#arrrrgh. I feel like I'm overthinking it but also it will. not. leave me alone.

[classasurreptitiouslurker]

There will come a tempest, and darkness, and great storms. And the dead will leave their graves and walk the earth once more. And there will be great lamentations... Every day it's getting closer.

Gabriel's amnesia is probably one of the things that has most consistently bugged me since the season came out, very nearly on par with the continuity/time oddities. I'll likely have more to say about it still in the future - because hardly anything about it sits right with me - but for now I'd like to just point out one of the first things that stood out to me: namely, the moment just after the one above. Jim snaps out of his strange, unexplained, ominous prophetic (?) trance and the first thing he does is ask, "Who am I? What happened to me?"

The latter question is at least a somewhat reasonable thing to ask in the confusion of the moment: he is, after all, either missing time, if the trance suppressed his consciousness, or he's just been present when a foreign force took over his body and forced statements from him that made very little sense. The former always struck me as a little... odd. It's like, for a moment, his memory is completely gone again, like it was when he first turned up at the bookshop. He doesn't seem so badly confused that I'd expect him to have forgotten who he is.

So did the trance reset his memory somehow? Was there some weird bleedthrough with his old memories as Gabriel? Neither of those things, nor any other option I've been able to come up with, tracks with how his memory loss supposedly works. Because - storytime! - when I first watched S2, I did not, at all, understand how Gabriel's amnesia worked. So I went digging on Tumblr, found that there was a generally accepted explanation, went huh, ok, and went back to rewatching, only to realise that yeah, no, it still doesn't make sense to me. So at some point, once I had adequately recovered from first the Final Fifteen and then from Aziraphale and Crowley in general, I figured maybe I ought to pay Jimbriel some proper attention. Miiiight help with the whole making sense bit, you know? Nope! I just ended up with even more question marks floating over my head. Did Gabriel's memory loss really work the way it appears to have done, and if not, then what actually happened?