The last season ended with Castiel pulling all the souls out of Purgatory. Sam tried to stab him with an angel blade, but the new souls made Castiel so powerful that it didn’t kill him. The sixth season ended with him saying to Sam, Dean, and Bobby:

… the angel blade won’t work, because I’m not an angel anymore. I’m your new God. A better one. So you will bow down and profess your love unto me, your Lord, or I shall destroy you.

Bobby – being the most common sense-having of the trio – begins this episode by bowing down before him. Dean and Sam are about to follow suit when Castiel tells them not to bother, since it means nothing if they’re doing it out of fear. He makes it clear, though, that he has no particular affection left for them anymore. He’s not going to kill them, because there’s no point to it. As long as they do not move against him, he sees no need to kill them.

The status is definitely not quo this season.

Castiel also doesn’t feel a need to help Sam, whose memories of being in the pit are still causing him some problems. The deal was that he’d fix Sam if they stood down which, he points out, they hardly did.

Meanwhile, the three hunters go back to Bobby’s place. Sam seems to be recovering, but has strange visions and flashes, despite feeling okay otherwise. Bobby & Dean aren’t even sure how he’s alive at all. Trying to figure out that they can beat God, they decide that the only being with enough power to stand against Castiel would be Death himself. They summon Crowley, in order to get from him a spell to bind Death. Crowley says that they can’t handle that kind of mojo.

Castiel heals a faithful blind man, but upon gaining his sight, he realizes something is wrong with Castiel’s face. In fact, the new Lord has a bizarre set of lesions. While examining them, something seems to … begin trying to crawl its way out of his stomach, sort of Alien-style, except it looks like the thing pushing against the inside of his stomach has human hands. He doesn’t burst open – yet, at least. I’ll confess, I’m not really sure what’s going on here.

Dean, Sam, and Bobby perform the spell to summon Death, which requires a bit of breaking and entering on their part. Once Death shows up, Castiel soon follows, but he can’t kill any of the humans because they have Death bound. Then, things go crazy in the exposition department.

It seems that the reason Castiel is having so much trouble is that there were things far older than monsters and angels in Purgatory. The reason it was created in the first place was to contain the first creatures, the Leviathans, and when Castiel opened the door and sucked everything in, he consumed those as well. Death believes that Castiel – a mutated angel – isn’t powerful enough to contain that sort of poisonous power.

Which certainly seems true because – once he casually negate’s Deaths bindings – he goes and slaughters the entire staff of a holy roller politician. He appears to have had some sort of rage blackout during it.

Death offers the Winchesters a deal. He’ll arrange another eclipse, so that they can re-open the gate into Purgatory and shove all of Castiel’s usurped souls back. Of course, they have no way to force Castiel to cooperate, but a desperate Sam decides to pray for him to help anyway … and Castiel actually listens, showing up in bad shape and saying he needs help.

While Sam is getting supplies for the spell, Lucifer shows up, seeming at first to be one of Sam’s hallucinations, but Lucifer stands up to him, saying that Sam never actually escaped from the pit. No, Lucifer claims that this was all an elaborate torture scheme. Sam doesn’t return to help Dean and Bobby with the spell, so who knows what’s up with that…

The spell is cast and Castiel’s power is pulled from him, drawn back into Purgatory where it belongs. At the end of it, Castiel is dead … but then he gets better, becoming healed instantly. (This is his second inexplicable return from death, although tracking such things on this show is kind of pointless.)

But Castiel didn’t actually get away unscathed. It turns out that the Leviathan clung onto him when everything else was sucked into Purgatory, and it takes control of Castiel. It claims that Castiel is dead (but, as I said, we’ve heard these things before … just earlier in this episode, in fact), and Leviathan is now running the show.

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