Supernatural: Faith pt 1
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Sam: What have you got those amped up to?
Dean: A hundred thousand volts.
Sam: Damn.
Dean: Yeah, I want this rawhead extra freaking crispy. And remember, you only get one shot with these things - so make it count.
The opening is pure fairy tale. There’s an old, abandoned house that looks to be on the edge of a town - neither the road nor the streetlights quite reach it, so driving up to it is a bit like stepping into the past. Naturally a place that looks like this would have to have a monster in its basement, and so it does - along with two children it has dragged or lured there, presumably to eat. Everything about the place suggests the old fashioned and otherworldly: even the children hiding from the rawhead in a cupboard (which, according to at least one version of the Rawhead and Bloody-Bones story, would be the worst hiding place they could possibly have picked, but given that the puddles in the basement are a plot point I guess they’re going with the water spirit) look as though they might have wandered out of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; I assume they’re actually wearing school uniforms to achieve that slightly antiquated look - those have pretty much always looked like that and probably always will look like that.
This is Sam and Dean’s world, and they operate within it as natural authority figures - they are once more in the role of the woodsman stepping in to slay the Big Bad Wolf, the only difference being that they’ve forgone the traditional axe in favour of a pair of tasers. Since they are the only adults in the scene the children obey them without question, and when Sam enquires after the whereabouts of the rawhead there’s none of the usual nonsense they get about monsters not being real and Sam and Dean being crazy people for even suggesting them - these kids have wandered off the path into the darkest part of the woods, and they are perfectly clear on the existence of monsters. Of course, the thing about fairy tales is that they’re pretty grim. Even the sanitised versions contain pretty disturbing stuff, and it’s not very difficult to locate variants that contain even more rape, murder and cannibalism (by some quirk of fate, as a child I heard the Perrault version of Sleeping Beauty first; it was years before I was aware that it was even possible to tell that story without putting child-eating ogres in it), so it shouldn’t be too surprising that this particular fairy tale doesn’t have a happy ending: Sam shepherds the children out of the house and Dean succeeds in killing the monster - but for all intents and purposes he kills himself as well, suffering a severe electric shock when he uses the taser on the rawhead while they’re both in a puddle of water. So the lesson here would be that if you mess around with the fairy-tale world, bad things are going to happen to you. And also that they really should have stuck to tradition and gone in with an axe.
Sam: Hey, Doc. Is he …?
Doctor: He's resting.
Sam: And?
Doctor: The electrocution triggered a heart attack. Pretty massive, I'm afraid. His heart - it's damaged.
Sam: How damaged?
Doctor: We've done all we can. We can try and keep him comfortable at this point. But I'd give him a couple weeks, at most. Maybe a month.
Sam: No, no. There's got to be something you can do, some kind of treatment …
Doctor: We can't work miracles. I really am sorry.
…
Dean: Look, Sammy, what can I say, man: it's a dangerous gig. I drew the short straw. That's it, end of story.
Sam: Don't talk like that, all right? We still have options.
Dean: What options? Yeah, burial or cremation. I know it's not easy. But I'm going to die. And you can't stop it.
Sam: Watch me.
By contrast, the next scene is rooted firmly in the ‘normal’ world - the one most of us live in full time and that Sam and Dean only visit to buy coffee and cheeseburgers. There they are the people with the least authority, and the brightly lit, modern hospital is littered with people acting in official capacities: doctors, police officers and administrative staff - and Sam has to navigate his way past all three before he’s even allowed to talk to Dean. All of them are kind and sympathetic (I assume the police have some good reason for thinking that Sam and Dean were not involved in the initial disappearance of the children), but they are nevertheless gatekeepers - and as long as Sam and Dean stay in the normal world, these people have the power to decide their fate. The hospital needs to know who is going to pay for Dean’s treatment; the police officers need ‘the facts’ of the case they’re working on; the doctor can determine what is and isn’t possible. This is the world that Sam ran away to because it was ‘safe’. It isn’t really safe, of course: he’s already learnt that the monsters can get to him just as easily in his own home as they can out on the road, and he’s just now discovering that this world can’t save his brother either. In Scarecrow Sam was motivated to drop everything and run on the mere suspicion that Dean was in danger. Now we get to see what happens when Sam knows for sure that Dean’s life is on the line. As of yet, the demons haven’t done anything with the knowledge they gathered in Scarecrow - if anybody is pulling the strings in Faith, it would be the angels - but the template of many of their future plans is already being laid out. Here Sam will use the magical powers of another person to save Dean’s life - and it’s only a short jump from Faith to Nightmare, where he will first use his own powers to rescue Dean.
When Sam finally does get to Dean, he finds him attempting to cover up fear with jokes and bluster - because he has, essentially, given up. As Sam and Dean spend more and more time with each other, the story increasingly blurs their roles - they’ve ‘switched places’ several times and to different degrees, depending on what each plot arc requires of them. Up until Faith, Sam has operated as the most ‘normal’ of the characters: the one who played soccer and attended university and lived at a fixed address for more than a week and a half at a time. And until now his problems have been of paramount importance, and they have been decidedly abnormal: Jessica’s bizarre death was quite bad enough on its own, but then he followed it up with prophetic visions. This is standard for Sam - it’s not that he never suffers physical injuries, but his problems are much more likely to fall into the category of ‘too bizarre to be quantified’; just recently the trouble in The Born-Again Identity was that the doctors were trying to treat him for a mental illness, which he didn’t have - it was his soul that was broken, and what on earth can you do about that? Now Dean’s problems are taking centre stage, and while it isn’t as though his issues are never of a supernatural nature (after all, he dies and comes back so often that I very much hope the ferryman is giving him a frequent, er, rower’s discount), but despite the fact that he has spent his whole life dealing in the supernatural he is far more likely to land in hospital for purely mundane reasons. Their identities are always being challenged.
Incidentally - I know virtually nothing about medicine, so I am curious as to why the doctor doesn’t suggest a heart transplant. What little I do know would suggest that a young, otherwise healthy person would be an ideal candidate for a transplant. Given the haunted-organ problem that came to light in Mannequin 3: The Reckoning, it’s a very good thing that he didn’t suggest one … but I have no idea whether I’m looking at a plot hole or a perfectly valid assessment of the situation.
Sam: Hey, Dad. It's Sam. You probably won't even get this, but … it's Dean … He's sick, and the doctors say there's nothing they can do. But they don't know the things we know, right? So don't worry, because I'm going to do whatever it takes to get him better … All right. Just wanted you to know.
…
Sam: What the hell are you doing here?
Dean: I checked myself out.
Sam: What are you, crazy?
Dean: I'm not going to die in a hospital where the nurses aren't even hot.
Sam: You know - this whole ‘I laugh in the face of death’ thing? It's crap. I can see right through it.
Dean: Yeah, whatever, dude. Have you even slept? You look worse than me.
Sam: I've been scouring the internet for the last three days; calling every contact in Dad's journal.
Dean: For what?
Sam: For a way to help you. One of Dad's friends, Joshua, he called me back; he told me about a guy in Nebraska. A specialist.
Dean: You're not going to let me die in peace, are you?
Sam: I'm not going to let you die, period. We're going.
Having sworn to save Dean’s life, Sam retreats to a motel room to research. Whereas the first scene belonged wholly to the supernatural world and the second wholly to the mundane one, this one hangs somewhere in between: motels are a real-world thing, and people stay in them, but most people don’t live in them as Sam and Dean do. They are strange halfway places that contain the basic elements of a home - beds, bathroom, sometimes even a kitchen - but aren’t one. The motels Sam and Dean stay in are often bizarre in themselves, with the sort of décor that could make your eyeballs bleed - and they tend to bring in even stranger things: they clean their weapons on the beds and scatter occult literature all over the place. And we can see that Sam’s brain is hovering between the supernatural and mundane world: his research covers both cutting-edge surgical techniques and mystical solutions. All of which leads up to how Sam has actually decided to deal with Dean’s condition: he’s going to fix him with religion.
This, too, is a ‘halfway’ thing. Religion is a thing that many people in the real world do. It is accepted as ‘normal’. But it is also steeped in the supernatural: gods and souls and magic - and whatever else any given religion demands. I can see why this solution appeals to Sam. The mundane world can’t offer him any guarantees. Even if he talked some specialist surgeon into operating on Dean or managed to wrangle his way into a drug trial there would be risks - a chance that whatever they did, Dean would still die. On the other hand the supernatural world, which can invoke ‘magic’ any time it likes, could offer a much more complete and immediate cure. But there are risks there too: the supernatural world is a dangerous and unpredictable place. But religion is all about controlling the supernatural world. Perform the right rituals, offer the right sacrifices, follow the right rules - and you can reap the rewards. It worked perfectly well for the people in Scarecrow, after all. Of course, many religions offer their ‘rewards’ only in the supposed afterlife, so they can’t prove that there’s any actual payoff for all that work. But Sam’s found a guy who promises healing now. Magic with rules. That should be a sure thing, but of course it isn’t. Any ‘control’ people feel they have over the supernatural is illusory, and any bargain you make with a god is bound to be a bad one. Sam hasn’t learnt that one yet.
But when we get back to Sam, he isn’t researching or making travel arrangements. He’s on the phone, trying to let John know what has happened. Just recently, I read a defence of John by the actor who originally portrayed him, Jeffrey Dean Morgan:
‘My stance always is, I would love to come back,’ he said. ‘In fact, they have trashed John so fucking much on that show that I would like to come back just to set the record straight the real way. I'm not that bad of a dad. I saved my kids. I went to hell to save my kids. How bad can I be, people? But there are a couple of storylines that I'd like to resolve and more importantly those people mean a lot to me.’
Supernatural Wiki
This amused me, because most of the stuff that makes me think of John as failing completely as both a parent and a human being happened during Morgan’s tenure, not after. I think they’ve done pretty well by John in the subsequent years. Yes, he’s portrayed as chronically absent in flashbacks - but what else can they do when they can’t get hold of the actor? And this is, in any case, a well-established character trait: ‘He's always missing, and he's always fine,’ Sam grouched in the Pilot, unable to see what Dean was getting so worked up about - and John’s persistent absence is a major plot thread in the first season. Occasionally they throw in a touch of ‘John is a champion at obsessing, and that can be awkward for everyone’ … but that’s pretty well established too. But they’ve also devoted a reasonable amount of time to explaining that this was not at all what John wanted out of life, for himself or for his children. He was just a nice-enough guy minding his own business when the supernatural world descended on his head. And he’s been as badly screwed over by the gods as anybody else.
But this scene here is pretty inexcusable. Even if it isn’t possible to come in person, this is not a phone call you just ignore. And it probably would be possible to come in person; John is clearly overestimating both his own importance and how much danger his children would be in simply by being near him - he’d be more likely to be in danger by being near them. While I appreciate that John is no doubt learning some very scary things about the kind of world he lives in, and that taking back control of his life by destroying the monster who ruined it is vitally important to him … this is not John’s shining hour. I’m often sympathetic to John’s plight, but this would be one of those moments when I would say that he is exactly that bad - and really needs to get over himself and come at a run when one of his kids is dying and the other sounds right on the verge of tears. This is more important than his stupid pseudo-hero quest. But, well. Jeffrey Dean Morgan offers up ‘going to hell’ in defence of John, which strongly suggests to me that he hasn’t thought this through.
This particular moment offers a strong contrast between Sam and John. The obvious similarity is there too, of course: Sam has been researching obsessively for three days, and according to Dean has skimped on sleep to do it. It’s hard to fault his sense of urgency - the doctor did say weeks, after all - but his dogged refusal to stop until the job is done is also evident. But while John seems to have largely closed down after Mary’s death (he has no partner and doesn’t seem to be very close to any of his friends), Sam, similarly bereaved, has already formed a new kind of bond and is fighting hard to keep from losing it. When Dean dies at the end of season three, he will become suicidal - but he will also reach out to Ruby for solace and friendship. Even the soulless version chose to work first with the Campbells and then with Dean; since he had no emotional needs, this would presumably be because he needed someone to formulate his long-term goals for him - but still, this is a pattern completely unlike John’s. Partnership is now an important part of Sam’s identity.
And Sam doesn’t ask John to come. Nor does Dean try to contact him. They simply leave him a message and then let the matter drop. Instead, Dean makes what has to be a difficult and painful journey to Sam’s motel room to shake him out of his obsessive behaviour and chide him for not looking after himself. Whereas in Home Dean desperately reached out to John for support, now he seeks out Sam - and Sam is actually where he’s supposed to be when Dean goes to find him. Dean too is moving away from his dependence on John, and working on constructing a working relationship with Sam. John had his chance to be a part of this, and he missed it. They still love him, of course … but he is essentially an outsider now. Sam and Dean operate as a partnership and John works alone - and never the twain shall meet.
What Sam is able to tell Dean, once they’ve finished fussing over each other, is that he’s heard of a healer from a friend of John’s named Joshua. And … I really hope Joshua isn’t a hunter, because if he is his incompetence knows no bounds. It hardly takes extensive research to uncover the fact that Roy Le Grange is a fraud - but it doesn’t sound as though he did any at all. At least Mackey in The Born-Again Identity did some basic fieldwork, and I can hardly blame him for not knowing how to uncover and dispose of angels - that really is a Winchester specialty, and there has hardly been time for the information to filter down to the rest of the hunter population. It’s remarkable that John has chosen to befriend such an inept individual … unless, I suppose, this is the Joshua from Dark Side of the Moon, masquerading as a friend in order to do the angelic dirty work. That only works as a piece of backwards engineering, of course, since angels hadn’t been introduced yet. But I like it somewhat better than having random idiots move the plot along.
Dean: I mean, come on, Sam - a faith healer?
Sam: Maybe it's time to have a little faith, Dean.
Dean: You know what I've got faith in? Reality. Knowing what's really going on.
Sam: How can you be a sceptic? With the things we see every day?
Dean: Exactly. We see them, we know they’re real.
Sam: But if you know evil is out there, how can you not believe good is out there, too?
Dean: Because I've seen what evil does to good people.
Layla: Maybe God works in mysterious ways.
… Shut up, Layla. Who asked you, anyway?
This, unfortunately, is the point where I stop enjoying the episode and start having, well, problems. Of all the first-season episodes, I think I like this one the least. It’s not that I think it’s the worst-written episode, it’s just the one from which I derive the least enjoyment. I realise that if the internet had bouncers I could probably get kicked out of the fandom for not liking the episode wherein Dean almost dies and Sam goes to extraordinary, and morally grey, lengths to save him - but there it is: I don’t. If it were just exploring that issue, I probably would like it; Mystery Spot takes that theme and runs with it, and it is my absolute favourite episode. But there’s a whole lot of other stuff in Faith that I find … uncomfortable at best, and much of it is actually distasteful. Starting with this conversation.
When Sam and Dean arrive at Roy Le Grange’s tent church, Dean is moderately disgruntled because Sam neglected to mention at any point along the way that the ‘specialist’ they are going to see is a faith healer. That segues into a debate about good and evil. On one level, I can appreciate that there is some decent character work going on here. Sam has spent the past four years in the ‘normal’ world, and at university, where it is both safe and perfectly acceptable to sit around debating abstract notions of ‘good’ until you’ve reached the point of drunkenness where the only contribution you can make to philosophical thought is still being able to sing all the words to the Bruces’ Philosophers Song. Dean on the other hand has spent the last four years up to his elbows in monster blood, and speculating wildly about whether the monsters might be friendly is a very good way to get yourself killed. It’s not surprising that they have different perspectives on this, and it fits the theme of the episode - that they are currently inhabiting a place halfway in the normal world and halfway out. And there is a valid midway point where their ideas can meet: there are friendly monsters but not a whole lot of them, so for your own safety it’s best to be on your guard - but not to start shooting until you’ve gathered some evidence. Fair enough.
But this conversation isn’t really about abstract notions of good and evil, or whether Roy Le Grange might be a friendly wizard - like Missouri Moseley, but with more power. It’s about religion, and that’s where this gets awkward. While poking around the Supernatural Wiki, making sure I’m spelling everything correctly, I came upon this quote on Faith from Eric Kripke, the show’s creator:
It's when I first realized what the show was capable of. Here's this episode about: Is there a god? What's meant to be? And is there free will? And is your life worth the cost of someone else's life? It's a metaphysical and moral study of the boys' universe. There's so many different places the show can go and so many tones. That's been really fun to do.
Supernatural Wiki
… And at that, I can only shake my head in bewilderment. Really, Mr Kripke? ‘Is there a god?’ That is not a profound, mysterious and fascinating question. That is a question you answered in the previous episode. Yes, there is at least one god: Sam, Dean and a girl called Emily set it on fire. Moreover, since Sam and Dean discussed the matter in a completely nonchalant fashion it is pretty strongly inferred that they at least know about other hunters’ battles with gods, even if this was the first one they’d taken out themselves. Gods in the Supernatural universe are a known quantity, and nothing at all to get excited about.
The only way this makes sense is if you assume that Sam and Dean are filtering Yahweh off into some separate category in which other beings are gods, but he’s, well, God. And I can’t see any valid reason for doing that. Once you’ve established that other pantheons are out there, any claims of monotheism are revealed as patently false, and once you’ve got competing mythologies you certainly can’t trust anything a deity has to say about himself. ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’, begins Genesis 1:1 and, well, good for him. But we know the Norse pantheon is running around as well, and they say that Odin and his brothers made the world from the bones of a giant. So what makes one story more credible than the other? The literature on Yahweh is much the same as it is on any other deity: some instances of benevolence, some atrocities (and even some instances of accepting human sacrifice), and a fair amount of bafflingly weird stuff. Certainly, since he has managed to make himself the centre of the world’s two largest religions, there are plenty of people out there who think Yahweh is lovely, but what of that? Thanks to Twilight and other similar material, there are currently millions of teenage girls who think vampires are cuddly, and that won’t cause Sam and Dean to filter vampires off into some separate category that is somehow ‘better’ than other monsters. They’ll simply be a bit bewildered by the whole phenomenon, because they’ve met vampires. Just like they’ve met gods.
What bothers me about this conversation is that Sam and Dean don’t sound like people who know what they’re talking about. Dean objects that he doesn’t believe because he’s ‘seen what evil does to good people’, but it’s easy to imagine words like that coming out of the mouth of a soldier or social worker who’d simply seen too much death - but Dean is much more than that: he’s a man who, quite recently, only narrowly avoided being eaten by a fertility god … which really shouldn’t give him too good an opinion of the divine. Sam insists that it’s ‘time to have a little faith’, but the people in Scarecrow had faith - faith that was completely validated by the results they got, and by the approval of their deity, and there was nothing good about it. Everything they say is abstract and theoretical, as though they know no better than any average person on the street. But they do know better. They are being put in a position of doubt, a halfway place, with Roy Le Grange as some kind of competing authority - but this is completely their territory. Sam and Dean know more about the nature of gods than Roy ever will.
Ordinarily, I like the way Supernatural handles religion. It treats both religious and non-religious people fairly, and while all gods are problematic they are also just more people trying to get by in a confusing world. In the context of the apocalypse and the war between the angels and the demons it makes sense to talk about Yahweh as something special, because to his own pantheon he is. That’s perfectly fine. But that doesn’t mean I like everything they have to say about religion, and this is one episode wherein I spend about 30 minutes out of 40 quietly grinding my teeth. It seems to me that, having decided to use a devout Christian woman as their villain, they feel the need to go cap-in-hand to Christians in general and reassure them that they think Christianity is lovely, really. Personally, I think any Christian open-minded enough to watch Supernatural can probably handle a Christian villain without having hysterics, and that this pandering is cowardly, patronising and poor storytelling.
And then there is Layla, whom Sam and Dean encounter shortly before entering Roy’s tent. I struggle to understand what they are trying to achieve with her character. It doesn’t help that I am immediately inclined to dislike her. Layla introduces herself by butting into a private conversation to offer a remarkably trite response to ‘the problem of evil’, which is essentially the issue that Dean is raising with Sam. Really, the only way Dean could have failed to hear the line about ‘God working in mysterious ways’ before is if he’s lived his whole life under a rock. Since Layla doesn’t seem to think he has, or believe that she’s offering any original or useful input into the conversation, I just get the impression that she likes inflicting her religion on random people who weren’t talking to her. This does not endear her to me.
If that were the point, then it would be okay. I could appreciate, especially in the context of this episode, an argument that whether or not I like a person personally has nothing to do with their right to live. The idea calls to mind a point from The Lord of the Rings:
‘But this is terrible!’ cried Frodo. ‘Far worse than the worst that I imagined from your hints and warnings. O Gandalf, best of friends, what am I to do? For now I am really afraid. What am I to do? What a pity that Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, when he had a chance!’
‘Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need. And he has been well rewarded, Frodo. Be sure that he took so little hurt from the evil, and escaped in the end, because he began his ownership of the Ring so. With Pity.’
‘I am sorry,’ said Frodo. ‘But I am frightened; and I do not feel any pity for Gollum.’
‘You have not seen him,’ Gandalf broke in.
‘No, and I don’t want to,’ said Frodo. ‘I can’t understand you. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, have let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is as bad as an Orc, and just an enemy. He deserves death.’
‘Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I have not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies, but there is a chance of it. And he is bound up with the fate of the Ring. My heart tells me that he has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before the end; and when that comes, the pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many - yours not least. In any case we did not kill him: he is very old and very wretched. The Wood-elves have him in prison, but they treat him with such kindness as they can find in their wise hearts.’
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
In The Lord of the Rings they follow through on this idea: ultimately the world is saved because first Frodo and then his friend Sam spare the life of the murderous, treacherous Gollum. They do not absolutely need to kill him to survive their encounters with him, and they choose not to ‘strike without need’; being Ring-bearers themselves, they are able to appreciate the horrors of his situation. He’s bad, but that doesn’t make cold-blooded murder right - and the story rewards them for this by giving them their lives, when Gollum takes the evil Ring into the fire. And even then, they express pity for him. Consistency is nice.
But I don’t think that’s what Supernatural is going for. When Sue Anne, the villain of the piece, is killed by a reaper I get the strong impression that I’m supposed to cheer: it even has Sam delivering a cutting one-liner in judgement of her. There doesn’t seem to be any suggestion that, while Sue Anne may deserve to go to prison for her crimes, her murder isn’t really any more moral than anybody else’s - they certainly don’t angst about that aspect of the case later. It’s a very pro-vengeance scene. So apparently the story is perfectly okay with killing people who ‘deserve’ it, it just differs from Sue Anne in its opinion of who those people are. So I think I am meant to regard Layla as a special sort of person: someone who has, insofar as it is possible in the space of a single episode, been developed to the point where her life is as valuable as Dean’s on an emotional as well as a moral level. Dean certainly seems to like her, and he frets about her wellbeing specifically, rather than about the lives of the many people who have come to Roy for healing.
But I can’t see why. Most of what comes out of her mouth is simply bland religious platitudes - she never expresses an opinion or a personality trait that allows me to think of her as an individual. She doesn’t seem to have any recognisable character arc. She doesn’t struggle openly with her impending mortality and come to learn that there are worse things in the world than death - she seems pretty serene about the whole thing from start to finish, and mostly seems to be visiting faith healers for the sake of her mother. She doesn’t embrace the realisation that Roy and his wife are not all they claim to be, and come to appreciate that placing her faith in charlatans, even for her mother’s sake, is not necessarily a good idea. She doesn’t discover from Sam and Dean that her world is a much stranger place than she ever realised, and resolve to learn more about it in the time she has left to her, dropping the platitudes in favour of ideas that are really profound. Layla is peculiarly static, and I find it difficult to sympathise with her on an individual level. The contrast between Layla and, say, Nancy of Jus in Bello, who is simultaneously vindicated in her belief in the devil and brought to the knowledge that a desk covered in religious paraphernalia and an informal vow of chastity won’t protect her, is profound; I have no difficulty at all connecting with Nancy. On the other hand, I wish Layla good luck and an unexpected remission, but that’s no different to what I wish for any of the silent extras who populate the tent scenes. Her character doesn’t even attempt to hold the kind of weight that Dean’s does - and characters in earlier episodes, from Haley to Jenny to Kat, have already come much closer to being fully realised individuals. I find myself connecting far more profoundly with her mother. The elder Ms Rourke is bitter, desperate, angry, quite possibly a bigot - and if looks could kill Dean would beat Sam to the underworld by a year and a half because of her … but at least she has a recognisable emotional reaction to the situation. At least she seems to be taking Layla’s condition seriously.