#gamble's era is objectively better put together than the dabb era but at least in the dabb era it's easy to just
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dyed-red · 3 years ago
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just saw a gifset set during s6 where dean confronts soulless and bobby about the fact that they left him in the dark for an entire year about sam not being in the cage still, and my issues with gamble era were top of mind i didn’t want to be super negative in the tags of OP’s gifset so here we are --
i can’t abide gamble era exactly because of shit like that scene. 
so, for anyone interested, a ridiculously long complaint post about s6-s7 under the cut.
so what’s my issue? i can’t abide how gamble’s era prioritizes plot points above characterization.
soulless never provides a halfway adequate reason for not going to dean sooner, and never provides a halfway adequate reason for why he goes to dean when he does at the start of s6. it’s been a long time since i watched so i’m fuzzy on some particulars but i know that it just sort of amounted to “i didn’t feel like it before but you’re the best partner and i prefer working with you”
and that rings so hollow because soulless isn’t the type of guy who would not go straight to dean if he preferred him as a partner because hey, no guilt about ruining his little domestic bliss, right? but also if he thought dean would be a nuisance and hold him back from this thing he enjoys and is preferring to do (hunting), then his reasons for scooping up dean are also shallow because why now? if he needs someone to watch his back because he doesn’t trust samuel and the campbells surely there are other options than his overprotective brother who will be suspicious of his lack of sleep and will want to protect and smother him?
(edit: came back to add he does give/imply a reason -- dean would be baggage, essentially like  described here -- and he returns to dean by happenstance through a case. but that still fails to satisfy me because like -- he could have avoided dean if he had half a reason or desire to?)
it always just felt to me like gamble threw a year in there to inflate angst because it fit the story she wanted to tell, rather than fitting the characters and their actual motivations. and that’s one of the things that frustrates me to no end about writers. fitting characters to a story you want to see happen doesn’t work if those characters have pre-established motives and desires and thought processes you have to work with. you need to sort out their thoughts and feelings in more depth for why and how they would get to where they are and why this chain of events would happen, and s6 has always felt to me like it doesn’t care about that, it just cares about getting us to where we’re supposed to be (where the writer wants the story to get) without spending near enough energy on sorting out realistically how and why the characters would get there.
(maybe overstating my own ability as a writer, but i’m of the opinion you can always get characters to whatever end you want, no matter how far-fetched that end, you just have to understand them well enough to know what would lead them there, and then adjust and tweak the conflicts and setting accordingly. but if you’re impatient or unwilling to dig around in those questions you just brute-force it, and it ends up shallow)
anyway if you want further proof of what i’m talking about and why i think gamble ultimately misses the mark and has a certain laziness in how she pushes characters into story beats that don’t fit -- look no further than bobby. 
bobby - bobby - who kept his home open to sam and dean, who watched dean sell his soul for sam and who choked up holding dean’s face after he did, who put sam in a panic room to detox and then wrung his hands regretting and doubtful while dean held steadfast, and then told dean to fucking fix it after that broke them, who said the line ‘family don’t end in blood’ to mean that he saw sam and dean as his sons, who was possessed when a demon told sam all sorts of hurtful things about starting the apocalypse and then even after being released from possession and stabbed and dealing with his own pain and issues still took the time to tell sam that the demon was lying and essentially to affirm that he still loves sam, who was an angry old man with a disability who sold his own soul to reclaim the use of his body and to get a location on death and despite all that messy anger and grief still carried on and saw the larger picture and tried his damn best to be good to people -
that bobby? didn’t tell dean that sam was alive? despite knowing like the entire time?
that bobby????
like yes okay bobby has referred to sam as being full of character defects, and people like to focus on that but they ignore the rest of what he’s saying and why he’s saying it!! he literally follows it up with explaining how sam is a hero and how they’re too hard on him and that if anyone can beat the devil, it’s sam. i’ve seen people say that no one believed in sam when it came to defeating lucifer and bobby literally says like two lines after the character defect one: “then you know Sam will beat the devil.” like sure ok, he follows that up with “...or die trying.” but then he immediately follows that up with “that's the best we could ask for.”
i get so annoyed seeing that defects line taken out of its original context and being used to say bobby didn’t love sam or treated him poorly. sam literally ditched bobby for months after dean’s death and bobby could not find or contact him, wouldn’t have known if he even died, and bobby didn’t even begrudge him for it. bobby loved sam and he believed in him. he loved dean and understood him. he asked dean, after that speech about how sam could beat the devil “so I got to ask, dean - what exactly are you afraid of? losing? or losing your brother?”
he! gets! dean! he watched dean sell his soul for sam and he watched sam turn monstrous and he helped pull them back together when their jagged edges were cutting each other raw and he wasn’t always nice and he wasn’t always right or righteous but he understood dean enough that he was able to talk dean around to giving sam his blessing with the whole lucifer plan because he understands that dean fears losing his brother more than he fears the literal apocalypse.
and then season 6 came along and bobby suddenly has let dean believe sam is dead for an entire year.
i just - i could scream that in all caps with a million emojis because it makes me so incredibly angry but instead i’ll just. i’ll just leave it. at that.
so anyway gamble era destroys bobby’s character through and through. as showrunner she’s willing to see him used for convenience and man-pain (killing him off to motivate dean in s7) rather than treat him like a 3-dimensional character whose thoughts and motivations she (the narrative) has to consider. there is a lazy line in there about how bobby was happy dean got out and had a family and was safe and it’s such utter goddamn bullshit because, as established in my rant up there, bobby knows dean better than that, and he’d never in a million years do that to dean, and he’d never in a million years believe sam would do that to dean either, nor would he trust a sam who told him to lie to dean about him being alive. that would raise his hunter alarm bells so fast and loud and he’d be on the phone with dean before sam would be three steps off his lot.
for the record him being a ghost is also the dumbest plot i’ve ever seen. the man is a fucking hunter whose wife was possessed by a demon and then came back as a zombie; he’s seen all manner of things including more than enough ghosts. i don’t believe for a second that the bobby we knew in s1-5 would stick around. i mean unless quite specifically it was a “i’m pretty sure i’m going to hell and i know that’s a real thing and also how shitty it is so maybe i’ll become a vengeful spirit and slowly wither into nothing that sounds nicer” but that’s not at all how it’s presented, it’s not some rational choice it’s just that he can’t let go because he’s attached to sam and dean and too pissed off about dying, and it just... fails to ring true to the character.
(don’t get me started on how he reacts to re-souled sam; gamble drop your location i just wanna talk)
anyway - i know a lot of folks praise the gamble era for the motw stuff but i mostly found them unremarkable. and yes gamble clearly understands how sexy jared padalecki is and like hallelujah ma’am, but i’d give up every single canon shirtless scene in all 15 years in a heartbeat, wave them happily goodbye, if it meant having s6-7 with more depth of characterization. 
and like - there are some really funny episodes! soulless sam, once we know he’s soulless, is kinda fun! i like the alien/fairy episode a lot! and the french mistake is one of my all-time favorites. season 7 time for a wedding is fucked up but fun to watch! balthazar is interesting! castiel has a great and interesting storyline! and we got soul-fisting!
there’s also some good emotional moments like the lisa and ben fallout! and weekend at bobby’s had some interesting character insights, and frontierland is great in so many ways! and this era introduces both garth and kevin and i love them both so damn much! and the scene in mommy dearest with eve looking like mary and biting dean is deliciously fucked up! weird oedipal bullshit is where spn is at, ba-bey! 
and appointment in samarra is a really good episode! (even if everyone is acting dense saying that putting sam’s soul back in him could kill him when like - if sam’s soul is in the cage he’s dead, like that soul is not alive on earth, and the soulless version of him that you’re ‘killing’ will still be part of him but no you’re not killing sam even if putting his soul back in him kills his earthly body, because even then his soul would go to heaven like? why was this a debate between these smart and interesting characters except that the writers needed to artificially raise the stakes of this course of action?)
anyway. it was a really good episode for the dean and death side of it. 
so there’s lots i liked about the gamble era too, but the problem is they’re mostly one-off things written into single episodes by people other than gamble, rather than (other than the cas storyline) actually part of the fabric of the seasons or direction or characterization that a showrunner should be in charge of keeping on track.
because like -- the mains plots? i hated the hallucifer plot and the way sam’s trauma was handled, with only a few good moments and most of them in the first two eps of s7. the alphas failed to inspire even though the alpha vamp was just a fun character. the leviathan look dumb as hell, even if there’s something interesting going on there with their ultimate goal and how they aim to achieve it. sam campbell felt goddamn pointless and again like he was added to fill a desired plot rather than really thinking character dynamics through -- like literally there was no purpose for that character to be their resurrected grandfather, any hunter would do, the family bond was deeply under-explored and included for what??? for me to be disappointed? 
so anyway this is the most negative post on this blog by a massive margin but i just needed to rant and get it out of my system. 
i see a lot of sam fans praise gamble’s era and i love that sam receives so much focus in her era, but i honestly think gamble’s writing strength comes in the most with dean and how she intuits his character. 
long as tangent here, but look at the actual episodes gamble writes (not counting any she co-wrote in s1 with Raelle Tucker who imo elevated gamble’s writing) -- like yes you’ve got Houses of the Holy and Heart and AHBL but you’ve also got Bloodlust (introduces gordon and that turning point for dean), Crossroad Blues (dean-centric), and the Kids are Alright (introduces lisa). even in Houses of the Holy, the central arc is dean having his lack-of-faith shaken. gamble wrote ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ and that episode is !!!! for dean’s psyche. Jus In Bello is bibro but what’s central is dean and his tension with henricksen and his refusal to play ruby’s games, where sam’s little tiptoe into ‘maybe we kill the virgin?’ is important but not the focus. 
like “are you there god it’s me dean winchester” and “the curious case of dean winchester” ??!!!!!!  “it’s a terrible life” is about the angel’s manipulations on dean. it’s all dean!
gamble writes dean exceptionally well and her episodes almost all do something really fascinating with him. why don’t we talk about that more?
but of course i’ll grant you there’s some sam focus! Heart invokes sam’s fears of becoming a monster (even if sam acts shy for waaaay too long being flirted with, it’s hard to suspend disbelief); AHBL1 is an amazing episode focused on sam; Fresh Blood has the holy fuck razor-wire scene; Time is On My Side has unhinged bros; When The Levee Breaks is a fucking masterpiece. 
and in fairness, both Bloodlust and “the curious case of dean winchester” have sam gaining an upper hand by being more level-headed than those around him, and both eps have men flirt with sam, which i love. “the song remains the same” is beautifully bibro in its little moments even though i find it more dean-centric. “two minutes to midnight” is an incredible episode with Death, even if that most memorable moment is the conversation between Dean and Death it still has a lot of implicit focus on sam and who he is, with the final conversation between dean and bobby (the one about sam being able to beat the devil) as essentially sam-centric.
(literally how did gamble write that episode and “death’s door” with such insight into bobby but still have him not tell dean sam is alive for a year???)
this incredible writing for dean carries through to her own era. i just complained a bunch about the start of season 6 and soulless and bobby, but dean is perfect in 6x01 and entirely believable. appointment in samarra, which i praised above? dean is 100 in that. “let it bleed” where dean leaves lisa and ben behind and has cas take their memories? the dean-centric plot there is devastating. and imo only one of gamble’s eps in s7 is genuinely sam-centric and it’s “the born again identity” where he ends up in a mental health institute because of hallucifer, and even there she has dean being focal, sorting through his inability to forgive cas, and she shoe-horns cas in with memories loss as “emmanuel” as this truly bizarre deus ex machina cure for sam’s hell-trauma that comes totally out of left field and feels intensely un-earned. it’s another thing that is just there to push the plot to where it ‘needs’ to be rather than taking time to figure it out in more depth.
(this is the same shit we criticize bucklemming for - and yes they’re way way worse for it and just worse writers like whoa, but why are we giving gamble a pass! look i actually think gamble is an incredible writer, i think her episodes are always interesting and they explore the characters and i’ve never hated a gamble ep and in fact love quite a few of them, lots of my faves. but i don’t enjoy her as a showrunner and i’ve tried really hard to get into her other properties and i can’t.)
anyway this is just my own biased reading so take it with a grain of salt, but i feel like gamble adores sam to the point where she prioritizes what she wants for him rather than what suits the character or story. she writes dean better because dean aligns well with her own adoration of sam and gives her a vehicle for it. we get bamf!sam moments and smart!sam moments from her on an episodic basis because of that love, so yay! but she writes dean with more genuine depth and a lot of her best scenes are of him, a lot of the best emotional arcs she writes are his.
final point - putting my wincestie goggles on here - i don’t feel like she invests in the codependency. and if i’m fully honest that’s why i don’t enjoy her seasons. (i can forgive bad writing but i can’t forgive ignoring the erotic codependency). imo if any showrunner came close to breaking the dependency, it was gamble. while her dean is obsessed with sam, her sam does not read (to me) as mutually obsessed. he is at times reliant and desperate, but not devoted. some of this is soullessness but after that it’s all ??? to me. 
where it crops up in the gamble era, it’s typically in an ep written by either dabb (the og domestic brothers stan) or edlund (thank you for the french mistake with the complaint that they aren’t even brothers in that world, mr. edlund, and also for the insane 7x02 cut-sam’s-hand-to-kill-hallucifer scene. godspeed.), or else kripke’s final episode (aka “the man who knew too much” -- what a work of art -- with that fundamental understanding of sam who overcomes his own internal fracturing and wakes up because he knows he needs to get back to dean).
anyway that’s all probably unfair but 🤷‍♂️  i’m a kripke-era stan and a carver-era truther so i’m just gonna own that.
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