Bardic’s Descant: 6:15 – The French Mistake: We Matter To That World
Commentary and Meta Analysis
While this episode played mostly for lovely laughs, giving us wonderfully amusing alternate-universe take-offs on the real behind-the-scenes world of Supernatural as a television series in active production, it also conveyed some steps forward on a major plot for the season and served a very real – albeit inadvertent, from Balthazar’s and Castiel’s perspectives – psychological purpose for the Winchester brothers. In this discussion, I look at Heaven’s civil war and Balthazar’s use of the alternate dimension, and at the brothers’ experience in an alternate universe reinforcing the importance of Sam and Dean in their own world.
Raphael Is After Us All
When Balthazar showed up at Bobby’s, he provided the first information we’ve had on the angelic civil war since Castiel reluctantly admitted he was losing in Caged Heat. We’ve gotten very little information on what’s been going on in Heaven all season. Castiel gave us the bald outline in The Third Man, looked distracted and then simply vanished in response to an awareness of having to leave in Family Matters, and confessed problems without solutions in Caged Heat. I’ll admit to sharing Dean’s dissatisfaction with how little we know about what’s going on in Heaven, despite the importance of the stakes to human life on Earth. Castiel warned all the way back in The Third Man that Raphael’s traditionalist, fundamentalist goal was to put the apocalypse back on track with extremely deleterious consequences for human life on Earth, but that’s pretty much all we’ve learned all season. Even with regard to that, all Castiel volunteered was there was nothing the brothers could do to help him in his fight.
This time, we learned from Balthazar that Raphael, after losing his human vessel in The Third Man to Balthazar wielding the same salt crystal weapon that did for Lot’s wife in the biblical tale of Sodom, had been consolidating his power base in Heaven, with great success. According to Balthazar, Castiel was in hiding, deeply undercover. Deprived of the ability to strike directly against Castiel, Raphael had sent assassins after everyone who had helped Castiel along the way, including both the Winchesters and Balthazar himself, hoping to draw Castiel out into the open. Escaping one assassination attempt, Balthazar arrived on the Winchesters’ doorstep – well, on Bobby Singer’s doorstep – with Virgil in hot pursuit and a plan to use the Winchesters as decoys to deflect the immediate heat and to keep Raphael and his attack dog Virgil otherwise occupied while Castiel and Balthazar reclaimed the weapons Balthazar had stolen from Heaven. After all, as Castiel said in The Third Man, Whoever has the weapons wins the war.
I suspect Balthazar’s choice of alternate world was very deliberate, and had less to do with the discomfiture of the Winchesters – although that clearly appealed to his sense of humor and pique – than with the intrinsically magic-less nature of the target world. As Sam learned, nothing about that world was supernatural or magical in any way: none of the monsters they’d fought were real there; none of the events of the apocalypse from the brothers’ world – such as the earthquakes reported during Swan Song after Lucifer took Sam – had happened anywhere but in the fiction of the show; magic didn’t work, as demonstrated by the magical spell to cross between worlds failing to take them from the inside out; and even a transplanted angel had no power within that world beyond his muscles and physical weapons. Inside that alternate world, nothing supernatural existed at all. I would suspect that made it difficult for Raphael to zero in on it even from the outside to locate and pursue the Winchesters. Clearly, angels could open doorways into that plane from outside of it – both Balthazar and Raphael did just that to send agents through the gate, and Raphael later managed to open a gate to pull Virgil out, although he – she – got the brothers instead – but they couldn’t have done anything more than a human had they been on the inside. Virgil demonstrated that graphically when he tried to attack Dean with angelic force, only to discover himself impotent. I think Balthazar was counting on that aspect of the world to buy the time he and Castiel needed to secure the weapons, or at least to put themselves into bluffing position with the ability to claim having the weapons.
Seeing this alternate world – one clearly neither ours nor the brothers’ – immediately made me think about the scene in the beautiful room in Lucifer Rising when Zachariah said this wasn’t the first world where the angels had presided over a “planetary enema,” and the brilliant moment when we saw Zachariah reflected in a seeming infinity of mirrors suggesting an infinity of worlds or dimensions parallel to our own. I think we saw a very specific one here, one in which the rules were more like our world than the brothers’, where science rules and magic is fiction, but … not quite. I loved that the “fiction” in that world matched the reality in the world of the Winchester brothers, down to the lines in the shooting script actually describing what was happening with Castiel in Heaven, which in turn matched their fiction in our world.
I have to wonder how much of all those worlds is an objective reality, and how much might be shaped by the thought of whoever creates it or opens a gate into it. The circumstances in Supernatural‘s bizarro world tracked the brothers’ reality far too well to have been random, which argues to me that Balthazar either selected a real parallel world with knowledge of it and how it paralleled his reality, or he was able to make it real – or make it seem real – by his own efforts. That makes me wonder whether alternate world knowledge or an actual ability to manipulate reality was behind the effects produced by Trickster Gabriel in Tall Tales, Mystery Spot, and Changing Channels when he made things manifest in the brothers’ world. Was Gabriel, like Balthazar and Raphael, using gateways into alternate worlds to bring through what he wanted from some place where it actually existed, was he creating it according to his own rules (which is what Gabriel claimed to be doing), or was he simply making people mentally perceive things that weren’t there, and was the brothers’ entire adventure here really nothing more than their limited, human perception of a battle that actually played out within and between the minds of warring angels? And have the brothers’ various angel-mediated forays across time, from In The Beginning to The End to The Song Remains The Same, been more of the same?
My mind is now sufficiently boggled that I’m going to stop speculating and just sit back to enjoy the ride. I will hope, however, that it brings us more information soon about what’s happening in the war in Heaven.
What Does It All Mean?
There have been five episodes where one or both of the brothers lived through a different vision of their real world: season two’s What Is And What Should Never Be, when Dean experienced a djinn-induced dream of what his life might have been like if his mother had never died and the Winchester men had never become hunters; season three’s Mystery Spot, when the Trickster Gabriel tried to force Sam to accept and deal with knowing he couldn’t save Dean; season four’s It’s A Terrible Life, when Zachariah threw both brothers into different lives to demonstrate that, even not knowing who they really were, they were born hunters; season five’s The End, when Zachariah sought to compel Dean to cooperate by showing him a horrific, hopeless vision of a future where he continued to refuse; and this season’s The French Mistake, where Balthazar sent the brothers simply to be decoys distracting Raphael and Virgil away from Castiel and Balthazar.
The one thing all of these alternate life experiences had in common was that the affected brothers came back from them with a renewed sense of purpose, although not necessarily the one the situation’s instigator intended.
The djinn in What Is And What Should Never Be had just wanted to keep Dean placid while he slowly died. However, realizing that all the people he, John, and Sam had saved in the real world had died in the dream one because the Winchesters weren’t hunters compelled Dean to find a way out of the dream. The vision didn’t make Dean feel any less trapped by his hunting life or any more certain that his life actually meant something, but Sam tried hard afterward to reassure and persuade him that what they’d given up was worth it.
Trickster Gabriel professed wanting Sam to realize from Mystery Spot that he couldn’t save Dean and had to let him go, but that lesson was lost on him. Instead, Sam’s experience of losing Dean over and over again, and then losing him apparently for good, simply reinforced Sam’s determination to save his brother no matter what, because the life he lived without Dean for the perceived six months of the Trickster’s torment was devoid of any emotions but loss and rage and of any meaning but revenge. The glimpse we and Sam got of mono-focused, robotic hunter Sam back then proved to be a frighteningly accurate portent of things to come in season four, and an eerie foretaste of soulless Sam in the first half of season six.
Zachariah had very mixed results from his two attempts to influence Dean by putting him outside himself to give him a different view of events. I would submit he succeeded brilliantly in his first attempt, and failed abysmally in his second. In It’s A Terrible Life, Zachariah set up a situation intended forcibly to rebuild Dean after his experience in On The Head Of A Pin had left him physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually destroyed. Giving Sam and Dean totally different lives and identities and dropping them into a real haunting took Dean in particular away from the trauma of torturing and being tortured by Alastair and of learning he had broken the first seal, and provided both the brothers with the opportunity to rebuild a partnership temporarily freed of the baggage of their past. In the end, Dean – and separately Sam, although Zachariah hadn’t targeted him – turned away from the false life with the realization there was something else important to him that he had to do. When Dean returned to his real life, it was with the different perspective discovered through the false one that what he did mattered, and he couldn’t give it up and still be himself.
Zachariah’s failure in The End was due to his assumption that the only lesson Dean could possibly learn from that dark vision of the future was that Dean saying yes to Michael was the only way to avert the fate he’d seen. Instead, Dean concluded his then-present-day estrangement from Sam was the more likely proximate cause of disaster, since it had left Sam to struggle against and ultimately face Lucifer alone. The very first thing Dean did upon his return to the present was to reunite with Sam, and that simple act changed everything that followed.
Here in The French Mistake, Balthazar tossed the Winchesters into a magic-less, alternate dimension not to teach them anything, but simply to make them into useful decoys to occupy Raphael and Virgil while he and Castiel attended to business. I would submit Balthazar also thoroughly enjoyed both messing with the brothers and putting them in peril, given his resentment of previous interactions with them and their impact on him, but didn’t have any lessons in mind.
The unintended side effect of Balthazar’s plan, however, was once again to make the brothers see their real lives in a different and more positive light. In the two immediately preceding episodes, both Sam and Dean had confronted the latest worst aspects of their real lives – Sam discovering in Unforgiven just how off the reservation his soulless self had been and then getting a taste of his unremembered Hell, and Dean in Mannequin 3: The Reckoning facing the loss of the relationships he’d built with Lisa and Ben and the knowledge of how he’d hurt them – and both of them were left wondering, in the aftermath of a thoroughly unsatisfactory ghost hunt, whether anything they did or suffered mattered at all. Shown a different world devoid of magic where their lives were totally separate, materially successful, and vapidly meaningless, they chose instead to find a way back to their lives of hardship where they were brothers and mattered. Dean’s speech at the end pretty much said it all: You heard my brother. That’s right. I said brother. ‘Cause you know what, Bob? We’re not actors. We’re hunters. We’re the Winchesters. Always have been, always will be. And where we’re from, people don’t know who we are. But you know what? We matter to that world. In fact, we’ve even saved the son of a bitch once or twice. And yeah, okay, here, maybe there’s some fans who give a crap about this nonsense … But, Bob Singer, if that even is your name, tell me this: what does it all mean?
On the surface, this served exactly the same purpose as every other alternate world scenario the show served up in the past: the brothers’ change of perspective got them to rededicate themselves to the things that truly matter to them – being who and what they are, with all that implies. But in one very important respect, this situation was very different, because for the first time, the brothers experienced it, talked it through, and made that choice together. I think that beautifully and intentionally illustrates the new equality and balance developing in their partnership relationship.
In every other alternate world episode, either only one of the brothers had the full experience, or despite sharing the experience, they made their individual decisions separately, without a common agreement. Dean was alone in What Is And What Should Never Be and The End, and Sam was essentially alone in Mystery Spot since Dean remembered nothing every Tuesday and then died apparently for good on Wednesday, leaving Sam to endure six isolated months. In It’s A Terrible Life, they shared the experience and cooperated in the resolution of the adventure, but their real-world split carried over into the aftermath of the ghost hunt when Dean rebuffed Sam’s proposal that they stick together and keep hunting. While they both separately concluded at the end of Zachariah’s little adventure that they each were meant to be doing something else, something more important with more consequence, and took steps to break with the reality they were perceiving, they didn’t reach that conclusion together.
This time, however, they openly discussed and weighed the advantages of the alternate world – money, fame, Jared’s wife, no Heaven or Hell, no apparent danger, and no need to hunt – against being brothers and having lives that, however brutally hard, mattered in a larger context. With virtually no hesitation, they chose in full agreement brotherhood over independence and mission over peace.
That’s a mutual spiritual recharge I think they both desperately needed, and one that will make them stronger as they go forward from this point. And in that respect, I think this episode was anything but fluff and silliness.
Mary, this review made me so happy as I read it that I want to go watch the show again – for the 6th time! I loved it that much too. It’s definitely up there as one of my all time favourites along with Changing Channels and What Is And What Should Never Be.
I can add nothing more – you said it all and more. Thanks for pointing out the renamed studio to honour Kim Manners. I hadn’t read that. What a lovely honour for Kim.
Thanks for a brilliant review!
Cheers, Rose
Another great review, Mary. I love reading these.
Lovely, Mary. I was of two minds about the episode. I’d been having some difficulty reconciling what I’d perceived as two different shows (the beginning and the end as one, and the middle as another). But your meta really helped to tie it together meaningfully. Thanks very much for your thoughtful analysis and exciting speculations!
Lovely recap.. I was afraid of what this show would be,but am so glad they made it work.. The guys did a great job of ‘not’ being able to act..
Beautiful review!! I totally agree…this is my kind of world and my kind of show 🙂
This ep is definitely one of my favorites! There was so much silliness & fun, but very sincere & serious moments too. I can’t imagine my world without the Winchesters, & all that this show has given me, both in terms of entertainment & in friendship with fellow fans!
Thank you Mary. I love your reviews, especially the behind the scenes information you let us in on. I never cared about that stuff for any other show before.
Loved the episode of course, the crew, the writers (Thank God for Ben Edlund), and the two awesome stars of this show, not to forget Bobby and Misha and all the great guest stars we have seen.
Watching the actors not-acting very badly was a hoot and a holler and I would wish for some outtakes on the next gag reel. 😛
Glad you are here Mary and looking forward to your next review. 🙂 But not to the hateful hiatus. 😥
Perfect. Beautiful. I so agree with everything you’ve written, Mary! I think my favorite part was the attempt at acting. So hilarious and JP with his hand gestures and attempt at dialogue–laugh out loud funny! Also I am so happy to see the partnership relationship the brothers seem to finally have now! Thank you for reviewing!
Mary Wonderful review as usual. I’ve worked on TV and movies here in Toronto. The shots I loved the best were when I got to work on a set as to location. Like you I love anything behind the scenes. When I was on set it was MAGIC. Loved to see how everything worked.One of the best shots was “Kung Fu: The Legend Continues when I was witness to a scene with 3 gunshots and see just how much time is needed to produce a scene (especially with action) so yeah I’m a junkie too. Hilarious episode and grateful to cast and crew for sharing this with us. Have I mentioned I LOVE THIS SHOW!! J and J awesome acting at being god awful actors, too funny & shows just how great they are 😀