Lucifer Rising

No real effort to pretend that isn’t what’s going to happen in this episode. It starts in Colchester, Maryland, in the 70s, in a convent where a priest has just arrived to say mass and becomes possessed by Azazel (demons of his level are not bound by the “holy ground/holy symbols” stuff).

My big quibble with this scene is that the nuns just sit there and stare at him.

Nuns are, in theory, supposed to be non violent. But even so, no nuns would just sit there and stare at a priest as he went off on an anti God tangent and then began a Black Mass. Certainly they would’ve tried to do something before he slaughtered one of them on the altar. But there’s no mention in the script of “the nuns tried to fight back” or “the nuns tried to run”. The rules of Roman Catholicism may say that women can’t be priests or hold any position of religious authority over a man- but that doesn’t mean a whole room of nuns will just sit there while a priest blasphemes and desecrates a holy place and then starts murdering them. Nuns are actually pretty well known for holding on like grim death to the areas where they have jurisdiction and not all priests automatically, in a technical sense, get to outrank them. In fact, it’s a running joke that some nuns can be kind of scary. In a hierarchy where women have little power, it is very disconcerting to the men of any rank to have to deal with a woman who does, especially if she only answers to the men who outrank you. Priests have rights and privileges that nuns don’t, such as the right to be a priest, but garden variety parish priests aren’t in charge of nuns either- the Mother Superior of the local convent is the only woman in the parish who has as much power as the priest does. And a lot of men who become priests went to Catholic school, so they remember a time and place where nuns were the final (and scary) authority. It's one priest against a roomful of nuns in this case, even if they realize he's a demon they're not just going to sit there.

Did anyone notice that one nun, the one who talks, looks a lot like young!Mary from “In the Beginning”?

I don’t like the actress they’re using for grownup!Lilith. Too blonde, too tan, too many TEETH, not as convincing as the little girl from “No Rest for the Wicked”.

I couldn’t stand Bobby’s speech to Dean. There’s a good point that one person makes on TwoP. If Dean was a girl, and we’d just seen that scene, would anyone be telling her to take Sam back? Would we, as fans, like the person who said that to her?

I mean, if Dean and Sam are, as so many people insist, a love story, how would you then reinterpret the final scene of “Levee” in that light? Funny how even after discovering that I’m apparently a Sam, I still take Dean’s side in the conflict of this past season. It’s the difference, I think, between understanding why someone did something and agreeing with it.
I’m wondering if Dean even told Bobby everything that happened. He might have just said “Sam lost it, we fought and he ran off” rather than the truth. Because, Dean being Dean, he might feel a sense of shame about having lost the fight. He didn’t just lose, he got his ass kicked and then Sam really went to town. So he might not want to tell the whole story. You know, “Sam and me had a fight, and then I slipped and hit my head on the mirror.”

It’s the only explanation for Bobby’s misunderstanding of the situation. Well, unless we’re meant to see Bobby as that well meaning friend who tells you to go back to a relationship where you were just beaten. He tells Dean to be the bigger man, but Dean’s not exactly going to respond with “But I’m not, he is, literally, that’s the problem.” Bobby seems to think this is just a typical sibling squabble. Perhaps Bobby thought what happened was no worse than Sam rather gently knocking Bobby unconscious out in the barn.
If Dean did tell him the truth, then this is kind of bad writing. If anyone on this show does not need the “family is supposed to make you miserable” lecture, it’s Dean. All his family ever does is make him miserable.

Dean did need to go after Sam, and I’m glad they made up but I did not like Bobby’s speech at all. Except for the part about Dean being a better man than John, because, well, that’s true. Although the theory has been advanced that Dean dreamed that entire conversation…so that it’s not what Bobby would really say but what Dean thinks Bobby would say or what Heaven wanted Dean to hear.

It is very cool that the paintings in the “green room” change during the show. The show is really stepping up their game in the special effects/art direction department- even if they probably blew their entire 2008 budget on that room. Although I have to admit, that room is totally my taste.

There’s a recurring motif of Heaven portrayed as a cold hearted big corporation that uses people and spits them out, which goes along with the general “pro working class” point of view used throughout the show so far. And is, I suppose, fairly timely in a political sense too. “Sandover Bridge and Iron” was actually an illusion created by angels and it was the quintessential “Office Space” style workplace.

This is probably why it seems like they they sometimes wander off into areas that just don’t work as religious messages – and seem to spend a lot of time making sure everyone’s theological pov is considered, it’s because they don’t have a religious or anti religious agenda.
It’s using religious mythology as symbolic of contemporary American economic struggles. Heaven is the big corporation that uses you up and spits you out, only to try and buy out your land to build a mall and although legally you must consent, they’re perfectly willing to wear you down in every way they can think of. The demons are what you become when you can’t hold on to what you already have.