Supernatural Revisited: 6x09 Clap Your Hands if You Believe
This episode has a rating of 8.3 on IMDb and generally seems to be held in high regard by fans. After having watched it twice in the last year, I cannot unfortunately claim to especially like it. This is surprising given Ben Edlund's episodes are usually highly entertaining and this one is a tribute to The X-Files, but the humour in it mostly missed the mark, the fairies were underdeveloped, and the homage to The X-Files was superficial and completely forgotten after about five minutes. Many of the crew members on this show worked on The X-Files, and Kim Manners was a director on both shows, so this was a huge missed opportunity. One of the ladies commenting on Paula's review posited the idea that perhaps Sera Gamble hijacked this episode, as it is thematically all over the place and unlike Edlund's other work on the show. Maybe this is the case, and it would certainly explain the undue focus given to Sam's soullessness, but on the other hand even the best writers have off-days.
So as to get it out of the way first; a lot of the humour in the episode was based on the social taboo of male vulnerability, especially regarding sexual harassment, assault, and violence. This is nothing new for Supernatural, and both I and Paula had flashbacks to 2x15 Tall Tales while watching. If the idea of men being victims is taboo as it seems to be for the majority of humanity, the idea of a man like Dean being 'abducted' and possibly 'probed' or forced to 'service Oberon, the fairy king' is surely a laugh riot.
Forgive me if I am a bit of a spoilsport, but this does sound very much like that rape culture I have been hearing so much about since roughly 2011. The fact Dean is clearly deeply shaken by whatever happened or nearly happened to him is also played for laughs, because haha weak little man bothered by a little 'probing' isn't it funny haha oh and it's even funnier because Dean is big, muscly, and a capable fighter haha how pathetic must he be to let himself get assaulted and for the love of God, somebody kill me please.
I am aware Ben Edlund also has quite a lot of cred among the gay and bi viewership for including us as more than just jokes in his stories, but he could have challenged the mainstream audience a bit more here. Supernatural is not really the kind of show to deal with heavy issues like that in a frank, serious manner. But if this is the case, it probably should not have gone there at all.
Anyway, Dean and Sam investigate disappearances in a town which some believe are caused by aliens due to bright lights and crop circles. Dean ends up abducted, but it turns out that aliens have nothing to do with it. A watchmaker with Parkinson's summoned a leprechaun in order to make a deal: a cure for his disease in exchange for letting the fairie folk 'take the fat of the land'. Said 'fat' turned out to be firstborn sons, hence the disappearances. The episode ends with the fairies sent back to the faerie realm only to be completely forgotten and never mentioned again.
The episode presents the alien fans as dippy weirdos. It is understandable that the general population would roll their eyes at them, but it struck me as odd that Dean and Sam would also write them off so readily. After all, most people would think they are mad for thinking they hunt demons and monsters, and up until 4x01 Lazarus Rising they thought angels were completely made up. It did not feel true to character for them to be so dismissive of the idea of aliens, and certainly not fairies etc who are the Celtic versions of demons and monsters. There is no way in Hell Dean and Sam would be so sceptical of the existence of the faerie realm, though the idea of tiny winged humanoids might seem far-fetched to them.
As such, Sam being so aggressively rude to the fairy lady at the beginning was only there to try making the audience laugh, as well as an attempt to show that Sam without his soul is some variety of autism mixed with a cousin of Tourette's syndrome. This episode drove home to me that likelihood that none of the writers really had any idea what Sam lacking a soul meant for him, as his behaviour in this episode is so markedly different from earlier for no apparent reason. I think that this version of soulless Sam is the best so far as he clearly seems to lack understanding of basic things rather than being a total douchenozzle, but by this point in the show I am heartily sick of Sam Done Come Back Wrong. It does little to generate interest, takes up far too much time in the episode, and is generally incoherent. His soul will be returned to him soon enough, but enduring it until then really makes me wonder how this show was renewed year after year when Dead Boy Detectives only got eight episodes.
Back to fairies, and I am far from the first person to comment on the fact that, in a plot arc where characters are looking for purgatory, nobody comments on the fact that the faerie realm is another dimension which might fit the bill. Before the disneyfication of Celtic myth and folklore, the faerie realm was not a place people wanted to have much dealing with. Its denizens were not necessarily malevolent, but they could be expectionally dangerous and treacherous. Little winged ladies in leaf dresses were only one of the inhabitants of the faerie realm, with many other northern European folklore creatures existing there. There were mischievous 'fairies' such as goblins and hobgoblins, as well as brownies, sprites, pixies, and household elves (whence the house elves in Harry Potter which drew a lot from British / Irish folklore).
The Mammoth Book of Celtic Myths and Legends gives the author's own version of what the 'original' Celtic creation myths might have been based on thorough reading cross-examination, and comparison with other myths. The book is outdated, simplified, and not too reliable, but is a nice introduction all the same. When I read it, I was surprised by how much it reminded me of The Silmarillion (or perhaps how much The Silmarillion reflected Tolkien's knowledge of Celtic and Germanic myths and legends). The sidhe (residents of faerie) were the original inhabitants of Earth, birthed by the river goddess Danu / Anu, (whom the river Danube is named after). They were originally powerful humanoids very much like Tolkien's elves, but long wars with evil forces led to their diminishing and fading away to spirits and little elves in forests, caves, and ponds.
These elves, spirits, and fairies have several collective names, with the sidhe (pronounced 'she') being perhaps the most well-known. The seelie court and unseelie court are two other names, referring to the beings and powers associated with light, warmth, and summer (seelie) and darkness, cold, and winter (unseelie) respectively. These terms are mostly used in reference to the Scottish and Irish versions, while the term used for their Welsh cousins is the 'Tylwyth teg'.
Unfortunatley, there is no satisfactory English equivalent, in part due to the fact that (as Tolkien lamented) English myth and folklore was supplanted by Celtic, Norman, Latin, and Norse.
Something else which readers of The Silmarillion might also appreciate is the deep-running similarities apparent in Tolkien's worldbuilding with Celtic cosmology, regardless of the man in question's distaste for such comparisons. The west is of great importance is the Celtic understanding of the world (or worlds). To the ancient Celtic mind, the west was a land of mystery. To their west lay the Atlantic ocean where the sun set in the evening, and beyond it... nobody in Europe knew.
The Otherworld, known in Gaulish as antumnos and in Welsh as its distant descendant annwn (pronounced annoon), was believed to be somewhere far in the west. If accessible, one must travel westwards over the sea to get there, a journey which would transport the traveller to a different world which was at the same time an underworld. ...which incidentally echoes the Norse idea of Hel's realm being located 'north and down' (rather like Utumno in The Silmarillion, which sounds similar to antumnos... Everything is connected.)
The band Eluveitie has a song about this (and I bought my friend a t-shirt with art inspired by the song) about a journey to the Otherworld. Whgether or not the journey is real, or a metaphor for a personal transformation, or both, is entirely up to the listener.
The modern tale of Tir na n'Ăg is the folklore descendant of antumnos and the Otherworld, a land of eternal youth located far to the west. Early drafts of The Silmarillion also featured an Anglo-Saxon mariner named Eriol accidently making landfall at Tol EressĂŤa, an island which survived to the published 'final' draft. In this version, however, human children travelled to Tol EressĂŤa in their dreams, whence tales of Tir na n'Ăg.
Time to return to Supernatural: This is the mythic background of the faerie folk, and is not the same as the later folklore versions which have been stripped of their mythic context. But it should not be discounted just because the sidhe or ''fairy folk' look small. And Abrahamic mythology is only one mythology, not the mythology. Other systems do not have to map onto it or be subordinate to it, as much as the writers of Supernatural would like them to.
Fairies had their own laws and codes of conduct, one of the most well-known being that accepting food or gifts from the faerie will trap you in their realm and in their service. Escaping Purgatory suggested that what Dean thought was aliens pulling him towards a probing table might have actually been fae of some variety trying to get him to eat and thereby be trapped in their realm.
At one point in the episode, Sam scoffs at the idea of a leprechaun being able to get his soul back where angels failed, at which point I was glad for having nothing else to do during my lunch breaks at secondary school because a little bit of wikipedia at lunch goes a long way. Leprechauns are the folklore descendants of the mythological god Lugh lamhfhada; Lugh of the Long Hand from Irish mythology, i.e. the sun god. Lugh is also the Irish version of Gaulish Lugus, god of light and master of all arts.
All of this is to say of course that if a bored 14 year old can find this out in a lazy lunchtime twenty years ago, the writers had no excuses for not knowing their folklore. But even if leprechauns were not a bastardised version of pre-Christian deities, there is no explanation given as to why they would be less capable than angels,other than because the writers decided so. Conspicuous also is how there is another dimension full of beings as strong as gods who are never mentioned again.
Par for the course for this show, though.
At least the Irish sounded reasonably good in it, though since I am more familiar with Scottish Gaelic, I will leave it to people more familiar with Irish to make a final judgement.
On to The X-Files, Dean losing time after he was abducted is very reminiscent of alien abductions and alien activity in that show. The very first episode features Mulder and Scully losing about 9 minutes after seeing a bright flash of light, and Scully rejects out of hand the claim that they could possibly have 'lost time' because time is a universal invariable.
That claim is perhaps dubious, as quantum physics indicates that time moves differently the faster a thing moves. This is not the place for a lecture on quantum physics, and even if it were I am not the person to give such a lecture (although one piece of advice: I do not recommend Brian Cox's books on the subject. The metaphors he used to try explaining quantum mechanics became so confusing that I really would have preferred to just wrestle with the actual mathematics and science). But suffice it to say a person travelling at even a significant fraction of the speed of light will experience the flow of time quite differently than the rest of us, and a person who crosses the event horizon and gets sucked into a black hole will watch the life of the rest of the universe flash by in an instant.
Whatever the case, Dean did indeed seem to lose quite a bit of time, the reasons for which can be many. He might have blanked out whatever happened to him; time could move differently in the fairy realm; or he really was not paying attention. This is also the time when I feel it necessary to raise the point which Paula made: Dean's 'abduction' really is played like (attempted) rape. Losing track of time brings dissociation effortlessly to mind, and he is moreover not doing mentally well at all after his return. Over the course of the episode, his mentis continues to become significantly less compos and he gets paranoid to the point of attacking normal people.
However, it is all played off as a joke and Dean is made the butt of it. This is something I really wanted to touch on in my essay on the pornification of little boys in the Hogwarts Legacy fandom, but decided not to in order to not distract from the point of that which was that people are turning a blind eye to paedophilia because the perpetrators this time happen to be women (and they show no sign of stopping or being stopped).
The following discusses and mentions child sexual abuse and paedophilia, as well as graphic sexual language. Preface Before I start, this i
By humour skirting prejudice, I did not mean that gay jokes etc are themselves prejudiced. In fact, Family Guy's humour has always stood out to me as being anti-prejudiced, with the prejudice itself being the source of ridicule. This of course comes across differently to peopel in various cultures and different stages in life, but at least in Britain among college-aged (for Americans, read 'high school senior age') students, the humour came across mostly as I just described it. Brian's gay cousin, for example, was (probably) intended to be funny because he was such a ridiculous stereotype. That said, when I was in my early twenties I overheard students from my previous college saying how they used to like Family Guy until the humour all became racist, sexist, and homophobic. Somebody clearly totally misunderstood the humour, but who was it?
All in all, a generally alright episode, though since the majority of what I had to say about this was actually about Celtic mythology, it really does continue the trend for series six where there really is not much to say about it. One reason I have been so slow in getting these out since autumn last year is just that: what is there to say? As critical as I was of him, at least under Kripke's guidance the show had a direction and something resembling an identity. An identity taken from Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, and Terry Pratchett, true, but still. Now... I really see why people tapped out of this show, and my current rewatch with some friends has shown me it will be a long time until things get decent again. Jeebus, give me strength.
One final point to make is that this episode provided no closure to any of the plot threads it started. Are the abducted still missing? Is Dean still marked by the Otherworld? And why did the fairies want the first born in the first place?
You can read more of my analyses here:
Series 1
Series 2
Series 3
Series 4
Series 5
Series 6
Sundry
You can read Paula's review here and Demian's here.
P.S. Everybody knows the theme tune to The X-Files, but I think this is the best bit of music from the show...
