Sympathy for the Devil
You have Mick Jagger et al. to thank for this next bit of over-thought, over-involved meta. I guess that it is not for no reason that Don McLean called the man Satan.
I think I got a little too weighty for this otherwise mostly silly journal with that last meta. Let's go happier on this one. It has to with Supernatural. Specifically, the meat suits. All of this was inspired by one lyric: "I'm a man of wealth and taste."
Because if there's something that Mark Pellegrino (the actor playing the man now possessed by Lucifer) is not, it's a man of wealth or taste. At least, not in any of the shows I've seen him in to date--Dexter, Burn Notice, Lost. (Interesting to note that he previously has played someone with super human abilities before, however.) He's the guy you call in to play the "shady" guy, the one who looks like he slept off a bender on a public beach right next to some washed up hypodermic needles. No doubt he can clean up better, but it remains to be seen whether he cleans up good.
This is not to say he's not scruffily attractive, but he's not the same kind of inherently-pretty-underneath-the-stubble attractive as, say, Jeffrey Dean Morgan or Jensen Ackles. I'm getting off track, ahem.
Anyway, I was thinking about how insidiously vapid the Devil is in "Sympathy for the Devil"--the song, not the SPN episode. He's this untouchable, gloating presence of evil with a powerful sense of humor about making other people miserable because that's what he does. And how Mark Pellegrino, in other things that he's done, has been nowhere near that kind of suaveness, much less that indifferent intelligence. What he does do, however, is a kind of ferocious sanity and sympathy. Even as the lowest of low scum, he's still somewhat compelling. (Love to hate, that kind of deal.)
And then you have Lucifer coming to this actor, playing his character as a bottomless pit of self-inflicted misery, as an ethereal woman with an aching, long-suffering pain and slow-burn anger at God. Veeeeeery different from what The Stones would say Satan is like. And very effective. It's a common trope to make the bad guy sympathetic, or to show a villain make a bad choice from an understandable point of torment. Or, more cliche still, to have Satan make an offer that is just too good to pass up.
But is She-Satan, now Mark Pellegrino-Satan, really a villain at all? Satan is by most reckonings a cunning liar. It's entirely possible that She-Satan saying, "I don't lie because I don't have to" is telling yet another of those crazy half-truths that the better incarnations of the Devil always pull off with such panache. It's totally within the realm of probability that She-Satan presents herself as a sympathetic, beautiful woman in order to get that invite that is necessary before an angel (even a fallen one, apparently) can possess someone.
And yet? I find myself really questioning whether Lucifer is the Big Bad. This is helped along by two things. One, Lucifer, in the two seconds he existed as She-Satan, is easily the most sympathetic supernatural character to come along in a while. For an angel, he is surprisingly not dickish! That's really at the heart of my first argument: we know what the demons and the angels are like, and while the demons are brutal, the angels are merciless. Of the three, Lucifer seems like the nicest one so far. Sure, that could be a set-up for a big fall, but I'd love it if the mind-fuck stayed in place. What if Lucifer had a legitimate grudge with God?
The other thing encouraging my Lucifer-is-not-that-bad, really? From what I've seen, it's an open debate right now as to whether or not God or Lucifer himself saved Dean, Sam, and Castiel from their respective dooms. Archangels smote Castiel until his host vessel was a bunch of lumpy bits stuck in the Prophet Chuck's hair. (Poor the Prophet Chuck!) They did so on standing orders, not because they thought one way or another about murdering to pieces one of their own. That's pretty goddamned ('scuse the pun) disgusting for a bunch of divine creatures. It also makes God look as much the dick as Uriel and Zachariah put together.
Did God intervene to put Castiel to rights as he plucked Dean and Sam out of harm's way? Why would he do that when he has otherwise been so hands-off w/r/t this war as to let his own angels murder one another? I think it was Lucifer. Again, this could be saving up for a later, more awful conflict, but I'm not sure.
Regardless? I love that I don't know! Most of the time, no matter how appealing or sympathetic the package, Lucifer is always going to fuck you. Always. The Devil shows up, you're fucked, end of story. Maybe you're in the Bedazzled-type of story where you'll eventually get one over on Satan. But most of the time, you're going to try to get one over on him, and he's going to make the payback that much worse. But this time? With this show? And it's crazy mix-up of how Heaven and Hell play mean with each other? I'm honestly not sure that that's how it will go.
Of course, we're only one episode in, so all of that might be moot by tomorrow, and I will then be griping about how obvious it all was. For now, HAIL SATAN.
One meta lead to another as I was thinking about how "Sympathy for the Devil" this show is not: vessels.
Specifically, I was thinking of Dean. I don't think that Dean was ever possessed on this show. Just about everyone he's ever spoken to for more than episode has been possessed by a demon--Daddy, Bobby, Sam--or turned into a monster at some point (like poor Gordon). Hell, Ellen and Jo are back next week, so odds are at least one of them's gonna end up possessed.
But not Dean. It's an important distinction that, to my memory, Dean has only ever been copied when he's been acting evil and stuff--shapeshifters and what not standing in as him. He got that crappy-ass (though hilarious) ghost sickness that one time, but possessed? Never. He had that uber-creepy vision of himself as a demon, but that was a nightmare. Dean's been himself or he's been sick, that's it.
And now it turns out he's a vessel for an angel, if Zachariah is to be believed. (I think he's telling the truth. He seemed too keen to make Dean say "yes" to be pretending.) This makes me do think-y stuff about how this show has--by intent or by sheer luck--avoided ever making an angelic host a demon meat-puppet. Granted, our selection size is small--we don't ever see Uriel or Zachariah's host bodies before they were taken. But we did see Castiel's, and we saw Jimmy's daughter, another potential vessel for Castiel. Notably, in a tiny family of three, the demon went for the one member who was not a suitable vessel.
Moreover, it seems like an overly complicated matter to go about possessing people who aren't your target. The demons that attacked Jimmy and his family could have jumped into his body at any point. There's no reason for them to go around him--thus setting up an overly-elaborate trap that was bound to bring in the Winchesters as was what happened--when they could just go through and directly to him. But they didn't. Ditto with Anna. Why bother kidnapping someone when you could just possess them and walk them to where you want to be?
Dean has never been possessed by a demon, and no demon has ever possessed an angelic vessel. Could these two issues be related? I am getting my think on!
The heritage issue of vessel suitability is also interesting. Because both John and Sam and Samuel were all possessed, clearly, this is not a dominant sort of trait in a family. The only ones we don't see possessed in the Winchester/Campbell family are Deanna, Mary, and Dean. Mary is another example of someone uncomfortably but not intimately involved with a demon interesting in possessing/controlling members of her family who is not, herself, ever possessed. (Murdered pointlessly, yes. Possessed, no.) I'm sure it's a fault of casting Mitch Pileggi as Grandpa Samuel that they went with Azazel possessing him, not Deanna, but it's interesting all the same that he was chosen and she was not. Somewhere on the maiden side of the Campbell line, this angelic host business might have gotten its start. Narratively, it's rather brilliant to have the feminized son be the one to carry on this attribute as well. (The feminization of Dean Winchester should be so obvious at this point that I can spare you all an essay on that.)
Long story short? It's waaaaaaaay too early in the goddamned season to start thinking so hard about this stuff. What I find most interesting in all this mind-dumping is that I thought the season premiere was rather lackluster for the most part. It was only in going back over it, sparked by a very silly sort of song sung about a fictional devil by the real musical one, that any of this had an impact on me. Curiouser and curiouser.
I think I got a little too weighty for this otherwise mostly silly journal with that last meta. Let's go happier on this one. It has to with Supernatural. Specifically, the meat suits. All of this was inspired by one lyric: "I'm a man of wealth and taste."
Because if there's something that Mark Pellegrino (the actor playing the man now possessed by Lucifer) is not, it's a man of wealth or taste. At least, not in any of the shows I've seen him in to date--Dexter, Burn Notice, Lost. (Interesting to note that he previously has played someone with super human abilities before, however.) He's the guy you call in to play the "shady" guy, the one who looks like he slept off a bender on a public beach right next to some washed up hypodermic needles. No doubt he can clean up better, but it remains to be seen whether he cleans up good.
This is not to say he's not scruffily attractive, but he's not the same kind of inherently-pretty-underneath-the-stubble attractive as, say, Jeffrey Dean Morgan or Jensen Ackles. I'm getting off track, ahem.
Anyway, I was thinking about how insidiously vapid the Devil is in "Sympathy for the Devil"--the song, not the SPN episode. He's this untouchable, gloating presence of evil with a powerful sense of humor about making other people miserable because that's what he does. And how Mark Pellegrino, in other things that he's done, has been nowhere near that kind of suaveness, much less that indifferent intelligence. What he does do, however, is a kind of ferocious sanity and sympathy. Even as the lowest of low scum, he's still somewhat compelling. (Love to hate, that kind of deal.)
And then you have Lucifer coming to this actor, playing his character as a bottomless pit of self-inflicted misery, as an ethereal woman with an aching, long-suffering pain and slow-burn anger at God. Veeeeeery different from what The Stones would say Satan is like. And very effective. It's a common trope to make the bad guy sympathetic, or to show a villain make a bad choice from an understandable point of torment. Or, more cliche still, to have Satan make an offer that is just too good to pass up.
But is She-Satan, now Mark Pellegrino-Satan, really a villain at all? Satan is by most reckonings a cunning liar. It's entirely possible that She-Satan saying, "I don't lie because I don't have to" is telling yet another of those crazy half-truths that the better incarnations of the Devil always pull off with such panache. It's totally within the realm of probability that She-Satan presents herself as a sympathetic, beautiful woman in order to get that invite that is necessary before an angel (even a fallen one, apparently) can possess someone.
And yet? I find myself really questioning whether Lucifer is the Big Bad. This is helped along by two things. One, Lucifer, in the two seconds he existed as She-Satan, is easily the most sympathetic supernatural character to come along in a while. For an angel, he is surprisingly not dickish! That's really at the heart of my first argument: we know what the demons and the angels are like, and while the demons are brutal, the angels are merciless. Of the three, Lucifer seems like the nicest one so far. Sure, that could be a set-up for a big fall, but I'd love it if the mind-fuck stayed in place. What if Lucifer had a legitimate grudge with God?
The other thing encouraging my Lucifer-is-not-that-bad, really? From what I've seen, it's an open debate right now as to whether or not God or Lucifer himself saved Dean, Sam, and Castiel from their respective dooms. Archangels smote Castiel until his host vessel was a bunch of lumpy bits stuck in the Prophet Chuck's hair. (Poor the Prophet Chuck!) They did so on standing orders, not because they thought one way or another about murdering to pieces one of their own. That's pretty goddamned ('scuse the pun) disgusting for a bunch of divine creatures. It also makes God look as much the dick as Uriel and Zachariah put together.
Did God intervene to put Castiel to rights as he plucked Dean and Sam out of harm's way? Why would he do that when he has otherwise been so hands-off w/r/t this war as to let his own angels murder one another? I think it was Lucifer. Again, this could be saving up for a later, more awful conflict, but I'm not sure.
Regardless? I love that I don't know! Most of the time, no matter how appealing or sympathetic the package, Lucifer is always going to fuck you. Always. The Devil shows up, you're fucked, end of story. Maybe you're in the Bedazzled-type of story where you'll eventually get one over on Satan. But most of the time, you're going to try to get one over on him, and he's going to make the payback that much worse. But this time? With this show? And it's crazy mix-up of how Heaven and Hell play mean with each other? I'm honestly not sure that that's how it will go.
Of course, we're only one episode in, so all of that might be moot by tomorrow, and I will then be griping about how obvious it all was. For now, HAIL SATAN.
One meta lead to another as I was thinking about how "Sympathy for the Devil" this show is not: vessels.
Specifically, I was thinking of Dean. I don't think that Dean was ever possessed on this show. Just about everyone he's ever spoken to for more than episode has been possessed by a demon--Daddy, Bobby, Sam--or turned into a monster at some point (like poor Gordon). Hell, Ellen and Jo are back next week, so odds are at least one of them's gonna end up possessed.
But not Dean. It's an important distinction that, to my memory, Dean has only ever been copied when he's been acting evil and stuff--shapeshifters and what not standing in as him. He got that crappy-ass (though hilarious) ghost sickness that one time, but possessed? Never. He had that uber-creepy vision of himself as a demon, but that was a nightmare. Dean's been himself or he's been sick, that's it.
And now it turns out he's a vessel for an angel, if Zachariah is to be believed. (I think he's telling the truth. He seemed too keen to make Dean say "yes" to be pretending.) This makes me do think-y stuff about how this show has--by intent or by sheer luck--avoided ever making an angelic host a demon meat-puppet. Granted, our selection size is small--we don't ever see Uriel or Zachariah's host bodies before they were taken. But we did see Castiel's, and we saw Jimmy's daughter, another potential vessel for Castiel. Notably, in a tiny family of three, the demon went for the one member who was not a suitable vessel.
Moreover, it seems like an overly complicated matter to go about possessing people who aren't your target. The demons that attacked Jimmy and his family could have jumped into his body at any point. There's no reason for them to go around him--thus setting up an overly-elaborate trap that was bound to bring in the Winchesters as was what happened--when they could just go through and directly to him. But they didn't. Ditto with Anna. Why bother kidnapping someone when you could just possess them and walk them to where you want to be?
Dean has never been possessed by a demon, and no demon has ever possessed an angelic vessel. Could these two issues be related? I am getting my think on!
The heritage issue of vessel suitability is also interesting. Because both John and Sam and Samuel were all possessed, clearly, this is not a dominant sort of trait in a family. The only ones we don't see possessed in the Winchester/Campbell family are Deanna, Mary, and Dean. Mary is another example of someone uncomfortably but not intimately involved with a demon interesting in possessing/controlling members of her family who is not, herself, ever possessed. (Murdered pointlessly, yes. Possessed, no.) I'm sure it's a fault of casting Mitch Pileggi as Grandpa Samuel that they went with Azazel possessing him, not Deanna, but it's interesting all the same that he was chosen and she was not. Somewhere on the maiden side of the Campbell line, this angelic host business might have gotten its start. Narratively, it's rather brilliant to have the feminized son be the one to carry on this attribute as well. (The feminization of Dean Winchester should be so obvious at this point that I can spare you all an essay on that.)
Long story short? It's waaaaaaaay too early in the goddamned season to start thinking so hard about this stuff. What I find most interesting in all this mind-dumping is that I thought the season premiere was rather lackluster for the most part. It was only in going back over it, sparked by a very silly sort of song sung about a fictional devil by the real musical one, that any of this had an impact on me. Curiouser and curiouser.