#literally the title of the episode spells it out in bold letters for you

[paintingformike]

thinking about how you can never have a productive and civil discussion on sttwt about how mike is intentionally associated with brenner in s4 without people holding pitchforks in an outrage and twisting your words to make it seem like you’re trying to call mike an abuser

[bibliophileiz]

I gotta tell you, as a kid, I would have been stoked after learning the title of Supernatural Season 14′s premiere.

Stranger in a Strange Land is, yes, a sci-fi book by Robert A. Heinlein that maybe someday I’ll get around to reading, however. Heinlein’s title references the Book of Exodus. Specifically he references Moses, who says at one point: “I am a stranger in a strange land.” (Exodus 2:22)

(My Archaeology Study Bible, which is a NIV translation, actually translates the line to “alien in a foreign land” but that doesn’t sound as good and obviously hasn’t inspired other works of art and literature like the more well-known translation.)

Anyway, nine-year-old Iz was a huge fan of ancient Egypt and especially the Exodus story. And looking at Supernatural in the context of what recently happened in the show and this quote “stranger in a strange land” actually says some pretty interesting -- and slightly worrying -- stuff about Michael in the upcoming season.

So to put the original quote in context, Moses has fucked up. He has killed an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew slave. Worse, he’s gotten caught, so he has to run away from Egypt, the only home he’s ever known. It should be noted that at this point, he’s already learned he’s a Hebrew. (Movies like The Prince of Egypt or The Ten Commandments always make that a Huge Reveal scene, but there’s nothing in the Bible to suggest one of his moms didn’t just sit him down one day and tell him.)

Moses runs into the desert where he finds these women being harassed by a group of douche bags and he, not being a dick, scares the douche bags off. The women invite him home, and it turns out their father’s a Midianite priest who lets him stay with them. Moses basically moves in and ends up marrying one of the priest’s daughters, a woman named Tzipporah. (Again, my NIV Bible spells it Zipporah, but I learned it as Tzipporah. Idk which is correct, though I guess the most correct would be the version spelled with ancient Hebrew letters.)

Anyway, Tzipporah has a baby, and Moses names him Gershom, which roughly translates to “an alien there.” That’s when he says, “I am a stranger in a strange land.”

Which is an interesting place to say that, quite frankly. He’s already run away from Egypt, but he didn’t say it when he ran away. He doesn’t say it when he finds himself among the Midianites, doesn’t say it when he's invited to dinner or invited to stay permanently, or even when he gets married. He says it when he has a child with a Midianite woman, which is about as strong a root as a refugee can put down in a new land. It’s also a pretty bold statement of identity -- not only are you identifying yourself as being ‘not from around these here parts,’ but you’re placing that identity on your child, who in this case is literally the grandson of a Midianite priest. Midianite priests were basically administrators -- it was his father-in-law who advised Moses in how to split the Israelites into groups to more efficiently govern them after they all left Egypt. This would be like if the daughter of a senator or judge married a refugee and the refugee named their child “Not American.”

If you wanted to get meta, you could interpret it as a larger metaphor for the Israelite people, who by this time have been in bondage in Egypt -- not their ancestral homeland -- for multiple generations by that point. And they are very much “strangers in a strange land” who don’t worship the Egyptian gods and who are separated from Egyptians by The Worst Class Barrier Ever, a.k.a. slavery, similar to African Americans in the antebellum United States. When the Israelites in Egypt have babies, they have to throw said babies into the river by order of the pharaoh. Everything about the way the Egyptians treat them says, “This is not your place, you are not in charge here.” So whenever Israelites have children -- children who they know may never see their ancestral homeland that God promised Abraham, children who they know will spend their lives enslaved by another group of people, children who may not even be allowed to live -- they’re probably thinking roughly the same thing Moses said when he had his child. 

And of course almost anyone reading Exodus knows that Moses will, within a few years, go back to Egypt to lead the Israelites out of slavery and eventually to Israel. The Israelites don’t actually make it to their ancestral homeland until after Moses dies, on account of the Hebrews disobeying God a bunch of times in the desert, so neither Moses nor anyone from his generation ever actually live in the land of Abraham. So there’s a permanent sense of ‘being out-of-place’ to this whole story.

This is a long way of coming to my point about Supernatural, but who would be the character feeling most out-of-place at the beginning of Season 14? It’s Michael.

Michael, who after fucking up and destroying his home universe, finds himself in a totally different, not-yet-destroyed universe with his true vessel and possibly a group of angels who need leading back to the Heaven of days gone by. Remember, in Season 13 we left Heaven in a ... not good state. There are nine angels left, and they can’t hold Heaven together much longer. Michael’s goal is to create Paradise -- on earth, on heaven, I have a feeling he’ll be down for either. 

So Michael comes from a place (AltUniverse) that is not his end goal (Paradise) to an entirely new place (In-universe Earth) with the goal of attaining Paradise, which kind of follows the path Moses took. On the one hand, this is good because it suggests a). Michael will fix Heaven and b). Michael will die before having much to do with it. However, it also suggests some problematic stuff for Dean, who in this metaphor, is Gershom.

If Moses uses the phrase, “stranger in a strange land” when he’s putting down roots, staking his claim in this strange land by having a son with a native woman, then Michael’s staking his claim on earth by ... well, possessing the man who, in the show, represents humanity and using him to try and bring about Paradise on Earth instead of Heaven, where it’s supposed to stay be. Which also makes me think Dean’s not getting un-possessed, at least not this episode, and maybe not in the next. Michael’s putting down some roots, just like Moses did, and it took a while -- and a literal argument with and miracle from God -- to get Moses to do what he was supposed to and go back to Egypt.

Even if Sam and Jack and Cas DO manage to save Dean in the season premiere, I think there will be a lot of lingering effects of the possession throughout the first half of the season. Our Dean’s not going to come out of this unchanged, that’s for sure.

As a side note, I’m not crazy about the anti-refugee stance this suggests, and I only hope we also get a parallel between Michael and Cas, the other out-of-place angel, but one we like. In general, this theory paints angels as bad refugees, and I don’t know how the show is going to satisfy both the ethical need to not paint refugees as bad and the practical in-show need for the angels to gtfo already. (Also, to be fair, I’ve been reading refugee themes in almost every piece of pop culture I’ve consumed in the last two years, so maybe I’m just hyper-sensitized to it by now.) (Also to be fair, they have good refugees with the, you know, ACTUAL human refugees that Michael displaced, so.)

I don’t really tend to write meta, especially not this in-depth, but the ancient-Egypt-loving hot mess of a nine-year-old in me is super excited about the Exodus reference! Also, rereading the first two chapters of Exodus has armed me with a Biblical argument to take to the next anti-immigrant or anti-black bullshit that comes up in conversation with my extended family. God disagrees with you and wants you to be harassed by locusts, Uncle Ed!