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starseneyes · 2 years ago

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Chenford REWIND - Lucy Chen / Tim Bradford - The Rookie - Season 3 Eps 7 & 8

I had a request for Episode 8, but that would mean 7 was living in a bubble without a real anchor. So, I decided to pair these two together for a two-fer.

I also realized that by getting these two written up, I'll have finished an entire season. Huzzah!

SPOILER ALERT: Standard warning applies. Please don't click the "Keep Reading" and expect not to get spoiled. I'm going to spoil these episodes (and everything that came before) to pieces. I do try to write these without foreknowledge, just so you're aware.

Kosher? Cool. Let's dive in.

"True Crime" AKA Grumpy/Sunshine Meme Activated

Lucy and Tim's First Interview

It strikes me that even as Tim is sitting down, he's turned in and looking at Lucy. At this point, Lucy is comfortable to Tim. What they're about to do isn't.

Tim hates this, but he's gonna do it. I don't know if it was a direct order from Grey, or he wanted to make sure it was done right so he was going to do it, damnit, but he's here and he's not happy about it.

Lucy, on the other hand, is thrilled. Her True Crime loving heart is filled to bursting and no doubt she's researched every person who was going to be there so she could fangirl all the more. It's adorable.

Also, these two make for good television. I mean, we already knew that, but the pretend producers happening onto this had me rolling. I bet the True Crime fans call them "Chenford" and perhaps that's the way the term might make it into the show someday.

"I'm sorry, I cut you off. I'm sorry."

She's so damn excited! And they haven't quite gotten their back-and-forth rhythm down that they will later display with gusto. It's close once she calms down, but girlfriend is thrilled right now, and Tim's "this is bullshit" meter is rising with every passing second.

"This is fun."

Tim looks at Lucy like she's grown a second head. And I'm trying to pick myself up from the floor where I've been rolling with laughter.

Look, the Grumpy/Sunshine trope is beloved for a reason, and we always knew Tim and Lucy had it in them. We've seen glimpses of it before. But sitting them down in an interview situation for an hour? This is pure gold!

I wasn't a fan at the time of airing, so I can only imaging how many memes were born out of these moments. It's amazing.

"Holy crap." "What is it?" "It's a, it's a-" "A what?" "A mummy. In a suit." "What?!"

Because, what else would a Mummy under a bed wear, right?

Eric Winter has this really wonderfully exasperated way of saying, "What!?" where you can really hear both the exclamation point and the question mark.

It reminds me of David Tenant during his run on Doctor Who. There was an entire scene in the TARDIS where he said "What!?" several times, and that was pretty much all he had to say on his first meeting of Donna.

It's. So. Funny. To have the ability to make a word funny. David Tenant and Eric Winter share that "What!?" power, and I kinda think Tim would enjoy the reference (see Season 4 to understand why).

"What's that saying? Those who can't do, teach?" *laugh*

We got a Tim laugh!? I mean, he made himself laugh, but it's still so cuuuuute. Like, rough, tough, mean-faced Tim having a chuckle is somehow so endearing. Especially at this phase, when we haven't seen him even smile much.

FAST FORWARD: There will be a day when we see smiley Tim. If you're just watching for the first time and wondering if it's coming... Tim's arc is one of the most complete (thus far) of the show. Stay tuned...

"You were literally my teacher. What are you saying?"

Ah, yes, the one indication that this episode was written in a post-"Amber" world where Lucy is no longer a Rookie.

See, the early days of COVID were a fustercluck for productions. I happen to know some people who worked through it, and there were so many different models of how to cope with it, copious amounts of hand sanitizer, masks, zones, wait periods in hotels for a week after landing, etc.

Now, there are more structured COVID protocols, but in the early days we knew so little about what was happening, and it impacted productions, ended series before they began, and delayed some seasons of shows that have now been permanently shelved.

So, Season 3's episodes aired in a very strange order compared to how it was written. Now, I'm grateful that the writers established Lucy and Tim's new dynamic early in the season so that's it's consistent, even when she's no longer his Rookie. So, I don't feel the need to call-out the air date vs production number, much.

But since the lower third provided for Tim and Lucy identified her as a Rookie, we know that this is supposed to happen during her Rookie year. But this one word lets us know something is amiss, if we're really paying attention.

And, golly, it's a word. I'm not trying to be dramatic, but trying to clarify for anyone who might not be aware of the whole Pandemic-fucked-everyone-over nature of Season 3 that makes this one word out of place.

So, if you ever wondered why Lucy used past tense instead of present tense, there's your answer.

Synchronicity

The moment they learn someone they know has been affected, they turn to one another.

And I love the synchronicity, here. Tim and Lucy have worked together a year, at this point, and they are very in sync with one another.

FAST FORWARD: Watch them undercover in 5x01 with how they sort of shift with one another, as though there's a cosmic pull between them that waves and they move with it. I feel that the evolution of their synchronicity really starts here in Season 3.

"It's LA. It's not the first time I've found a script at a crime scene." "I've only been on the job for a year and I've already found three." "Have either of you ever written one?" "God, no." *silence* "It was for a class."

Because she knows how he feels about screenwriters. If only Caleb had said "screenwriter" as his profession because then Tim would've locked him up right away.

"He was trying to cut her out—from the script, the cult, and the money."

True Crime Kink Activated. Look at how Lucy Chen is scoping out her future husband when he rattles off some Law-and-Order level soundbite. Girlfriend is surprisingly turned on at those words rolling off of his tongue. Oooh, the places that tongue could go.

*ahem* Now, Lucy's not going to jump his bones anytime soon, but there's definitely a moment there where she's finding Tim Bradford a little hotter than usual.

Who would've known the key to Lucy's heart was an oxford comma?

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, right?" "Cool. Way to trivialize female anger." "Hey, I'm not trivializing. All sorts of crimes are motivated by jealous ex-partners." "And how many of those ex-partners are men?" "Most."

See!? See what I mean!? These two are hilarious. We've seen Lucy call Tim on stuff, before, but this format is allowing them to be hilarious with it.

And I love the way he gives her the side-eye before saying "most". It reminds me of the side-eye he will give Grey in a future episode when having to tell a story he'd rather keep private.

"I heard it was Office Chen who broke the case wide open." "I don't know if I'd describe it quite that way." "How would you describe it then?"

Married. This is so married. Because Lucy is giving him the "don't try me" wife face, glaring at her man on-camera for mass consumption.

The fact that he stares right back and doesn't turn to ashes is only because Lucy didn't want to commit murder on-camera. But I love the way Melissa O'Neil is playing Lucy's confidence in this episode.

"Her addiction to social media finally paid off." "That is hurtful."

I bet he's not even on Social Media. That makes it easier for whatever relationships he'll have along the way before he and Lucy finally get it together (I have faith). No need to change your relationship status online when you don't have it listed to begin with.

That said, Lucy's Mom totally has a shadow account that she uses to stalk her daughter to spy and see if she's found a stable man, yet.

The Wrong Video

I love how embarrassed Lucy is, and how Tim tries to get a look at what the heck she played before she gets it onto the right video. He looks actively concerned. Like, "Please don't tell me you're one of those 'dance challenge' girls because I was just starting to respect you."

And, look, no shade from me. But Tim Bradford likes to throw shade, and I'm betting he'd throw some on Lucy if he'd gotten a glimpse of that video.

"Okay, look, the case was definitely weird. But, I mean, come on, all this? This feels so exploitational. The low-hanging fruit of celebrity scandal and murder."

Tim is not wrong. A lot of what is on television relating to celebrity scandal is exploitative. But I love Lucy, here. Melissa O'Neil gets a lot to play with in this episode, and she does not let it go to waste.

She has nailed the withering sigh of your wife sitting beside you as she lets you rant and dig your own grave.

"You should be making serious documentaries about things that really matter." "My last film was about climate injustice in Puerto Rico. It won a BAFTA." "Oh. Well. Alright, then."

And Lucy's withering sigh has transitioned to a knowing look. Like, Tim, you need to talk to your wife about this stuff, more. She has the 411 and will keep you from getting embarrassed.

"You got, you got something in your hair." "What?" "It's kind of-." "Has it been there the whole time?" "Yeah, it's pretty big. Let's get out of here." "I would tell you if you had broccoli in your teeth, man. What the heck?"

Am I the only one who thinks there wasn't really anything there? Because, Tim is so ready to be done with this, and Lucy's high over doing the interview is totally annoying him.

"Bad Blood"

Breaking Up... In A Text

Look, this is totally the coward's way out... but when Lucy's face lit up to see his message, I might've vomited in my mouth a little.

So, seeing him break it off brought out a little cheer. Huzzah! But, oh, no, poor Lucy. But *whispers* huzzah Chenford *whispers*.

I've never had someone break up with me over text... because the only person I've dated since Text Messaging has been widely available is my husband. I remember the first time we saw people texting all the time in England and we couldn't quite get why.

But I did have a boyfriend break up with me over the phone on my 17th birthday... the week of prom... because he was cheating on me because I wouldn't sleep with my first boyfriend 2 months into dating him. Later found out the entire reason we dated was because he had a reputation as a "de-virginator" and none of our friends warned me. I don't keep in touch with most of them anymore.

So, while I'm not quite on Lucy's level of indignation, I understand the frustration to have your boo cut it off in the most cowardly way available.

And putting Tim in the middle!? Emmett, my man, what are you doing!? You already have one half of Chenford wanting to set you on fire. Piss of Tim and he'll happily help her finish the job.

"I can't believe him... breaking up with me by text? What is he, 14? He doesn't have the guts to do it in person?" "Most guys don't."

Tim looks over to Jackson on that beat. I bet Tim would never do that, but he's also only got his own limited experience. Jackson's actually dated other men, so he knows better than Tim, in this case.

"Look, just be happy he didn't ghost you." "Can we get to work now?" "Did Emmett talk to you about this?" "No. Why would he?" "Because you're friends." "We don't talk feelings. We drink and watch sports together." "That's guy for friends." "Straight guy for friends."

I think Lucy doesn't quite yet understand what Tim considers a "friend". Because, at this point Tim does have one solid friend. Angela.

And, yes, we are in the era of Tim and Lucy being friends, but I'd argue it isn't until Season 4 when they are as interwoven into each other's lives (if not moreso) than Tim and Angela.

Also to note... Lucy is holding her phone the entire scene. She quite literally can't let it go.

"Look, you want my advice-"

She does. Look at her open-mouthed, wide-eyed, hoping he'll say something to make this atrocity better. And she did tell him that she values his opinion.

Gosh, I wish I could tell her to lower her expectations right about now.

"Walk it off. Clearly he's the wrong guy for you."

As said by her future husband. What? I couldn't leave that alone! Emmett is definitely the wrong guy for Lucy. But Tim's still learning how to comfort Lucy, and this time wow did our boy get it wrong.

"It's the same advice he would give me if I got hit by a pitch. What is wrong with men?"

Trust me, Lucy. Someday you'll come to appreciate his sports metaphors. And find a new appreciation for baseball!

Yes, I try to write these without foreknowledge, but c'mon! It's right there!

"Have you ever been dumped out of the blue before?" "Let me think. One time my wife left the house in the middle of the night and I didn't see her again for two years."

Yeahhh... Um. I'm not touching that. Because Tim Bradford's being flippant, and it's warranted here.

But (yes, there's a but), Tim doesn't understand all of Lucy's hangups about how she sees herself, yet. He doesn't fully understand the weight of her mother's expectations. And how she has never felt enough.

Like, she can handle romantic rejection. She doesn't like it, but she can handle it. But why wasn't she worth a real breakup? That's what's playing in her head. She need to know the why. Why wasn't she good enough for some basic decency?

"Okay, I get it, in the grand scheme of things, this isn't that bad. I just want to know why. Can you please ask?"

If she can understand it, she can process it. But we all know Tim isn't asking his drinking buddy about his feelings—unless that feeling is about how he feels about the Rams not living up to their potential.

"He must've been a seriously hardcore guy for you to obsess like that. What was his main crime?"

Because Tim would only obsess if it was something important, right? Right!?

"3EYEZ tagged your shop back when you were a Rookie?" "My TO was chasing a suspect. I was guarding a vehicle full of evidence." "A vehicle that was ten feet away from your Shop. It's right in your notes."

I love how Tim's trying to rationalize this away. He has a habit of doing that when he's called out—trying to minimize his own embarrassment by stating facts. (Trust me, he does it at the beginning of 5x01 with Angela)

But, Timmy, Lucy's got the facts in her hands. And you totally dropped the ball.

"I was ordered to keep my eyes on the car. I'd just left the Army where you follow orders to a T."

He thinks this'll get her to back down, but Lucy's long past being afraid of Tim. In fact, she's openly laughing at him. And I low-key love it because this is a form of flirtatious teasing.

Look, these two have a completely unique language. Pranks. Embarrassing photos. And even this harmless giggling.

They're comfortable around each other, and by now they know what's crossing the line with each other. So, it doesn't bother me that Lucy's teasing him, here. In fact, I think it's adorable.

"Oh, man, I can just imagine the relentless teasing. Did they give you a nickname? Please say yes." *yoinks paper* "No."

But your eyes say yes. Wow, now I sound like some of those creepy Christmas songs from the 50's. You know the ones.

"That's why you're so intent on catching this guy. It's personal."

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner! Look, when Tim tried to call in the cavalry when he first saw the tag, I wondered what the hell I was missing. Lucy, apparently, was, too.

Is this tag a symbol of a gang war? Or a killing spree? What terrible, horrible thing is going to happen because of this?

Nada. Nothing. Nil. Except maybe Tim Bradford's ego getting a bit bruised.

"Even if we were to track him down for tagging our Shop, it's a misdemeanor. Is that really the best use of our time?" *yoinks another paper* "I will get us a fresh Shop."

There's something so delicious about Tim's silent protest via yoinking those papers. And Lucy knows him well enough that they're done talking.

Look, these episodes aren't about pent up sexual tension or the angst of longing. These are foundational episodes, and what we're seeing is Tim and Lucy learning to work together. They're increasingly a unit in Season 3, even though Lucy spends most of it still his Rookie.

They're learning how to communicate with one another. So, if they ever do get their acts together, they're already going to have that part down pretty well.

"Let's go. Not a word about the Shop."

He knows her well enough to know that she'll tease him. She knows him well enough that if he says he doesn't want it, she's not going to do it.

See? They're communicating!

"What? You disapprove. You think I'm just dating him to make Emmet jealous? Heck, yeah. Maybe I am. But, he deserves it. Will you say something, please?"

Lucy processes by talking it out, we know, and when Tim doesn't interject, she starts projecting. Because even she knows going out with this guy isn't purely motivated. She's hurting and lashing out, and she knows it.

Tim's simply listening. But when she asks him to speak, he realizes that's what she needs.

See? Communicating!

"Today's the first time you've talked about Emmett in weeks." "You hate it when I talk about personal stuff."

Nice excuse. Look, Tim and Lucy are mirroring each other a lot this episode. They both have personal things that they're obsessing over that are clouding their judgment and thoughts.

And they're both rationalizing. Tim rationalized missing the tagger when he was a Rookie by saying he was just following orders. Lucy is rationalizing not talking about Emmett by defaulting to Tim's dislike of personal talk in the Shop.

They're both not thinking clearly. And, of course, it takes the other to help them get through.

"And yet you still do. But in all those conversations, you haven't said one word about your boyfriend." "What are you saying?" "Look, maybe Emmett treated the relationship like it didn't matter because you treated it like it didn't matter."

The realization hits her that he's right. It's one of those rare moments where Tim's the one helping Lucy examine herself. But that's what I love about them. They help refine one another. It's a give and take, and not just one person "healing" the other.

Tim and Lucy are on their own, personal journeys to healing and self-realization. But, I'll argue, each is a vital part of that journey. But to give one or the other full credit is to ignore the individual's effort to grow.

Tim and Lucy are growing together. And I love that so much more than one patching the other up. We're not patching up holes, we're actually healing. Yes, there will always be scars. But the healing makes it all so much more bearable, and so much easier to fully live, again.

But when he sees the realization hit her, his gaze softens. Tim hates to see her in pain. But we're not quite at the point where he's going to offer her comfort, especially on the job.

After all, Lucy is still his Rookie, and he needs to keep the lines firm between them. Because, if he were honest, he'd realize they're already getting blurrier and blurrier.

"Alright. Focus up. You read the file. Do you think 3EYEZ is done for the day?"

Tim's trying to get her back on track, like he has so many times before. But, Tim knows her well enough to know that sometimes barking out orders isn't enough for Lucy.

She needs something to help her switch her brain, something else to think about. They've done her mock-plan of how to sabotage her ex's wedding, before. This time, Tim tries a different tactic—he offers a piece of himself.

"Eagle Eye."

Lucy looks at him with confusion while I shove my face into a pillow so the kids don't hear me squealing and come running in here, mistaking it for screaming.

Tim doesn't have to do this. But he wants to. He wants to let Lucy Chen in just a little more.

"What?" "The nickname I got. After the Shop got tagged right under my nose." *giggle* "But it wasn't my TO who came up with it. It was Isabel. It kind of became her pet name for me." "Aw. That's sweet."

It's still hard for him to talk about Isabel. Those wounds are still healing, even though he's tested the dating pool a little. And it's important to remember that he and Isabel did have good times. There was a time when Tim had a lot of happiness in his life.

But he opens up a little to Lucy, here. He gives her insight. He gives a little of himself. And that's huge. He's starting to talk about Isabel without tearing up, without scowling, without the same agonizing pain striking his chest.

It still hurts. To a degree, it'll always hurt. But it's starting to heal. And I love that when he's starting to get healthier, the first person who gets to see it is Lucy.

We're not to the point of them swapping saliva and dreaming of the other's taste. But, we're building a really solid friendship. Heck, Lucy giggled when Tim opened up just now.

And I've talked about it a bit in this Meta, but I think it's important to draw out that Lucy has become comfortable to him. Why is this important?

FAST FORWARD: Remember the famous double date of S4? Why did Tim invite Lucy? Because he wanted a source of comfort in this truly uncomfortable situation. So, later when Bargain Barbie remarks about his creature comforts and about how he needs to get out and do more... nobody takes into account that Lucy is one of his comforts. So, once he and Lucy start dating, they are out all the time together. Why? Because he doesn't need all the other comforts when he's with her. Lucy is his comfort.

Thank y'all for reading and going on this journey with me. I think with this Meta, I've finished my tour of Season 3! It was a short season, so that made it a bit easier to chunk out.

And sorry this one took so long. My roof's leaking and it looks like I'm emptying out my 401K to replace it. It's always something, but I remain grateful. I've faced my death a few times in my lifetime, so every day I'm given is an absolute gift.

Just gotta take it one breath at a time.

#Chenford #Lucy Chen #Tim Bradford #Melissa O'Neil #Eric Winter #The Rookie #Meta #Lucy x Tim #Tim x Lucy

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving.

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold.

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show.

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit.

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins.

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art.

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural, he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag.

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living.

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism.

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to.

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it.

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light.

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line.

Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence.

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade.

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome. I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else.

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half.

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves.

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome.

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight.

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer.

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it.

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace.

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar.

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says:

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean.

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to.

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas. Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna.

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life.

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs.

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.”

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it.

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do.

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another.

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it.

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours.

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay?

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas.

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure.

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar!

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.”

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

#transcripts #supernatural #supernatural podcast #<60mins #this is first and foremost a podcast about cas and misha collins

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