Baby’s Rear View Recap: 12.10 “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets”

Diyah Pera/The CW

This post is about Supernatural season 12 episode 10 “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets,” written by Steve Yockey and directed by Thomas Wright.

*****Spoilers below*****

“That’s right, call your friends. I’ve waited so long.”

The episode opens on a woman playing an arcade game in a bar. The employee warns her that it’s closing time and leaves to take out the trash. Once he’s gone, a redheaded woman with an eyepatch appears behind her. The redhead addresses her as “Benjamin” and blocks her path out of the bar. The redhead pulls out two angel blades and a fight ensues. Somehow, the redhead is able to keep Benjamin from using angel powers. She corners Benjamin, who is able to get out an Enochian plea to a select few other angels just before she puts an angel blade in his vessel.

“I'm not pissed that he cares about us, you know. I'm -- I'm grateful. But Billie said there would be cosmic consequences if that deal got broken. You have any idea what that means?”
“No.”
“Neither do I, but I'm pretty sure it ain't jellybeans and g-strings.”

Sam and Dean are taking a look at Cas’s info board on the missing mother of Satan’s baby, Kelly Kline. Sam asks about Mom and Dean tells him she’s out hunting, although he doesn’t sound particularly pleased about it. The conversation turns to Cas, and Sam admonishes Dean for giving him the silent treatment. Cas steps into the room, having heard the tail-end of the conversation.

“Well we'll come with you.”
“Both of you?”
“Sure. Yeah, we could help. And make sure you don't do anything else stupid.”

Cas defends his actions and promises to deal with it. He then tells them that he has to go. To deal with something personal—the message he got from Benjamin over angel-radio. Dean and Sam invite themselves along.

“Wow, this Benjamin seems like he's pretty cool, you know. Like he wouldn't make any half-cocked, knee-jerk choices.”
“Yeah, you know what I like about him? Is that he's sarcastic, but he's thoughtful and appreciative, too.”

Sam tries to get Dean and Cas to speak to each other on the horribly silent drive. If not about Billie, at least about Benjamin and the case they’re about to work. Cas reveals that Benjamin and his vessel were “friends,” which means that Benjamin would never willingly put her in danger.

“Benjamin and I, we fought together. He was he was a gifted soldier. I don't know how this could've happened.”

TFW shows up at the site to find Benjamin dead. Dean finds and angel blade on the floor. When Cas picks it up, he senses that the blade isn’t Benjamin’s; and the Redheaded woman senses him.

“I'm not a hero, but sometimes doing the right thing requires sacrifices.”
“True, but it just always seems that it's other angels sacrificing for your good deeds. Their wings, their lives.”
“Are you here to insult me or talk about Benjamin?
“Can't we do both?”

Cas leaves the boys behind to meet with the two other angels we saw receive Benjamin’s message. The angels are Mirabel and Ishim, and they are unhappy with Castiel for his hand in events in the past. Ishim and Mirabel reveals that all the other angels from their flight have been murdered.

“These are my friends -- my friends who don't listen very well.”

Dean gets impatient and storms in. Sam follows behind. They squish into the booth. It’s a little bit funny, but Ishim isn’t amused. He orders Mirabel to see if there’s anyone else outside. She does, and is found and stabbed by the redheaded woman.

“Why do you let him talk to you like that?

“If Ishim can help me find whoever killed Benjamin, then I have to.”
“Okay, yeah, look, I-I get that we need super dick there, but, I mean, come on.”
“The angels that I served with are being killed. So I will put up with Ishim, I will put up with everything else, and so will you.”

Meanwhile, Ishim continues to insult them. He suggests they move this conversation to a safe house and goes to get Mirabel.

“You can't smite me, Ishim. I'm not powerless anymore.”

Ishim runs into the redheaded woman outside and they fight. He tries to smite her but it doesn’t work, and she gets the upper hand. Cas comes to Ishim’s rescue and the Winchesters come to Cas’s. The woman disappears in a flash of light, and then drives away.

“Her family was murdered. I mean, I-I know you were just doing a job, but—”
“Are you saying that those angels deserved to die?”

“What?”

“You think I deserve to die?”

Once they’re at the safe house, Cas explains who the redheaded woman is. We are shown a flashback: Cas, in a female vessel, is part of a party of angels congregated to punish an angel named Akobel who has married a human woman and fathered a Nephilim. The angels execute Akobel while Cas reads his sentence, and then Ishim goes inside to take care of the Nephilim. The human woman was Lily Sunder, and she’s somehow still alive and kicking ass over 100 years later.

Ishim explains that she has made a demonic pact. Dean and Sam go to talk to her while Cas stays behind to heal Ishim.

“You know why we're meant to stay away from them humans? Hmm? It's not because we're a danger to them. They're a danger to us.”

Ishim tries to convince Cas that humans are bad news. Cas insists that Sam and Dean have made him stronger. But healing Ishim’s wound has made him substantially weaker.

“You broke my heart, Lily. Now I'm gonna break yours.”

After going home and healing herself, Lily Sunder gets ready to go out again. But she’s met by Sam and Dean. Sam tracked her rental car, apparently. Sam asks to talk and starts to explain that it wasn’t Cas’s fault, and that Heaven has rules about Nephilim. As we see another flashback, Lily explains that she studied angels all her life. She summoned Ishim, and learned things from him. Ishim became dangerously obsessed with her, and Lily needed Akobel to protect her from him. Ishim killed her daughter just to break her heart. Her daughter was human.

Dean calls Cas to confirm, but Cas isn’t answering. Dean goes to find him while Sam stays with Lily.

“I used to dream about my daughter every night. Do you know what I dream about now? Nothing.”

Sam finds out that Lily is using Enochian magic and that every time she uses it, a piece of her soul burns away.

“I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna cure you of your human weakness same way I cured my own -- by cutting it out.”

Dean finds Cas and tells him Ishim’s lying. A confrontation follows, and Ishim easily overpowers them both. He beats Cas down and then goes after Dean—Cas’s human weakness. Dean has painted a banishing sigil in blood, but chooses not to use it when Ishim tells him that it could kill Cas if he does. Ishim has him cornered and is about to deal a killing blow when Lily and Sam burst through the door.

Lily takes on Ishim, revealing that the eye beneath her eyepatch holds the power of an angel. Dean, Sam, and Lily all fight him together, but Sam and Dean can’t keep up. Lily manages to hold Ishim long enough for Cas to step up behind him and stab him in the back.

“I'm sorry. I was wrong. And while it's true that I didn't know we were killing an innocent, ignorance is no excuse. I truly can't imagine the depths of your loss. This was your child. I can't imagine the pain. So if you leave here and you find that you can't forgive me I'll be waiting.”

Dean and Sam ask Lily if she’s done now that Ishim is dead. Lily doesn’t seem to be sure. Cas apologizes to her and Lily leaves.

“You're not weak, Cas. You know that, right?”
“I mean, obviously, you've changed, but it's all been for the better, man.”
“And you have been with us every step of this long, crazy thrill ride.”
“And no matter how crazy it got, you never backed down.”
“And that takes real strength.”

Back at the bunker, TFW talks it out over beers. Dean reveals that he’s not angry about Billie—he’s just worried. Cas says he doesn’t regret it, even if it costs him his life. They talk about what to do about the Nephilim, and whether Cas will be able to cause such pain and harm to a mom and her kid. When Dean asks what they’re gonna do now, Cas replies “Let's drink, and hope we can find a better way.”

Questions:

Do angels have gender? I have always wondered this. I always think of them as genderless, but they do seem to use gendered pronouns. But is that a definite answer, or just a result of convenience? I think Benjamin being referred to aggressively as “he” in this episode had much more to do with the fact that they were trying to emphasize his separation from his vessel than it had to do with his actual gender-self-identification.  Different genders was the easiest way for them to establish that Benjamin and his vessel were two separate beings who were both present, narratively and actually.

Interestingly, Ishim refers to Cas as “he” in the present (he only uses 2^nd person with Cas in the past). He also refers to Akobel as “he,” even among only angels (side note why weren’t they speaking Enochian here? Could it be because Enochian is better suited to their true forms and more difficult for vessels? Or was it because Benjamin insisted they use English for his vessel’s benefit—even though her native language was probably Spanish, but it seems likely that English would be easier for her than Enochian anyway? Or, more likely, it was just for convenience because we also see angels using English in heaven, which I frankly think is ridiculous but this is a tangent)…

My guess is that the use of gendered pronouns is likely just so as not to jar the audience. They give us what we expect, because they don’t want us to be distracted. Again, I think that they refer to the angels as the gender of the vessels they occupy first for our benefit. Not because of the gendered order of heaven. But who knows. Gender might really be eternal (o.o), since God seems to be unequivocally male for some reason. Or, it might just be a way for them to make sense of themselves through the human lens.

How does Lily have two blades outside of the diner if she left one behind? Did she take Benjamin’s? Did she leave her blade specifically so she could use it to spy on the body? Interesting…

If Lily Sunder can teleport using Enochian magic, why can’t the angels? Because it looked like she teleported outside the diner. Just minutes before, the angels were standing around talking about how they can’t teleport since they lost their wings. But it looked like Lily did. Was this some sort of misdirect, and she really just ran over to the car while we were blinded by the light? It really looked like a little mini-teleport to me. I would say she somehow has the wings of an angel if it weren’t for the fact that she was using a car. Because she and Sam did get to the safe house rather fast. Maybe she has a slightly less powerful version of wings? Can teleport short distances? Can move extra quickly but can’t actually fly?

Ok, so didn’t Cas say he hadn’t taken a vessel for 2000 years before Jimmy? But this was only like 100 years ago? So was he lying? This is a question that has been asked a lot in fandom the last few days. I mean technically, it’s been pointed out that what Cas actually said was “Why do you think we're here, walking among you now for the first time in 2000 years?” (in 4x02). It seems to me that he was just talking in general about how angels weren’t regularly stationed en-masse long-term on earth in vessels since then, not that they never once touched down in all that time or that he himself hadn’t had a vessel in that time. I mean, Gabriel had certainly been on earth during that time, though he wasn’t stationed here. I think that canon statement was very clearly proven false long before this episode. Although he also says in 4x10 “I was stationed on Earth 2000 years. Just watching. Silent. Invisible.” That might imply that he was not in a vessel. Or he could have been watching from a vessel that entire time, who knows. I don’t know. I think a lot of us assumed that the flashback in this episode would have been one of the memories he lost to Naomi’s tinkering, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (unless maybe the longer he goes without reprogramming, the more his memories come back?) Either way, it wasn’t addressed anywhere in the ep. (More on this here!)

Remember how two episodes ago Cas got this massive migraine message that a Nephilim had been born? So how come he didn’t realize in 1901 that there had been no message, and therefore no Nephilim? Was it because the angels didn’t used to do that then? Or was the message about Satan’s spawn an anomaly because of Satan’s raw power—or the angels’ (ones who did automatically know) corresponding level of fear over it? I mean, I don’t think Cas knew about the Nephilim that Metatron introduced him to either, so my guess is that the Satan Spawn message was an anomaly.

What was that banishing sigil? I don’t think we’ve ever seen that one, and I need to know the difference! Is it just a new one they found that he wanted to try out? Or one he found and wanted to use because it was smaller and more convenient?

And speaking of, do banishing sigils count as Enochian magic? Because Sam and Dean do that all the time… and I’m sure they’ve done other Enochian magic too. Does that count against their souls? Or does the type of magic Lily is harnessing require an actual pact before it starts to do that? Or does the magic have to be a much higher level? My guess is that nothing the Winchesters have done counts as Enochian magic, because Sam said “you can do that?” when Lily explained she was using it. I think it’s not just spells or sigils in Enochian, but a way of actually harnessing the power of an angel.

Is it true that weakened angels can die from being banished? Or was Ishim just lying so Dean wouldn’t banish him?

Two back-stabs in a row by Cas? What does it mean?

Will we ever see Lily Sunder again? There’s a chance she will stop using Enochian magic now that her revenge is complete, which will allow her to die a natural death, presumably. But if she doesn’t stop… if she does continue to use the magic, she may turn soulless and then come after Cas when that happens. Or, as some have speculated, they may bring her back to help control the Nephilim.

And: where is Kelly? Why can’t they find her?

Conclusions:

Yes! Finally an episode that I’m excited to write about! No offense to the last four episodes or so, I’m just being honest.

Long live Steve Yockey. Yockey is our king. Literally I love him and I’m gonna go read his plays (anyone know where to find them?). Both of his episodes have been solid favorites this season. His sense for character-building is A+, and he has a good handle on pacing and emotional climax. A few people have said that the characters were a little different this ep than we usually see them, but since I like the direction he seems to be pushing them in, I’m really not bothered. And actually, the things we saw in this ep—like sassy Cas—are  things that have been building for a long time, so it’s actually more in-line with the character development than it is ooc. I’ve seen this ep compared to fan fiction (in a good way) a lot already, and I think it’s because these are the characters lurking underneath the characters on the show. These are the characters we want to see, that’s why we write them that way. Yockey found a way to bring that out, and it was funny and touching and good. And we are here AF for DeanCas bickering like an old married couple. Just throwing that out there. Yockey is a keeper, and if he doesn’t stay for a long time, I will be devastated (I hope you’re listening Yockey. I will never forgive you for leaving. I will Lily Sunder your ass. That is not a threat it’s just an expression of my feelings on the subject.)

There have been some complaints that Sam was sidelined in this episode, and he definitely was, at least from an action/reaction, driving-the-story standpoint. I absolutely wish that they would write more for Sam in the show. But this episode at least let him react, and many episode don’t even really let him do that. I love Sam, I loved him in this episode, and I wish we had all the time in the world to devote to him. I’m just glad he was sidelined for an episode that was at least good, rather than sidelined for a story I don’t give a fig about. Little victories. Plus, there were lots of great sastiel moments, and boy do I love those. Those are my favorite.

Look, I love Cas episodes, okay? There’s no barometric for how biased I am when it comes to this angel, so if you didn’t like this episode, just leave me alone to die.

There was so much DeanCas interaction in this ep. I’m just over-the-moon about it.

I seriously—I don’t think I even have any complaints about it.

Except maybe to lament the fact that Dean didn’t get to react to Cas having a female vessel before Jimmy. (btw CAS HAD A FEMALE VESSEL BEFORE JIMMY!)

Also, I’m saddened that Benjamin and Mirabel had to die. I would have loved to have heard more about Benjamin and his vessel’s relationship. And there’s also the fact that it was yet another WOC that died without comment on the fact that it was a WOC. Could have been a fantastic recurring character. But, I can’t say I’m surprised. 

Also, as a wonderful person just pointed out to me, this implies something disturbing about Mirabel and Ishim. Their vessels were strapped to them for over 100 years. That’s messed up, dude. I get that it made the most sense, because it would be annoying to have a flashback where you have to aggressively keep establishing who is who for it to have any impact at all… but yeck.

But besides those things, I’m really quite happy. It was a solid episode with lots of happy things, some actual communication and expressions of loving feelings and mutual respect, and a new female character that did not die and was not punished for fighting back against those that hurt her. 

I am here AF for this.