5 best moments from Supernatural season 14, episode 8: “Byzantium”

InSeason 14, Episode 8, Supernatural brought an episode with a lot of answers and drama. I laughed, I cried, I cried again and again. Jack had an adventure no one will soon forget, we encountered the Empty, and we got some intel on our big bad. Lots to talk about this week!

It’s always a challenge to pick out the top five moments of any Supernatural episode because they are routinely packed with goodness. But this week was especially tough. I felt like the whole episode was moments and the information was endless, as well.

We got to revisit an old character with a new appearance, and we finally had a bunch of stuff happen that we were teased with and have been anticipating heavily. Jack’s illness came to a breaking point and he went on a super adventure to hidden corners of the universe.

When all was said and done, we were right back where we wanted to be all along — at the table, in the bunker, with family. For a moment things are calm, but this is Supernatural so we’ll just see how that goes.

As always, tons of deep spoilers are ahead so if you need Stephanie’s review or Alexandria’s recap discussions, hop over and do that first. When you’re done, check out my list below of the top five best moments from “Byzantium.”

#5 Tonight we get loaded

Let’s dive right in. The episode starts with the focus on Jack, as expected. It’s not good, not at all. Sam, Dean, and Castiel are around him doing just as Rowena told them. Watching over him and staying by his side as he dies. Jack is the only one who is dealing with it well and it’s more than Dean can handle.

When he storms out, Sam and Jack are left to a conversation that ends up being Jack’s final thoughts. He tells Sam to tell Dean that it’s OK. Then he asks him what comes next for someone like him? Sam confesses that he just doesn’t know where a nephilim goes when it dies. So Jack showers Sam with his optimism in one of the top five best lines of the episode, “Then it’s gonna be an adventure.” He settles into the bed all cozy and just goes ahead and contently closes his eyes and dies.

Castiel went out to get Dean back in there, telling him that he knows it’s not fair, everybody knows that, pull yourself together and go back in there right now, young man, ’cause he needs you. So they go back in, but a moment too late because Jack has already gone. Sam ends up taking off and leaving the bunker in despair and obvious sad frustration.

So Cas and Dean head off and find him moping by the car having failed at chopping down trees when the axe broke. He was trying to get wood to set up a hunter’s send-off for Jack as they decided. Cas was all broken up because he said Jack dying before him just didn’t feel natural. More focus on the fact that this was their little baby.

With everyone just standing there not knowing what to do, Dean pipes up and says that they are going to say goodbye to him. But not now, not until tomorrow. “Tonight, we get loaded,” he said. And so they did.

This is the scene that was teased to us with the preview pics from last week. It was predicted that this scene was a potential goodbye tribute to Jack that the guys were having around the table with their whiskey and candy bars. That’s exactly what we got.

Somber memory music played while the guys reminisced about the nephilim they took under their figurative and literal wings. Sadness. Sam got up and stumbled away part of the evening through and later we discovered it was because he had an idea.

#4 The Lily situation

So you remember Lily Sunder? She used to be the mother of the most famous nephilim in history, who turned out not to be a nephilim. When she finally got revenge on some of the angels responsible for her daughter’s murder, sparing Castiel, she ended up with an eye patch and what she calls “a whisper” of her soul left.

Well when Jack died, Sam felt he just hadn’t done enough. He struggled with it so hard that he broke down when he couldn’t chop the trees. It was when the guys were back at the bunker doing their let’s-get-trashed celebration of Jack’s life that Sam had one more big idea. That idea was Kevin’s angel tablet translations.

Of all the things in the universe, the one place they didn’t look for a solution to Jack’s ills was the angel tablet writings. Since Kevin translated them into a protected code, Sam thought of Lily Sunder. We saw a mystery woman in the preview for this episode and it’s no wonder none of us recognized her. Apparently, she is letting herself go a little these days.

When Dean woke up still at the table next to his party evidence, he heard their voices in the next room. When he finds it’s Lily, he’s a little salty and a lot confused. The last time they all met, after all, it was a bloodbath. She had been seeking vengeance and in the long run, she went on her way leaving Castiel alive after his sincere apology for being misled into killing her daughter.

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But Sam thought, she brilliantly tapped into the angel magic and was the foremost human expert on their magic. So maybe she could help read Kevin’s work. Alas, her final answer tied into what was probably the best Dean exchange in this episode of Supernatural.

After a silence and her shushing Sam while she looked at Kevin’s work, she bluntly tells them she’s sorry but nope. Dean responds with “Oh. OK, well thanks for stopping by.” Still clearly suspicious of her and anxious to see her depart again.

But after a second, her real motivation for accepting the invitation comes right out. She is getting old because she’s not using the angel magic anymore. She got her revenge and luckily had a sliver of soul left. If they will help her get to heaven to see her daughter, she will get them Jack back, good as new. She has an app for that.

Reluctantly, they agree, even knowing it will cost Jack a sliver of his own soul which she guarantees will be small enough that he will never miss it. However, she also threw in a little sentence that is one of those “didn’t need to know” details, and I stand firm on the opinion that unnecessary isn’t something Supernatural does.

I’m going to go ahead out on a limb here and call it that the day will come when he will have issue with her “soul-sucking magic,” as Dean called it. You see, she said very quickly in passing that he wouldn’t miss it, as long as he’s only using it to sustain his human body. This definitely implies two things to me.

First, the magic gives him the ability to use his soul to sustain his body by basically spending a sliver of it. Second, he’s definitely going to find a reason to make a larger purchase in the future. My guess is that it might tie into the secret deal that Castiel ends up making to save him from a certain cosmic emptiness that has a nothing with his name on it.

To make a long story short, Anubis wasn’t cool about changing Lily’s fate of going to Hell for all that angel killing and such that she did. Castiel said that Heaven asked him to take over soul accounting while God was away.

He told them, importantly, that God doesn’t make that call, nor does he. Each person decides their own fate through their actions all the way up until the precise moment of their death. Her abacus beads said that she was going down and that was that. But again, this is Supernatural.

#3 The Empty

We knew it was going to happen and in this episode of Supernatural, we finally got to see the cosmic entity from the Empty reappear. Interestingly, I also now find myself wondering if this wasn’t what we caught a glimpse of in the cosmic black goo while Nick was praying back at the end of “Unhuman Nature.”

Speculation says it’s Lucifer who was taking shape out of the goo, but a flashback of Castiel’s reminds us that the entity from the Empty took this exact form (minus the red eyes), before it morphed into a mirror image of Castiel when he woke it up. So I guess we’ll have to wait and see about that.

So when Castiel was about to leave to see if he could track down Jack in Heaven, he heard a distress signal over angel radio. It seemed that all the gates of Heaven were open, even those Metatron had forcefully closed. He went off to see about that while Sam and Dean were working on conjuring up Anubis.

When he got there, he saw what Jack had seen as he showed up. The entity had indeed invaded Heaven and was seeking Jack, as well. Traces of its goo were all over the two angels Castiel found knocked out on the ground. The angel Duma jumped up with a start and begged Castiel not to leave her alone, so he brought her with him on his search for Jack.

He didn’t realize what they were dealing with until Naomi showed up and gave him the 411. She reminded him that The Empty felt Jack belonged to it because he was part archangel. “And who knows, maybe it’s right,” she said. Another case of maybe from Supernatural that we may fall back to later on. Naomi reminded Castiel that the thing wouldn’t stop until it had Jack and begged him to help give him to it. He declined.

Eventually, it led to a showdown between “The Shadow,” as we finally learned it is called, and Castiel, Jack, and Kelly in Kelly’s corner of Heaven. The goo took over Duma and was in there with them. Duma was the representation of the thing now and W O W did she kill that performance. Huge buckets of kudos to Erica Cerra for her emotionally charged performance this week.

#2 Let’s make a deal

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In keeping with tradition on Supernatural, when all else fails, it’s time for a deal. This time, it’s to save Jack from The Empty. When the chips had fallen, Duma had Jack by the throat and The Shadow controlling her was prepared to snatch him away to the land of nothing.

At that instant, as Castiel and Kelly were both seemingly helpless, having been shoved to the floor, he heard Sam and Dean praying to him that they were ready. He was supposed to look for that as the clue to pull Jack into his body for an instant so Lily could give him the magic to be whole again. Knowing they were beaten, he did what any good Winchesteresque folk would do and offered himself in exchange.

He reminded The Shadow, who he also called “The Empty” (seems they are part of the same), that it was he who woke it, he was the one it truly wanted. It agreed and offered to take him in exchange, later, much later, when he was finally feeling good about life again. It mentioned more than once that it really wanted to see him suffer. Castiel accepted the terms and the thing booked right out of Duma and out of sight. Until they meet again…

Sealing up his commitment to the Winchester tradition, this deal had to be kept a secret from Sam and Dean because Castiel “wouldn’t want them to worry.” Jack made a promise not to tell them. We’ll see how that goes down. Castiel put his hands on Jack after his tearful goodbye with Kelly, and he was back in his body.

Before Cas left to head back to the family, Naomi found him again in the halls of Heaven. She was pretty glad he did what he did. She knew he did it for his own reasons, in his words, it was because he made a promise and well, they all love Jack. No price was too high. anyway, Naomi was grateful so she went ahead and told him where Michael was. More on that definitely coming right up next episode.

Lily’s part in this situation took the last drop of her life and she died, leaving her book of magic in the hands of the Winchester, and her legacy on the universe. She paid the ultimate price, selflessly, and she ended up in accounting with Anubis. He let her try the abacus one last time and what do you know? She was off to see her daughter, finally. She cried. I cried. You cried.

#1 Jack’s big adventure

This moment was really present throughout the whole episode and several leading up. When Jack told Sam he was headed on an adventure when he died, it had such optimistic, childlike charm. The whole episode opened with Jack saying “Please don’t be sad.” Dean had a keeper of a line with “Don’t give me that meant-to-be crap.”

When Jack took his last breath, he woke up without knowing anything had happened. He was eating a burger outside of li’l Skipper’s Beach Cafe with Dean and Sam and Dean was going to show him how to read a map. When Dean glitched and then the sun started to strobe, Jack picked up on the fact that something was fishy.

He was in the halls of Heaven and right behind him was the black slushy goo water from The Empty. He took off down the hall and the next thing we know, he’s coming out of a bush and meeting his mother’s 10-ish-year-old self. Of course, he found her Heaven and this was the moment they finally met.

When he tells her he’s her son, we see her suddenly appear as her adult self that we recognize and she quickly realizes that she died. But she’s SO happy to see him. Tears from me. Just as fast, knowing he’s there in front of her, she realizes that he’s dead. Tears, even more, and so many tears from me.

Initially, she was upset because Castiel was supposed to take care of him and here he was dead. But Jack reassured her that he, as well as Sam and Dean, did everything they possibly could to take care of him. She accepted that but was still bummed out that it went the way it did. She wanted him to have a much longer, cooler life.

So once Castiel showed up in Heaven and went on his own adventure to find Jack, he knew Jack would head for Kelly. He found them at her Heaven house, getting to know each other. Jack was super surprised to see him and they had a tearful reunion. I thought it was also really special the way Jack got to see Cas and Kelly encounter each other with a specialness.

This was a seriously important episode on Supernatural for Jack’s story. I loved the fact that while he’s been told all about Kelly, seen her video, and learned about her character through Castiel and the others, meeting her was something I didn’t think would happen, at least not soon.

On top of that, to be able to also witness her relationship with Castiel, even though he understood it, was also a big affirmation of Castiel’s true involvement with Jack’s journey into and through his life experiences. I thought this was a really smart, and fulfilling piece of storyline for Supernatural.

It wasn’t long before the situation changed, though. Castiel quickly explained everything to Jack that was going on in Heaven and on Earth in his absence. He told him about the soul-sucking magic and that, unfortunately, a great burden was on his shoulders. Not only was it his life at stake, but all of Heaven was also at risk unless he was alive.

This is the time when Dean was giving figurative hell to Lily for deciding to walk away because they couldn’t find a way to get her into heaven. He gave a moving speech to her that turned it all around, and this was literally what ended up saving Jack and Heaven. Yay, Dean and teamwork!

He told her that maybe losing all that soul had made her something that wasn’t even human at all. He said that if she had any soul left, she could never make someone go through what she went through. Losing a child is what he meant, and he did mean it. “Please don’t do this to us,” he begged her.

That was a huge tear-jerker for me. What a beautiful moment and so sad, at the same time. Man, that Jensen Ackles can really get into character. Whew.

Anyway, what a special set of things he said. Not what we would always see from the tough Dean Winchester, but his emotions have always run deep, that’s been no Supernatural secret. This part of Jack’s journey was so important, even though he wasn’t there to see it. But we were. He’s one of them, there’s no question.

So that scene from before, when Castiel made the deal, started the last leg of this adventure for Jack. He says bye to his momma, Cas puts the angel juice into him and he shoots up in his dead body, confused as ever. The guys hand him the spell Lily prepared, which he says aloud.

Right then, we see a little flash in his eyes. “Was that my soul?!” he asks with that baby Jack excitement and awe. So there he is, in the deepest Winchester fashion, he has had his first resurrection, at the hands of Castiel and solidified by angel magic, just to give it that fine Supernatural authenticity.

The adventure wraps for him at a table, with his dads, toasting to himself and the big adventure to come. They know where Michael is, and they’re gonna make him pay.

One more time, the Supernatural geniuses throw in another on-the-record character name for us though. I mean they can’t have the fans out here just calling these folks whatever thing they come up with, right? I’m still going to keep thinking “Bad Place Kaia” when I see her, though. My bad.

So,  “Dark Kaia” is still out there and so is the spear. But that’s not going to worry them, is it? Right after a beer and a nap or something, they’ll head out to find her, the superspear, and to take the battle back to the Big Bad. I can’t wait.

Did your favorite part make the list? Did we leave anything out? Let’s keep the discussion going in the comments below, or send us a tweet with your thoughts!

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