That tender moment is ruined by the loud angel siren as Uriel and Anna show up to tag team the Winchester family.  Dean gets the crap kicked out of him again, John gets tossed outside and Sam gets stabbed.  Sam dies, again, and Anna apologizes, but she's the one who's sorry when John returns.  Only it's not John, it's Michael!

Yes, Michael finally shows up and he does away with Anna before snapping his fingers to get rid of Uriel.  He knocks out Mary and agrees to bring Sam back, but only after he gets a chance to talk to Dean.

Michael can enter John's body because he's connected to the same bloodline as Dean, the same bloodline that goes all the way back to Cain and Abel, or as Dean calls it, "Six Degrees of Heaven Bacon."  Michael calmly explains that he doesn't want to kill his brother Lucifer any more than Dean wants to kill Sam.

But Michael is going to do it because it's right and because his Father wants him to.  Dean doesn't accept this logic because he wants to believe that he has free will.  Michael responds that it took a million not-so-random acts of chance for Mary and John to meet and have Sam and Dean, and that Dean has made all of his choices, yet every one brings him closer to his ultimate destiny.  "Free will's an illusion," he says.

You can't change destiny, so Michael brings Sam back to life and sends him and his brother back to the future before wiping John and Mary's memories of everything they've learned.  Cas also manages to make it back in one piece, leading to a sober realization: a former blood junkie, a dropout and a comatose angel are the only three beings who can defend the principle of free will.

At this point, I feel the same way about season 5 as I did about season 3: there's only one logical way for it to end, and it's with Sam and Dean both saying "Yes" and having a fight to the death.  There's no way Supernatural can do that, yet it's the only thing they can do, so they will.

The episode ends back with John and a very pregnant Mary in the nursery staring at a cheap angel figurine as Mary whispers to her unborn baby, "Angels are watching over you."  That makes about 17 different layers of subtext for that line.  Well done, Supernatural.


Next week on Supernatural: Things get disgusting with a very bloody Valentine's Day episode.  However, unlike Jensen's previous work, this bloody Valentine will only be in 2-D.

 
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(Image courtesy of the CW)