Supernatural review: 02.13 - "Houses of the Holy"

[littlewings04]

Fair warning: This is religion-major heavy. In fact, I think we might be able to properly call this a Supernatural exegesis. Thank you, Chaplain, see how I use what you taught me?

As always, in perpetuam:

Comments

[dotfic]

This is a beautiful meta.

Dean prefers the profane, arcane, the things that most ordinary people cannot understand. He wants his covert world of darkness, not a world wherein something as easy to understand as a unicorn might be real. Because what he does is harder, it has more validity to him than easy faith in beautiful, good things.

I think that's exactly where he is on that. I commented somewhere else this evening that we don't have evidence of *good* supernatural beings (only rituals and materials). An angel would be one such being and Dean can't accept it.

And Dean turns out to be right; it was a ghost.

Dean was given faith by his mother, and when he lost her, he couldn't hold on to the faith she tried to instill in him.

His bitter rejection of that faith was, I think, because it was such a betrayal. He's not capable of seeing it that Mary *lied* to him. But her faith is a safe target and I think he rejects that faith all the harder since it was first offered to him by someone he loved and trusted that much.

Loved your thoughts on Sam being shut out of the car and this: His Gethsemane cannot happen while he feels safe and protected. It requires vulnerability, and that means getting out of his armour and let doubt puncture him.

Which is now making me think further. Because in that scene I saw in Dean a horror at the death, so much regret. And at the same time, that death was also confirmation of a higher power for good.

So much going on in this episode! And it was good to hear a knowledgeable religious perspective on it.

[littlewings04]

Thank you, I'm glad you liked it. I don't know that I have authority so much as an education that comes in handy, and I'm reluctant to claim any such thing. But it does make me warm and fuzzy to be called knowledgeable.

I think Dean is having trouble dealing with the amount of death he's caused. Croatoan, Devil's Trap, all of it. Dean has been dropping people all over the place, and tonight, he was face-to-face with what he wrought. That's the Gethsemane moment. Realising what you've done, what you have to do, and experiencing the anguish that comes with knowledge. Knowledge was gained in the Garden of Eden and redeemed in Garden of Gethsemane.