He was the favorite.

The face of God makes me think of the Face of Boe.

Hmm, John Barrowman on SPN. . .

Presumably Metatron, Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael would be the four in direct communication with God. Uriel is usually depicted as an archangel (and some accounts have seven rather than four), but he's clearly not that lofty here.

And Anna's angel form didn't have to be female just because she took on a female human form on earth.

Good point. I'm now hoping the show goes there if Anna reappears in a possessed human body at a later date.

I would think angel gender is probably kind of flexible...

I think traditionally they're supposed to be hermaphroditic rather than sexless.

Pity Dean couldn't run into Emma Thompson from Angels in America. I think she/it was more accomplished at the whole glorious celebratory sex thing than Anna.

Catch-up post.

I rewatched. I found Sam just as fascinating to watch in that final scene as Dean. I thought JP was going to break down crying himself at least once.

Thank you! Yes, the one thing you can always count on JA for is what he brings to enhance and enrich a scene that focuses on another actor, his reaction. Even if it's in the background. JP has been taking notes. This scene reminded me of nothing so much as the end scene in CSPWDT: Both of them out of the Impala, but leaning up against her. Dean facing not toward Sam, as if he couldn't say what he had to while facing Sam. And in this one he was actually giving Sam his back, not just his profile. JP's reaction-acting was miles better than in S2, both more engaged and more subtle. His reaction choices were good, on the right beat to increase the emotion of the scene, but not to pull focus from Dean.

And gods, Jensen just knocked it out of the park. There's not anything else I can say about that. I need to check and see who the director was. Without checking I suspect Manners--he always manages to pull the best reactions in tight camera work.

Also, when Dean confessed it was forty years, I couldn't help but wonder how long it was for John, if you count a decade for every month, it would have been 120 years, if time moved the same for him as it did for Dean. What atrocities did John commit over that time, and where did he go when he fought his way out of hell? There was every indication that he was still himself, and had not become a being of evil. Of course that was before the current storyline was thought out, but an alert writer could console Dean with Dad's evident redemption, even after more than a hundred years in hell.

John Winchester: stubborn old bastard who refused the offer every single time it was made until the day he broke out?

Or this.

He should be a hot mess. Angel came back feral, and that dude had personal experience with torture already. Dean has been remarkably well-adjusted for a man coming off forty years of untold agony.

Ten of inflicting that agony, against everything in him that made him who he was. My theory has been that when Cas yanked him out, healed his body, he installed a barrier, or buffer if you will, to memory that at first prevented Dean remembering more than flashes. His halluination of Lillith in Yellow Fever was notice that the barrier was starting to erode, and the memories were starting to trickle through. Cas' healing had (in my theory) made remembering difficult, but also stripped out much, if not all, of the sensation of those memories, so what Dean's been getting is the intellectual recall of those memories and his emotional knowledge and reaction to what he suffered, and the acts he committed. Can probably be summed up by "handwave," but it works for me.

I still think that knowing what you did, seeing what you did - is different than feeling it. Like there is still some sort of shock preventing him from getting the whole effect but not enough to prevent the nightmares and thus the self-medicating.

Or, this. I do think it was a deliberate thing done by Cas as part of the healing, though.

I'm afraid I disregarded the whole hand-on-the-window thing. Perhaps I should not have.

I'm inclined to agree that Mary believed it would be she who would pay Azazel's price for restoring John. I don't think she realized when she made the deal that she'd sacrificed one or both of her children. And while John may have begun to suspect, I doubt he ever knew or accepted the full truth about what Mary had done.

As for Anna's "fall," I think she wanted humanity, she ripped out that part that made her an angel. When she recovered it, she regained her form, but not her station. She's an angel, with an angel's power now. While she's no longer of use or interest to demons, since they won't be able to use her as a listening device, she is still on heaven's hit list because of her trip off the reservation. She'll be operating on her own, with no backup, and with other angels looking for her. Her decisions have made punishment imperative.