Supernatural: Faith pt 2
Images borrowed from here because my efforts to screencap anything would be laughable.
Roy: Each morning, my wife, Sue Anne, reads me the news. Never seems good, does it? It seems like there's always someone committing some immoral, unspeakable act. But I say to you, God is watching. God rewards the good and he punishes the corrupt. It is the Lord who does the healing here, friends; the Lord who guides me in choosing who to heal by helping me see into people's hearts.
Dean: Yeah, and into their wallets.
Roy: You think so, young man?
Sam and Dean move into the tent, where we get our first look at faith-healer Roy Le Grange. And I continue to be baffled and appalled. For a story that claims to be a ‘moral study of the boys’ universe’, Faith seems to have a bizarrely black-and-white view of Roy. Apparently he is either a complete monster who callously exchanges one life for another or he is a good man who has been bamboozled by his wife and deserves none of the nastiness that surrounds him. Certainly he isn’t a killer, but the latter view doesn’t seem to mesh very well with the facts of Roy’s case.
For a start, there’s the fact that he’s chosen to hold his meetings in his gigantic backyard - which clearly turns into a swamp whenever it rains. The very first images we see when Sam and Dean arrive onsite are of people with a variety of disabilities carefully and uncomfortably picking their way around the muddy pools. At best, this would seem to me to be grossly inconsiderate. Since Roy himself is blind, making his way from his door to the tent must be at least awkward: he can’t see where the big puddles are, or easily avoid those big ridges made in the mud by car tyres. Surely it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch of the imagination to realise that the same journey would be quite difficult for someone on crutches and a complete nightmare for somebody in a wheelchair? Some of these people attend his service regularly, and he could have rented a hall somewhere with decent footpaths and wheelchair access. But he doesn’t seem to be interested in exerting the slightest effort to make life easier for his ailing ‘flock’.
But it’s far more damning that he holds these services at all. When Sam sits down to do a little research on Roy, he’ll reveal that he’s healed only six people over the past year. Six. Of course, in terms of the way his ‘power’ actually works this is, relatively speaking, a good thing: it means he and Sue Anne have only murdered six people over the past year. But in terms of the way Roy understands his ability, I can’t fathom it. As far as he knows, when he puts his hand on someone, they get better. It doesn’t cost him anything because he isn’t really doing anything - so there’s no more effort involved than in just standing there. Think of the good that such a person could do, roaming quietly through hospitals and nursing homes. You could get through dozens in a day. In the long term, I could understand setting up office hours and even charging a small fee (after all, doctors get paid, and his miraculous healing abilities presumably haven’t done away with his need to eat) - but Roy isn’t even getting through one a week.
In season four, when Sam begins to explore his psychic powers, he will explain his actions to Dean thus:
Sam: I'm sorry, Dean. I am. But try to see the other side here.
Dean: The other side?
Sam: I'm pulling demons out of innocent people!
Dean: Use the knife!
Sam: The knife kills the victim! What I do, most of them survive! Look, I've saved more people in the last five months than we save in a year!
Metamorphosis
Now that sounds to me like a good person who has discovered magic powers that can save lives and isn’t examining the nature of those powers as closely as he should because saving people is (to slip into Winchester parlance, which just sounds silly when I say it) just so awesome. Of course, Sam’s training sessions with Ruby, with the possessed person bound to a chair, aren’t particularly more impressive than standard exorcisms - but they are just training sessions. The goal is clearly to use these powers in combat, where they are undeniably superior: trapping and exorcising demons en masse, as they do in Jus in Bello, is a tricky business; this should work every time. Sam is a complex character, and it’s reasonable to talk about hubris and self-loathing as components of his decision to dabble in magic, but the desire to do good is clearly vitally important to him. The numbers don’t lie: Sam can save more people with magic than he can without. So I completely believe in Sam as a good man led astray. But Roy is something else.
The sign over the door of his church says ‘Welcome All Faiths’, but that is a blatant lie. They’ve got crucifixes plastered up everywhere, and there are Bible quotes all over the walls; one of them reads ‘Jesus Christ maketh thee whole’. So if you are Jewish, say, or a Buddhist, then your faith is emphatically not welcome here. At best it means ‘all flavours of Christianity,’ which is not the same thing. Roy may heal nonbelievers, but his ultimate goal is conversion: ‘You will be, son, you will be,’ he remarks sinisterly to Dean, when Dean tells him he isn’t religious. As far as I can tell, Roy is everything David Wright, the protester who hangs around outside his tent, claims he is: a fraud who takes people’s money. If anything, the fact that he really can heal people makes it worse. This is an occasional trick he pulls out to help lure in the desperate and the frightened, so he can have a captive audience for his little speeches and a source of easy income. He withholds help in order to increase the effect of his demonstrations, and to keep people coming back who might otherwise move on. Ew.
Dean: That's odd.
Sam: Maybe it's a coincidence. People's hearts give out all the time, man.
Dean: No, they don't.
Sam: Look, Dean, do we really have to look this one in the mouth? Why can't we just be thankful that the guy saved your life and move on?
Dean: Because I can't shake this feeling, that's why.
Sam: What feeling?
Dean: When I was healed, I just … I felt wrong. It felt cold. And for a second I saw someone. This old man. I'm telling you, Sam, it was a spirit.
Sam: But if there was something there, Dean, I think I would have seen it too. I mean, I've been seeing an awful lot of things lately.
Dean: Well, excuse me, psychic wonder. But you're just going to need a little faith on this one. Sam, I've been hunting long enough to trust a feeling like this.
Sam: Yeah, all right. So, what do you want to do?
In any case, Roy’s magic heals Dean and a subsequent trip to the doctor confirms it: he’s okay and he isn’t going to die. So that’s good, anyway. It also reveals that, at around the same time Dean was healed, another young, healthy man died of a heart attack, which makes Dean suspicious and Sam uncomfortable.
It is a vital part of Sam and Dean’s relationship that they try very hard to take care of each other. Sometimes it is their greatest strength, sometimes their greatest weakness. When they are at their best, it gives them a kind of unbeatable solidarity - they can’t be intimidated by any god or monster as long as they remember their loyalty to each other. The rest of the time, it is a messy, complicated thing because, while they both try constantly, they also seem to both believe they’re failing at it. Dean seems a little better at appreciating individual successes: if Sam is still alive at the end of any given day, he’ll regard that as a win. But because he can’t accept that there’s any moment when he isn’t personally responsible for Sam’s safety - including when he’s tied up, unconscious or dead - he is also keenly aware that he is ultimately destined to lose. On the other hand, Sam seems to have difficulty appreciating just how much he does for Dean on a daily basis. Sam has already saved Dean’s life on several occasions. The rescue at the end of Scarecrow is probably the most dramatic example, but he also facilitated Dean’s escape from the police station in the Pilot, fetched him out of the wendigo’s lair in Wendigo and is the only reason either of them (or anyone else) walked off the plane alive in Phantom Traveller. But none of those things seem to ‘really’ count in his head. Something like this, where he has engineered the solution to a life-threatening problem from start to finish, would count - and his failure to find answers to these kinds of problems seems to make him feel inferior and unhappy.
They’re better about these things these days, obviously, since working through a number of their issues in season five - though they are still susceptible to relapses - but here in Faith what is immediately clear is how uncomfortable Sam is with the idea that his ‘solution’ might not be so great after all. At the very end of Scarecrow he made an official decision to stick with Dean until the end of the quest, and it must be a terrible shock to him to face losing him so soon after that; since Devil’s Trap will reveal that Sam was on the brink of proposing to Jessica when she died, it’s easy to see this becoming a pattern in his mind - as soon as he commits to something, it’s taken away. But he’s fixed this now: Dean is going to be fine, and Sam has proved something to himself by being able to snatch his brother from the jaws of death. So he doesn’t want to hear anything about spirits or evil, anything that would take away from his accomplishment. On the one hand, this makes Dean’s insistence on looking the thing in the face painful: it’s not fair that Sam is denied his success, and the sense of equality that would give him. But on the other hand, it prevents Sam from falling into the sort of damagingly insular mindset that John has, where he can’t trust anybody but himself with anything. So I find Dean’s practical scepticism in this scene a refreshing moment in a largely frustrating episode. They have a variety of elements that do not yet have a satisfactory explanation: a man with magic powers, a spectral figure, an unusual death. So what should they do about it? What they should have done in the first place: the research.
Dean: Can I ask you one last question?
Roy: Of course you can.
Dean: Why? Why me? Out of all the sick people, why save me?
Roy: Well, like I said before, the Lord guides me. I looked into your heart, and you just stood out from all the rest.
Dean: What did you see in my heart?
Roy: A young man with an important purpose - a job to do. And it isn’t finished.
…
Ms Rourke: No, Layla, this is too much. We've been to every single service. If Roy would stop choosing these strangers over you … strangers who don't even believe. I just can't pray any harder.
Dean: Layla, what's wrong?
Layla: I have this thing …
Ms Rourke: It's a brain tumour. It's inoperable. In six months, the doctors say …
Dean: I'm sorry.
Layla: It's okay.
Ms Rourke: No, it isn't. Why do you deserve to live more than my daughter?
While Sam goes to find out about the man whose death coincided weirdly with Dean’s healing, Dean goes to find out what sort of people these faith healers really are. It’s established that Roy discovered his magical powers after suffering from cancer: he got better, and found out that he could make other people better too. It also turns out that his selection of Dean was perhaps a little odd. Dean’s question is certainly a little sad, in that it is a reminder that he almost always manages to convince himself that everyone else has more of a right to live than he does, with occasional outbursts of resentment that in giving up all his chances at freedom he has missed so much … but it also strikes me as a little naïve. While Roy makes a song and dance about being guided by his god in the selection of every person he heals, given how this actually works there’s no reason to believe this is the case. More likely, Sue Anne helps him determine the ‘best’ cases through a combination of watching people as they arrive and reviewing their security footage afterwards (since they get repeat attenders, and she definitely uses that method to target Dean when she wants him dead). After all, at least some of the sick people bring healthy relatives with them, and it would be very awkward if Roy called upon someone who wasn’t actually sick.
In light of that, Dean looks like an ideal candidate. For a start, he arrived at the tent looking like death warmed up, and with Sam hovering over him like he might collapse at any moment. He was obviously a sick man. And then he drew attention to himself as a sceptic, making sardonic remarks in the middle of the sermon. So in healing Dean, Roy could at the one stroke perform an obvious miracle and convert a nonbeliever. That’s a golden piece of showmanship. It’s practically Biblical: I remember Robert M Price writing about the basic structure of miracle stories told about Jesus - that a note of scepticism is essential to most of them. You’ve got to have someone in the peanut gallery yell out ‘That can’t be done!’ to both heighten the tension and increase the triumph when your protagonist proves he can really do what he says he can. Roy knows how to do his job - when we next see him heal a man, it’ll be a guy in a wheelchair hooked up to an oxygen tank; that’s drama. When Dean encounters the Rourke family outside, come to beg Roy to help them, Layla’s problem is immediately clear: she doesn’t look sick enough. She’s dying, but right now she looks fine, so there wouldn’t be anything to see if Roy took her tumour away - and she already believes, so she’s useless for propaganda. Give it another four months or so, when she’s down to skin and bones and in constant agony, and she might start looking attractive to the Le Granges; as it is, she probably only gets her chance at all because of her friendship with Dean. I still don’t see why I should have anything good to say about the Le Granges.
But, that said, there is also something to Roy’s remark about Dean having ‘a job to do’, and he probably did get a little angelic nudge in Dean’s direction. While it’s difficult to be sure how far ahead the writers planned their story - and I am aware that some alterations were made along the way - it’s probably fairly safe to say that they knew things would get epic in the end. They start out with a small-scale quest and vague murmurings of ‘something coming’, and eventually that ‘something’ will come, and Sam and Dean will have to go up against some form of ultimate evil. And that makes this the creepiest and most evil part of the whole story. Dean isn’t alive because anyone (outside of Sam, who is also being used) cares about his wellbeing. He’s alive because there are powerful beings who want to use him for their own purposes. When he dies in No Rest for the Wicked, it will be because those same powerful beings want him dead: he’ll serve their purposes far better in hell. Even here, at the beginning, there are distant things claiming ownership of him - just as the demons are claiming to own Sam.
Sam: There was this cross. I noticed it in the church and I knew I had seen it before - here.
Dean: A tarot?
Sam: It makes sense. Tarot dates back to the early Christian era right, when some priests were still using magic? And a few of them veered into the dark stuff? Necromancy, and how to push death away? How to cause it?
Dean: So Roy's using black magic to bind the reaper?
Sam: If he is, he's riding the whirlwind. It's like putting a dog leash on a great white.
Dean: Okay then, we stop Roy.
Sam: How?
Dean: You know how.
Sam: Wait, what the hell are you talking about, Dean? We can't kill Roy.
Dean: Sam, the guy is playing God; he's deciding who lives and who dies. That's a monster in my book.
Sam: No. We're not going to kill a human being, Dean. We do that and we're no better than he is.
As Sam and Dean work out what they’re really facing - a chained reaper - Roy’s healing claims its next victim: a young woman (Holly Morton, I think, although her name is difficult to make out) out on her morning jog who suddenly finds herself running for her life. And this is a legitimately creepy scene, and another bright spot in the episode. The DVD contains a deleted scene depicting the death of Marshall Hall, the young man whose life was exchanged for Dean’s, at a local swimming pool. Even setting aside time constraints, I can see why they cut this: it preserves the mystery of exactly what is happening a little longer, and allows Sam and Dean to investigate a peculiar situation and piece together the facts, rather than just having the writers reveal the whole thing - it’s the difference between the Winchesters and the Le Granges, who are big on all that unexamined ‘miracle’ stuff. But taking the two scenes together does say something about Sue Anne’s selection process. Both victims are young and obviously health conscious - they meet their deaths while working out. Though religious matters are the primary consideration, Sue Anne is also clearly picking out individuals with a lot of life in them to give; she’s not attacking 60 year olds who disagree with her, for instance. Having decided that these are ‘non-persons’, she feels perfectly justified in treating them as livestock, with a harvestable life force - and she takes the very best cuts for her people. It makes me think of Never Let Me Go, a story in which another group is treated as inhuman for religious reasons (their society arbitrarily decides that clones don’t have souls), and are therefore a convenient source of replacement organs for the general population. Now that is creepy.
Religion offers people control over both the natural and supernatural world: it allows people to believe there is something big and strong on their side, to protect them when the world turns against them and to give them something to hope for after death. It’s normal and not at the same time - a halfway thing. Sue Anne has taken the idea to an extreme, and horrifying, conclusion. Instead of simply propitiating a deity with prayers, promises and sacrifices, she has enslaved a supernatural being. It can and will give her and the people she likes more life, because she has ordered it to and it has no choice. It can and will destroy any obstacles in her path, because … she has ordered it to and it has no choice. More efficient than prayers, sure, but also much scarier. While Roy is no authority on gods, Sue Anne sort of is, in her way. Sam and Dean are always trying to destroy the supernatural, trying to make it stop interfering with humanity. Sue Anne is controlling it, making sure it only interferes in ways she approves of. They’re different ways of dealing with the alarming realisation that the monsters are out there. And while Sue Anne discovers that control can’t last forever, it has to be said that Sam and Dean have found out that there will always be more monsters to fight.
But then they start discussing the mechanics of how this all works and I’m back to being confused again, because I’m pretty sure tarot is a late medieval invention and has nothing to do with early Christianity at all. As I understand it, early Christians had a complicated relationship with astrology, which was a popular (although sometimes illegal) form of divination, but tarot requires playing cards, and they didn’t exactly feature in the Roman Empire. Some of the ideas and images used in tarot are older, sure, but in that case they’re generally older than Christianity, too. But I guess this is one of those instances where Sam is right because the script demands it. So - okay, tarot is early Christian magic. Got it.
Then they discuss what to do about Roy, and I grant this is a genuine moral dilemma. What Sam and Dean do is not, strictly speaking, the most moral thing in the world. They kill monsters, who are often only dangerous because they are starving or terrified or confused. Mostly, they didn’t ask to be monsters. Their actions are only reasonable at all because they don’t have much other choice. There aren’t enough hunters in the world to build prisons or hospitals for monsters, and if they leave them alive the body count will only climb; it’s a question of lesser evils. Here, you have a human being who is committing murder. He (or she, really, but they don’t know that yet) should be a case for the police - but he is using magic to kill, which means he’s bound to get away with his crimes. I would say that both Sam and Dean’s response to the situation is simplistic. Sam insists that they can’t kill him because he’s human, which I would say is irrelevant: they’ve already encountered a handful of friendly ghosts, and surely it would be just as wrong to attack them? Dean is furious with Roy for making him (however unknowingly) complicit in a murder, and leaps to homicide as the first means of stopping him - when it is at least possible that they can just prevent him from doing more magic. Neither scenario really takes into account the concept of justice, but justice isn’t really a big part of the hunters’ universe. Still, I find it sad that the only serious exploration of morality in an episode that purports to be about morality is so short and shallow. Incidentally, I have never understood the phrase ‘playing God’, because it implies that it’s okay when a deity does that sort of thing. Personally, I’d call murdering people monstrous no matter who is behind it. I mean - it wasn’t okay when the Vanir did it.
Dean: Layla, listen to me. You can't go up there.
Layla: Why not? We've waited for months!
Dean: You can't let Roy heal you.
Layla: I don't understand. Roy healed you didn't he? Why can't I let him try?
Dean: Because if you do something bad is going to happen. I can't explain. I just need you to believe me
…
Sam: So Roy really believes.
Dean: I don't think he has any idea what his wife's doing.
Sam: Well, I found this hidden in their library. It's ancient. Written by a priest who went dark side. There's a binding spell in here for trapping a reaper.
Dean: It must be a hell of a spell.
Sam: Yeah. You’ve got to build a black alter with seriously dark stuff. Bones. Human blood. To cross a line like that. A preacher’s wife. Black magic. Murder. Evil.
Dean: Desperate. Her husband was dying; she didn't have anything to save him. She was using the binding spell to keep the reaper away from Roy.
Sam: Cheating death, literally.
Dean: Yeah but Roy's alive, so why is she still using the spell?
Sam: Right. To force the reaper to kill people she thinks are immoral.
Dean: Man, God save us from half the people who think they're doing God's work.
Sam: We’ve got to break that binding spell, Dean.
Sam pokes around in the Le Granges’ home to work out how they’re binding the reaper - and finds both the recipe for a binding spell and a list of victims in the form of newspaper clippings. It turns out that Marshall Hall was a gay man who won some kind of equal rights battle (his story is hard to make out), Holly Morton was an advocate for women’s rights and David Wright, next on the list, is a noisy sceptic. Meanwhile, back at the tent, the Le Granges are engaging in a piece of blatant manipulation. Not only has Dean not become a vocal advocate for their church, he’s been hanging around and asking awkward questions about when Roy developed his power and how the magic works. So they do the obvious thing to shut him up: they offer to heal Layla, forcing Dean to either embrace their methods to save someone he likes, or destroy her in opposing them. It’s a perfect no-win situation - whatever he does, it’s going to feel halfway wrong. He goes for option B, begging Layla not to submit to Roy’s healing - and when that doesn’t work, yelling ‘fire!’ to halt the service. I’m actually a bit surprised that Dean never attempts to explain the situation to Layla. Yes, this is usually the point where he and Sam would be threatened with the arrival of the men in white coats - but this is a woman who believes a guy has the magical ability to take away brain tumours by putting his hand on her head. ‘Black magic’ shouldn’t be too hard a sell in this case; she’s halfway there already.
Unfortunately, stopping the service doesn’t stop the magic - Sam goes to check on poor David, and he’s still dying - so they determine that it’s Sue Anne performing the spell, not Roy. Which … isn’t really surprising, since it would probably be noticeable if Roy were incanting up on the stage. In any case, Dean interrupts Sue Anne and is hauled out of the tent by a couple of local cops who spend the episode patrolling the property, because apparently the whole town is involved in this nightmare. So David is safe for now, Layla is confused, and Sue Anne makes it clear in a nasty little speech that she’s gone from being moderately worried about Dean to seriously annoyed with him, so he’s likely to be her next target.
Sam and Dean retreat to their hotel room to plan their next move, and I am appalled by their conversation. ‘Roy really believes,’ Sam says - as though that somehow makes things better. As though Roy isn’t using his powers for blatant personal gain, with complete disregard for the wellbeing of people around him. Plenty of people who commit atrocities ‘really believe’. Sue Anne really believes: when we get to the climax of the story she’ll deliver a fervent little speech about how she believes she’s following ‘God’s will’. Does that excuse her actions? I’m also uncertain as to how they immediately jump to the conclusion that Roy isn’t involved. My first thought here would be that this is a neat little double act - rather like those sisters in The Mentalists, with one performing the magic while the other puts on the show. Since the story makes no further attempt to engage with Roy, I’m willing to believe he isn’t involved, but I don’t see why they think so. They just seem to be taking his word for it. Because …? Um. Because.
But whether or not Roy is performing dark magic, the story has just produced more evidence against him. One thing that is quite clear from the story is that Roy and Sue Anne are happily married. They love each other, and Sue Anne’s initial desperation to save her husband mirrors both Sam’s desperation to save Dean and Layla’s mother’s to save her. Sue Anne openly and delightedly supports her husband’s work. So it’s reasonable to think that their religious views are similar.
Roy began his first sermon of the episode thus:
Roy: Each morning, my wife, Sue Anne, reads me the news. Never seems good, does it? It seems like there's always someone committing some immoral, unspeakable act. But I say to you, God is watching. God rewards the good and he punishes the corrupt.
… And here we have a variety of newspaper clippings depicting people Sue Anne believes are immoral. So it seems to me to be reasonable to understand from this that these are the ‘immoral, unspeakable acts’ Roy was describing. Various people fighting for an equitable, just society. Roy is a monster. He’s just not the sort of monster you kill. He’s the sort of monster you have to face down, laugh at, push away into the shadows until he finally gets it through his head that his bigotry is not acceptable. If he’s better than his wife, it is only by the narrowest of margins - am I supposed to be giving him a round of applause for not stooping to murder? And I’m looking suspiciously at Layla and her mother, too. It may be that they describe themselves as ‘believers’ only in the sense that they are some sort of Christian … but from the way they talk, I get the impression that they feel quite close to Roy and his sermons. They don’t seem to have any distaste for them.
Sam expresses dismay that ‘a preacher’s wife’ would do these things, and Dean will remark later that Roy is a good man. I don’t understand this at all. This is, bluntly speaking, a church full of arseholes (excepting, at least hopefully, the desperate people who have come for healing) - and I think less of Sam and Dean for not calling them out on this stuff. They’d better hope Charlie Bradbury never hears about this.
Sue Anne: I gave your brother life and I can take it away. Sam, can't you see? The Lord chose me to reward the just and punish the wicked. And your brother is wicked and he deserves to die, just as Layla deserves to live. It is God's will. Goodbye, Sam.
…
Sue Anne: My God, what have you done!
Sam: He's not your God.
Since Roy has promised Layla a private session to make up for the one that got interrupted (also giving Sue Anne a chance to get at Dean before he can cause any further trouble), they head back to the church to stop the healing sessions for good. Dean distracts the cops, and Sam goes to destroy the altar hidden away in a cellar - and discovers for himself that Dean is the next victim. Since she was no doubt expecting some sort of attack, as Dean confronted her in the middle of her last spell and clearly knows what she’s up to, Sue Anne catches Sam and locks him in the cellar, then very efficiently goes back to setting the reaper on Dean - so he’s about to trade in his heart attack for a tumour.
Fortunately, cellars are no match for Sam and he fights his way out, gets to Sue Anne and destroys her amulet. The reaper, freed, promptly abandons Dean and goes after Sue Anne while Sam … does absolutely nothing to try to stop it, and doesn’t even look especially perturbed by what is happening, because apparently we don’t kill people we don’t like ourselves but are perfectly happy to let monsters do it for us. Or something.
It’s a grim conclusion, establishing that no one is safe, ever. In their world, Sam and Dean can’t always save each other from the monsters; in the ‘normal’ world doctors and police officers can’t always make you better or safer; here in the between place, Sue Anne was once master of her world - but only for a brief time, and in the end she too had to pay a price.
Still, I’m perturbed by this whole scene. Sam informs Sue Anne that ‘He's not your God’ right before the reaper comes for her, apparently employing the No True Scotsman fallacy in order to make himself feel better about what she has done. If she really believed, she wouldn’t have done that. And … well, no. I don’t think Sam gets to define other people’s religion for them. Sue Anne clearly identifies as a Christian. She’s using something Sam has specifically identified as Christian magic. She’s hardly the first Christian in history to do something horrible. Yahweh is her god, whether Sam likes it or not. I love Sam a lot. I think he’s a fantastic character, and he devotes most of his life to struggling to do good despite what the gods have planned for him. I’m sympathetic to most of his decisions - I can see how they made sense to him, even when they were bad ones. But I was very relieved when his theistic phase came (at least more or less) to an end. Because the only time I ever doubt Sam’s moral fibre is when he lets religion guide his actions.
Layla: You know, I went back to see Roy.
Dean: What happened?
Layla: Nothing. He laid his hands on my forehead … but nothing happened.
Dean: I'm sorry. I'm sorry it didn’t work.
Layla: And Sue Anne. She's dead, you know? Stroke.
Dean: Yeah, I heard. You know … Roy's a good man. He doesn't deserve what's happened … It must be rough - to believe in something so much, and have it disappoint you.
Layla: You want to hear something weird? I'm okay. Really. I guess if you're going to have faith, you can't just have it when the miracles happen. You have to have it when they don't.
Dean: So what now?
Layla: God works in mysterious ways. Goodbye, Dean.
Dean: Well … I'm not much of the praying type, but … I'm going to pray for you.
Layla: Well. There's a miracle right there.
And then there’s this scene, because apparently they haven’t annoyed me enough yet. Sue Anne is dead, Dean is alive and the reaper is gone, so Sam and Dean head back to their motel in order to pack up their stuff and get away - presumably before those cops who were patrolling the church find a way to make them responsible for everything. Sam calls in Layla so they can say goodbye, in the hopes of alleviating Dean’s guilt; he’s upset because he gets to live and she doesn’t. Layla assures him she is fine with everything, which isn’t exactly news. At what point in this episode has she not been fine? They let Layla utter a few more platitudes and say goodbye, ending on Dean’s promise to pray for Layla and Layla’s quiet joy at this expression of faith.
This makes no sense. If something had happened in this episode to convert Dean to religious faith, I would understand it. I wouldn’t like it, because I think the world has quite enough stories about religious heroes and could do with a few more about nonreligious ones. But I’d get it. As it is, the next time the subject comes up, Dean will offer the exact same arguments against religious faith that he’s offered in this episode. He won’t actually change his mind on the matter until he’s being personally bothered by actual angels, at which point he’ll decide they’re real - he just doesn’t like them. So there is no point in him offering to pray, except that the writers wanted to convey the idea that religious faith is always better than a lack of religious faith and that prayer is always superior to any nonreligious expression of goodwill or compassion. Thank you, Sera Gamble and Raelle Tucker, for that insulting message.
Ah, well. The very best thing I can say about Faith is that nothing makes me this angry again until Houses of the Holy.