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<\/a><\/p>\nDirected by Allan Kroeker
\nWritten by Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker<\/i><\/p>\n
Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker established themselves early on in Supernatural<\/i> as a powerhouse writing team, with their script for Episode 3, the beautiful and elegiac “Dead in the Water”<\/a>. In an interview, they both talked about how they came up with the idea for “Faith,” mapped it out, and then had a small discussion amongst themselves about how it would NEVER fly with the creators\/producers. Should we even hand it in? Kripke et al would take one look at the script and say, “Are you all out of your minds? What is this? Where is the Monster? What is all this about Christianity? Why isn’t there a big fist fight and at least one blood splatter? What show do you think you’re working on? Get outta here with this.” But none of that happened. The script was embraced wholeheartedly. And it, in its own way, cracks open the series as a whole, and broadens the spaces where it will feel free to go. Up until now, the depth in the series has been psychological in nature: family drama, emo-conversations, sibling rivalry, mixed with some hell-raising, some thrills and some gore. Morality and ethical issues have not shown up, at least not in any profound way. “Faith” announced that the show would not be afraid to “go there”, that it would go where angels fear to tread. Religion was hinted at, in “Hook Man,”<\/a> with Laurie’s rage at immorality and hypocrisy, and the church setting. But that was just a world that Sam and Dean entered into and left, like any of the other worlds they enter into when working a case, it didn’t have anything to say to them, personally. “Scarecrow”<\/a> is filled with Biblical allusions, not to mention the final scene of Meg calling a mysterious “Father” after slitting a guy’s throat. Obviously Supernatural<\/i> was headed in that direction. “Faith” pulls back the tent-flap and the show strolls right on inside.<\/p>\n There is no monster here. The only “monster” is of the human variety, and she started out doing what she was doing because she didn’t want her husband to die. And the Reaper (our first glimpse of them) is “trapped” by her to do her bidding. Reapers are not monsters. Reapers are an essential part of the natural order. They do not act from petty motives. They have no motives. Everyone dies and it is their job to “take” those who die. Reapers are, therefore, detached. Only humans (and spirits\/ghosts) feel attachment. <\/p>\n Creator Erik Kripke loves this episode, and was amazed that anything this “classy” would be associated with his name (he’s very funny in interviews). He had created the show out of a love of horror movies and American folklore. But of course once you hire a writing staff, those individuals are going to come to the table with their own take on things, their own strengths, their own interests. “Faith” stands out. And not in a bad way. It doesn’t feel like it’s from another series. It feels more like it is a bold announcing of intentions: Here is where we are going to be going. So get ready.<\/i> Or even a challenge: To those of you who are into this show only for the gore, you’re gonna need to adjust your expectations a little bit, because this is what WE want to do.<\/i> You could lose a big chunk of your audience with an episode like “Faith”. It’s like the bozos who complained about the psychiatrist-heavy episodes in The Sopranos<\/i>, wanting more tits and violence. Apparently they didn’t remember the pilot of the damn show, which clearly announced its intentions and interests.<\/a> It’s a delicate balancing act, maintaining the tone of the show, while also keeping it interesting and fresh each week. <\/p>\n Audiences can be very wise but they also can be really dumb. They want to see what they already KNOW. Well, but what’s the fun in that? A talented director or writer can lead an audience into areas that they DON’T know. I think of Bob Dylan “going electric” and being Booed by his audience, and his response to that was to turn his back to the audience, and keep fucking playing. Because HE was in charge of his own art, NOT the audience, who wanted him to keep just doing the same thing over and over again, because that’s what they already knew. Fuck them. <\/p>\n So, you know. You have to walk that line.<\/p>\n Supernatural<\/i> is only halfway through its first season when “Faith” comes along. They had no idea at this point that they would still be going, 9 seasons later. Hell, they didn’t know if they’d last 2 or 3 seasons. But to keep just doing the same thing over and over would be tantamount to NOT exploring the full potential of the topic of the show.<\/p>\n And it was time to start talking about morality, it was time to start examining ethical issues. It was time to face death, too, in a very real way. You don’t need any monsters with that. Death is the ultimate monster to all of us. <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n“Faith” is a startling and bold 42 minutes of television. It’s up there in my own personal Top 10 list of episodes. I prefer the comedic episodes, that’s when the show really finds its stride, for me, and when the actors shine the brightest. The comedic episodes, often dismissed as “one-offs”, or “filler”, are actually GENIUS, and show how bold the show really is, how innovative, how CERTAIN of itself. It’s hard to imagine another serious show actually indulging in something like “The French Mistake” and getting away with it. “Faith” is not a comedic episode but it is profound in a way that feels earned. It is not imposed, or artificial. Supernatural<\/i> has already earned the right to ask these questions, AND – even better – to NOT provide answers. Because when you’re talking about the human condition, there are only questions. Those who think they have the answers are the ones you have to look out for. <\/p>\n “Faith” is about death. It threatens to kill one of the lead characters. It actually floats that out there as a possibility. We could do this, ya know \u2026<\/i> It is also about God, and those on earth who declare that they speak in His name. “Playing God” is a risky proposition and almost every character in the episode plays God, to some degree. The motives may be good or evil, but it’s still just Playing God. Sam ignores the doctor’s diagnosis for his brother, and decides to play God by bringing Dean to a faith healer. The faith healer picks people out of a crowd, lays his hands on them and heals them of various illnesses and conditions. The faith healer’s wife is the puppet-master, actually choosing folks to kill off (through the Reaper) in order that someone else may live. She plays God: he is immoral, he deserves to die, so that this sick person may walk again. And Dean, caught up in his own healing, realizes that someone has died so he can live, and then – he ends up playing God with Laila’s life. Every single aspect of “playing God” is presented, in these four different situations, all melded together into one symphonic whole. “Faith” also acts as a warning against judgment. You may think it’s bad to play God, but playing God can also mean you do what it takes to make sure that Good triumphs. Is it bad to play God when you are doing what it takes to help your loved one heal? Those with easy answers are also the ones who are quick to judge. <\/p>\n “Faith” is an introduction of a vast and indefinable grey area, at the heart of the series. The brothers are almost forced to choose black-and-white paths. It is the way they were raised. Dad was a black-and-white guy. Both brothers have black-and-white aspects, which are still being highlighted and pointed out and twisted, in Season 9. They STRUGGLE. They are drawn to the grey areas, but their behavior must so often be black-and-white. It’s killing them, Dean, in particular, who is more of a 100% grey-area kind of guy than Sam is. Even with his moral certainty that what he does he does “because it’s the right thing”, as he said in a recent episode. But moral certainty like that is often a smokescreen for a huge and impending awareness of the grey areas. I mean, we see it in politics and religious leaders all the time. It’s almost become a joke: any preacher who rants with too much certainty about the evils of gay marriage, is almost sure to have a gay scandal just waiting to explode, a massage therapist ready to talk, ball gags and butt plugs in his closet. I mean, you don’t even question it anymore. Moral certainty like Dean’s is necessary for someone like him, who is so tormented by his own susceptibility, his own attraction to the grey areas of life, its softness and its UNcertainty. <\/p>\n The Winchester brothers face all of that here. It’s subtle, but so much of where the series actually goes, can be traced back to “Faith”. <\/p>\n Also, it is one of the best-looking episodes of television I have ever seen. (Hence, the number of screen grabs.) Allan Kroeker directed the episode, and it’s his only Supernatural<\/i> credit. He creates a mood with “Faith” that borders on sheer impressionism. The show is always good at entering us into a different and specific world each week, the production design team and props team pulling out all the stops on a low budget to give us a realistic Frat House<\/a> or Sewer System<\/a> or abandoned mental asylum<\/a>. But “Faith” makes all of that look like set dressing. “Faith” is an actual WORLD. And Kroeker and team make us enter that world in a moody meandering way, with strange cut-aways to extras unconnected to the main action, strange sudden pan-ins to this or that face, glimpses of faces, hands, sudden alarming shifts of point of view, making us not sure where we are in space and who we should be looking at, an editing style that borders on the dream-like. Faith itself is not realistic, and therefore the style of the episode is not realistic. People who have faith do not need proof, and do not track faith in a literal way. Those who huddle in that revival tent in the middle of a muddy field become lost in the zone of their prayers, and their hopes, their fears, their desires, all poured into a group experience: individuality is somewhat lost in that environment. All of that is reflected in how the episode is put together. <\/p>\n I am interested in the mechanics of film-making. “Faith” should be studied by directors and editors. It’s a high watermark of the form, especially in episodic television. <\/p>\n Teaser<\/big><\/p>\n \n \nRight away in the teaser, we feel that “Faith” is different. In every episode up until now, the teaser sets up the Monster of the Week story, showing us a violent and unexplainable death completely unconnected to the Winchester brothers (except for the pilot<\/a>, where the teaser was a flashback). The brothers enter the series after the teaser. But not here. Here, they are the teaser. This is a clue that our journey here will be a little different. The episode will be primarily about them. <\/p>\n It’s a misty night and the Impala pulls up in front of an abandoned house in what appears to be a neighborhood of abandoned houses. The brothers, in medias res<\/i>, grab weapons from the trunk, talking in low urgent voices about what they need to do, which involves Tasers. Whatever the hell they are hunting (and we never learn what it is), it needs to be deep-fried. Wielding flashlights, Dean and Sam break into the house and head down into the basement. Their lives always bring them to such spaces. It’s always night. It’s always dirty. They never get to break into a clean house. Or rarely. One understands why Dean would jump at the chance to do so in order to try the “steam shower”<\/a>. Once in the basement, they throw open the doors of a rotting wardrobe and see two little terrified kids hiding in there. You would certainly need a lot of control with a gun to NOT blow someone away, to hold off pulling the trigger, despite the surging adrenaline (and both Sam and Dean seem VERY tense in this teaser – maybe because we, the audience, are not filled in on the backstory, we are just tossed into the middle of it). They stare at the two kids, and Sam whispers, and he’s so intense, “Is it still here?” The two little kids nod. It’s a beautiful moment, somehow. Dean and Sam grab the kids and Sam goes to hustle them up the stairs. He is grabbed by a hand through the rotting slats of the stairs and falls, and everything feels extremely chaotic and dangerous. Sam recovers, throws his Taser down to Dean, and races back up the stairs with the kids, leaving Dean alone. <\/p>\n The floor of the basement is covered in about an inch of water, so when Dean is attacked, by some big looming creature, he falls into the water, and then scrambles to grab the Taser. As the creature comes at him, Dean shoots him with the Taser, sending blue lightning-bolts through the creature’s body, but then the electricity is conducted through the water on the floor directly into Dean. Dean is basically electrocuted, lying in a heap in the water, writhing and screaming, his chest heaving up with each volt (amazing physical work from Ackles, who is always great when he’s in pain, or injured),. Finally, the currents stop, and Sam comes back, seeing Dean unconscious in a dark wet corner. Sam huddles over him, calling, “Dean! Dean!”<\/p>\n 1st scene<\/big> It’s one of those funny moments when Supernatural<\/i> acknowledges just how far off the grid these guys really are. They don’t just reach criminal levels. They are out-and-out criminals, fraudulent liars, wielding fraudulent IDs. It’s awesome. They don’t even care that the names on said cards are either ridiculous or clearly do not match who they are. They get away with it. Two cops nearby stand and watch Sam, and there’s an incredibly serious vibe to the whole thing. While Sam and Dean’s story may be suspicious (“Yeah, we were just driving through the neighborhood and heard screams \u2026” Neighborhood??? Is that what you call a series of rotting ruins swathed in mist??), the cops are kind and grateful for their help. It’s lucky Sam and Dean got there when they did. But still, there’s something in how they treat Sam: he is not like other people. Neither brother is. We often get these shots, in the series, of total outsiders reacting<\/i> to the sheer REALITY of the Winchesters, it’s almost like people fall silent when confronted with them. That’s kind of what’s going on with the cops there. <\/p>\n Sam rushes off down the hallway to meet up with Dean’s doctor, who has emerged from Dean’s room. <\/p>\n A certain thing happens when you get bad news of this kind. It takes a while to sink in. You keep asking questions, because you aren’t sure that you even heard right. The conversation starts off as a “So here’s the status” and slowly, you start to realize \u2026 that this is very different. That you are getting Bad News, the worst possible kind. I remember so vividly my own moment in my own life that was like this, and it comes rushing back into my mind when I see Padalecki play the reaction shots in this small scene with the doctor. It’s all done in one big beautiful listening close-up and you can’t even list how many expressions go across his face. Concern, fear, gumption, but then, as the realization sinks in what he is actually hearing<\/i>, stark disbelief, a brief laugh followed by tears welling up \u2026 It’s one hell of a small piece of acting on Padalecki’s part. <\/p>\n \n The doctor says, “His heart. It’s damaged.” Dean’s heart is a big deal, metaphorically and actually: here it is the actual organ that is damaged, but the “heart” comes up again and again. Dean doesn’t “do” feelings. He hates having them. Or he hates having certain kinds of feelings. The heart is the organ of feelings and Dean has a messed up relationship to it, and those who get in there into that heart, are rare beings indeed. And once they are in there, Dean will never let them go. Hearts break, too. Dean’s heart breaks repeatedly. Sometimes in big ways, sometimes in small. It’s a defining event when your heart breaks at the age of 4. The damage, in many ways, is irrevocable already. But, as Anna says to him in the junkyard in Season 4, pain is part of what makes humans human. She wanted in, on all of it, even the pain. Dean doesn’t get that, but he starts to, in that scene, with her guidance. <\/p>\n So. Damn right his heart is damaged, doc. <\/p>\n Sam can’t actually comprehend what he is hearing. You’re telling me my brother has a couple of weeks to live? Wait \u2026 what did you just say to me? <\/p>\n “Faith” very well could have been one of those manipulative Very Special Episodes. Where you place a lead character in danger as a ratings grab. “Faith” doesn’t feel like that at all. It feels like an implicit acknowledgement of the dangers of their life. The series needs to deal with that: otherwise the Winchesters are untouchable superheroes and that would get real old real fast. <\/p>\n The doctor’s final comment, said very gently, is “We can’t work miracles.” The line is a bit on-the-nose for me, considering where we are going, but it does pour us into the thematic thrust of the episode. <\/p>\n Sam rushes into Dean’s room. Dean is lying in bed, flipping through the channels. He looks like absolute shit. His eyes are bruised, he is pale, and he is clearly suffering. This is not just a makeup job, this is pain from the inside. He looks<\/i> damaged, and let’s face it, with Ackles, that is not easy to do. <\/p>\n \n I love it when Dean gets to look like shit. It evens the playing field. Kinda like when Hitchcock made Cary Grant do this.<\/p>\n \n \nHitchcock reveled in making the most beautiful man in the world cower in the dirt. Hitchcock knew that audiences have complex relationships to beauty, and lust\/desire is only a part of it. There’s envy there, too. I’ve written about that before with Elvis, as well. If beauty is untouchable, there is certainly a fascination in that, and we can flip through a fashion magazine and ogle at the models to get our Beauty Fix. But in the world of cinema, in the world of acting, that beauty needs to be filled with something else, the actor’s essence. Beauty that is not illuminated by talent (which equals soul) is, ultimately, un-interesting. Without Carole Lombard’s insanely brilliant comic timing, her delicate beauty would have been dime-a-dozen. Cary Grant is the most beautiful man to ever practice the craft, and yet he too understood that audiences needed to see him struggle, it would be cathartic for them. He did not say, “No, Hitch, you cannot make me, Cary Grant, cower in the corn fields, looking desperate and dirty.” He said, “Hell, yes, this will be amazing.” Actors who protect their beauty, who can’t bear to be seen in anything other than a positive light, may have a brief moment in the sun, but it won’t last. It won’t have any lasting resonance. <\/p>\n Supernatural<\/i> cast two crazy good-looking guys in the lead roles. Acknowledging their beauty, and the eye-candy factor, is a huge part of the show, often utilized in subversive or gender-bending ways. To pretend that either of these guys is “normal” would be to completely deny reality. My friend Mitchell said something interesting about Angelina Jolie, and her performance in Changeling<\/i>. We both are Jolie fans, so treat that as a given. Mitchell said, “My issue with the film is that it did not acknowledge how drop-dead gorgeous she is, and so every single scene didn’t feel real because of that. If you have Angelina Jolie walk into a police station, and every single person in the room DOESN’T stop what they are doing to gawk at her, then you are not dealing with reality.” It’s a fair point, and I imagine that being beautiful like that can be frustrating and limiting. (I know, boo-hoo, right? But I am not interested in that tone of conversation. Beauty is interesting to me, especially when USED by those who know they have it and feel comfortable messing with it.) I understand why beautiful actors feel the need to “ugly up” in order to prove that they are more than their looks. They often win Oscars when they do so. <\/p>\n All of this is to say: Jensen Ackles is not a dumb man and he knows what he looks like. He clearly has made some kind of peace with it, because he operates in a very casual unself-conscious way about it, as though his beauty doesn’t interest him. And it probably doesn’t, although his hair always looks cool, and he always looks good when he’s out in public. He’s not an idiot. But he also is not trying to convince us that he is not good-looking, that we shouldn’t care about that aspect of him. He is USING himself to the fullest, in other words, and he is doing so in a way that is compulsively fascinating to watch. It has no SELF in it, strangely. It’s all about the WORK. Sometimes when beautiful people “ugly up”, they want to be congratulated for it. You can FEEL it in the work. I remember when Shallow Hal<\/i> came out (I actually love that movie), and Gwyneth Paltrow made all these comments about what it was like to wear a fat suit, and how it changed her perspective, and how weird it was, and hot it was, and blah blah blah what, you want a medal for playing an obese woman, Gwyneth? Yeah, we get it, you’re a twig and it was super interesting<\/i> to pretend to be fat for 2 days. Stop talking. Immediately<\/em>. It was a huge turn-off. Vera Farmiga was talking in the special features for some film, and she mentioned having to gain 10 pounds for the role, and she interjected, “And on me that’s a lot.” She just had to remind us that she was normally very thin. And don’t get me started on Bridget Jones<\/i>. It’s not strictly the actress’ faults for being insensitive about this. The entire industry is set up to shame anyone who weighs more than 2 pounds. But I don’t want to hear you go on and on about how much pasta you ate to pork out for your role. Stop asking to be congratulated for doing your damn job.<\/p>\n Jensen Ackles doesn’t “show his work” at all, so his actual looks, then, become a “given”, and we are only reminded of it when he looks like shit, or when he is hit on\/noticed\/drooled over\/creeped on – which happens all the time. As it must happen all the time in real life, too. Beauty is a magnet. Magnets don’t just attract the positive, they attract the negative, too. I’m telling you: Beautiful people often can’t bring all of this to their roles, or that awareness, because the industry is set up to PROTECT the beautiful, it is set up to ONLY value the beautiful. So beautiful people are not encouraged to use themselves to the fullest in Hollywood: nobody wants them for that. Thank God Ackles found Supernatural<\/i>. It wants ALL of him. It ALSO acknowledges the beauty. So it’s best of both worlds for this particular actor. Imagine him in a series that did not allow him to be a goofball\/clown. How would anyone have known how funny this guy is, nearly world-class funny<\/a>, if he hadn’t done Supernatural<\/i>? Look at those looks. We are all judged by our looks, unattractive people and the beautiful ones. Who would have even WANTED him for that?<\/p>\n Beauty Digression over. There will probably be more. I blame Supernatural<\/i> for that. <\/p>\n So it’s startling to see really how truly bad Dean looks. And Ackles is doing it from within the context of the character, he is lost in the situation of it. In other words, he is not winking at us, in a vain way, “Look how BAD I look.” We all have seen Beautiful People (\u2122) play roles like that. It’s gross. We never get that from him. His concerns are elsewhere. When Sam walks in, Dean is disgruntled by what is on the television (or, more accurately, what is NOT on, meaning anything good). He murmurs something about wanting to hunt down the fabric softener teddy bear and “kill the bitch”, a line that always makes me laugh. <\/p>\n It is fascinating to watch this scene in light of Dean’s existential struggle in Season 9, as well as his other struggles in Season 4 and 5, where he had to actually accept the fact that he was “worth” saving from Hell. Dean is always on the rack, soul or body. He knows he’s going to die. When Sam enters the room, upset and trying to keep it together, Dean greets him with as much strength as he can muster. It’s not easy. But he sees Sam’s face, and he tries to ease the pain. “It’s a rough gig, Sam \u2026” Sam later calls Dean on this “laughing in the face of death thing” and calls it “crap”, but I think there’s more sincerity there to it. At least this first time. Dean always had a death-wish, on some level. He could never have seen his way out of the road he was on, and he accepted young that it would probably end violently, but there was no other way for him to go. He never would have done what Sam did, see a way out, and try to make it happen. Dean’s a warrior. His only milieu is war. (It’s not a coincidence that I often think of Jeremy Renner in Hurt Locker<\/i> and John Wayne in The Searchers<\/i> when I think of Dean Winchester.) How does society deal with its warriors? They are not like you or me. <\/p>\n Dean, also, is too weak to fight right now. Sam is gonna have to do the fighting for both of them. Sam tries to get Dean to stop talking like that. Dean is too weak to protect Sam, and that alone tells you how bad it really must be. <\/p>\n \n \nThere’s more there, though, of course there is. Sam’s urgency to save Dean brings up an equal urgency in Dean not to be saved. We’ll get into that more. It’s not just self-loathing, although that, of course is a huge part of it. I also sense that Dean flat out does not like to be the center of attention. It makes him itchy. Unfortunately for him, he is the center of attention in almost any room, by default (Angelina Jolie in Changeling<\/i>), so he has incorporated that fact into his personality, through the sexuality he throws around recklessly (not just in sexual moments), and the flirting he can’t help but do. It’s his way of dealing with the fact that, through no fault of his own, everyone is always staring at him<\/i> and wanting something from him<\/i>. He is NOT that special, he seethes. Everyone just leave me alone<\/i>. So it’s a complex tangle there. It’s not just self-loathing, that’s too simple. Being as sick as Dean is means you are the center of attention in your own particular family (well, not Dad’s attention, but Dad’s a dick). The scales are now way out of balance. Dean knows who he is when he’s strong and he feels “above” Sammy, a hovering protective presence. To Dean, Sam is the center of attention and that’s the way it’s always been. Unhealthy, sure, but that’s his reality. Now it’s him. He does whatever he can to side-step the attention, even if it means being blas\u00e9 in the face of death. It won’t be the first time. It takes half a season for Dean to even be able to admit that he doesn’t want to die in Season 3. He just cannot carve out space for himself like that. <\/p>\n And that’s where we stand in Season 9, too. He’s carving out a space for himself, all right, and it ain’t pretty. But it makes perfect sense. <\/p>\n Dean fully expects Sam to leave him there in the hospital and move on. Even though that’s not what he would do. He says, “Take care of that car, will you?” <\/p>\n Dean doesn’t have the strength to meet Sam’s energy. But that’s why Sam steps up to the plate. Dean is weak. Dean is never weak. It’s time for Sam to be strong. The scene ends with a great exchange:<\/p>\n Dean: “I’m gonna die. And you can’t stop it.” \n 2nd scene<\/big> And Sam does not defend himself. He is crushed. He has led Dean to this. He has made things much much worse. <\/p>\n We all make mistakes. We all make errors in judgment. But when Sam does, the ramifications are always enormous. Well, I guess that’s true for Dean, too. The question on the table in “Faith” is faith itself. Does the faith healer work because people believe in him? Are they being duped? Played? What role, if any, does faith play in it? We learn in a later episode that Sam prays every day. Dean is shocked by that revelation, and also a little bit jealous. There’s a lot to unpack here. But I have a hard time believing Dean would follow the lead to that muddy Nebraska field. The religious aspect of it would be a turn-off. The brothers argue about this, briefly, in “Faith”. Dean believes in what he can SEE. He has no problem with magic, because he has seen it in action. But God? Faith? You can’t even SEE it and that is bull shit, he wants no part of it. But Sam is a believer in his own quiet stealth way (and I would love for the series to address what has happened to that belief, and what it has transformed into, after everything. It hasn’t really done so.) People are getting healed in Nebraska. It’s worth it to go check it out. And if it works, why question it? If you need faith to have it work, then why not try faith? <\/p>\n These are existential issues separate from their own Family Drama that Supernatural<\/i> had not yet attempted. This is philosophy. This is theology. It’s new territory. <\/p>\n Because I am obsessed with the Motel Room motif: the one Sam sits in in this scene is a sickly green, with limp plaid curtains, low light, and a scratched dirty white door. It looks like a furnished apartment, as opposed to a motel. They do such a great job in finding variety in these motel rooms and I never get sick of them. <\/p>\n \n \nThe opening of this scene is heartbreaking in so many different ways, the text itself, and also how Padalecki plays it. Sam sits on the bed, laptop open, with fliers about heart health spread out on the bed. He is on his phone, leaving a message for Dad. The last time he spoke to Dad was, what, a week ago or a month, and it did not go well. Dad got cold and short with him and Dean grabbed the phone to finish the call. Sam is probably still seething about that, but Dean is dying and he needs to call Dad. We hear Dad’s outgoing message again which ends with: “Call my son Dean. He can help.” <\/p>\n But who can help Dean? <\/p>\n Sam launches into his message, and he keeps it together. He expresses no anger, he doesn’t reference the former call, or the Thing that Killed Mom, he doesn’t make any demands, he doesn’t cry. But there’s also residual intimidation: it is hard to go to Dad for anything, and it is hard to be the one in charge, as Sam is right now. Both brothers have a skewed vision of childhood: to Dean, Sam was the one Dad “doted” on, and to Sam, Dean was the “perfect” one. Neither version is true. But in Sam’s version, now he has to be the son who is a Disappointment giving Bad News about the Favored Son. Padalecki is juggling all of that and it makes the phone call heartbreaking, and also enraging. This father, I swear. Sam does not ask Dad to come and help. He makes it a strictly informational call: “Dean is sick and he won’t get better \u2026 ” Then he laughs, and says in a false and awkward chummy way, “But they don’t know the things we know, right?” The laugh is awful and empty, he doesn’t have a close relationship with his father, he has never laughed with his father, he can’t be close to this man, ever. It’s such a great choice, that small laugh. Sam seems so alone. He ends the call with: “Don’t worry, cause I’ll do whatever it takes to get him better.”<\/p>\n Dean called Dad crying about Sam<\/a>. Dad was probably already in Lawrence at that moment, and he didn’t answer the phone or reach out in response. Sam is now calling Dad telling him Dean is dying. He will never hear back from Dad about that either. Dad is a dick. Dean will lay into him for that later in the season in one of the more satisfying cathartic moments in Season 1. I didn’t realize until that moment how much I needed to see Dean get pissed off about Dad. <\/p>\n When Sam hangs up, he sits there for a while and he actually bites his nails. It’s so vulnerable, totally unconscious behavior, making him look very young and anxious.<\/p>\n A knock comes at the scratched white door, and Sam goes and opens it. Eventually, any time a knock comes at the door, the brothers treat it like it is a monster, bringing out their guns, peeking through the peephole. It’s standard. They’re not at that level of paranoia yet in “Faith”. <\/p>\n Dean is slumped against the door jamb, with a giant glowing vending machine behind him. Vending machines crop up often in Supernatural<\/i>. It’s fun to count their appearances, and loop them to the scenes around them. They’re usually important signifiers. I mean, think of Crowley in last week’s episode, trying to steal candy out of this random glowing vending machine that looks like it’s standing in the middle of a park. Classic. Anyway, just another one of their Americana Motifs that they have a lot of fun with. <\/p>\n \n \nDean has checked himself out, saying, and he can barely stand up, “I’m not gonna die in a hospital where the nurses aren’t even hot.” Yes, I can see how, to Dean, that would be Hell on Earth. It’s destabilizing to see him out of breath, unable to walk, weakened. We are already invested in his strength, in him existing<\/i>. <\/p>\n Sam tries to break through the facade, tries to speak Truth to Power, whatever it is he is doing, “You’re laughing in the face of death and I don’t buy it, you’re freaked out” – which feels very Little Brother-ish to me. Dean is the heroic big brother, the guy he has looked up to always. He gets the sense Dean might be trying to be strong for HIM. I think Dean is just trying to be strong because Dean is always trying to be strong. That’s his deal, basically. So Sam’s little impassioned request to admit he’s freaked out is rewarded with Dean murmuring, “Whatever, dude”, which seems so real. <\/p>\n Dean limps his way over to a chair, asking if Sam has slept. Even in his own trauma, he is Sam-focused. Maybe he feels relieved he’s going to die. But I think it goes back to Dean feeling uncomfortable when he is the center of attention. When he was the center of Dad’s attention, it meant he was in trouble. When he is the center of attention to a monster, it means he’s about to die. He feels more comfortable being the center of attention in sexual contexts, because he can kind of control that, and nobody’s getting hurt, and it’s all fun. But Dean does not seek attention. It seeks him. As much as he loves getting drunk and macking on willing broads, he does so in a quiet stealth-bomber sort of way. He’s not the guy hogging the mike at karaoke, or getting sloppy drunk causing scenes. He actually exhibits great self-control, all things considered. But being sick, or dying, changes all that. It’s way too much attention. He would, literally, rather die than have it continue. Just leave me ALONE, I can’t take everyone CARING for me and WORRYING about me. Let me die. <\/p>\n I am always grateful when they decide to give an establishing shot of the Motel Room as a whole. Here it is. I revel in it. <\/p>\n \n \nSam does not tell Dean about calling Dad. Knowing he will meet resistance, he barrels forward on what he has found out. He has been calling Dad’s contacts, and one has told him about “a guy in Nebraska”. That’s all he says. He knows his brother well. Dean listens to this, looking tired, and says “You’re not gonna let me in die in peace, are you.” Sam says, “I’m not gonna let you die period.” <\/p>\n There’s a nice shot of Dean with Sam thru the mirror. Thru such visual choices, you avoid the repetition of close-up to close-up stuff, which is typical television filming. This looks cinematic. There is great depth-of-frame. <\/p>\n \n 3rd scene<\/big> So there’s THAT. “Faith” is destabilizing to the extreme. We get close-ups, but they are off-kilter. We see someone’s face, but only part of it. We see hands, but then they move up and out of the frame. The camera lands on someone, and then moves in halfway close, but not as close as we want them to go. It is bold and emotional, it requires deep thought and planning to create a mood like the one created here. And what it also does, painstakingly and invisibly, is create a world. It’s a fuller world than we’ve been in in any other episode. This world existed before the episode began, and it will continue after the episode ends. The mud, that field, the house, the tent, the people coming from all around \u2026 that world is engrained part of American history: the tent revivals, the various Great Awakenings<\/a>, the Chautauqua circuit<\/a>, the Pentecostal explosion in the Southern poor, its down-and-dirty acceptance of Sin, a far more redeeming attitude (in many ways) than more affluential sects, giving lost and helpless people a great deal of comfort, the history of showmen\/conmen like P.T. Barnum who utilized similar tactics as the tent-revival circuit to showcase his Greatest Show on Earth \u2026 ALL of that, that entire history, reverberates through the scene in a full-immersion-baptism kind of way. This is America. In all its chicanery and all its beauty. <\/p>\n \n \nIt is presented without condescension. It is certainly not above critique. But it is not looked at from an “aren’t we so superior to those people” Northeast-elite attitude (you know, those folks who were disgusted by Elvis because he was both sexual AND openly religious, two things they could not reconcile, and two things they did not approve of. The Southerners “got it” immediately.) The people who flock to that tent are not filmed as though they are “grotesques”. They are filmed in all their pain and hope, their brave determined slog through the mud to get their asses in the seats.<\/p>\n All of this is merely conceptual<\/i> if you don’t find a way to bring it to the screen. If this material was approached with too much reverence, it wouldn’t have the strangely political bite that it ends up having. If this material was approached with no reverence, you would be being unfair and reductive to an important and powerful strain in American culture (one that has done a lot of harm, yes, but has also done a lot of good). In Supernatural<\/i>, both sides are true. That is difficult to pull off in a mere episodic. Kroeker and team splice up their film, giving us the scene in fragments, snatches, glimpses, Sam and Dean sometimes surging back to take over the frame, but then receding, so we zoom in on something else. It is meticulously edited. The sound is meticulous. The colors are meticulous: everything is grey, nobody is wearing a primary color in that tent. You can feel how cold it is, you can see everyone’s breath. <\/p>\n MOOD is the most indefinable thing to create, and you cannot rely on accident. You have to make careful choices, each step along the way, in order to create such-and-such a mood. And Supernatural<\/i>, above all else, can create Mood like nobody’s business. Every single person who works on the show, from producer on down, has said that this is the most challenging job they have ever had in show business. It’s a road trip show, with very few standing sets. You have to create an entire world each week. The fact that they do so so consistently is a great tribute to their creative power as collaborators. But they really outdo themselves in Faith<\/i>. <\/p>\n The location and the weather help. The field is drowning in mud. The sky is dark and grey, and everything looks both cold and inhospitable and also warm and welcoming, so you figure out how THAT works out. But it’s the WAY it is filmed that help the sequence land. We see the Impala driving up the muddy lane, the white tent revealed off to the side. Cars and people fill the field. We then cut to a closeup of the muddy ground, and we see a person on crutches (or, we see them from the knees down) squelch through the thick mud. Then we suddenly get a wider shot of people heading towards the tent as other people hover over a trash-can fire in the background. We then get a shot of an elderly lady with a walker. And only then do we see Sam and Dean get out of their car. Elegant and atmospheric editing. Sam and Dean have nothing to do with those establishing shots. We are not really seeing the world through their eyes, not at first: we are seeing something that exists whether they are looking at it or not<\/i>. <\/p>\n \n \n \nSam races around to the passenger side to help Dean out of the car, who gets annoyed immediately by this, and annoyed even further when he sees the “FAITH HEALER” sign at the entrance to the tent. Somehow, in the drive to Nebraska, Sam has failed to mention where he is actually bringing his brother. Which can’t have been easy, since Dean is a bloodhound who senses Untruth whenever it occurs in a 4.5 mile radius. Dean isn’t wearing his Dad’s leather jacket here. He’s wearing a bulky jacket and under that is a hoodie, and it makes him look like a teenager. And he’s hunched over his own body, which makes Sam just loom even taller. The whole thing is pissing Dean off. <\/p>\n More shots away from Sam and Dean, of the other people heading to the tent, the mud, the fires, the obvious signs of physical weakness (crutches and canes and walkers), but all done in an almost documentary-like or collage-like effect. It’s an impression<\/i> being given. The way we see things when we see them for the first time. <\/p>\n As Dean grumbles loudly about being brought to some quack, a woman passing by under a grey umbrella, responds, “Reverend Le Grange is a great man,” which also gives us more information about the power of this world they are entering into. Nothing has been set up for us about the “guy in Nebraska”, we are as much in the dark as Dean is. There’s also a lone protestor standing near the tent, handing out fliers, calling out to people about how this is a cult and the Reverend is dangerous. Two cops hover near the protestor. Sam and Dean pass by, and we see them from afar, which is, again, a directorial choice and editing choice. We could have had portentous closeups of Sam and Dean looking at the protestor which would have underlined for us its importance. It would have telegraphed: “The protestor will be important.” But we don’t get that at all from how it is filmed. <\/p>\n \n \nThe protestor is as much a part of the atmosphere as the old lady with the walker and the Grey Umbrella Lady. It is hard to parse out what is important when things are filmed this way. And, in a way, that is how Reverend Le Grange runs his operation. It is a group event, where individuality is smoothed out. That’s how groups work. There isn’t one person that is “better” than others, or more important. All of this is suggested in how the sequence is edited. We would not have gotten it otherwise and we get it in the best possible way: by osmosis, through visual information. It works ON us, as opposed to TELLING us. <\/p>\n Dean is grumpy, and struggling with things like walking and breathing. A dude is protesting, doesn’t that tell you something about Mr. Faith Healer? Sam tries to break through the wall, saying that when people don’t understand things, there is always controversy. Sam says casually, and it is a clue of where we are going, not only in this episode but later ones, “Maybe it’s time to have a little faith, Dean.” <\/p>\n Now. If this show were about how having faith in God somehow saves you, naturally I would not care about it and probably would not watch it. My own feelings on faith are private and I grew up in a faith which is extremely important to me. But I have no interest in didactic preachy art. Sam is not seen as better because he does have faith, and if anything the show is tilted in Dean’s more skeptical direction. But faith doesn’t have to mean religious faith, and that’s the sucker-punch hidden in this particular conversation between Sam and Dean. It will come up again and again. In Season 3, Sam looks at Dean, who has been dealing with his impending death by ignoring it, by having threesomes, for example, while poor Sam waits in the car. Eventually, Sam says to Dean, “What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you care about yourself?” So faith can also mean that you believe in yourself, that you believe your life has worth, that you believe you are worth saving. That will never be easy for Dean. Religion will come into it, and feelings about God, and anger towards a God who never shows his damn face or intervenes on the side of good. Faith comforts those who have it. Isn’t that enough? Dean doesn’t think so. Dean has faith in reality. Sam asks him how he can be a skeptic, knowing what they know? Sam says, “If you know evil’s out there, then how can you not believe good’s out there, too?” <\/p>\n Ah, Sam Winchester, that is the question. <\/p>\n \n They are talking quite loudly and a blonde woman, standing near the door of the tent, overhears, and interjects, “Maybe God works in mysterious ways.” Her smile is friendly. Everyone they meet here is friendly, by the way. These people are not portrayed as creeps or weirdos or drones. They exist in the grey areas of life, immune to our judgments.<\/p>\n She is very pretty and that, and her comment, stops Dean dead in his tracks. As I’ve said, probably most explicitly in “Wendigo”<\/a>, Dean is surprised by women. He can’t get “over” them. It’s not just the sexual aspect of it although that of course is operating. It’s that women don’t factor into his everyday world. He grew up in a military commando-style all-male family. Softness was punished. Softness here is represented by women, although I’d put Dean in that bucket too. Sam, with his empathy and sensitivity, does not seem soft. Dean does. The softness in him reaches out to the softness in women. Speaking stereotypically. Again, it’s not just about the sex. It’s about the space of kindness that they provide him, the cushion of understanding and listening. Dean isn’t “over” that. He NEEDS it. He needs it from men, too, but he always seems to mess that up by sexualizing his moments with them, flirting, and “acting”, and men clock him as \u2026 “off” way more than women do. Dean obviously sees a pretty girl and gets a boner instantaneously, not trying to say he doesn’t, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Some people seem to think Dean “reduces” women to sexual objects. Bull shit. He likes to fuck, and he puts it out there that he’s up for it, and if a woman is responsive, he moves in to seal the deal. Please Lord, don’t ever let men STOP doing that. Of course, they have to take No for an answer, but Dean always does, if a No comes. (Kali in “Hammer of the Gods”, bluntly: “No.” Dean: “10-4. Copy that.”) But he doesn’t see women as JUST sexual objects. He doesn’t judge them, for either NOT sleeping with him, or, worse, sleeping with him. He doesn’t think they’re whores if they “put out”. His misogynistic language like “skank”, etc., are reserved for demons, and maybe it’s a way of letting off some steam. But he’s not sneering at women AS he’s coming onto them (a classic component of the guy who “reduces” women). He’s happy he’s invited along. Dean is in a constant state of flux with women, adjusting how he sees them, which seems to me totally normal. “Oh \u2026 okay \u2026 so you’re this way \u2026 I had clocked you as this way \u2026 moving on \u2026 so are you into me? Am I coming on too strong? Okay, let’s have a drink and talk some more then \u2026 I ain’t in no rush \u2026” And if he gets a “no”, he totally takes it. Dean never pushes himself in where he is not wanted. Because he knows intimately what that feels like from his side of the fence. He knows how creepy it is. But boy is gonna give it a TRY, and I say go for it. But then I am used to Irish men, who seem virtually OFFENDED if you sit by yourself in a pub in Dublin. They can’t BEAR it. They see it as their DUTY to swoop into your life and try to make you laugh. Yes, it can get annoying. But whatever, say, politely, “I’m waiting for someone” or “I’m actually enjoying my book” and we can all move on with our lives, no harm no foul. <\/p>\n I’ll probably return to this. It will come up again. I suppose it depends on the personal filter through which you see Dean Winchester. I will certainly concede that. But I’m putting my own filter out there. He is a friendly<\/i> womanizer. <\/p>\n So. Dean, at Death’s Door, sees Layla, and immediately perks up. <\/p>\n \n \nWell, hellooooo. <\/p>\n It’s so obvious that Sam gets embarrassed, but she doesn’t get embarrassed. Dean introduces himself. They all shake hands. Her name is Layla and she is played, beautifully, by Julie Benz. Layla says to Dean, and she is not being exclusive or rude, she is truly curious: “If you’re not a believer, then why are you here?” <\/p>\n At this point, Layla’s mother (the wonderful actress Gillian Barber) comes up, with a huge anticipatory smile, thrown Sam and Dean’s way, and brings her daughter into the tent. It’s tragic, when you know the backstory to that smile. This woman BELIEVES. She has staked everything on it. Quit her job, mortgaged her house, whatever, so that she and her daughter can come to all of these meetings, in the hopes that the reverend will pick Layla. <\/p>\n Sam and Dean enter the tent, which is a whole other atmosphere, set up beautifully and impressionistically. There is almost no outer soundtrack to “Faith”. There are a couple of music cues, but they are few and far between. Inside the tent, there is an almost bluesy-sounding piano trilling underneath the low hubbub murmuring of the crowd settling in to their seats. We don’t see the piano, not a closeup anyway, so it seems that the piano music is in the air, in the minds\/hearts of the people, trilling between the molecules. And it’s a great sound. It’s not an organ, droning a familiar hymn. It’s improvisational almost ragtime-blues piano, which also grounds us in Americana, its long tradition of gospel and blues and religion and burlesque. It’s all in that sound. Excellent evocative choice. <\/p>\n \n \nDean wants to sit in the back. He doesn’t want to have a fuss be made over him. This, inadvertently, loops us in with the celestial “fuss” made over him by the angels when he is pulled out of Hell. It can’t be denied, and it is here in “Faith” too, the feeling that: This one is important. This one the world needs.<\/i> Roy Le Grange will pick up on it. His wife may be pulling the strings with her black magic, but Roy may be able to “see” things after all. <\/p>\n The moral issue comes into play there: why is Dean more important than Layla? Than anyone else? How is that fair or just? Dean has been raised to believe his life is expendable. He is required to sacrifice himself for the greater good. That’s how he will be able to measure whether or not his life has meant something. <\/p>\n \n Dean can’t live in a world where he is seen as special, so even Sam helping him walk down the aisle of the tent makes him angry. “Dude, get off me.” <\/p>\n And, amazingly, there are two seats together up front, even though the whole place is packed. How did THAT happen? Dean feels exposed. He can’t hide up here. Sam and Dean are sitting behind Layla and her mother, who sit with rapt expectant smiles. Sam looks around. We see the others gathered, huddled together, or separately, seen in a line across the aisle, or moving in on a specific face. The mood is so thick you could cut it with a knife. RICH atmosphere. <\/p>\n At some unseen cue, the service begins. The piano keeps its ragtime-blues-y trilling throughout. Reverend Roy Le Grange (Kevin McNulty, fantastic) stands, and a woman comes to his side (his wife, Sue Anne, played by the excellent Rebecca Jenkins), and helps him take off his jacket. The Reverend is wearing dark sunglasses. With no fanfare, he begins speaking. <\/p>\n \n \nThe Reverend speaks casually, intimately, and since you can’t see his eyes, there is an added level of mystery to his down-home persona. He speaks of how he wakes up every day and his wife reads him the news. “There’s so much bad news out there\u2026” he says, and the crowd murmurs “Amens” in response. Sam, sitting next to his hunched-over uncomfortable brother, looks around him, taking it all in. A sponge, that one. The cut-away editing style continues here, beautifully: as the Reverend speaks, we get fragments of the crowd, cut-away to oxygen masks, people sitting in a line, people praying, people rapt with listening. Collage: that’s what filming is all about. <\/p>\n \n \n \n \n \nSam, alert, notices a Coptic cross on the altar, but it’s just a quick shot, part of the establishment of atmosphere through detail. It will become important later but like everything we’ve seen thus far, the protestor, the Reverend’s wife, they are not filmed as any more important than anything else. Sam, without even knowing it, is working. He will remember that cross later. It is an acknowledgement that Dean is out of commission, wrapped up in his own suffering, not to mention his annoyance at being at a tent revival meeting, as well as his embarrassment at sitting up front. Dean is not working. Not at all. Sam is. <\/p>\n \n Roy talks of the immorality in the world. He does not rant with anger. He speaks with sadness and familiarity. He talks about his relationship with the Lord, and how the Lord shows him who to heal. The Lord helps Roy see into people’s hearts. The heart again. <\/p>\n Dean snarks to himself, under his breath, “Yeah, you see right into their wallets.” Layla hears the comment, and she pauses in her own engrossed reaction to the Reverend. It is a glitch in the mood. It doesn’t pain her, not exactly. If anything, she is pained for Dean. Even when Dean is trying to be invisible, he is the center of the room. Roy hears the comment and calls him out on it from the platform. It’s creepy and yet somehow loving and inclusive too. Roy is not defensive. Nothing Dean says “offends” Roy. People who truly have faith – like Roy, like Layla – do not get “offended” by non-believers. They may feel pity but they don’t feel the need to attack. The best advertisement for your faith, by the way, is to show love to your fellow man. That’s it. All else is just PR tactics, doomed to alienate anyone who might be on the fence. <\/p>\n \n \nDean is embarrassed. He didn’t mean his comment to be for public consumption. He says, “Sorry.” Roy says, “It’s okay. But watch what you say around a blind man. We got real sharp ears.” He is not threatening. He is laughing. It is a great performance. You can actually see why people from miles around would come to hear this man speak. It is not a cliche. It comes from the earth, this performance, it is grounded in the reality of what it might mean to desperate people, of how he would be a draw. <\/p>\n During this next conversation with Dean, there are multiple and dizzying point-of-view shifts. You don’t know who to look at. You don’t know who to side with. We are close on Dean, then suddenly we are behind the Reverend, looking out at the crowd, where we can see Dean, only now he is tiny. Then we switch, and we are looking close at the Reverend, only from the side of his face. You don’t know where you are in space. You are being flown around the room. This reflects Dean’s own experience. <\/p>\n \n \n \n The Reverend says, “What’s your name, son?”<\/p>\n Dean is hating life right now. He clears his throat briefly, a tic that is compulsive, and shows up all the time. I love when it shows up because you know he’s about to get vulnerable. It is probably somewhat compulsive on Jensen Ackles’ part, and he knows to utilize it, because it works. It shows up when he feels awkward, shy, or like he is not sure he wants to “go there” emotionally. He needs to get his shit together, and so he clears his throat to buy a little time. It’s also a way of gathering the remnants of his politeness together. Because Dean actually can be very polite. But it takes a second. The clearing-throat thing shows up a lot. It’s a great emotional “tell”. <\/p>\n Roy, who can’t see, is sensing Dean’s energy, emanating at him throughout the space. He is listening on another plane, and gestures for Dean to come up onto the platform. The audience starts clapping in excitement, but you can see, briefly, as the camera moves by her, the look of agony on Layla’s mother’s face. It reminds us of the stakes for every single person in that tent. <\/p>\n It’s a space of pain and need. Everyone wants to be “the one” picked. It hurts to be passed over. It doesn’t just hurt: it’s life-or-death. But being happy for others’ good fortune is part of the experience: you MUST rejoice in others being saved. Otherwise you can’t be healed yourself. But the pain is still there, in the applause. <\/p>\n Now comes a fascinating small sequence where Dean initially refuses to get up on the platform. No, it’s okay, I’m good, I’ll just watch. <\/p>\n \n \nHe doesn’t want to get up there on that stage in front of everyone where he won’t be able to control what goes on. That seems to be the most obvious reason. He’s embarrassed. Seasons later, he says he hates it when he’s singled out at birthday parties. You totally get that. And when there’s a woman he actually cares about, his main response to her is shyness, because his vulnerability is alarming and in that state she has so much power over him and he is totally out of control. But in the moment the Reverend calls him up, with the clapping, the praying, the sudden sense that he is now the Important One \u2026 he doesn’t like it. And why would he? Sam has left an urgent phone call to Dad that Dean is dying and Dad doesn’t pick up or respond. <\/p>\n Sam is looking at Dean, wondering what the hell is going on, and the camera is moving around, from one then over to the other, or there is a sudden small zoom in to Sam and Dean before a quick cut-away to the Reverend. Seriously: every single one of those camera moves represents hours of conversation beforehand, and choices, and diagrams, and shooting schedules. It LOOKS off-the-cuff and it isn’t. If you want to know what people mean when they talk about emotional film-making, or how the camera is an actual EYE that picks up spirits\/souls, this is what they are talking about. <\/p>\n Dean just does not want to get out of his chair. But he also knows he doesn’t want to be rude. He isn’t about to storm out. He doesn’t have the energy for that, and Dean is perceptive: despite his skepticism, he feels the friendliness from the Reverend, he feels the good-ness of the man. Fine, let him have his fun, I don’t want to ruin it, but “Why don’t you pick someone else?” he says up to the stage. Not in a bratty way, but almost in a tone of helpful suggestion.<\/p>\n Roy again, laughs, and said, “I didn’t pick you, Dean. The Lord did.” Roy, from the get-go, treats Dean with kindness and humor. Total openness. It’s a fascinating dynamic. We are primed, as audience members, to see him as sinister, maybe even a cult leader, or somehow disingenuous. The episode sets us up that way and then stings us at the end. <\/p>\n \n \nThe peer pressure, from the crowd, and from Sam pushing in on him from the next chair, is impossible to resist without making a huge scene and Dean doesn’t have the energy for that. A part of him wants to believe. A part of him wants to be saved. <\/p>\n Reluctantly, he gets up and a wave of energy\/support\/prayers come at him. He makes it up onto the stage, at one point making a little, “Okay, here I go” face, to himself, making him look like a self-conscious Best Man about to make a bad speech. We see Sam looking up at Dean, hopeful, his own heart pouring out of his eyes up at his brother. Maybe this will work. Maybe I’ve done a good thing here? It’s heartbreaking. <\/p>\n Once Dean is up on the stage, he says to Roy, “No disrespect but I’m not actually a believer.” <\/p>\n \n He is not embarrassed saying that. He is also not defensive or pissed. And when he says “No disrespect” he actually means it. Dean may have no boundaries. He obviously doesn’t. But part of that means that other people are allowed to do whatever the hell they want to do, as long as they don’t hurt people. Dean doesn’t bother himself trying to police the behavior of human beings (and he will be tested in “Faith” in that regard). He is focused on evil things, not people. Let people be flawed and messy and do stupid shit like cheat on their wives. Sucks for them, but they don’t deserve to DIE just because they’re dicks. He has skepticism about faith. But when confronted with Roy, he does not sneer with sarcasm, or flaunt his lack of belief as a battering ram. He concedes ground to Roy. He is also trying to give helpful information before they get started. <\/p>\n Roy doesn’t tar and feather him, he barely reacts. He just laughs kindly and says, “You will be, Dean.” Which could be (and often is) quite obnoxious, but not, somehow, in the way he says it. <\/p>\n \n \nIn a slow ritualistic way, Roy opens his hands (we get many closeups of his hands throughout), gathering into them whatever healing powers he feels he has. On cue, everyone in the tent raises their hands in the air, clutching the hand of the person next to them, bringing the group together. It must be horrifying for Dean: such a fuss being made over him. What if he faints? Or cries? What if it doesn’t work? Or, worse, what if it does work? What then?<\/p>\n \n \n \nObviously I am totally in love with almost every edit in this sequence. <\/p>\n Dean doesn’t know what is going to happen next, and he seems like he wants to vanish from the stage, evaporating into the floor. <\/p>\n \nAs Roy raises his hands in the air, he reaches over and touches Dean on the shoulder, startling Dean. Dean doesn’t like to be touched. Those porous boundaries, remember. Warn me before you go touching me. But he submits, uncomfortable as he is, and when the Reverend moves to cup Dean’s head, everything changes. His discomfort disappears, his embarrassment disappears, he forgets that everyone is looking at him<\/i>. Something is happening. <\/p>\n Roy feels that something, too, and says, almost to himself, but really to whatever it is he is sensing, “All right now, all right now \u2026” <\/p>\n Suddenly, in that moment, for the first time we get a keening note of outside music. It is our first real editorial choice that comes from outside<\/i> the world of the Roy’s tent. Something is draining out of Dean. Whatever it is is flowing from him and into Roy’s hand, and as it occurs, somehow without even realizing it, he has fallen to his knees. The crowd is electrified. <\/p>\n \n \nRoy is still saying, to the unseen thing, the fight going on within Dean, whatever it is he senses, “All right \u2026 all right \u2026” and it manages to be both mysterious and soothing. Dean, on his knees, suddenly gives out, and, with the film suddenly going slow (but not too much, not lingeringly so, it’s slowed down a tad<\/i>), he collapses to the floor in a faint. We see it from the back of the tent, we see it from Roy’s point of view, and we also see it in a closeup on Dean. Again, with those dizzying point-of-view shifts. <\/p>\n The crowd gasps, and Sam runs up to Dean, once again huddled over the unconscious body of his brother. Dean eventually wakes, with a start, groggy, out of it, but we see his eyes focus up at the Reverend, and suddenly sharpen into alarm. Behind the Reverend, looking down at him, is a strange grey figure which suddenly dematerializes. Nobody else has noticed. <\/p>\n \n 4th scene<\/big> \n \nSam is elated. Dean is suspicious. The doctor tells him that yes, it is strange, but a guy died just yesterday of a heart attack: “guy like you, 27, athletic, out of nowhere, a heart attack.” (Thank goodness she said something. Otherwise the plot could not move forward and then where would we be. But she says it in such a casual incidental way that I didn’t pick up on its weirdness the first time I saw the episode. It took me a while to catch up.) When the doctor leaves, the brothers are (as always) in two totally different emotional states, and they clash. Dean is not relieved to be saved. Something doesn’t feel right. Sam is overjoyed. Why look a gift horse in the mouth? Dean doesn’t believe in gift horses. Everything in life has a price. The noir lighting in this relatively stock scene reflects that uneasy feeling (and also places what is a pretty generic doctor’s office set into the creepy Supernatural<\/i> universe). <\/p>\n Dean can’t shake the feeling. He saw that grey man. It had to be a spirit of some kind. “When I was healed, it felt \u2026 wrong. I felt cold.” <\/p>\n \n Sam doesn’t think what Dean saw was a spirit, because Sam didn’t see it. Why wouldn’t Sam have seen it, especially when he’s been “seeing a lot of things lately.” It’s been a while since we’ve dealt with Sam’s psychic visions (well, one episode) but it’s a good way to loop us back in to that ongoing Arc, even though it’s on the back burner in “Faith”. Sam says it casually, as though he is starting to accept it, and Dean hates it. Hates the whole Psychic Shit, wishes it would just go away already. Dean is putting on his coat, he’s already on to the next piece, and says, “Excuse me, Psychic Wonder. You’re just gonna need a little faith on this one.”<\/p>\n Not “trust”. But “faith”. Something is switching in the mythology. Something else is coming into play. Dean normally asks for “trust”. Or, more accurately, demands it. But not here. Faith is asked for. You have to go delicately with this stuff, otherwise you are smack-dab in the middle of Touched By an Angel<\/i> and who needs that. It’s more interesting<\/i> than anything else, that Dean would explicitly use that word. <\/p>\n \n Padalecki has a moment where he is struck by the intensity of his brother’s objective (it happens a lot – and when Dean has an objective, he can literally move mountains). Sam feels that intensity coming at him, and then laughs a little bit, he knows he can’t fight it. And it doesn’t seem to cost him all that much, not yet. The big fight between the brothers in “Scarecrow” has obviously cleared the air in a lot of ways. In this moment in the hospital, Sam knows it’s easier to follow Dean, especially when Dean gets like this. Padalecki finds a lot of variety in such moments. There are so many times when the brothers argue about a situation, and then Sam says, “So what do we do now?” I haven’t kept a running tally but it’s got to be in the low hundreds. Here, there’s almost a sense of humor behind it. “Okay, Dean, okay, we’ll do what you want to do \u2026 I know you’re like a dog with a bone \u2026” Still, he’s just so relieved the faith healer freakin’ WORKED. <\/p>\n 5th scene<\/big> \n When Dean says to Layla in the final scene, “He’s a good man, he doesn’t deserve what’s happened” – it is this scene from where that feeling comes from. Dean is good at reading people (when he sits back and stops flirting with them, that is). He doesn’t flirt here. It’s not the space for it at all. He doesn’t even seem tempted (and for Dean, that’s saying something.) He is quiet, accessible, and gently skeptical. It’s a beautiful and interesting mix. Sometimes, when Dean asks a question, the wife will interject with an answer. “It was a miracle what happened to you,” she says. The actress plays this part great, and the director holds off on prioritizing her. She is mostly a blurry figure on the periphery, incidental to the main action. <\/p>\n Dean also treats her as peripheral. He asks the Reverend about the miracles and when they started. Watch the Reverend’s restless hands. He sees <\/em>with his hands. He relates his story to Dean: he had cancer and was given a month to live. He and his wife prayed for a miracle and he was cured. He was left “stone blind” but the cancer was gone. He discovered he could heal people shortly after that. <\/p>\n It’s hard for Dean, but he asks Roy, “Why me?”<\/p>\n And Roy says, “I looked into your heart and you just stood out from all the rest.”<\/p>\n \n \nHeart working on multiple levels of meaning here, the organ that was damaged, the feelings that are repressed, his whole Self included there. Dean asks, “What did you see in my heart?” <\/p>\n And forgive the granular observation, but God is in the details, performances are made of details and behavior: His eyes close briefly on the word “heart”. It’s another “tell”. He’s embarrassed. The conversation is verging on touchy-feely. He is not talking about the Heart the Organ, he is talking about the Heart as the Seat of his Self, his Emotions. And that’s all a bit \u2026 girlie, maybe, and it’s hard for him to say the word without a flicker of his feelings about all of it. <\/p>\n Roy considers this and answers, calmly, in a gigantic closeup: “A young man with an important purpose. A job to do. And it isn’t finished.” <\/p>\n Does Roy have Castiel on speed-dial, I wonder?<\/p>\n Dean throws an uncomfortable glance over to the wife. He is uncomfortable in general. Being special is not Dean’s goal. <\/p>\n Too bad, Toots.<\/p>\n 6th scene<\/big> \n 7th scene<\/big> \n \nSue Ann comes out to meet Layla, and apologizes, “Roy is resting.” He won’t be seeing anyone else today. Sue Ann is not cold, on the contrary she is warm and loving, which makes her rejection even worse. Layla’s mother, who has come up beside Layla, is devastated. Her urgency is heartbreaking. She pleads with Sue Ann. They’ve come to every meeting and Roy has yet to pick Layla. Why? Again, the rejection comes, sweet and loving. The Lord will let Roy know when it is time, he is fully aware of Layla’s situation. <\/p>\n Once Sue Ann goes back inside, Layla’s mother turns to Dean. <\/p>\n We see him get the full force of her anger: he almost physically draws back from her. Dean has guilt, it was already starting up in his “Hey I’m cured” moment with Layla but he doesn’t have the full picture yet. Dean doesn’t need an excuse to feel guilty. But here, his worst nightmare comes true. Layla’s mother wants to know why he is still here. You got what you came for. <\/p>\n Dean’s beauty – and it is there, it will carry him through some of the other scenes with Sam later – is that he doesn’t say “Hey, back off, lady” or “Don’t blame me.” Instead he hears her subtext and feels her despair. She is totally allowed to feel the way she is feeling. It sucks to be attacked, and you can see it is painful, but something is very very wrong here, and now he’s sniffing it out. He was chosen over Layla, and that’s already a bad deal for him. Layla tries to intervene, gently, and her mother is having none of it. They are devoted followers of Roy, and yesterday he chose to heal a “stranger who doesn’t even believe.”<\/p>\n It’s a hostile environment for Dean. But it somehow doesn’t matter. He is in the presence of grief. He does not take it personally. He leans in to Layla, asking what is wrong. It is a beautifully compassionate and caring moment. Layla, trying to remain strong, she is similar to Dean in that self-pity doesn’t really exist for her, or at least it is something to fight against, tells him she has an inoperable brain tumor and will die in a couple of months. Layla’s mother is in tears, and Layla touches her mother comfortingly, and Dean is looking on at all of this, helpless.<\/p>\n Then comes a three-way exchange that I just think is so awesome:<\/p>\n Dean: “I’m sorry.” \n The entirety of the human condition is in that exchange. And each part of it is totally true. Not one piece of it is prioritized or privileged over the other. Nobody is wrong on those porch steps. Every one of them is right. And therein lies our tragedy. And you don’t need 5,000 words to say it. You only need eight. <\/p>\n If Dean is somehow connecting with Layla, she is also connecting with him. She wants him to know it is okay that he was chosen. She is starting to make peace with her own death. Her mother is like Sam, pushing Layla into this wild goose chase, and she will go along with it because she loves her mother. She feels how troubled Dean is. All of this is suggested without any dialogue, it is just in how she looks at him. Dean doesn’t need to know her darkness, that is not his burden to carry. So she smiles at him instead. <\/p>\n Layla’s mother, ravaged by grief, looks at Dean, and asks, “Why do you deserve to live more than my daughter?”<\/p>\n It’s an amazing little scene. <\/p>\n \n 8th scene<\/big> \n \nHe has done research. He has learned that heart attack guy Marshall Hall (the poor guy was cut from the episode, although his scene in the gym is included in the special features) died at 4:17, the exact time Dean was healed. This is bad bad news. On multiple levels. It is a tragedy for Dean, who already feels pissed that Sam talked him into this, and pissed that he was singled out instead of Layla, who really should be living a full life, or the old lady with the walker, or the guy with the oxygen mask. It is not part of Dean’s nature to push to the front of the line like this. The whole thing has felt wrong from the get-go.<\/p>\n Sam has cross-referenced the people Roy’s healed with local obituaries. Every time someone is healed someone else dies of the same ailment.<\/p>\n Now we come to a masterful sequence, one of the best in the entire series bar none. It won’t do for me to break it down, because it works on a flow, but each piece has to fit into the larger whole, so that the entire thing we are seeing becomes ONE event. Information is given during the sequence, so that by the end we understand what has happened. All of this goes down to the accompaniment of Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (low at first, but then growing in power). The entire thing is:<\/p>\n 1. masterfully conceived, first of all – it’s bold and complex Intercut with other images over the scenes is Sam and Dean continuing to talk in the motel room, so that we understand what we are looking at. Often, though, we just hear their voices, as we watch other scenes unfold. We see a woman running in the woods. We see Roy back in the tent with a crowd watching. We hear Sam telling Dean, “Somehow Le Grange is trading a life for a life.”<\/p>\n The music builds, and the cross-cuts come quicker. From the girl in the woods (whom we have never seen before), to Roy in the tent, to Sam and Dean, and then back, and then back, and then back. <\/p>\n \n \n \n \nAs we see Roy heal someone with emphysema, we see the girl in the woods running from the Reaper who then cups her head, and she falls. We go back to Sam and Dean talking about it. The implications are horrifying. Dean is yelling, “Some guy is DEAD because of me. You never should have brought me here.” Sam is in tears. <\/p>\n As they talk, and as the Blue Oyster Cult song builds, and we see the other scenes, Dean leans in to Sam, saying dead-serious: “There’s only one thing that can give and take life like that. We’re dealing with a reaper.” Bursting lyrics from BOC, which draws it all together, all the unconnected threads we have been seeing, now they all converge. <\/p>\n A+ sequence. You don’t see shit like this in normal episodic television. <\/p>\n 9th scene<\/big> \n \nDean is more experienced in this Lore than Sam is. Sam is like, “The Grim Reaper? What?” Dean corrects him: “It’s not THE reaper, it’s A reaper.”<\/p>\n Surrounding them on the table are pictures of Reapers, and Sam is researching it on the laptop. I love how Dean is holding a print-out saying FAMINE. <\/p>\n \n \nConsidering what happens to him 3 seasons later, when Famine rolls into town, it’s an awesome (if inadvertent) dovetail. Famine affects everyone in town except Dean. He is immune to hunger. Why is that? Well, here he is, visually contemplating that question years beforehand.<\/p>\n They put together what they think is going on. Somehow Roy is “trapping” the Reaper to do what he wants. Dean knows Reapers stop time, so that would explain the clock in the gym. Sam is still hesitant. Maybe his own guilt at getting Dean into this is holding him back. Because Dean is pissed and upset. Marshall Hall haunts him.<\/p>\n Sam suddenly remembers that Coptic cross on the altar, and reaches around on the table for a Tarot pack, which, naturally, the brothers carry. Sam finds the card he’s looking for and hands it to Dean, giving us a brief explanation of what the Tarot is, in case we have been living under a rock in Chad for the last 500 years. If Roy is binding the Reaper, Sam says “He’s riding the whirlwind, it’s like putting a dog leash on a great white.”<\/p>\n \n \nI love it when the brothers know shit. <\/p>\n The episode, as jam-packed as it is, allows for pauses, and now we get one, as Dean gets up, full of thought, walking to the sink, standing there. Pauses are part of why Supernatural <\/em>works, because it is so much about what ISN’T being said, and about thought itself. <\/p>\n Dean’s thinking about what Roy is doing, deciding to kill someone in order to save someone else. That’s wrong. And it’s doubly wrong because Dean personally has benefited from it. So he bears some responsibility here for making it right.<\/p>\n Here we get into an ethical dilemma, the first one of its kind. Dean’s position is totally the opposite than what it will be later, in Season 6, when Sam is suddenly willing to kill human beings in order to get to the monster. Dean basically thinks they should kill Roy. He’s doing bad things, “he’s a monster in my book”. <\/p>\n Dean’s guilt must be tremendous to even contemplate going down that road, and Sam is the voice of reason. “We’re not gonna kill a human being<\/em>, Dean.”<\/p>\n Sam is so strong in that moment, that Dean’s next comment is a dig, “Any bright ideas, college boy?” <\/p>\n Actually, college boy does. There must be some sort of binding spell Roy is working. They need to figure out what it is and figure out how to break it, all at the same time that they stop Roy from healing anyone else. Should be super easy. <\/p>\n 10th scene<\/big> \n \nSam and Dean launch themselves out of the Impala, and the hardy Protestor is still there, all by his lonesome, calling out warnings to the flock. Sam says to him, as they pass by, “Keep up the good work, brother,” a small almost invisible detail I love. Skepticism has grown in the middle of his faith. He has second thoughts about what he has done. Maybe the only person doing “good work” here is the protestor. We see Roy being led out of his house by his wife and an associate; the service is almost about to start. As they disappear from the frame, Sam sneaks by around the side of the porch, and climbs through the front window of the house. So Dean is on Stop Roy Duty, and Sam is on Binding Spell duty. <\/p>\n Roy’s house is dark and Victorian, with huge glassed-in bookshelves, no overhead light, lots of objects, a sort of faded genteel atmosphere. Sam goes straight to the study, looking around. He sees a shelf of big important-looking monochromatic books (does the prop department scour old book shops? These are great-looking props.) The dust on the shelves stops at one book, suggesting that it has been removed a lot (a cool effect used again in Dad’s storage unit). <\/p>\n \n \nSam pulls out the book and looks through it, lots of text, he isn’t sure what he is looking for. But his eye catches a glimpse of something hiding in the shelf space behind where that book was resting. He reaches in and pulls out a small black leather book. <\/p>\n Yahtzee. <\/p>\n The book is clearly old but the pages are crammed full of newspaper clippings. One is about a gay teacher (Marshall Hall), and another about an abortion rights activist (I didn’t get a look at the picture, but I imagine that’s the girl in the woods). It’s a pretty hard critique of political Christianity and how it manifests itself currently. Obviously these people are targets due to their “immoral” beliefs. <\/p>\n \n \nLastly, Sam comes comes across a newspaper article about the protestor outside the church where he calls the church a “cult”. <\/p>\n 11th scene<\/big> \n \nIn “Faith”, the brothers are often separated. They split up to do their job better. In the following scene, we are shown their experiences simultaneously, another excellent editing job of two totally different thru-lines. <\/p>\n Dean is looking around desperately, trying to come up with a plan, and all of that whooshes out of his head in the next moment, when Roy calls from the stage, joyously, “Layla Rourke! Come up here, child!”<\/p>\n The crowd whoops in what sounds like sincere excitement. They are a community. They have all probably gotten to know each other very well. Layla is probably beloved, and everyone knows her struggle. You can feel that in the surge of excitement\/approval. People hold up their hands in thankfulness, reach out to Layla, as she looks around, smiling, her mother reaching out to hug her, all as Dean looks on from the sidelines. This is the worst possible moment for him to stop Roy. Now Dean has to play God. <\/p>\n \n \n \n \n Layla moves along the aisle, surging with energy towards the front, where Sue Ann stands, smiling and supportive, holding out her hand to Layla. Dean stops Layla and there is an intense and painful conversation where he tries to stop her from going up there. He can’t explain why. “Something bad is gonna happen.” Layla is almost hurt, although she is as perceptive as Dean is, and can tell he is upset about something that is probably very real to him, but it confuses her and hurts her: “He healed you!” she says. Why would he not want the same for her? <\/p>\n Looked at from one angle, Sue Ann is seen in the background, between Dean and Layla. One the other side between them is Layla’s mother. Layla cannot go back or forward. She is drawn to Dean. He seems good to her. She sees the internal man. But she does not understand where he is coming from right now. She is not angry, she is hurt, and torn. Which, of course, makes it worse for Dean. He would rather you be pissed off at him than hurt. <\/p>\n \n \n Outside, in the muddy field crowded with cars, Sam hears panicked cries for help and comes across the cowering protestor who sees something Sam cannot see. <\/p>\n \n \nLayla, with one last hurt confused look at Dean, has gone up onto the stage, after being hugged joyfully by Sue Ann. She is ready. The scene lingers, drawing out, intensifying the tension. We see Roy’s hands slowly open and rise up. Layla waits. We see Roy slowly reach over to hover his hands near Layla’s head and that’s when we hear Dean shout (we don’t see him), “Fire! Everybody out!” Panic breaks out, and in the following melee, Roy has lowered his hands, and Layla stands there, abandoned. Layla’s mother, standing off in the crowd, screams, “No!” and I can’t look at her face without wanting to cry. This actress freakin’ goes there<\/i>. And Dean is shattered. <\/p>\n \n \nIn the next couple of moments, we will see Dean against these Biblical quotation backgrounds, placing him in direct opposition to matters of Faith. <\/p>\n Back out in the parking lot, though, the Reaper has reappeared and has grabbed hold of the Protestor, whose life is draining out. Sam calls Dean back, shouting that Roy must not be in control of the thing. That is when Dean, again placed in front of a big quotation, gets a glimpse of Sue Ann, back to him, over in the corner, huddled into herself and praying. <\/p>\n \n \nStylistic choice alert: When he sees Sue Ann, there are three razor-sharp quick cuts, with a percussion sound accompanying each cut (a very frightening stylistic choice, popular in every horror movie since the beginning: time the sound effects with the cuts. As Hitchcock said about the shower scene in Psycho<\/i>: The cuts in the film are the stabs of the knife.) We go from a long shot of Sue Ann’s back to a medium shot of Sue Ann’s back and then back to a shot of Dean, taking it all in, with Boom Boom Boom on the drums. It’s effective: going from long shot to medium shot tells us we are seeing what Dean is seeing, Dean has put it together. Dean runs to her, and when she sees him, she holds up her Coptic cross necklace, almost like she is trying to ward him off. At that moment, the Reaper outside lets go of the Protestor and backs off. Sue Ann, busted on some level, cries out for help, and the cops swoop over and grab hold of Dean. He never breaks eye contact with her throughout his “arrest”, just nodding at her, grimly (“Dean, grimly”), like, “I know what you’re up to, sister. I SEE you, bitch.” <\/p>\n He’s dragged outside of the tent, where he is then confronted by a gentle sad-eyed Sue Ann who tells her that she is “disappointed”, “after everything we’ve done for you.” She finds the perfect note for her creepy character. She is a True Believer. <\/p>\n \n Layla then walks up to him, and the second he sees her he is immediately caught up in her pain, it almost takes his breath away. This is the blessing\/curse of having no boundaries. And he can’t explain, he can’t make her see it, he doesn’t even try. Why does he get to be saved? Her mother’s question: why do you deserve to live more than my daughter? Well, Dean knows that’s bull shit. Layla deserves to live more than he does. He’s alive by the luck of a shitty draw. Layla, who had seemed somewhat peaceful about her death on the steps, is now crushed. She was given a glimpse, a moment when she thought she would be healed. To have that taken away …<\/p>\n \n Dean is almost pleading, but there’s so much guilt that it effs up his delivery. “I know it seems unfair. And I wish I could explain. But Roy is not the answer I’m sorry.”<\/p>\n It’s terrible. What is even worse, is when she walks away and turns to look back at him. It is one of those “outsider looks” I keep mentioning, a moment when someone outside the Winchester world takes them in, really sees them. The brothers don’t quite know how extraordinary they are. They think they suck, basically. They hate their lives. They do what they have to do but they certainly aren’t puffed up about it. Layla’s look isn’t quite like that, but it is definitely from outside of Dean’s normal experience. It is kind. It is loving. Unconditional. Even with what he just did. She somehow knows he felt he had to do it. She doesn’t know why. She doesn’t want to leave him shattered. <\/p>\n She says, “I wish you luck.” Dean is practically beside himself. <\/p>\n \n \nHe fights to get out the words, “Same to you.” We then have a nice big juicy pan-in to his face, really reveling in his pain and self-hatred, and he murmurs, “You deserve it a lot more than me.” Totally dramatic, and totally earned at this point in the episode. <\/p>\n Dean heads through the mud back to the Impala, and passes by a small grouping of people, with Sue Ann and Roy telling Layla’s mother that he will give Layla a private session that night. Everything will be all right. The choreography looks accidental, with all of them in the frame, but of course it isn’t. <\/p>\n \n \n12th scene<\/big> \n \nI mean, what the hell. <\/p>\n Dean is pacing back and forth, looking out the window, going back to pacing, still beside himself. He says, “I don’t think Roy has any idea what his wife is doing.” The not-knowing part is also getting to Dean, because he had a conversation with Roy, and he got a good vibe from the guy. Roy being tricked is a betrayal of a clearly good man with good intentions. The intentions are what matter to Dean. It is why he lets people off the hook when they are clearly not in control of themselves. He is amazingly generous that way. “It’s not you, Sam.” “It wasn’t you, Bobby.” “Ben, that’s not your mother.” Even when she says those horrible things to him. He can put it aside. He judges people who consciously hurt others, who choose to be cruel. Like Sue Ann. But Roy? He wants to heal people. Ain’t nothing wrong with that impulse. <\/p>\n Sam is holding the little black book and has done his homework. It’s a spell book and there’s a spell in there about how to trap a Reaper. Sam shakes his head, after delving into such dark stuff, thinking about what Sue Ann is doing. He says, “To cross a line like that \u2026 the Preacher’s wife \u2026 black magic?” <\/p>\n An interesting moment, because Sam will be all about crossing those lines in later seasons. The line between being a hunter and being evil, like the things they hunt, is a fine one. The same is true for True Believers. What happens when you start to control others using your Faith? No good can come of that. As hunters, using black magic for their own ends would be tempting. How could it not be? Sam isn’t there yet, and perhaps is \u2026 unconsciously \u2026 thinking of himself, with his own psychic powers, and what that might mean. Sometimes when we know something about ourselves, we react with judgment against that very same thing (i.e.: fundamentalist anti-gay preachers with a collection of butt plugs, again). I’m just saying that Sam is pretty judgmental here. It gets Dean’s attention, and we then get two gigantic competing closeups over the following dialogue. <\/p>\n “Evil,” Sam says. \n \n \nGrey area again. A flip-flop. <\/p>\n This is where the show inverts our expectations of these characters, set up so strongly in the pilot that we are still invested in watching them flip-flop\/deal with all of this stuff 9 seasons later. We may think, from first impression, that Sam is the more reasonable one, the more cool-headed one, and therefore the one more open to “the grey areas” of life. Let’s think things out, let’s not just shoot and ask questions later. But that’s not actually the case, not entirely. Dean is, in many ways,on the side of complexity, nuance, and understanding here, even for Sue Ann. She was desperate<\/em>. Not evil. She may be evil now, but her original intentions were not. People do crazy things when they are desperate. It’s better to try to understand. <\/p>\n The whole damn world could change if we could understand that. <\/p>\n Sue Ann is obviously now using the binding spell to sic the Reaper on people she thinks are immoral. Dean sits in that, thinking about that. He has clearly not been in a Batting Eyelashes Mood for about 24 hours now (which must be a record), but that doesn’t mean his eyelashes don’t cast shadows halfway down his face. <\/p>\n \n \nDean, thinking about Sue Ann, mutters to himself, “God save us from half the people who think they are doing God’s work.”<\/p>\n It’s a strong political point. The writing is subtle enough to handle statements like this. The mood of the episode is so strong it can take<\/i> a lot, unlike, say, the reviled “Bugs”, which is so weak, narratively, that it can’t take<\/i> anything without falling apart. <\/p>\n Once more, unto the Tent. Both Sam and Dean overheard the Reverend invite Layla to come for a private session. They’ve got to find Sue Ann’s witchy headquarters, un-do the spell.<\/p>\n 13th scene<\/big> Dean says, “If she’s not healed tonight, she’s gonna die.”<\/p>\n Dean has a problem with death. I mean, everybody does. But he really does. It seems wrong to him. I suppose if you watched your mother burn up on the ceiling you would see all death as Unfair. I love it when Dean can’t deal with Death. And he flip-flops on that, too, his strong statements about “what is dead should stay dead” completely being erased when Sam is involved. I love it when he is drawn to Tessa the Reaper (all of their scenes together are so phenomenal<\/i>, some of my favorites in the series). He yearns for death, because then he could fucking relax, and he’d be off the hook. He fears death, because who the hell doesn’t. He wants everyone to live Happily Ever After, because he’s Dean Winchester and that’s what his whole life is about. He doesn’t include himself in that scenario, but that doesn’t negate his wish for it for everybody else. He’s just not philosophical at ALL about death. “When it’s your time to go, it’s your time to go.” No. Dean does not believe that. Everyone should live to be old, everyone should be happy, “are we okay? You okay? We okay now?” Dean wants everyone to be OKAY. (I went into that in the “Wendigo” re-cap. His “are we okay now?” thing.) His feelings about death are childish and unfinished, and they cause him so many problems in later seasons that he has destroyed most of his relationships. Being unable to accept death as part of life is maybe his greatest flaw at this point? This is the part of Dean that is the PTSD Dean. The unfinished traumatized Dean. The one who was broken in pieces when he was a child and never given the chance or opportunity to put everything back together for himself. <\/p>\n The situation with Layla is obviously exacerbated by guilt because he got to be healed and also he just fucked up her chance to be healed. <\/p>\n Sam speaks to the moral core of Dean, the older brother who knows what is right, saying, “What’s happening to her is horrible, but what are you gonna do? Let somebody else die to save her?”<\/p>\n And, of course, once we know the end of the episode: Dean is the next target. So in not saving Layla, he has inadvertently saved himself. And in the years to come, he will think of Layla, of that I am sure. He knows he owes her his life. Dean has to be tricked into fighting for himself. He won’t do it on his own. <\/p>\n \n \nA small hearty group has gathered in the tent. Dean and Sam move off into the shadows at the edge of the field, and Dean uses himself as bait for the cops who threw him out of the tent before, calling out to them, “You gonna put the fear of God into me?” Dean often uses sexual come-ons in such moments, sexually charged language, he can’t help it. He taunts them, and they give chase, Dean racing off through the parking lot, giving Sam a chance to make it to the house undetected. <\/p>\n Dean hides from the cops behind a little RV and is scared to death by the sudden barking of a dog inside. Dean and dogs do not mix. They want to eat him. Well, join the club, dogs. There’s a great moody atmosphere: randomly parked cars and campers, thick mud, mist, darkness, fire coming out of the trash cans. Dean crawls onto the top of the RV and the cops wander around below, wondering where the hell that assclown went. Sam, meanwhile, skulks around like the criminal that he is, looking for signs of \u2026 black magic fakery. Peeking over the edge of the porch, he sees light shining through a little bulkhead. <\/p>\n \n Sam descends into the creepy stone space, seeing all the lit candles, and an altar, covered in candle wax and weird objects and a picture of Dean, taken from the video camera inside the church. The photo has a big red X over his face. <\/p>\n \n Suddenly, Sue Ann is there, speaking to Sam in a droning voice, intense and yet still somehow measured. She is not shrill. She is certain. “The Lord chose me. To reward the just and punish the wicked and your brother is wicked<\/em>.” <\/p>\n Has she SEEN what is going on with Dean in Season 9? She needs to cool her jets until THEN. <\/p>\n Sam tips over the altar, but by then Sue Ann is back outside, locking him into the bulkhead, calling down to Sam almost in a pleading tone. Everything will be all right, the Lord wants this, blah blah blah. I love how she chose to place her voice. Her persona is so ingrained: she is a kindly warm Godly woman, they do not shriek or sneer or yell. She may be feeling all of those things in this desperate moment, and the struggle against her outer persona shows in her voice. <\/p>\n Sam, trapped, easily busts out one of the cellar windows. You can’t keep a Winchester locked up, lady. <\/p>\n Outside, Dean hustles through the mud back towards the tent, and suddenly, the overhead lamps surrounding the parking lot go out, one two three, with the same percussion\/cuts that we saw in the Sue Ann sequence. Roy, inside, has raised his hands to touch Layla, but his energy has changed. He senses something different, he senses a change, an alteration. Dean, still freaked by all those damn lights going out, suddenly sees the Reaper coming towards him through the darkness. The Reaper is threatening, but not like a regular monster is threatening. He is threatening merely because of what he is. <\/p>\n \n \nAs all of this is going on simultaneously, we also see a desperate Sue Anne clutching her cross, standing outside the tent flap, and praying to her black magic Gods. Inside the tent, Roy has laid his hands on Layla’s head. She stands, eyes closed, waiting. <\/p>\n \n \nMeanwhile, outside, the Reaper grabs hold of Dean’s head, echoing the gesture going on inside the tent. Dean, such a fighter, can’t fight the Reaper, and falls to his knees, at the same time that Laila falls to her knees inside the tent. Soul mates in experience and illness. <\/p>\n The Reaper, looking down on Dean, has an intent expression, almost gentle<\/i>, as though he is encouraging Dean, he will be there for him as he transitions. Reapers may be able to be trapped and used for Evil as Sue Ann has done, but they have an important place in the world, they maintain the natural order. <\/p>\n \n \nThis will come to its full fruition in the gorgeous portrayal of Tessa at the start of Season 2. Now THAT is a reaper. Dean may hate that death exists, but it does, and the Reapers take their jobs seriously and there is no morality behind it. People die. Immoral people, moral people. It’s not fair who is “taken”. Fairness has nothing to do with death. People like Sue Ann will never understand that. And, on the flip side, neither will Dean. Dean and Sue Ann are two sides of the same coin. <\/p>\n As Dean goes into his second set of death throes in one damn episode, Sam runs up to Sue Ann, grabs the cross off her neck and smashes it to the ground. The Reaper, with no emotion, it is not connected to emotion, lets go of Dean, and walks away, glancing behind him. Inside the tent, Roy lets go of Layla. Something is not right. Roy does not feel what he normally feels. Roy is troubled. “I don’t understand.” Layla, hoping for something else, looks around her, lost. <\/p>\n Back outside (seriously this episode is giving me whiplash), Sue Ann crouches over her smashed cross, screaming in despair, “My God, what have you done?” <\/p>\n Sam has one of the best lines in the episode, and he says it from his position behind her: “He’s not your<\/i> God.” It’s tremendously vindicating. He sounds furious. Sue Ann looks up and sees the Reaper off in the darkness, waiting for her. And this time, this time only, when facing her, the Reaper has emotion. He smiles. <\/p>\n Reapers don’t like being used. <\/p>\n Inside the tent is gentle confusion, a deflation of energy, both Layla and Roy lost and grasping, while outside the Reaper grabs onto Sue Ann’s head, and she goes blue and collapses into the mud with a horrified look on her face. <\/p>\n The brothers meet back at the car. Dean looks wrecked. <\/p>\n 14th scene<\/big> Small acting observation: The framing is that Dean is in the foreground, the focus on him, and Sam is in the background, standing, and he is in a blur. When Sam asks Dean again what is the matter, he puts his hands on his hips in the background, a slight challenging smile on his face. It’s so real. It’s unconscious. Acting is all about behavior and Sam’s behavior in that moment tells you EVERYTHING. He is intimidated by his brother, and you usually don’t ask Dean things twice. But here’s what I want to say, and this just says something about who both Ackles and Padalecki are as actors:<\/p>\n \n \nThe focus is on Ackles, as I said, and Padalecki is a blur. But Padalecki is acting the shit out of his moment anyway. He’s doing something interesting enough that it would warrant a closeup or his own focus. But he, the actor, doesn’t care. That’s a nice moment he’s having, even without the focus being on him. It is the meaning of generosity and talent. It’s why Supernatural<\/i> sometimes feels like live theatre: there is life in the takes, there is spontaneity. To compare: I have a couple of friends who have done guest spots on Grey’s Anatomy<\/i> and they have said that the set is a nightmare of ego. This is not talking out of school. It’s common knowledge. The majority of the main cast members wait for their individual close-ups to do their A-game work. It’s selfish, in other words. It’s also understandable, since Grey’s Anatomy<\/i> is such a close-up heavy show, it’s like a soap opera in that way. You don’t want to be doing Emmy-award winning work in the background. Save it for your closeup. But you can see how that attitude is also selfish, and creates a selfish atmosphere, which guest actors pick up on. The attitude of the main cast members leave guest stars hanging out to dry, having to act by themselves, essentially. Casts are an organism. Some casts create a true ensemble, others are all in it for themselves. And word gets out. People never have anything bad to say about appearing on ER<\/i>, for example. The cast reaches out to the guest stars, are there to support them during the guest stars closeups, make them feel welcome. Same with Supernatural<\/i>. You never hear horror stories of egos. People like working on that show. People like Padalecki and Ackles. In the commentary track for “Phantom Traveler”, Ackles and Padalecki were watching the teaser, and Ackles said, in almost a sad tone, “We never get to meet these people in the teaser.” He sounded truly sad, and then said something like, “But they always do such a great job.” That’s meaningful. Guest spot people pick UP on that shit. <\/p>\n So it’s a tiny thing, but Padalecki choosing to do this whole big illuminating behavioral thing when the camera isn’t even focused on him, when he is a blur in the background<\/i>, when it is Dean’s closeup, not his, is an example of the generous manner in which both of these guys approach their work.<\/p>\n Dean wants re-assurance that they “did the right thing here”. Sam is like of course we did, but Dean isn’t sure. He feels like shit. <\/p>\n A knock comes at the door. <\/p>\n This small next moment is another example of how the brothers COULD operate if they were halfway normal human beings with normal sibling boundaries. You can count such moments on no more than 10 fingers. Sam, quietly, over the course of their time in Nebraska, has sensed the exchange of energy and yes, love, going on between Dean and Layla. Without having to ask questions, he knows that it is a circle that will need to be closed and Dean, because of his sense of guilt, will not do what he needs to do to close it. So Sam has intervened secretly, like a six-foot-four Bossypants, and has given Layla a call saying, “Dean wants to say goodbye.”<\/p>\n It’s intimacy. A moment passes between the brothers, vulnerable, Sam knowing Dean, Dean shocked at being known. It’s embarrassing, a little bit, for both of them. But there is also a weird relief for Dean that someone is taking care of him<\/i>, not just physically but emotionally. Because he sure as hell wouldn’t have been able to do it. When Layla appears, Dean stands up, and he looks blasted-open at the sight of her. He’s speechless. He cannot hide. He doesn’t even think to try to hide. <\/p>\n \n He asks her, all soft and pliable and shocked, “How’d you know we were here?” <\/p>\n Dean appreciated Layla’s outer beauty for one leering second and then threw that away when other considerations came into play, considerations having to do with her humanity, her kindness as a person, and her illness. This is one of the many many MANY examples of Dean’s dealings with women which make me confused when people casually refer to him as a misogynist. Why? Because he sleeps around? Because he makes “you’re a girlie-man” comments, and associates being a girl with being weak? I get it, it’s rude, but these people need to get out more. These people need to meet some REAL misogynists. The kind that make your skin crawl. The kind that want to implement public policy that curtails women’s involvement. Seriously. A Tough Guy saying “you throw like a girl” is the most soft-core misogynist imaginable, Jesus Christ, and more often than not, if you say, to Tough Guy, when he says, “He throws like a girl,” “Dude, that’s offensive, why is throwing like a girl BAD, besides I can throw a baseball just fine,” he’ll say, “What? It’s offensive? Get the fuck out of here.” And then you tell him why, and he’ll be like, “Oh. That’s totally not how I meant it.” And you say, “Well, now you know. Stop saying it.” And he won’t do it again, except right in your face, to annoy you and make you crazy. I speak from experience, having had that exact conversation, word for word, with my Tough Guy ex-flame, who was so macho that he rolled his cigarette packs up in his T-shirt sleeves as though he was an extra in a Roger Corman biker movie. And he did this un-ironically. He looked\/acted like a freakin’ Thug, and he was the kindest best guy in the world.<\/p>\n So. That is my Dean filter. That guy. It’s where I’m coming from. Misogyny is a real thing. Dean don’t qualify. <\/p>\n Sam, busted on calling Layla, and “assuming” that Dean wants to say goodbye: Padalecki, again, is doing a symphony of awesome behavior at the door, which honestly makes me ache for .. the Road Not Taken for the Winchesters, who they COULD have been to each other. Sam is embarrassed, afraid Dean might be pissed, but also \u2026 he’s enjoying the moment. He can see the look on Dean’s face at the sight of Layla, and he’s a little bit proud that he helped make it happen. He’s happy to give this to Dean because Dean needs it and Dean wouldn’t ask for it. Dean throws Sam a quiet glance over her head. Not annoyed. There’s an inarticulate relieved and yet somewhat scared “thanks” in that look. <\/p>\n \n \nSam excuses himself. Dean is too moved by Layla’s presence to be pissed off at Sam butting in. He is so soft that you wonder how he gets through the day, actually, when he’s like this. <\/p>\n Layla walks by Dean into the room: and watch how he follows her with his eyes. He is so drawn to her, so filled with conflicting feelings. And not one of those feelings has to do with wanting to kiss her. I don’t think that’s present for Dean at all. <\/p>\n She looks up at Dean and says, “I went back to see Roy.” <\/p>\n Dean doesn’t say, “I know” even though he knows what happened. He instinctively gives her space and asks her what happened. It’s her story to tell. Her grief. Her life. Her death. It’s not for him to own. They sit on the bed together. Dean says, “Must be rough. To believe in something so much and have it disappoint you like that.”<\/p>\n These are not just words. He means it. He could be thinking about his Dad too, although Dad has not been a presence at all in “Faith”. It’s just one of those hovering deeper connections that COULD be going on. <\/p>\n \n Layla looks at him, with a growing warm full smile and says, “You want to hear something weird?” <\/p>\n Dean is thinking about something else for a second, and then says, “Hm?” looking over at her. It’s a counterintuitive take. I am sure there was another take where he was already looking at her, already glued in on her, but they chose THIS take. It’s a bit destabilizing. It is suggestive. Dean has to be pulled back into the gentle moment. <\/p>\n She says, “I guess if you’re gonna have faith you can’t just have it when the miracles happen. You have to have it when they don’t.”<\/p>\n Dean, who lacks faith, is stunned by what she has said and also by her, in general. Who is this amazing person? How did she get to be like that? Can he have what she has? <\/p>\n He asks her, “What now?”<\/p>\n She slowly shrugs, almost girlish, and there’s a tragedy in that. But she is not present to the tragedy, not anymore, and she says, “God works in mysterious ways.” That could have been so sappy but the way she plays it – she is clearly referencing them back to their first meeting outside the tent. It’s a callback. She reaches out and touches his forehead. Being touched is a big deal for Dean. His boundaries are always so compromised, he’s never sure if it’s going to be a caress or a slap. He lets her touch him and they sit there like that for a second. (I am very glad they didn’t kiss. What happens here has nothing to do with romance, lust, attraction. It’s soul meeting soul, human meeting human.)<\/p>\n She gets up to leave and there’s a moment where we see the impact of her leaving on Dean – he’s upset. He won’t see her again. She is going to die soon. It’s almost a grasping moment. Just a second. He stops her. <\/p>\n And again, he clears his throat. Compulsive. He knows what he wants to say, and it will be hard to get it out, and he clears his throat, clearing a path for himself. He says, “I’m not much of the praying type \u2026 but \u2026 I’m gonna pray for you.”<\/p>\n There is nothing this actor can’t do. There are 1,000 things going on for him in one tiny moment. It’s a powerhouse. <\/p>\n And she feels his powerhouse nature. She felt it from the beginning. She says, “Well. There’s a miracle right there.”<\/p>\n Honestly, in another show, I might gag. In Supernatural<\/i> you have to wipe me off the floor. <\/p>\n \n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Directed by Allan Kroeker Written by Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker Sera Gamble & Raelle Tucker established themselves early on in Supernatural as a powerhouse writing team, with their script for Episode 3, the beautiful and elegiac “Dead in the … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n
\nAt the hospital, the receptionist says, a bit awkwardly, to Sam, who looks out of his mind with worry, that there isn’t any insurance on file. Sam, matter-of-factly, hands over a card. She looks at it, looks back at Sam. Says, “Okay, Mr \u2026 Berkowitz \u2026”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSam: “Watch me.” <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSo let’s talk about Sam’s choice in “Faith”. His desperation leads him to follow a pretty sketchy lead from one of Dad’s friends, who tells him about a faith healer in Nebraska, who seems like the real deal. The whole crossroads-demon thing is in the future for the brothers, who can’t seem to stop themselves from making deals and trying to sacrifice themselves for the other. Later in the episode, Dean, once he realizes just how bad the situation is, and what the faith healer is actually doing, says to Sam, “You never should have brought me here.”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nI’m gonna get pretty nuts-and-bolts technical here, because the WAY this first faith healer scene is filmed is key to the episode’s eerie dreamy power. We move out of literal film-making, which Supernatural<\/i> has never been really interested in anyway. By literal I mean: establishing shot to medium shot to closeup. That’s the way it goes, that’s the way you get your coverage. Supernatural<\/i> HAS establishing shots, but very often they “bury the lede”. They don’t start out there, they start out in close-up, or in medium shot, so that you can’t tell where you are, you want to peek at the edges of the screen to see more. They hold back on their establishing shots, in other words. This creates a destabilizing effect. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nBack at the hospital, Dean is informed by a baffled and yet friendly doctor that his heart is totally fine and there is no record at all that it was even damaged in the first place. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nDean sits in the living room of the Reverend’s big rambling house that sits right on the edge of the muddy field, tent still erected, parking lot empty. (This scene is another example of how we don’t get a full establishing shot until halfway through the scene. We are left to infer where Dean is, through close-up details, and we can’t see the entirety of the room until the scene is almost over. For the most part, we stay in gigantic closeups of both Dean and the Reverend.) Sue Ann, smiling and warm, pours Dean some iced tea. Dean and the Reverend, sitting side by side, are in the same frame, and the focus shifts from one to the other. Whatever is going down here is mainly between Dean and the Reverend.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSam interviews the attendant at the gym where the other guy had the sudden heart attack. If I’m not mistaken, the entire scene is shot in one take, from the locker room, through a hallway and up the stairway to the pool. Ideally, you don’t notice these things. But they help with the show’s look and feel. They don’t make it easy for themselves, by just doing “coverage” and then doing back and forth closeups. They find ways to make it interesting filmically. The guy who died yesterday was healthy, swam every day. It makes no sense. The guy said “something was after him” but nothing was there. And the clock on the wall stopped at 4:17, at the moment the guy died. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nDean comes out of the Reverend’s house and runs into Layla who is on her way in. It is a grey rainy day (grey and rainy throughout the episode). She is happy to see him, and he is happy to see her, but sadness is in the air. She wants to know how Dean is feeling. He says he’s doing great, but he’s focused on something else, and no longer has the appreciative leer that he had when taking her in in the first scene. Dean let that go. Layla is obviously sick. He knows that now. She is very sick. Something in him, the part that knows what that is like, reaches out to that part in her. What transpires between Layla and Dean is profound, one of the most profound one-off relationships he ever has in the entire series. They cast her beautifully. In another environment, Layla would be someone Dean would want to kiss and roll around with. But he can’t see her that way now, although he is drawn to her. If you didn’t cast her right, you would never get the pay-off of their moving last scene together. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nLayla: “It’s okay.”
\nMother: “No. It’s not okay.”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nBack at the motel room: Sam is on his laptop when Dean returns. It is a dark dank room, with moldy-looking wallpaper and 70s light-fixtures (we don’t get an establishing shot until later, n’est ce pas). Dean is lost in thought but Sam is even more so. All he says to Dean is, “I’m sorry” and you can tell he’s almost near tears. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n2. masterfully executed – you never lose the urgency, or the drive<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nMotel room decor alert. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nNext up, is a stunner of a shot of the muddy field, the lowering sky, the Impala spraying mud as it barrels forward, and a makeshift old lightbulb sign, straight out of a carnival. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nWhile Sam is inside the house, Dean hovers inside the tent, floating around in the outer aisle, as people gather. Things are about to get started and he doesn’t know what to do. Dean’s phone rings, and he answers it – Sam fills him in, but says, mainly, “You can’t let Roy heal anyone, all right?” He’s out in the parking lot looking for the protestor, who is obviously the next target. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nA very important scene, but before we begin, another glimpse of the glorious ridiculous motel room. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\n“Desperate,” Dean corrects. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nIt’s nighttime, and lights gleam from out of the tent flap doors. The muddy parking lot is almost empty, and Dean pulls up next to Layla’s car. It’s raining lightly, speckling the windows of the Impala. There’s something going on with Dean, a hesitation, a regret, and he doesn’t get out of the car right away. Sam hesitates, looking at his brother, and Dean finally says, “If Roy had picked Layla instead of me, she’d be healed right now.” Sam tries to counsel Dean out of that. How could he know? Please don’t think like that. Etc. Dude, you need to gear up in regards to your brother’s self-loathing and get ready for more of these arguments. We’ve got 9 seasons more of it.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nBack at the cheese ball motel room, Sam is packing up, and Dean is sitting on the bed, silent, distracted. Sam, the caretaker, as he has been this whole episode, for good and ill, asks Dean what it is. It’s not easy to ask Dean what’s the matter. But Sam does anyway. Dean doesn’t quite respond. So Sam asks again. <\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n