Supernatural: Heaven Can't Wait
November 7, 2021 4:27 AM - Season 9, Episode 6 - Subscribe

Dean and Castiel team up to find a Rit Zien, an angel healer, who is easing peoples' suffering by killing them. Sam and Kevin ask Crowley for help in finding a way to open the gates to Heaven.

Quotes

Castiel: [to Dean] I guess you can't see it, but there's a real dignity in what I do, a human dignity.
Nora: Hate to interrupt you guys, but, Steve, a customer had an accident in the men's room.

Heartbroken Teenager: He dumped me, Jace. In the cafeteria. In front of *everyone*. It's just like, who does that, you know? Like, why couldn't he just dump me on Facebook like a normal person?

Castiel: Going on dates, that's something humans do, right?
Dean: Yeah, I mean, my dates usually end when I run out of singles, but, yeah.

Dean: [prepping Castiel for his date] Always open the door for her, okay? Ask a lot of questions. They like that. And, oh, if she says she's happy to go Dutch, she's lying. All right? Go get him, tiger.

Bill: Morning, Steve.
Castiel: Bill. High -- [hold up hand. Bill walks past] -- five.

Castiel: [Baby Tanya is crying] Hello? Um... please -- please don't.

Crying Teenager: She was kind of bummed that dick-bag Travis broke up with her in front of the whole school.
Dean: Kind of bummed?
Crying Teenager: Yeah. Like more bummed than when she got a "C" on a quiz, and less bummed than when her parents split up. Kind of bummed.

Dean: [reading the title of a large book] Zimmerman's Encyclopedia of Extinct Languages, Volume One: Adai to Atakapa. How many volumes are there?
Kevin: Twenty-four. Don't worry, we've got them all.
Dean: Awesome. [his phone rings, giving him a chance to do something other than reading the Zimmerman's Encyclopedia of Extinct Languages] There is a God.

Nora: I also found a rolled-up sleeping bag behind the tool locker.
Castiel: Yes, I wanted to be thorough with inventory, so I worked late last week, and taking a nap here was easier than going back home to my bed. Which I have, of course.

Crowley: I'll do it. But I want something in return.
Sam: Yeah, what's that?
Crowley: A telephone call. Come on, moose. Even Dahmer got one telephone call.

Trivia

The "lullaby" that Castiel sings to baby Tanya is actually the theme song to the '80's TV show The Greatest American Hero.

Crowley teases Kevin by calling him "Short Round", the name of the Indiana Jones' Asian kid sidekick in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

When Castiel unbuttons his shirt in preparation for his date, Dean tells him, "That's far enough, Tony Manero." Tony Manero was the character John Travolta played in Saturday Night Fever.

When Dean answers the phone in the mini mart he says, "This is Agent Lee Ermey." R. Lee Ermey is an actor most famous for his role as the savage Gunnery Sergent Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket.

The title of this episode is a take on the angel-themed 1943 and 1978 films Heaven Can Wait.

Dean says, "I'll track down this Kevorkian wannabe." Dr. Jack Kevorkian, often called Dr. Death, is known for his role in the national debate over physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients.

This episode takes place in Rexburg, Idaho instead of Rexford.

Sam says that Metatron designed the spell (to cast the angels from Heaven) to be resistant to any attempts to reverse it. However Metatron didn't create the spell; God did. Metatron was merely the scribe who wrote it down.
posted by orange swan (4 comments total)
 
That whole "Castiel thinks he has a date with his manager" thing was so contrived. Nora would have made it perfectly clear that she was asking Castiel to babysit. It was cute watching Castiel with that adorable baby, though.

It was also funny watching Castiel wear his convenience store uniform vest to what he thought was a date. It's consistent with how he wears Jimmy Novak's suit and trenchcoat throughout the series. To him, if he's inhabiting Jimmy Novak's body, then he wears the outfit Jimmy was wearing when he possessed him; if he's homeless, he wears cast off things from the laundromat lost and found; and if he's a convenience store employee, then he wears the uniform for that. Castiel doesn't understand how clothes work and that people wear different styles/looks depending on what they're doing and where they're going at the time, just as he doesn't understand so many things about how people operate.

Interesting way to exterminate a human being. Those crime scenes looked like they were covered in Pepto Bismol.

Crowley being placed on hold when he called hell was hilarious.
posted by orange swan at 4:36 AM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


Jeeze, that's a dirty by the store manager (and a durrr in the writer's room). But... Cas is so naive that he shouldn't have concluded that it was a date and should have been clueless enough not to be let down?

Then again, I'm not convinced - from the writing qua sine non - that Cas is as clueless as he's trying to make everyone thinks he is.

Speaking of contrived, the rit zein not understanding degrees of human emotional distress thing is just stupid. Shouldn't Ephram be buried under by the background noise of pain that Castiel's sitting baby's mild fever would be completely lost? He'd be too busy pepto bismol-ing 5/8ths of every town he's traveling through.

Along the lines of R. Lee Ermey, that sheriff-type dude at the first "suicide's" house looked like he was trying his best to do an Ermey impression.

I did like Crowley being picky about blood re: Sam, "No, not you, I've had you."

The Short Round comment - jeeze writers, yeah, Crowley might go there but that's almost designed to put Osric Chau's (HK/ Malay) hackles up, if not Kevin Tran's. 'Temple of Doom' (where the Short Round reference is from) is a very low point in Hollywood (and... I hate to say it, 'Goonies' also, which Jonathan Ke Huy Quan, who's Vietnamese, was also in - and was ethnically miscast in both of those [possibly for the latter]) and (along with 'Gung Ho,' which ethnically miscast Gedde Watanabe) a really bigoted and confused era in response to Japanese economic adolescence.

'Temple of Doom' also did real dirty to South Asians.

fwiw, I think that 'Big Trouble in Little China' is the least bad among these films of the era, because it acknowledged what it was doing and got the ethnicity, cultural mythologies, and the nuances and realpolitik of then-current race-relations in the US not terribly wrong. It was also a rollicking good movie, counted coup on some of the shittiness of Chinese culture, and Kurt Russel's character got a lot of comeuppances and got kicked around a lot, which Russel took with aplomb.

Sam just rinsing the used (now non-"virgin") blood down the drain bugs me a tiny bit. The bench immunologist in my whimpers quietly to (at least) pour some bleach into the bowl and swish it around first. The rest of me applauds the blase the boys have towards potential sources of (supernatural) power. Or not, the supernatural power had been consumed from it already from the ritual/ spell.
posted by porpoise at 5:52 PM on November 7, 2021


The Short Round comment - jeeze writers, yeah, Crowley might go there but that's almost designed to put Osric Chau's (HK/ Malay) hackles up, if not Kevin Tran's.

Another on Supernatural's ignominious pile of "oh this didn't 'age poorly', this was clearly trash at the time."

The whole contrivance of the date/babysitting was real dumb but Dean coaching Castiel for his date was pretty funny. He probably would’ve been more help with baby advice tbh. One can only imagine the version of that talk Sam would’ve gotten when Dean was like 17.

This is going to sound sarcastic and it's not, but I really would have been curious to know what in Dean's worldview would be an acceptable day job for a fallen angel.
posted by jameaterblues at 7:22 PM on November 7, 2021 [1 favorite]


How the hell does Cas know that Greatest American Hero theme song, given how unaware he is of most pop culture references? Also, why is he singing that? The lyrics are about somebody who is in the exact opposite situation that Castiel is in: happy, flying (literally), being free and being in love.
posted by sardonyx at 10:38 AM on November 8, 2021


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