolves are immune to silver
And they meet Dean… apparently unpossessed claiming Michael is gone
I do not believe this. Even if he takes off the hat.
So to Castiel playing the emotional support. Jack is upset and trying to research when he can get his Grace back. The research is somewhat spotty on Archangel grace for nephilim so he gets a time scale between 1 month and centuries. At which point I don’t think you can safely call this “research”. Castiel awkwardly offers comfort on how Jack needs to stop wasting time mourning and focus on what he actually has
Castiel isn’t great at comfort. But when challenged he points out that he has actually has faced similar - having lost his grace, heaven and pretty much everything else. It’s season 15 Jack, you cannot say “you don’t know what it’s like” to the Winchesters - they do, they’ve done it. Probably twice.
He advises Jack to focus on what he has. So he goes to see his grandparents. Who don’t know he exists, don’t know his mother, their daughter, is dead, or what happened to Kelly’s son. He’s also technically about 2 years old. Despite this they seem to be quite ok with a work colleague of their daughter to drop in to drink tea, look at old photo albums and then cry.
…
I… I literally cannot imagine how anyone could think this scene would work. Or how he could mention her name and then cry and NOT have them realise she’s dead? This is just… weird.
Cas also disapproves - because everyone is hunting him and he shouldn’t be alone. Jack pushes back and Cass concedes at least it was… kind?
This is a trainwreck
Trainwreck two! Nick is falling into bits because of his terrible memories of being Lucifer’s hosts and it doesn’t help that Castiel can’t even look at him without seeing the king of hell. This is Awkward. (Not as awkward as your daughter’s teenaged work colleague showing up on your doorstep to look at her childhood photo albums. I mean what part of this doesn’t scream stalker?!)
Nick can’t get over the fact that he consented to possession - what kind of monster does that? Turns out a man who is completely falling apart after his wife and kid are brutally murdered by a man with a hammer… oh, yes he didn’t remember that. Castiel maybe should have held off on revealing that.
He also tries to comfort Nick by revealing he too has possessed someone and this isn’t his actual body - this is the body of a man called Jimmy Novak. Who consented, his family was kind of devastated and, oh, he’s actually dead now.
Nick calls him a body snatcher which rubs Castiel really raw over what happened to Jimmy’s family.
He does touch Nick and Nick reacts by pulling away and snapping his finger - a move Lucifer would do to kill people. And it’s an ultra terrifying scene as we realise Lucifer may not be 1000% gone. Castiel is clearly shaken: but Nick is focused on trying to find his family’s killer.
Which involves finding the case pretty much abandoned by the police but him managing to track down the one witness to the murder… who then recanted his testimony. And when Nick can’t convince the man to speak up, he kills him with a hammer.
This reeks of side-plot-we-don’t-need. Unless it actually leads to Lucifer coming back
