This strange
combination of noir and mob story kind of comes together to form… well… a
rather pointless mess with some added theology on top which just… doesn’t
really work in the canon of the show.
We open with someone
deciding to steal a saint’s skull from a nunnery in Malta - and smack a nun at
the same time.
Over to the
Winchesters who are grappling with their portal spell - they need Lucifer’s
grace (only don’t know where he is), fruit from the tree of life (Castiel is in
Syria looking for that) and the blood of the most holy man. Which is kind of
vague, as Dean points out. They hit on needing a saint, which opens the big
dark internet realm of the holy relic black market. Apparently Sam is able to
discern who is genuine and who isn’t somehow. Personally I would have thought
Castiel would be the one to actually discern if there’s any actual holiness
going on. They’re looking for the blood of a saint. Which is rather a problem
because saints are kind of a posthumous title and long dead corpses tend not to
have a lot of blood
They travel to find a
dealer, Margaret Astor, who says she knows someone who happens to have a stock
of saint’s blood. And she’s happy to point them in the right direction with
lots of flirting between her and Sam and lots of eye rolling from Dean
They go to see the
next terrible person in the chain who is very posh, very rich and
apparently does have saint blood. Since Sam and Dean blatantly do not have the
small fortune he would charge for it, instead he offers chicanery - them to go
steal that skull we saw in the opening credits - which has been stolen by a mob
boss, Santino Scarpatti.
Sam is really unhappy
with this: he doesn’t want to become a thief. While Dean kind of shrugs it off.
You do what you have to do - in an imperfect world you can’t stick to
impossible standards when you have important goals.
Except when they
manage to track down the thief they find that he’s already been murdered. And
there’s a very obviously fake cop who tries to frame them for the death.
Handcuffs don’t hold them for long though because maybe the Winchesters have
been kidnapped and captured so many times by now they should be more skilled
than Houdini.
Now things just get
more convoluted because we’re going full on noir here. The mob boss who is just
made up of rather dull shallow tropes, drags them into a meeting so he can
intimidate them (which doesn’t work - which makes sense. Dean has literally
been menaced by Lucifer, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse and God’s not very
happy sister - mob bosses should barely even feature on his threat radar. If
anything this should have been emphasised more). Like posh guy Greenstreet, the
mob boss also wants to hire Sam and Dean to find the skull
And at this point I
don’t even know why so many people really want an old skull. More, I have no
idea why all these fabulously wealthy people have decided to hire complete
strangers for illegal activities (and they could be undercover cops for all
they know). I mean doesn’t a mob boss have contacts for this kind of thing?
None of them have even the slightest indication that the Winchesters are
competent for these tasks.
Anyway there’s some
inept investigation because this very much ISN’T what the Winchesters do. They
do find a piece of paper but then Sam is knocked out and has it stolen (Dean
duly mocks his princess hair and makes a snipe at the sheer number of times
they’ve been knocked unconscious. They must be in severe brain damage territory
by now). But the guy who knocked him out is found unconscious because someone
else has knocked him out. He’s Father Callieri who has come to get his church’s
skull back. He’s decided that he can’t trust the police to handle it because
it’s way beyond them so instead he’s going to send an unarmed priest to travel
to the US with a big case full of money
Reasoned decision
making is not strong with this man.
He’s planning to buy
the skull back from the thief and then spends a lot of time explaining how
important and meaningful this bone is to Sam and Dean. He also has some
powerful moral messages about faith (which is dubious given Sam and Dean have
literally met god. And called him out) and how good people need to work to make
the world a better place and just accepting that the world is terrible is just
lazy and used as an excuse for both inactivity AND to excuse one’s own bad
behaviour. Which isn’t a bad message albeit perhaps somewhat idealistic.
It also makes Sam
even more guilty about stealing it and he decides that rescuing his mother and
Jake now needs to be put on hold in favour of finding an old bone for an inept
priest. Because it matters - to prove this he asks what Dean would do if
someone stole his Impala.
Murder everyone. Of
course.
After a dubious feat
of memory from the priest, they manage to track down the skull. Which has been
stolen by the fake cop who is actually working for Margaret Astor and… yeah
this is supposed to be a Noir twist. Basically everyone shows up with money, there’s
crossing and double crossing and a big fire fight and Dean takes out a load of
guards because, y’know, he’s fought a whole lot of vampires et al so goons
aren’t much of a muchness. For some bizarre reason we put the combat in the
background so we can focus on Callieri’s prayer… and why? Because he gets shot
but it turns out only to be a graze? Are we supposed to believe in a miracle?
Because we know Chuck doesn’t do miracles. We know the angels are really not
listening to prayers - you can’t play this “hey maybe someone is listening”
because we know they’re not. We even get a nod to this from Dean who isn’t that
impressed by Callieri talking about putting his faith in god.
So, everyone is dead
or arrested and it turns out no-one has any saint blood. But hey, the priest
gets his skull. But luckily it turns out the pope once called Father Callieri a
most holy man so he totally counts. Yeah they have their blood sample.
And some debating and
almost despair from Sam about how they wish they could make things better - how
they can get rid of all the monsters and not just bounce from apocalypse to
apocalypse.
Ok on holiness… i
think this is something Supernatural kind of has to address at some point.
Given what we’ve seen with Chuck et all, even some admission that actual
holiness is a whole lot of nonsense or just magic? I mean, Chuck’s and angels’
indifference is somewhat canon in Supernatural so what actually makes
something holy in this world? What makes the Pope an authority on who is The
Most Holy man, remembering that we’re actually talking about some mystical
quality to activate a spell, not just someone’s opinion. We see this with holy
water as well - why does it work? Given the actual holy forces we see generally
seem to be pretty indifferent to holy people, holy acts etc etc?
I think the long term
canon of this is something that needs to be addressed. And this all feels kind
of weird when there’s Father Callieri praying for intervention - when Sam and
Dean are clearly aware that it’s not going to work - to have him talk about
faith and goodness to them when they’ve literally spoken to a rather a
depressed god and have not only met pretty much every archangel, but killed a
large number of angels. It feels surreal to have a man be all holy and faithful
when he is pretty much demonstrably wrong on the holy side; if not on the
actual ethical and hopeful side.
I do actually like
the conflict of Dean’s view and Father Callieri’s view is also interesting
though, again, it kind of feels like they haven’t gone deeper on this. Father
Callieri preaches that the world being imperfect doesn’t absolve good people of
the need to work to try and make it better and further adds that an imperfect
world is no excuse to absolve your own misdeeds. But Dean’s view isn’t in
direct opposition to this and though the show seems to present Callieri’s words
as somewhat superseding Dean’s. Dean acts, Dean is the good person working to
try and make it better - but the imperfect world means that he doesn’t feel
like he can stick to Callier’s rather idealistic standards and he’s definitely
close. Can we say that Dean’s relative indifference to, what he rightly labels
a hunk of bone, compared to actually having the real tools they have need to
make a real different and save the world is a bad or dark act on his part?
Especially since he’s much closer to the realities of the front line than
Callieri?
Oh and do we contrast
the “we can’t let an imperfect world drive us to do bad things” with the fact
Callieri did knock Sam unconscious? His virtue stands until it becomes useful
to discard them
Especially when we
consider that Winchester brothers have done considerable work to save the world
- with the dystopian shadow world being a perfect example of what the world
would be without them. Yes it’s bleak because, as Sam points out, they’re
fighting tooth and nail just to keep things the same and not actually making
things “better”; but it is making a difference. It’s only that stopping things
getting worse doesn’t actually demonstrably shows things getting better
