SPN 5x11 - Sam, Interrupted
Jan. 22nd, 2010 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI 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.
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.