Grace Unlooked-for: just a few belated thoughts on SPN 7.17 & 7.18
I've been meaning to write some sort of deeply coherent essay about the State of Supernatural right now, but I'm not feeling that coherent, so here's a random jumble of thoughts. The first part is mostly tl:dr Samgirling, with some meta about grace, and Cas. Later there’s a little unspoiled speculation about where the rest of the season may go.
"The Born-Again Identity" was insanely overstuffed, just way too many things going on, and it made it a little hard to sort out my feelings about all of them. I do feel like this season has major pacing issues, and I can't help but relate that to what appears to be a behind-the-scenes power struggle, which is a little sad. I suspect Gamble has a much better sense of pacing that would be evident from this season, and that there was considerable pressure from the co-producer, Robert Singer, to keep it more MOTW-focused. This is all pure speculation on my part, of course, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
"It’s hard to believe you were the guy that saved the world once."
The biggest thing for me in that episode was - Sam. I mean, there he is, dying of organ failure, and still saving people - not because he feels guilty, or like he has to, just because it's who he is. SO MUCH LOVE.
I've seen a lot of the Sam!girls around me expressing frustration about the resolution of the Hallucifer plotline - the feeling that this was something which belonged to Sam, and that taking it away and giving the same plotline to Castiel is a diminishment of Sam's role. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure I agree. I'm definitely in the camp which feels that there is more to Hallucifer than just a hallucination, that there is an element of a psychic link with Lucifer in the Cage, or else perhaps a small splinter of Lucifer's Grace which lodged in Sam's soul when Death retrieved it. monicawoe and purplehrdwonder have done a great job of rounding up all the evidence for this here and here - the only thing I'd add is that it seems unlikely that a product purely of Sam's mind, no matter how malevolent, would be strong enough to render a fully-powered angel catatonic.
And so the feeling is, I think, that if Hallucifer was really Lucifer all along, and the hallucinations can be passed of to someone else, then none of what happened really says anything about Sam . It was all a waste.
I disagree. First of all, even if there was a tiny sliver of the Devil in Sam, or some kind of black telephone into Lucifer's cell, whatever it was, it wasn't very strong, in the beginning. It had to work with what it had, and what it had was Sam's psyche. It worked itself deeper into Sam's mind, like a splinter aiming for the heart, using Sam's fears and emotional insecurities and memories and dreams. The hallucinations may say a little bit about Lucifer, but mostly they are about Sam. (Interesting, then, that Hallucifer took the form, mostly, of a dark mirror of Dean. Either literally as in Hello, Cruel World, or figuratively, as he takes the form of a denim-clad, wisecracking, annoying brother-figure. Interesting parallel to Ruby remaking herself into a dark mirror of Dean to more effectively manipulate Sam, I think.) So many Sam&Dean feelings!
Secondly, the way Hallucifer left Sam. I do really wish that there had been more of that throughout the season, more sense of what Sam was dealing with on a daily basis. It all felt a little disjointed somehow. But what we did see was Sam coping. We saw Sam doing that stubborn Sam thing, where he just refuse to give up, where he takes action, where he utterly refuses to give up. It is one of his most admirable qualities (and one that gets him into the most trouble!), and that’s why it was such a shock, to us and to Dean, when he gave up this episode. I loved the callback to Faith, BTW, and the way Dean responded here - the way he just went out to find someone who could Fix Sam, and did so, and literally did not stop until he was leaving the hospital with his brother. ♥
And the thing is, it was frustrating that Sam couldn’t fix himself, in the end. But - we can’t always fix ourselves. We can’t just bootstrap ourselves out of mental illness: it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, we need help - there are things no one, not matter how tough or strong or heroic, can do alone. Sam realizes that, of course: he knows there is a limit to even his boundless determination. And so, we see him just give up this episode. For precisely the second time in the course of this show, we see Sam just give up, stop fighting. It freaks Dean out, of course - he’s never seen it, and I don’t know that he believed Sam’s account of when it happened before - and he is galvanized into action. In addition to the Faith parallels, I see callbacks both to Dark Side of the Moon, and to I Know What You Did Last Summer. Because in that episode, Sam gave up, and was ready to die. And at his lowest moment, a demon appeared on his shoulder, with an agenda. Sam was saved by an external force, but only because he was needed as a pawn in someone else’s game. This time, an angel appears, and saves him, with (as far as we can see) no agenda at all.
I don’t think Castiel did what he did because Dean asked him to, though that was part of it. I don’t think he did it out of a sense of duty (to whom? God is long gone, after all). I think he did it because Sam was the one who tried to save him, before. Sam was the one who reached to to him, who said “we can help.” Sam receives Grace, not because he asked for it or because he feels he deserves it or because he earned it, but because it’s there. It’s that classic moment in the hero’s quest, where the little old lady he stopped to fetch water for turns out to be a powerful witch who saves him the giant, where the lion whose paw he drew a thorn from all those years ago refuses to eat him in the arena. Sam is saved, not by his own considerable agency, because no-one can be saved by their own agency all the time, but because he has been the kind of person who spreads grace in the world, and sometimes that comes back to you when you need it. Sam carried faith for Dean, and for Cas, when they had lost theirs in Dark Side of the Moon. Now it’s their time to return it. (Also I have a lot of Sassy *feelings* here, can you tell?) Dean tells Cas that maybe he was brought back for a reason, and that reason is to set right what was wrong, and what Cas does with that is to fix Sam, and somehow this seems eminently fair to me, Sam!girl that I am.
I should add a caveat here: it is my belief that what Cas took from Sam was Hallucifer only - the psychic tumour or the psychic link or the splinter or whatever it is, and that Sam has retained all of his memories of Hell, of robo!Sam, etc. If this turns out not to be the case, I will be a lot more unhappy. DNW memory wipe - Sam has worked hard for those memories, has fought for them - I’d be pretty pissed off if it turns out that Cas took them away >:(
"Slaughterhouse Five-Vonnegut or Cat's Cradle-Vonnegut?"
The other thing I found interesting in that episode was Lucifer playing cat’s cradle. Given that Vonnegut is clearly an influence on this show (Dean and Chuck both canonically read Vonnegut, after all, and all the meta-stuff and authorial self-insertion has a certain Vonnegut feel to it. Also, “Hello, Cruel World” is a line from Mother Night - be careful what you pretend to be! - as well as the title of the episode where Sam started coping with Hallucifer), I can’t help but think it must be if it’s a reference to Cat’s Cradle.
If so, it says a number of potentially interesting things. Cat’s Cradle has a lot of themes which resonate here, one of them being about how groups of people are brought together to fulfil God’s plans, and will keep encountering each other over and over until the plan is fulfilled. Which seems relevant in the episode where ALL THE CHARACTERS return. But it’s also about the idea that the universe is inherently meaningless, there is no pattern, and any patterns we perceive are just that: artifacts of our own perception. All religion is lies, says Bokononism, the invented religion which most of the characters in the book follow. What’s important is to live by a set of harmless untruths which make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. You get out of the universe the meaning you put into it, in other words. It’s also a book about unintended catastrophic consequences, something out heroes are pretty intimately familiar with.
Lucifer doing cat’s cradle also makes me wonder about who’s pulling the strings here - I mean, strings got pulled, right? Cas came back. Daphne found him, and married him, because God (or someone!) told her to, in a dream. The episode ends with Hallucifer transferred from Sam to a much more powerful being, under the care of a demon who was one of Lucifer’s top lieutenants, an exiled princess of Hell and a loyalist to the Cause. Is all that accidental? I don’t know, but I wonder. I wonder if Lucifer isn’t going to put in a surprise appearance as a Big Bad at the end of this season, and the Leviathans may stick around to be next year’s problem?
I don’t have a lot to say about Party On, Garth. It’s interesting to see another example of a relatively happy, well-adjusted hunter with a network of social connections, and how strong the contrast is with Sam & Dean. Dean’s hopefulness when Sam suggested they were seeing Bobby because they were grieving “like normal people” was kind of heartbreaking. I can’t help but wonder if ghost!Bobby will fill a similar role for Dean that Cas did for Sam in 7.17 - to provide un-looked for grace, and a solution, or the start of a solution, to Dean’s depression and drinking issues.
This entry was originally posted at http://cordelia-gray.dreamwidth.org/37298.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
"The Born-Again Identity" was insanely overstuffed, just way too many things going on, and it made it a little hard to sort out my feelings about all of them. I do feel like this season has major pacing issues, and I can't help but relate that to what appears to be a behind-the-scenes power struggle, which is a little sad. I suspect Gamble has a much better sense of pacing that would be evident from this season, and that there was considerable pressure from the co-producer, Robert Singer, to keep it more MOTW-focused. This is all pure speculation on my part, of course, but it does make a certain amount of sense.
"It’s hard to believe you were the guy that saved the world once."
The biggest thing for me in that episode was - Sam. I mean, there he is, dying of organ failure, and still saving people - not because he feels guilty, or like he has to, just because it's who he is. SO MUCH LOVE.
I've seen a lot of the Sam!girls around me expressing frustration about the resolution of the Hallucifer plotline - the feeling that this was something which belonged to Sam, and that taking it away and giving the same plotline to Castiel is a diminishment of Sam's role. I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure I agree. I'm definitely in the camp which feels that there is more to Hallucifer than just a hallucination, that there is an element of a psychic link with Lucifer in the Cage, or else perhaps a small splinter of Lucifer's Grace which lodged in Sam's soul when Death retrieved it. monicawoe and purplehrdwonder have done a great job of rounding up all the evidence for this here and here - the only thing I'd add is that it seems unlikely that a product purely of Sam's mind, no matter how malevolent, would be strong enough to render a fully-powered angel catatonic.
And so the feeling is, I think, that if Hallucifer was really Lucifer all along, and the hallucinations can be passed of to someone else, then none of what happened really says anything about Sam . It was all a waste.
I disagree. First of all, even if there was a tiny sliver of the Devil in Sam, or some kind of black telephone into Lucifer's cell, whatever it was, it wasn't very strong, in the beginning. It had to work with what it had, and what it had was Sam's psyche. It worked itself deeper into Sam's mind, like a splinter aiming for the heart, using Sam's fears and emotional insecurities and memories and dreams. The hallucinations may say a little bit about Lucifer, but mostly they are about Sam. (Interesting, then, that Hallucifer took the form, mostly, of a dark mirror of Dean. Either literally as in Hello, Cruel World, or figuratively, as he takes the form of a denim-clad, wisecracking, annoying brother-figure. Interesting parallel to Ruby remaking herself into a dark mirror of Dean to more effectively manipulate Sam, I think.) So many Sam&Dean feelings!
Secondly, the way Hallucifer left Sam. I do really wish that there had been more of that throughout the season, more sense of what Sam was dealing with on a daily basis. It all felt a little disjointed somehow. But what we did see was Sam coping. We saw Sam doing that stubborn Sam thing, where he just refuse to give up, where he takes action, where he utterly refuses to give up. It is one of his most admirable qualities (and one that gets him into the most trouble!), and that’s why it was such a shock, to us and to Dean, when he gave up this episode. I loved the callback to Faith, BTW, and the way Dean responded here - the way he just went out to find someone who could Fix Sam, and did so, and literally did not stop until he was leaving the hospital with his brother. ♥
And the thing is, it was frustrating that Sam couldn’t fix himself, in the end. But - we can’t always fix ourselves. We can’t just bootstrap ourselves out of mental illness: it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes, we need help - there are things no one, not matter how tough or strong or heroic, can do alone. Sam realizes that, of course: he knows there is a limit to even his boundless determination. And so, we see him just give up this episode. For precisely the second time in the course of this show, we see Sam just give up, stop fighting. It freaks Dean out, of course - he’s never seen it, and I don’t know that he believed Sam’s account of when it happened before - and he is galvanized into action. In addition to the Faith parallels, I see callbacks both to Dark Side of the Moon, and to I Know What You Did Last Summer. Because in that episode, Sam gave up, and was ready to die. And at his lowest moment, a demon appeared on his shoulder, with an agenda. Sam was saved by an external force, but only because he was needed as a pawn in someone else’s game. This time, an angel appears, and saves him, with (as far as we can see) no agenda at all.
I don’t think Castiel did what he did because Dean asked him to, though that was part of it. I don’t think he did it out of a sense of duty (to whom? God is long gone, after all). I think he did it because Sam was the one who tried to save him, before. Sam was the one who reached to to him, who said “we can help.” Sam receives Grace, not because he asked for it or because he feels he deserves it or because he earned it, but because it’s there. It’s that classic moment in the hero’s quest, where the little old lady he stopped to fetch water for turns out to be a powerful witch who saves him the giant, where the lion whose paw he drew a thorn from all those years ago refuses to eat him in the arena. Sam is saved, not by his own considerable agency, because no-one can be saved by their own agency all the time, but because he has been the kind of person who spreads grace in the world, and sometimes that comes back to you when you need it. Sam carried faith for Dean, and for Cas, when they had lost theirs in Dark Side of the Moon. Now it’s their time to return it. (Also I have a lot of Sassy *feelings* here, can you tell?) Dean tells Cas that maybe he was brought back for a reason, and that reason is to set right what was wrong, and what Cas does with that is to fix Sam, and somehow this seems eminently fair to me, Sam!girl that I am.
I should add a caveat here: it is my belief that what Cas took from Sam was Hallucifer only - the psychic tumour or the psychic link or the splinter or whatever it is, and that Sam has retained all of his memories of Hell, of robo!Sam, etc. If this turns out not to be the case, I will be a lot more unhappy. DNW memory wipe - Sam has worked hard for those memories, has fought for them - I’d be pretty pissed off if it turns out that Cas took them away >:(
"Slaughterhouse Five-Vonnegut or Cat's Cradle-Vonnegut?"
The other thing I found interesting in that episode was Lucifer playing cat’s cradle. Given that Vonnegut is clearly an influence on this show (Dean and Chuck both canonically read Vonnegut, after all, and all the meta-stuff and authorial self-insertion has a certain Vonnegut feel to it. Also, “Hello, Cruel World” is a line from Mother Night - be careful what you pretend to be! - as well as the title of the episode where Sam started coping with Hallucifer), I can’t help but think it must be if it’s a reference to Cat’s Cradle.
If so, it says a number of potentially interesting things. Cat’s Cradle has a lot of themes which resonate here, one of them being about how groups of people are brought together to fulfil God’s plans, and will keep encountering each other over and over until the plan is fulfilled. Which seems relevant in the episode where ALL THE CHARACTERS return. But it’s also about the idea that the universe is inherently meaningless, there is no pattern, and any patterns we perceive are just that: artifacts of our own perception. All religion is lies, says Bokononism, the invented religion which most of the characters in the book follow. What’s important is to live by a set of harmless untruths which make you brave and kind and healthy and happy. You get out of the universe the meaning you put into it, in other words. It’s also a book about unintended catastrophic consequences, something out heroes are pretty intimately familiar with.
Lucifer doing cat’s cradle also makes me wonder about who’s pulling the strings here - I mean, strings got pulled, right? Cas came back. Daphne found him, and married him, because God (or someone!) told her to, in a dream. The episode ends with Hallucifer transferred from Sam to a much more powerful being, under the care of a demon who was one of Lucifer’s top lieutenants, an exiled princess of Hell and a loyalist to the Cause. Is all that accidental? I don’t know, but I wonder. I wonder if Lucifer isn’t going to put in a surprise appearance as a Big Bad at the end of this season, and the Leviathans may stick around to be next year’s problem?
I don’t have a lot to say about Party On, Garth. It’s interesting to see another example of a relatively happy, well-adjusted hunter with a network of social connections, and how strong the contrast is with Sam & Dean. Dean’s hopefulness when Sam suggested they were seeing Bobby because they were grieving “like normal people” was kind of heartbreaking. I can’t help but wonder if ghost!Bobby will fill a similar role for Dean that Cas did for Sam in 7.17 - to provide un-looked for grace, and a solution, or the start of a solution, to Dean’s depression and drinking issues.
This entry was originally posted at http://cordelia-gray.dreamwidth.org/37298.html. Please comment there using OpenID.