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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years ago

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I was wondering if you could pls describe (or show me some tags if its easier) the traits of some writers of spn..? I usually hear "X writer usually writes more sam" or "this strucutre is usual in X's episodes" but I've never been able to pick on those; the only ones I've been able to pick up are bucklmming and its beacuse they are somehow instantly bad :/ ps. u dont have to like explain EVERY single writer or anything, just general things that you know or notice in their respective episodes

Hiya :D

Yeah, it’s a thing that’s really, like, aside from Buckleming being bad and coming with a warning notice that we’re all helpless, please don’t burn the fandom down after their episodes, it’s not really more than nerdy interest that means anything about knowing who the writers are, so in that sense you have the toolkit you need to function :P

Buuut from my very very deeply nerdy and writery observations through what is now more than a decade (eep) of watching this bloody thing…

The show starts with a Generic Tone, and most of the original writers have this tone. This is in NO WAY a bad thing, but of all the writers, you have to really delve to connect common themes in their episodes, and for many of the writers who didn’t endure out of seasons 1-5, we don’t really have a clear profile on their habits, for reasons I’ll get to.

We can see Sera Gamble’s fingerprints a bit more because we get 2 seasons of her as a showrunner, but by and large as one of the original writers, she really sets the tone so her writing IS Supernatural, as much as Kripke or John Shiban or Raelle Tucker or Cathryn Humphries and whoever else wrote multiple episodes seasons 1-5. They have things they might like but dropping into a random early episode doesn’t give much away because they had a much tighter playbook.

1x13 shows this because despite serious, painful hindsight of all the things they do wrong that we recognise NOW from seasons of their nonsense, Buckleming wrote far more to the brief than they ever do these days; the difference in style has to be almost entirely attributed to being a first season and close creative control and enforced use of a playbook that disguised a ton of their worst habits which go unchecked these days, and @justanotheridijiton has dug up evidence of them cheerfully commenting on writing in such a way into deep history >.> Despite it being technically their best episode, they were fired and given a 6 year writing ban until Kripke left. So I’m guessing it was fairly obvious they had these problems regardless.

Of all these writers in the early seasons, Edlund pops up in season 2, and he is a wild card with a personality, and he does not write ~generic SPN~ and never did: it’s always Edlund SPN and it gels perfectly with the slightly less technicolour SPN, frequently breaking the format and creating the modern version of SPN… If he does comic it’s Bad Day at Black Rock and if he does deep it’s On The Head Of A Pin, and if you look at what he wrote, very very few of his episodes are duds, because he has a brain swirling deep with interesting and bizarre nonsense. He’s also the biggest Cas stan ever.

Jeremy Carver pre-Carver era helped, which I think is why he gets to be part of Carver Edlund - we have 3 and a half years of his showrunning to know what fascinated him, so I’ll just say, in his very first episode in season 3, he alludes to Cain and Abel for the first time. He’s very big on narrative structure being used in fascinating ways, and his episodes are all very technically accomplished, but the downfall was that by the end he was writing narrative symbolism as a sort of withered husk of his former self with no emotion whatsoever, just hitting storytelling marks. 11x01 is the single most depressing episode to me in terms of “this is the man who wrote Mystery Spot and Changing Channels”

Fortunately, and I’m skipping over a ton of writers to tell this story, but could go back and talk about more of the interesting ones in between, if you watch 11x01 and 11x02 back to back, they work perfectly as a single episode and it’s like after the break all the life and emotion and intrigue is breathed back into the show in a rush of colour and character. Now, Dabb is one of the OG writers in my standards, in the sense that he and Loflin showed up in season 4, and to this day Dabb’s writing to me still shows a touch of writing within the original SPN playbook as a writer who CAN write alongside Kripke, Gamble, etc, and chameleon into the background as not writing Dabbnatural, but writing Supernatural. To me this is a part of his strength when it comes to story and why he and originally Loflin shot up the ranks in Gamble era to the point where they wrote 7x23, and from there Dabb always wrote the second, middle and last episode in a second-in-command writer role, which, now we hit season 14, means that’s half the length of the show he’s been clearly estimated as one of the powerhouses.

Because he had a co-writer for 4 years, originally you might think that it’s hard to tell what he is and isn’t writing, but he and Loflin split up, I hope just to ease empty seats in the writer room, and we get 2 Loflin episodes which betray a few of his weaknesses when it comes to story/structure/pace, but reveal he was the quippier, funnier, more manic one of the two. Like, I’d say Plucky’s (my no joke favourite episode) is probably something where he would have steered it more than Dabb :P But Dabb meanwhile, writing alone, writes 8x08 which is also funny but in a very sublime way based on situation and framing etc which makes us laugh without breaking up the story for quips so much as coming from character, such as “it’s a shortened version of my name”, “stop smelling the dead guy, Cas,” and ALL the uses of cartoon effects as part of the embedded storytelling. It’s like his resume for considering what he can do as a solo writer and he blows it out of the water.

Dabb is very good at characters who might have brief one off appearances, like, even within a scene, but still have a bunch of unique personality, as well as excellent handling of the main characters, and he can write some killer speeches and emotional pleas and stuff. He’s also absolutely filled with callbacks and repeats and narrative loops, and he started this on a smaller level, either to his own episodes, or dutifully doing his job to foreshadow and build the mytharc, but in Dabb era, this has turned into absolutely exploding the show’s callbacks into a weird fractal of meanings, which I think works wonderfully for supporting a 14 year old show on its own legs, because each callback and loop goes in a different, often wild direction, but still at the same time has an emotional continuity and truth to the story based on the story predecessors. The fact he writes like this is of no surprise to meta writers who’ve been keeping tabs on him far longer than I have. In fact, a combination of all Dabb’s strengths put to work versus his One Weakness, his kryptonite, is a terrible story of Lizzy’s hubris of not paying attention to the show and a hard learned lesson :P

After 10x21 I was utterly bereft and hated the show for what it had done, but I was gonna keep watching, as sarcastically and eye-rollingly as I could, and 10x22 started to deliver in spades. Dean drove ALL THE WAY down south and back, somehow missing Cas tailing him (without a car, we later learned) and all while Sam was on an urgent timeline to get things done before Dean got back… driving an hour back and forth in the immediate vicinity of the Bunker. The last times we see Sam are Urgent Driving Montages to get there in time while he’s basically coming from up the street, and meanwhile, Dean and Cas have logged like 20 hours of driving plus farting around murdering people, and I was GLEEFULLY tearing this episode to SHREDS for its car continuity, like, HOWLING with laughter.

Anyway I took a break to get some tea and came back ready to eye-roll through the end of the episode, hit play, and walked smack into the DeanCas confrontation and dramatic speeches about everyone you love could be dead, except me, and accidentally got so tense and enraptured that I spilled an entire mug of scalding tea down my front when Dean attacked Cas and I jumped out of my skin and screamed and then yelled again because OH YEAH I WAS HOLDING TEA, and from that day on I have A: loathed Dabb for his car continuity and B: always kept my eye on that fucker and when it’s his episode and what he’s up to… Once burned etc…

Dabb’s squad are awesome though. Obviously excluding buckleming, and I think with all the bingos and complaining you know what to look for in their episodes :D

Berens has been around since season 9, which makes him a veteran in remaining writers terms, just because Carver era had an en masse leaving when contracts were up (no hard feelings, just bad timing and Berens had been newer than all of them at one point :P) Berens is another writer I think can occasionally dip into pretending to be generic SPN on some mytharc episodes but he’s just obviously not been around in ye olde days, and joined in the time when, through Gamble era and then Carver in spades, the MotW writers in particular really fell into a new style of writing the show that I absolutely adore, which is where the individual episodes rather than mytharc stuff were increasingly left to the writers to do whatever they wanted with, and become more and more writing style and structure etc as standalone canvasses for your own skills, personality, etc. Because you CAN’T keep writing the same SPN episode over and over and over, and if one of the season 1 writers came back and wrote a season of season 1 style episodes, they’d be stiflingly boring, in tone and range, compared to what we have now. To keep people interested after so long, quirkiness and the ideas that an individual writer brings to the table as THEMSELVES, becomes increasingly the only way forward to keep the show fresh. Season 4 onwards began to have more of this, and Edlund had been doing it since his first episode anyway, but to me season 6 has very specific feeling tones for the episodes, while season 7 and Robbie Thompson’s arrival in particular start to set the tone for allowing the writers to be adventurous, and to me season 7 is the shift to the style of season we had from then onwards.

I think Berens episodes feel quite muted and cleverly restrained, but really really intelligent behind that. He’s written some incredible episodes that turn the season on the head while being standalones, and his run of 14th episode being where things were knocked out of the park but on a small stage, like, conflicts in a storage unit, barn, submarine, the BMoL hq and an abandoned hotel, all have devastating and dramatic emotional consequences while still somehow seeming understated and natural, quiet, almost, in the sense of what they turn on - looks and small agreements and emotional revelations etc. He doesn’t do fun and loud and flashy very often, and he delves very serious themes of suicide and depression, so I read his episodes and quiet, powerful, and very very pointed and driven and well-constructed to get to that point. His back and forth between scenes for dramatic irony is one of the biggest features I enjoy and identify, and that was an overall theme in season 13, on a much bigger level. 13x21 and Sam’s death, and, well, the whole thing really, was a wonderful example of the tension he can hold you in this way. Also: proof he CAN have fun but only when it’s super gay :P

I think Meredith Glynn gels really well with his writing, to the point where they co-wrote an episode within her first year on the show and then she took over the 14th episode slot for the first time since Berens got to the show and wrote an excellent episode that you could have told me was one of his and I’d have believed you, since it was structurally very very similar to any of his episode 14s which I have legit started seeing as a subgenre of the show in my own weird brain sorting way :P She has a great deal more fun though. She accidentally made the Worst Timed Episode Ever In The History Of Anything with 12x05 and I think got off on the wrong foot with fandom, but since then every episode has been an improvement on the last, and she’s had some absolutely wild rides, with 13x08 being I think her masterpiece overall, though Gog and Magog are funnier as an individual set piece :P

Her writing is playful and fun and shows a deep care for the character histories and how they affect them - 12x11 is hard to believe is someone’s 2nd episode if you don’t think the new writers did their homework, because she absolutely guts Dean, and throws in a Rowena backstory freebie along with, AND handles Sam handling Dean with perfect ups and downs and brotherly affection and horror etc. I also think her Gabriel episode is the best Gabriel episode ever, for him as a character, and in terms of fun, the unholy combination of her writing and Speight directing and acting and also acting was utterly unbelievable. 10/10 would use as the episode to drag friends back to the show if they only saw seasons 1-5... It’s not even comparable with her other episodes, because she seriously levelled up as a writer while doing it. I can’t wait to see what she is up to next season :D

Davy Perez is like the dark side of the coin of Glynn, where he is fun but dark as fuck, and 13x11 has the best example of that with his cheery music-playing serial killers, but it’s an attitude he’s had all along. He does his best with Buckleming characters they do their worst with, so he singlehandedly made me think things for Crowley weren’t going to be as bad as they were in season 12 with 12x12/15 and he absolutely was the only person to give Ketch and Asmodeus anything resembling an interesting dynamic in 13x17. 12x12 was an absolute masterpiece of non-linear writing, which requires a good brain to do and then he made it funny AND all while ripping off tarantino but in SPN and not making it corny and writing Cas and Crowley’s most dramatic love confessions… 12x04 was my personal reassurance that Dabb era was going to care about Sam again after Carver neglected to deal with his shit for 4 years while dumping on him in the narrative, and Davy betrays the old Gamble sam girl traits of doing stuff like tying him up and telling us in the same breath his heart is worth 100x its weight in gold :P

His episodes are wacky and fun in a way that draws blood and makes you seriously fear for the characters, even ones you think are fine and can’t possibly die in that episode, and his darkness frequently takes what looks like it could have been a Buckleming brief and makes you care about the characters they’ve been mauling all season in their own mis-applied love of writing the villains. You NEED someone who loves writing the villains, and Davy has a real relish to it that doesn’t woobify or jerk off to their evilness, it just makes them raw and scary to the point where you might actually believe Asmodeus is threatening for half a second, or that Crowley could win season 12, or to sell us on Ketch having a glimmer of a soul.

As for Yockey… I don’t know where Dabb found him but thank GOODNESS he did because sometimes you just need to take a random gay playwright with minimal TV experience, throw them into your writers room, and say, here, go nuts. Yockey has written like half a SPN episode and multiple literal excellent stage plays that are somehow on screen with our characters, which got to the point where in 13x19 I wrote like 40k episode notes while openly weeping because my Literature degree was being yanked so hard :P His nonsense often has multiple amazing side characters, like, sometimes a LOT of amazing side characters, and he knows how to make them all work. He literally has rude mechanicals like in 13x19 and the poor drunk angel. Shakespearean tropes. If you’re ever watching a SPN episode and it’s like why is this person writing for us and not a world famous literary darling? then it’s probably a Yockey episode. I am still struggling with how to handle it, and describe what’s going on, and all I can think is of 12x10 where an article about it literally was like, here is every single episode Cas has ever been in, and how this episode pulled on it and turned it into magic gold. Like, now 4x16 and 6x20 are the straw that Yockey turns to gold. I am too emotionally compromised to write something coherent and non-fangirlish about Yockey because he’s like, #writergoals in a totally bananas set the bar as high as the moon kind of way. He’s got that rare once in a generation talent and dammit I think he counts as my generation, so there goes my chance to be that person :P

And he’s writing for fucking Supernatural.

#Asks

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