#I feel like I could bench press a truck I'm so thrilled by this piece

[chuckwon]

My incomparable friend Deirdre T. (aka @sourtimesmachine on here) has posted an article about The Winchesters that perfectly encapsulates how and why the show is a masterpiece, what its depths highlight about Dean’s story in-narrative and out-of-narrative, and how what is ostensibly an exploration of the past is actually commentary on Supernatural and a path for the future.

Nearly every monster on this show takes its victims to another place— hidden lairs, pocket dimensions, buried spaces inside their own minds. Escape, every time, means the same thing: transformative catharsis centered around truth and the breaking of traumatic cycles. Telling your parent you believe in yourself, letting go of your father’s plan even if making your own is scarier, telling your childhood self that you’re going to fight for them and give them back their choices, confessing your guiltiest secrets and allowing your friends to accept and love you as a whole, giving up false peace for real love. Characters are offered ways to forget, to live free of their guilt, pain, and trauma, but this is never the answer. This isn’t real. They learn instead to let themselves examine the bad, embrace that it is part of them, and use it to inform and strengthen their ability to fight for the good as a more complete and centered person. It is fundamentally a story about healing, being told to us by someone whose own story ended with profound pain. Whose story ended in a trap, never escaping the cycle, never getting to speak or fully embrace his own truth or choice. Never getting to live. Rather than avoiding the narrative burden of Dean’s death and all the circumstances, both in story and out, that led us to it, The Winchesters is breaking it down. It is examining each theme that was regressed by the finale and pointedly reaffirming it. It’s telling us that what happened to Dean was wrong, that there is something to be done about it. It’s, maybe, trying to help us heal too.

I cannot recommend this full article highly enough. Unsurprisingly, Deirdre beautifully summarized a bird's eye view of much of my thoughts on this show. I feel like I want to print out pamphlets of this and hand it out in public!!!! But sharing it on this blog will have to be enough.

No matter what the events of the season one finale hold tomorrow, this show could not have been louder or clearer. Dean Winchester spoke to us for 12 episodes by comprehensively deconstructing every aspect of his ending, condemning it repeatedly and consistently, and showing us that he's doing his best to break free of it. And, through him, the real-world team behind this show conveyed the same in kind.

The Winchesters could not have been more validating and (in my opinion) thrilling at every turn. By design, there is SO MUCH in it to examine and talk about, all within the context of it being Dean's story. It's unbelievably dense in clever ways I don't think any of us could have expected.

(And it must be said that I did not watch this show every week expecting to see Chuck Won propaganda, and yet, EVERY WEEK...)

Anyway. Please read this article.

And if you've avoided watching this show, consider this your sign that you absolutely should watch it.