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SPN 4.18; or, this is the longest, most meta-y ep review I have ever written
This is some nonsensical episode commentary, with some historical and philosophical and nonsensical meta tossed in. Warnings for capslock and words like "textual communities."
Pretty much this sums it up:
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aesc: omg, I am trying to write about this and I CAN'T
aesc: I don't even know where to begin!
unamaga: can i make the suggestion of FHAWOGIJKAWF CAS AND DEAN ARE IN LOVE
aesc: can I quote you?
unamaga: absolutely
unamaga: we need to get the word out to the masses
Dean and Cas's Epic Love
Okay, so I am starting there. DEAN PRAYING FOR CASTIEL TO HELP HIM AND CASTIEL ANSWERING, EVEN IF HE COULDN'T IMMEDIATELY GIVE DEAN THE ANSWER HE WANTED, AND HOW ABSOLUTELY BROKEN CASTIEL WAS THAT HE STILL FEELS TOO CONSTRAINED BY HIS ORDERS AND HOW VERY VERY VERY MUCH HE WANTS TO HELP DEAN BECAUSE HE KNOWS DEAN NEEDS IT, LIKE NEEDS IN THE WORST, MOST DESPERATE SENSE OF THE WORD. Wait, fixing capslock. I absolutely love how the writers are taking Castiel on his own journey, how he's still conflicted, caught between his orders and his habit of looking at the big picture (which actually pays off when he tells Dean why he can't interfere) and the dawning knowledge that the microcosm--Dean's pain and fear, his need to keep Sam safe, his conviction that he's not strong enough to save Sam and save the world--has its own importance... Oh my god. His face. I just... I'm sorry. I can't.
HE LOVES DEAN, OKAY? THERE I SAID IT AND I'LL SAY IT AGAIN. HE LOVES DEAN AND THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT.
The Prophet Chuck
Okay, I admit, I loved Chuck from the second I saw him in the previews. I hope we get to see him again, with the proviso, Kripke, that he doesn't die. Sadly, most prophets tend to end badly, but I hope maybe he'll go the way of Elijah and get a free ticket to heaven.
Part of me--the shrieking, gleeful fangirl part--found Chuck and the Winchester Gospel hi-fucking-larious. ("You should have seen Luke" [I actually would have thought Mark, for some reason XD] Also, Castiel admires his work. This constitutes proof that Cas is a total Dean fanboy, and has been reading about him long before he ever got to meet Dean in person.unamaga and I have concocted visions of Cas being all anxious about the possibility of meeting Dean, the Dean Winchester and flailing to himself and having extra archival copies locked up somewhere, where the other angels can't make fun of him. ANYWAY.) My nerd side, however, loved the way this episode plays with text and notions of relative value, and looks back sardonically to the underground formation of Christianity (in all its forms, including the stuff that was eventually considered heretical, like gnosticism),* by having fans, with their endless fighting and complaining and writing of stories, eventually--perhaps--performing essentially the same tasks and activities that allowed Christianity to survive long enough for Constantine to legitimize it. If you look even cursorily at the early history of Christianity, when Christians were really little more than heterodox sects of Jews and Gentiles who could not quite figure each other out, what you're really looking at is a bunch of disparate textual communities, connected by lines of correspondence (letters, apostolic journeys, isolated meetings in initiates' private homes), with an uncertain access to a very amorphic group of texts and their own separate traditions of interpretation. And a lot of fighting and bitching at each other, and making up their own stuff when what exists doesn't suit them, or doesn't answer their questions.
Also, being persecuted and chronically misunderstood by a hostile majority, and not understanding why your crazy story about a guy who died and rose from the dead and is the son of God isn't more popular than it is.
And that is, basically, what fandom is, in some ways. And the 'nod' to our discipleship, taken in light of the way I decided to think about the episode, is pretty damn awesome.
Fate, destiny, free will, and oh my god, Dean and Cas
I can't remember where I saw it (I'm sorry!!!) but someone was talking about the preview for 4.18 and about the age-old problem of destiny and free will, and how you can choose freely when there's a God who knows what's going to happen to you every step of the way. I started thinking about it last week, but decided to hold off until I saw this episode to try to formulate my thoughts. I didn't count on being left almost completely incoherent by this episode, however, but I'll try my best.
Basically, the problem of free will has never been solved, and what we think of as "free will" has never meant one consistent, universally-accepted thing. The sense we have now, that free will entails an individual agent (the person who does things) who is the originator of action or who makes a choice between possible courses of action, and who bears an ethical or moral responsibility for that choice, is purely Western, and mostly modern. Colloquially, the sense of free will is that we can do whatever we want, without anything else predetermining our action, but this is essentially, a fallacy.
In medieval Western (Christian) thought, free will meant that you, as a human, are given the option to do your own thing or, conversely, to take up the station and responsibilities as a human that are assigned to you by God and nature. The freest person, and true freedom, wasn't found in the guy who says, "Hey, fuck y'all, I'm fucking gonna watch Law and Order on Sunday," but in the guy who accepts he is meant to be in a specific relationship with the created world and with the divine, who subordinates his own desires to higher-order things. This, for most moderns, is fairly whacked, but that was how free will worked for a good long time. (Or, properly, liberum arbitrium, which is the ability to make one's own judgments between right and wrong and to choose between them; Augustine believed that, after the fall, this judgment and choice was impaired, and good could only be chosen with the assistance of divine grace. I personally think that's crap, but anyway!)
The problem with believing in purely free will is that it runs up against difficulties in the here-and-now before it can even think about issues it might have with an all-knowing deity. We're all constrained by the prior baggage in our lives, by class, race, and sex, by cultures that do not allow us choices in certain matters, or make such choices so highly determined and weighted with expectation that they really aren't choices at all. The way we think about things, the categories and assumptions we bring to our experience of the world at an unconscious level, influences our choices as well, whether they're life-changing or minor. Further, even when we make conscious choices in the hopes of averting an outcome we sense to be coming, the choice comes to nothing and shit happens anyway; Dean discovers this when he orders tofu (bwahahahaha!) and, through no fault of his own, gets a bacon cheeseburger instead. Really, a lot of the stuff Dean tries to avoid is stuff that is, ultimately, far more out of his control than he'd like to think--the waitress messing up, the absent-minded mother, the jerk of a car thief. Even Sam, who is less under control than Dean ever thought; Dean never thought for a second that Sam would burn those hex bags.
In a sense, SPN points out that free will isn't as free as we think: it's more limited, it isn't as satisfying, and it has its costs. I think Castiel is starting to become aware of this, the potential for immense gain as well as immense loss if he knowingly disobeys and takes Dean's side. Dean, despite his insistent refusal to believe in destiny (and I don't think for a second that Zachariah's lesson in 4.17 has helped him accept it in any way), is continuing to make his own choices but is being led down a specific path by forces that don't have the same investment in freedom that we do. He tells Tessa in 2.01 that everything is a choice, life and death; Tessa tells him that, while she can't take him against his will, there are consequences to refusal that can be dire. And I think that just points to how the show is demonstrating--maybe knowingly, maybe inadvertently, I don't know--that, really, that the concepts that underpin and control the thing we call Western Culture, which are maybe not just concepts but texts as well--can't provide the absolute reassurance that we want. Sam's had his faith stripped away, superficial as it may/may not be; Dean is discovering that faith in something he can't trust of his own free will, but something he has to trust to get him through this for Sam's sake... that's a lot harder than any theologian or Sunday school teacher can make it look.
In my more optimistic moments, I think SPN is attempting to negotiate a middle ground, by positing, as Castiel tells Dean in 4.03, that there are many roads to one place. A person could, conceivably, have an infinite number of options to choose from, although they all lead to an end that only the people Up There can see, if they can see it at all. Think of it as being summoned to something seriously important, and you have to be there in person for it... That's the constraint, but within its boundaries you have a lot of options: you can fly, take the train, take the bus, hitchhike, pick any one of a dozen possible routes to drive yourself, or with a friend or with your dog, or you could pick any combination of these. The method doesn't matter; what matters is that you arrive, that you're there when you're required. To me, that's free will in SPN. And being able to drive a bitching vintage car for a good part of it... Well, that's the best part of all.
Blargh, Zachariah.
OH MY GOD DEAN AND CAS'S EPIC LOVE
I wouldn't mind seeing Chuck again.
How did Lilith find out she wouldn't survive?
Oh, Sam and Deaaaaan
CASTIEL'S VERY SAD FACE *FLAIL*
DEAN IS TOTALLY A BLUES MAN, "TRAVELING RIVERSIDE BLUES" FOR THE GODDAMN WIN
That is all for now.
Pretty much this sums it up:
aesc: omg, I am trying to write about this and I CAN'Taesc: I don't even know where to begin!unamaga: can i make the suggestion of FHAWOGIJKAWF CAS AND DEAN ARE IN LOVEaesc: can I quote you?unamaga: absolutelyunamaga: we need to get the word out to the massesDean and Cas's Epic Love
Okay, so I am starting there. DEAN PRAYING FOR CASTIEL TO HELP HIM AND CASTIEL ANSWERING, EVEN IF HE COULDN'T IMMEDIATELY GIVE DEAN THE ANSWER HE WANTED, AND HOW ABSOLUTELY BROKEN CASTIEL WAS THAT HE STILL FEELS TOO CONSTRAINED BY HIS ORDERS AND HOW VERY VERY VERY MUCH HE WANTS TO HELP DEAN BECAUSE HE KNOWS DEAN NEEDS IT, LIKE NEEDS IN THE WORST, MOST DESPERATE SENSE OF THE WORD. Wait, fixing capslock. I absolutely love how the writers are taking Castiel on his own journey, how he's still conflicted, caught between his orders and his habit of looking at the big picture (which actually pays off when he tells Dean why he can't interfere) and the dawning knowledge that the microcosm--Dean's pain and fear, his need to keep Sam safe, his conviction that he's not strong enough to save Sam and save the world--has its own importance... Oh my god. His face. I just... I'm sorry. I can't.
HE LOVES DEAN, OKAY? THERE I SAID IT AND I'LL SAY IT AGAIN. HE LOVES DEAN AND THAT'S ALL THERE IS TO IT.
The Prophet Chuck
Okay, I admit, I loved Chuck from the second I saw him in the previews. I hope we get to see him again, with the proviso, Kripke, that he doesn't die. Sadly, most prophets tend to end badly, but I hope maybe he'll go the way of Elijah and get a free ticket to heaven.
Part of me--the shrieking, gleeful fangirl part--found Chuck and the Winchester Gospel hi-fucking-larious. ("You should have seen Luke" [I actually would have thought Mark, for some reason XD] Also, Castiel admires his work. This constitutes proof that Cas is a total Dean fanboy, and has been reading about him long before he ever got to meet Dean in person.
unamaga and I have concocted visions of Cas being all anxious about the possibility of meeting Dean, the Dean Winchester and flailing to himself and having extra archival copies locked up somewhere, where the other angels can't make fun of him. ANYWAY.) My nerd side, however, loved the way this episode plays with text and notions of relative value, and looks back sardonically to the underground formation of Christianity (in all its forms, including the stuff that was eventually considered heretical, like gnosticism),* by having fans, with their endless fighting and complaining and writing of stories, eventually--perhaps--performing essentially the same tasks and activities that allowed Christianity to survive long enough for Constantine to legitimize it. If you look even cursorily at the early history of Christianity, when Christians were really little more than heterodox sects of Jews and Gentiles who could not quite figure each other out, what you're really looking at is a bunch of disparate textual communities, connected by lines of correspondence (letters, apostolic journeys, isolated meetings in initiates' private homes), with an uncertain access to a very amorphic group of texts and their own separate traditions of interpretation. And a lot of fighting and bitching at each other, and making up their own stuff when what exists doesn't suit them, or doesn't answer their questions.Also, being persecuted and chronically misunderstood by a hostile majority, and not understanding why your crazy story about a guy who died and rose from the dead and is the son of God isn't more popular than it is.
And that is, basically, what fandom is, in some ways. And the 'nod' to our discipleship, taken in light of the way I decided to think about the episode, is pretty damn awesome.
Fate, destiny, free will, and oh my god, Dean and Cas
I can't remember where I saw it (I'm sorry!!!) but someone was talking about the preview for 4.18 and about the age-old problem of destiny and free will, and how you can choose freely when there's a God who knows what's going to happen to you every step of the way. I started thinking about it last week, but decided to hold off until I saw this episode to try to formulate my thoughts. I didn't count on being left almost completely incoherent by this episode, however, but I'll try my best.
Basically, the problem of free will has never been solved, and what we think of as "free will" has never meant one consistent, universally-accepted thing. The sense we have now, that free will entails an individual agent (the person who does things) who is the originator of action or who makes a choice between possible courses of action, and who bears an ethical or moral responsibility for that choice, is purely Western, and mostly modern. Colloquially, the sense of free will is that we can do whatever we want, without anything else predetermining our action, but this is essentially, a fallacy.
In medieval Western (Christian) thought, free will meant that you, as a human, are given the option to do your own thing or, conversely, to take up the station and responsibilities as a human that are assigned to you by God and nature. The freest person, and true freedom, wasn't found in the guy who says, "Hey, fuck y'all, I'm fucking gonna watch Law and Order on Sunday," but in the guy who accepts he is meant to be in a specific relationship with the created world and with the divine, who subordinates his own desires to higher-order things. This, for most moderns, is fairly whacked, but that was how free will worked for a good long time. (Or, properly, liberum arbitrium, which is the ability to make one's own judgments between right and wrong and to choose between them; Augustine believed that, after the fall, this judgment and choice was impaired, and good could only be chosen with the assistance of divine grace. I personally think that's crap, but anyway!)
The problem with believing in purely free will is that it runs up against difficulties in the here-and-now before it can even think about issues it might have with an all-knowing deity. We're all constrained by the prior baggage in our lives, by class, race, and sex, by cultures that do not allow us choices in certain matters, or make such choices so highly determined and weighted with expectation that they really aren't choices at all. The way we think about things, the categories and assumptions we bring to our experience of the world at an unconscious level, influences our choices as well, whether they're life-changing or minor. Further, even when we make conscious choices in the hopes of averting an outcome we sense to be coming, the choice comes to nothing and shit happens anyway; Dean discovers this when he orders tofu (bwahahahaha!) and, through no fault of his own, gets a bacon cheeseburger instead. Really, a lot of the stuff Dean tries to avoid is stuff that is, ultimately, far more out of his control than he'd like to think--the waitress messing up, the absent-minded mother, the jerk of a car thief. Even Sam, who is less under control than Dean ever thought; Dean never thought for a second that Sam would burn those hex bags.
In a sense, SPN points out that free will isn't as free as we think: it's more limited, it isn't as satisfying, and it has its costs. I think Castiel is starting to become aware of this, the potential for immense gain as well as immense loss if he knowingly disobeys and takes Dean's side. Dean, despite his insistent refusal to believe in destiny (and I don't think for a second that Zachariah's lesson in 4.17 has helped him accept it in any way), is continuing to make his own choices but is being led down a specific path by forces that don't have the same investment in freedom that we do. He tells Tessa in 2.01 that everything is a choice, life and death; Tessa tells him that, while she can't take him against his will, there are consequences to refusal that can be dire. And I think that just points to how the show is demonstrating--maybe knowingly, maybe inadvertently, I don't know--that, really, that the concepts that underpin and control the thing we call Western Culture, which are maybe not just concepts but texts as well--can't provide the absolute reassurance that we want. Sam's had his faith stripped away, superficial as it may/may not be; Dean is discovering that faith in something he can't trust of his own free will, but something he has to trust to get him through this for Sam's sake... that's a lot harder than any theologian or Sunday school teacher can make it look.
In my more optimistic moments, I think SPN is attempting to negotiate a middle ground, by positing, as Castiel tells Dean in 4.03, that there are many roads to one place. A person could, conceivably, have an infinite number of options to choose from, although they all lead to an end that only the people Up There can see, if they can see it at all. Think of it as being summoned to something seriously important, and you have to be there in person for it... That's the constraint, but within its boundaries you have a lot of options: you can fly, take the train, take the bus, hitchhike, pick any one of a dozen possible routes to drive yourself, or with a friend or with your dog, or you could pick any combination of these. The method doesn't matter; what matters is that you arrive, that you're there when you're required. To me, that's free will in SPN. And being able to drive a bitching vintage car for a good part of it... Well, that's the best part of all.
* = that said, I could do with a bit less of the Christianity. There are lots of way the world could end, writers, and the Apocalypse of John is only one of them.Other things
Blargh, Zachariah.
OH MY GOD DEAN AND CAS'S EPIC LOVE
I wouldn't mind seeing Chuck again.
How did Lilith find out she wouldn't survive?
Oh, Sam and Deaaaaan
CASTIEL'S VERY SAD FACE *FLAIL*
DEAN IS TOTALLY A BLUES MAN, "TRAVELING RIVERSIDE BLUES" FOR THE GODDAMN WIN
That is all for now.
no subject
Uriel will be missed. Why is it that the characters I like are either evil or are sent to hell. Well, I like Castiel and he doesn't seem to be evil, and they did drag Dean out of hell. ...But still.