SPN 5x11 - Sam, Interrupted

[ivyfic]

I just had an epiphany about Supernatural this season. I’ve had quite a bit of antipathy towards it lately. For example, I didn’t watch the last December episode until last night, in literally the 45 minutes before the new episode. The only thing that got me to watch it was the thought that if I didn’t catch up then, and watch the new episode as it aired, I would never catch up.

Partly I think it is the rage I felt over the fan convention episode.

Partly it’s the amount of crack and meta that’s been going on. I mean, I love crack in fanfic, but it’s not really why I watch the show. I don’t mind something with a little bit of off-the-beaten path-ness about it, like “Ghostfacers,” but that episode still had a good old-fashioned ghost story at its core. You start throwing in too many eps like “Changing Channels” and I start losing interest. Fun, but not what what I’m here for.

Partly it’s the death of the Harvelles, which I’d been spoiled for, and made me really not eager to watch that episode. A) I liked those characters. B) Let’s take the most kick-ass females in the franchise and blow them up! I’m sure this was explored in meta at the time, but I’m still processing. I thought it was a great, heroic death for the Harvelles. They got their full due. But I was left with these feeling of, you know? I don’t buy that Sam and Dean are that worth it. I don’t think it is that important that they be the ones to survive. Which is an odd thing to feel about my main characters, but there you go.

Partly it’s that my fannish attention span is shorter than the run-time of most popular shows. I can be really obsessed with something for only about a year or two, which is why I gravitate towards closed canons, cause I can binge catching up on all the old episodes, then binge on the old fic, then move on. Supernatural, the height of my obsession was season two, so it’s been quite some time now. I’ve written and read a lot of meta, I’ve written a lot of fic (for me), and read probably thousands of Supernatural stories. Which means I feel like I know these characters pretty damn well. I don’t need to explore Dean’s psyche anymore. I’ve plumbed all those depths.

Which leads, I think, to the real problem. This season, Sam and Dean have been static. They really have not changed at all. In the early seasons, there was change. There was Sam learning to accept hunting, and then to accept how important his brother is to him. There was Dean learning to stand on his own. Even last season, there was tension from Sam and Dean learning to deal with each other after how much they had changed.

But this season? Yes, I like the overall mytharc. Yes, the MOTW eps have been fine. I don’t think it’s jumped the shark. But Sam and Dean are exactly the same as they’ve been. So when I get an ep where they’re in a mental hospital, which gives them a chance to vocalize all of their internal psychological drama, sure it’s nice. But it’s not new. I already knew Dean felt the weight of the world. I already knew they were “dangerously codependent.” For goodness sake, it’s become a cliché that they have a tear-ridden heart-to-heart at the end of every episode. They don’t need story construct like this to know this stuff—they’ve told us all of this already. This isn’t like “Asylum” in season one where you are, for the first time, hearing what’s going on in their heads.

So it’s nice, but it’s not new. And the way they’ve set up the mytharc, with the apocalypse, their own emotional drama is so overshadowed by the apocalypse that they are, really, reduced to soldiers and pawns in a greater fight. Their feelings about it don’t particularly matter any more. It used to be a show with a really meaty drama about a realistically dysfunctional family at its core. Now it is a show about the end of the world, with a family drama that is exaggerated to such extremes it is unrelatable.

Eh. So that’s where I am with Supernatural. I will continue to watch until such time as the writing gets so bad I can’t tolerate it any more, but I think the bloom is off the rose.

Comments

[dotfic.livejournal.com]

I agree with about 80 percent of this. My squee broke (yes, 509 and 510, I'm looking at you) and this new one wasn't strong enough to restore it. There were things I liked, Sam and Dean connecting, sort of, but then also it felt repetetive and the partnership is backsliding, not growing. It's not hitting my relationship buttons in the good ways. It's making me sad.

Probably without the gender issues, I'd be more okay and might be at squee.

I don't feel like the show ever stopped its focus on SamnDean. The apocalypse is too unwieldly and I'd like it to be over, but I like the way the god-family's been used as a distorted echo of the Winchesters. Sam and Dean are not intended to be a one to one correlation to Lucifer and Michael, but there are echoes and heaven is trying to shove them into those slots while Sam and Dean refuse. I like that.

But overall, I'm at yeah, sigh, whatever. (And this is me, here. When have I ever been nonflaily over spn? It's disconcerting).

I'm going to keep watching and stick with the fanfic but not giving it much energy otherwise.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

They have been doing a good job of paralleling the heavenly story with the Winchesters. But there was a moment in this ep where Sam was like, I'm fine, a little depressed, but it's the apocalypse. And that was the moment where I was like, yeah, this is so big, their emotional issues seem pretty petty. And it's the family drama stuff that made me like the show to begin with. But now it's so heightened and on such a grand scale it's completely drowned out the meaty, interpersonal, nuanced stuff that I like.

But yeah. This ep? Was just...yawn. Fine, whatever. But pretty predictable, and we've heard all this before. This wasn't like when we saw Dean's djinn-created world, or heard him call his father an obsessed bastard, or watched same fall apart on the groundhog day ep. This was just a statement of the emotional state we all know they've been in for awhile. Nothing new. Just more of the same. And that's what I'm getting to about the staticness of the characters.

I think it's a problem with most tv franchises--that the tension and change that drives the show at the beginning eventually gets resolved, and then you're just running through episodic plots with no underlying arc. Mulder learns the truth. Rodney gets used to heroic acts. Daniel accepts the military part of his job and being on the team. And once that happens, it's kind of like the elastic getting shot on a pair of shorts.

Here we no longer have any doubt that Sam and Dean care about each other and will stick together. Both of them have stopped shutting each other out of things--Sam doesn't have a big secret anymore, and Dean is only giving lip service to trying to keep Sam safely out of the game. Dean has, if not dealt with his daddy issues, reached a point of functional acceptance about them. Sam isn't looking for a normal life anymore. So what are we left with? They have to save the world. Okay, fine, that's a plot, but it's not as compelling, at least not to me.

[dotfic.livejournal.com]

I'll take it you aren't eager for a S6 then? *G*

I get what you're saying and 5 seasons is a good, long healthy run, so maybe some of this is natural fatigue on my part, not necessarily oh, the show doesn't work any more. It doesn't matter; what matters to me is my responses to it and I'm not excited about it right now, although I think I'm probably not done being excited about it.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to be upset if it's renewed, but I may wait for it on Netflix, as I do most shows I follow.

I've been in SPN fandom since season 2. That's a really long time for me to be in a single fandom. So I think it's partly that, but partly the tendency of interpersonal tension and characters changing to disappate over a show's run.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Also, honestly, my squee broke last season with the episode with the brother. That was the one step too far, the too much to put on their shoulders, that I couldn't deal with. And once I knew they hurt them (and me) that badly, and that irrevocably, it just made me nervous about every upcoming episode. Now that I know they'll do that, all bets are off, and the safety I felt from it being an episodic show is gone.

There's a reason I don't watch a lot of movies, particularly horro, and that I ran from 24--I like knowing the rug's not going to be jerked out from under me. And that safety net is gone in SPN, which makes continuing to watch it more of a dedication to the fandom than a squeeful event.

[dotfic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, see, I think a lot of what the show is doing is good, it's interesting or powerful. But it is getting too depressing, too melancholy. I don't feel squee, I feel too sad for them. Which is a testament to how well constructed these characters are. But I think it is a flaw in the show that they're leaning too heavily on getting the drama out of making Sam and Dean as miserable as possible. It's getting overdone and earlier this season I thought they were headed to climbing up out of the trench but it feels like everything's dragging them back down.

The thought of not writing spn fic, and not finding out what happens to Sam and Dean and Castiel canonically, also depresses me, though. So I'm at a point where it's, watch the canon to stay current but not with much joy, and I'll be taking refuge more and more in the fic. Fic can fix things or offer moments of grace the canon refuses to give us, or just plain can give the characters some happy.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

And see, most of the fic I read, if it's SPN and not RPS, is generic mid-season two-ish type fic. I haven't been reading stuff tied closely to canon for years. So the fic satisfies my desire just to be around the characters. While the show feels more like being beaten around the head.

Also, I tolerate a lot more angst in fic than in canon. I'll read a fic where absolutely horrible things happen to the characters, because I know in the next fic, it won't have happened. But when it's in canon, you have to deal with this level of "they are permenantly fucked up and will probably not live, let alone ever be okay." Which is not so much fun.

[dotfic.livejournal.com]

the fic satisfies my desire just to be around the characters. While the show feels more like being beaten around the head.

That's spot-on for me.

S4 I felt energized by the power of the story and felt tuned in with the writer's intentions towards Sam and Dean and my heart was in my throat almost every week. So it was brutal and melancholy, but kept hitting the sweet spot and I wrote a lot of ep codas.

Not this year; I find I can't write current mythology fanfic. Even my Dean/Castiel is set in a futurefic AU, or these little pockets of time when they are deliberately taking some down time. Last season I had worries any time I wrote a mytharc thing, of getting Jossed, but as I said, I felt very tuned into things last season and this season it feels murkier and I can't get a hold of it.

Not that I'm not curious where canon is headed, but it's not my id fanbrain happy zone.

I'm less tolerant of angst in fic, but for the same reasons as you said, because when canon is so miserable to them, I don't want fic laying it on thickly. I need the moments of grace.

It's made me lose my taste for h/c fic. The more they bleed in fic, the faster I hit the back button.