There is a large group of people in this country who believe that only "prophecies" originating from their own religion are the valid. This episode is a "frank" conversation about why this is not true.
There have been prophecies from much more ancient religions than the ones based in Rome and Jerusalem. Prophecies are never to be interpreted like a newspaper, because they are not telling us events in plain English or Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or whatever language they were written in. When you take into consideration the Hebrews of 2100 years ago and how wrong they got their own prophecies regarding their own "Meschiach", you can apply the same factor of error to anybody trying to interpret the book of Revelation today. Or any of those other prophecies spouted out by Jesus in those red letter editions of the Bible. Or Islamic prophecies. Or even prophecies written by Nostradamus, or Native American prophecies. There are prophecies in every culture.
In most cases the prophecy was fulfilled, but only in context of the actual text of the Bible, when you leave the context of the Bible and enter into the real world, then the prophecies do not appear to line up as perfectly as we thought they did. Particularly when the Bible translations that we have are mostly based upon Greek interpretations, Greek was not spoken by the people living in biblical times. They spoke Aramaic and they wrote in Aramaic. And they wrote on whatever scraps of papyrus they could find. So far, the best collection of prophetic papyrus scraps has been the Dead Sea scrolls, but all that they can do for us is to confirm that the Greek interpretations of the Aramaic are consistent, but only within themselves.
So we really don't know what "St. John the Divine" wrote when he wrote his book of revelation. The words were transferred to Greek, and when you change words from one language to another, you might as well throw the actual original intended meaning out of the nearest airlock, to quote a phrase from Star Trek deep space nine. So when it comes to certain prophecies, all we can do is try to guess the original intent and then go from there.
And so we come to the Native American prophecies of this episode. This is a wonderfully written episode but we have to understand that this is fiction, it is a story based upon Native American beliefs and characters but it is not completely accurate within that venue.
Character actress Amy Steel Who was most notably Ginny in Friday the 13th part 2 portrays Dr. Liz Michaels, who has made a startling archaeological discovery in a New York City construction site. Unfortunately she also discovers a murder...
At the same time there is a diverse group of Native American construction workers who have Floyd 'Red Crow' Westerman (From X-Files "Anasazi") in tow, and they have discovered a prophecy that also directly relates to this archaeological discovery, and murder...
And so, they act.
We have Floyd Red Crow's wonderful voice dictating portions of this prophecy to us as this episode unfolds, he also appears in a dive bar saloon where Frank has to visit in order to interact with the Native Americans, who are playing craps. And he gets to roll an eight "the hard way".
This episode does a great job of convincing us that it takes place in New York City, we are given many establishing shots of life and streets in NYC and it blends in magnificently with the footage from Vancouver. This was also done in the first season episode "Maranatha". The coroner in this episode is wonderful and she is listening to the song "Hell" by the Squirrel Nut Zippers... Who I used to get mixed up with Buster Poindexter all the time.
But mainly what happens in this episode is that Frank discovers the Native Americans prophecy by seeing it with his special vision, and he gains a special understanding of it which had eluded the Native Americans.
Frank makes the connection to the archaeological find and the murder and the reasons why behind both. And there actually is a series of events happening here, but the Native Americans think it means something that it does not mean.
In the end, watch for everything from the prophecy actually taking place... but as with all prophecy, it never happens in the way that you think it is going to happen.
We can't just dictate how prophecy is going to unfold, prophecy is its own entity, it has a life of its own. As our staple of Native American guest stars discovered for themselves in this episode. But despite any of the darker threads in this episode, it is remarkably uplifting.
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