#i loved the whole show but kripke era will always hit different | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dotthings · 6 years ago

Text

My history with Sam & Dean’s close emotional sibling bond is a little complicated, but it is important to me. It isn’t my fandom focus for a lot of reasons, and probably would never be my sole/primary focus but that’s not a reflection of how much it means to me emotionally. That was kind of part of the problem, in fact...it matters a lot and canon finally hurt in the wrong way one too many times.

I’m encouraged by the slow repair SPN has been doing to it for me, slow steps, starting S11, and S14 is doing some very very interesting things I’ve been waiting on for years.

So here’s a bit of a review on my ups and downs with it.

In the S1-5 era I was heart-first absorbed in the Sam & Dean bond. It was my anchor, even if I never, ever was a “brosonly” or watching “only for Sam & Dean”--other characters always intrigued me. But Sam & Dean was my “Brotp.” When Cas arrived and I started to ship Destiel, that continued, this is why Team Free Will was necessary--I had to put all those feelings somewhere. While platonic duos and romantic ships don’t elicit the identical type of emotions, both can be potent with the screaming/crying/squeeing/flailing. I just added Destiel onto that. That’s a lot of feels to cope with all at once.

S6-9 I was still into the bro bond and getting more and more into Destiel. But as SPN canon continued to make certain story decisions with the Sam & Dean bond, the harder I found it to relate to it. It became less of a comfort space and more alienating, while Dean and Cas has steadily made sense to me. I know it hasn’t for everyone, but this is a personal, subjective thing, buttons pushed or not pushed, nerves hit or hit the wrong or right way and Dean and Cas became more consistently my anchor in the SPN storm. This isn’t an either/or thing to me, I felt the loss of my connection to the bro bond, and I’d just go back to multi-squeeing if SPN continues to go in the direction I hope.

S9 was a bit of a struggle but I still believed in the strength of the bro bond. My feelings were starting to burn out on it but I was still there.

S10 slammed the door shut on it for me. With a big resounding clang. It was cumulative, it was too much at last. I still loved Sam and Dean, although Dean has been my more consistent touchstone character than Sam, I’ve always loved them both. I cycle in out of feeling connected to Sam, to Sam making sense, but I love them both, always--and Castiel. SPN at times in latter-era engaged me on each of the brothers, while the bond itself got elusive.

Team Free Will became my anchor platonic bond and brotp, a new comfort zone. Who knows why, maybe something about the alchemy of Sam, Dean, & Cas together, these three battered soldiers who start to become each other’s home, with Cas being the wanderer that Sam & Dean finally give a home to, but the interactions of all the relationships therein, Sam & Cas, Sam & Dean, Dean & Cas are important to me. Team Free Will enfolds multiple relationships and accommodates fans who tend to multi-love and consider multiple character pov’s.

Some people think just because somebody intensely ships Destiel that platonic bonds can’t or won’t matter to them; that’s not how this works at all.

When I say I was into the Sam & Dean bond in early SPN--I mean it. I was into it, emotionally. Never shipped it, never will, never did I think “this is the only thing on the entire show that matters” and I never will. But it bone-deep matters to me, as these characters do. During the past few seasons I’ve been warming back up to the Sam & Dean bond again. It’s never going to be what it was in S1-3 but that’s not a bad thing to me. Because one of my problems during Carver era was the refusal to let them grow enough.

So it means a great deal to me what Dabb era is doing, to advance things, to be more emotionally honest, to finally move beyond some of the things in the Carver era that were holdovers from the Kripke-Gamble era that and that I got desensitized on and burned out and hurt by it to the point where I had to step back from investment in it. I’m not saying Dabb era is perfect or Dabb era has never angered me. But this is how my tracking of the bro bond maps.

S11-13 have been very much transitional stages for the bro bond and maybe at some point I’ll try to go into more detail as to how/why, but I felt S11-12 canon presented them a bit distantly to each other, but growing more functional, and S13 was a lot warmer between them, and for me, and S14 so far...I am shook. There are things happening I have waited a long time to see. Now I’m holding my breath, not wanting to spook it off.

Charting my engagement with the bro bond would look like a wavy line: a sharp upward climb, then a drop in the middle, then a slow climb back upwards. It never stopped mattering to me, but I did dis-engage from it for several seasons for a time, for canon story and emotional reasons. And I find it weird, given my long history in the fandom, and with the bro bond, and my positivity for both characters, even if I had to step back from the bond itself at times, the false narrative that gets around about “bro bond hater.”

To take a brief side-bar into fandom wank for a moment--because it’s relevant, I wish it weren’t, but it’s just so pervasive in SPN fandom and it does affect people emotionally--the following things will get you labeled a “bro bond hater” even if you’ve never bashed Sam, Dean, or their bond in your life:

-rooting for character development -recognition of Sam and Dean as autonomous individual people along with the bond being important -criticism of codependency -criticism of ruthless isolation -not shipping incest -shipping Destiel (automatic “you hate Sam”) -identifying strongly with the Team Free Will relationship instead of exclusively Sam & Dean

Feeling protective of them and wanting them to end some of the recursive, harmful cycles they seem to get caught in, and wanting their bond to flourish and grow stronger instead of being worn down by lying and codependency and inability to community...all that gets painted, by a certain sub-group, to be hostile to the bro bond. I know, it’s wild.

The fact is, just as there are all kinds of Sam, Dean, or Cas fans, who ship any number of things, got into the show differently, watch differently, have different priorities, different favorites, different personal histories, nerves, buttons to be pressed right or wrong, so there are all kinds of Sam & Dean bro bond fans, from the most hard core ride-or-die ONLY Sam & Dean, to TFW fans who love the bro bond dearly but it’s not some exclusive thing, to fans somewhere in between, to fans who have Sam, Dean, or Cas as a favorite, who ship Destiel, who don’t ship Destiel, who ship S/D or don’t ship S/D, or somewhere in between, and who connect to different aspects of the relationship the most, different seasons, different storylines, and have different ids and wants.

I feel like “Sam & Dean fandom” should be a welcoming place, just as Sam and Dean take others into their family circle and offer people literal shelter at the bunker and who care so much it hurts, not just for each other, but those they love. That...hasn’t really worked out, in terms of the very specific aisles of fandom that are about “Sam & Dean” specifically. But the bro bond is widely loved by a lot of different types of fans and different shippers. Personally I find the TFW aisle the friendliest space for me to jump in and go HULLO HAVE YOU SEEN MY SAM & DEAN FEELINGS LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MY FEELINGS but everyone finds their own way. There’s been way too much virulent gatekeeping from the exclusive “onlies” and I think that’s hurt a lot of bro bond fans. It’s even hurt some fans who are narrowly Sam & Dean focused because not everyone wants to be surrounded by intense gatekeeping and hostility to everything else on the show, they just want their Sam & Dean feels and go in peace. “Bros fandom” therefore is pretty big, and crosses fandom lines.

SPN is in its 14th season and these two characters have grown so much and their relationship has changed so much. While SPN is an inconsistent canon, and my positivity can fluctuate, and canon changes, I feel this bond has consistently all along remained the main fulcrum of the show, and the bond itself has endured in canon, and I want to know now what’s next for them and I hope it’s in my favor because I really do miss that sibling bond and what it meant to me and I’m appreciating this uptick in my wanting to engage with it a whole lot.

#sam winchester #dean winchester #Sam and Dean: a work in progress #meta #supernatural #spn #castiel #team free will

107 notes · View notes

elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

Text

9x20 rewatch

@justanotheridijiton sent me a reminder that there are at least some small ways this isn’t as terrible as it could be, I think:

(http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Supernatural/Supernatural_9x20_-_Bloodlines.pdf)

Of course Mel could have just been tormenting me by making me read the whole script right after I watched this..

There’s no recap on this, and we jump right in with jazzy music and a city skyline.

I think one thing that was interesting about this was that with the right premise, this could have been a pretty great way to branch off the show, by taking it into the city as a permanent location, since the source material is very very rural. Along the way in this rewatch (and bearing in mind that this episode was eventually coming) I’ve talked about how Taxi Driver and 8x15, among others but mostly Buckleming, fuck up the show’s aesthetic by going inner city or delving into settled subcultures of monster stuff or just generally bringing in an urban fantasy slant to what is basically a cowboys vs monsters show. It really doesn’t fit :P This could have been a fascinating way to explore how to make the same aesthetic FIT. But as I mentioned, the above episodes plus years of drifting since like, season THREE, have taken us so far from the show’s original aesthetic/genre it’s hard to analyse this as a shift and more like an inevitable grim outcome, which doesn’t taste as good at all, since there’s not much sense of subversion of the source material going on (because this needed to happen like 7 years ago at this point to work like that) and sadly even Dabb, who has been demonstrating with season 12 he CAN subvert the story from its origins, could not pull off the work needed to salvage this idea from the trainwreck concept...

Anyway before I dive in, all the dreading watching this episode made me think a lot about genre. There’s a difference between episodes which are set in cities (e.g. Dean going to Death to stop him wiping Chicago off the map, or the MotW we’ve seen that have city settings) ... Urban Fantasy had a big trend of popularity in mainstream culture, soaking up a lot of themes I noticed, which I guess was really hitting its stride around season 8 & 9 (this is based mostly off my window on the world but it did seem this was totally in line with the amount of urban fantasy I was seeing discussed or stories I came across - my friend who had been churning through dark fantasy romances started lending me urban fantasy novels instead :P). But yeah, not like this show hadn’t gone corporate or done stuff in cities before, but they didn’t really make a big deal of being in cities? This being filmed on location allows them to use the waterfront skyline as an establishing shot and to play with the city as a location, and to develop those urban fantasy ideas.

Obviously, urban fantasy is popular and interesting and there are some brilliant stories in the genre. But it’s not Supernatural’s area and the best it does with cities is when they are a sort of landscape or vague presence, but the alleys and dark nooks and crannies and dank little hotels are the sort of ways they can use the city as a fairly “rural” setting in the sense that people aren’t around or it’s on the fringes without engaging. Even stuff like the Leviathan storyline is often dealt with by visiting warehouses and complexes which seem to be on the edge of towns - Charlie’s skyscraper job I think was the only time they actually went inner city, and again that was a change of genre to a heist movie one off (which worked well with the themes of the season but moving further and further from horror because even as a gimmick it’s dropping the format completely for a major plot episode)

As soon as a city landscape is more than 1 lonely person walking in a dark alleyway with something bad following them, but starting to explore what the city MEANS or how the supernatural takes up residence in it as a sort of landscape feature instead of a horror that’s not meant to be there, we’re in to a sort of genre-shift where the themes of urban fantasy take over from the horror (and SPN really struggles with being a horror show still from season FOUR onwards, and from Carver era, basically just gives up anyway :P It has horror-y episodes within a different sort of framework entirely.)

In Urban Fantasy it’s always about the people and cultures. The good stuff basically feels like it takes you on a walk around the city and shows you stuff you see all the time but with new eyes - turns random things like graffiti and gargoyles into fantastical elements and adds a mythology and magic to stuff you interact with all the time. It sort of invites you to go to the city and look around you and think that some magical underworld/otherworld is existing right alongside you. And it’s a LOT more about the sort of awe and intrigue of that and the normal coming up against the paranormal in an exploratory way. Including subcultures of monsters living among us or just out of sight or with a sort of speak-easy secretiveness of their lives.

That is a major trope to mark the genre and as Bloodlines is a new show, basically, it actually does get to USE these tropes honestly. Like just looking at it as an urban fantasy, it does the job. It just happens to fit in a trend of pretty unlovable SPN episodes by Buckleming exploring deepest this genre shift in the Buckleming way of totally failing to sell it, so the history of urban fantasy on the show has been tainted by the only writers who actually were interested in it enough to start messing with genre in that way. It just... I don’t know, doesn’t *feel* good mixing with the other elements of Supernatural. This isn’t a formal essay :P

I still can’t think of other Urban Fantasy spn episodes that aren’t Buckleming, because they love their witches and messing around with developing that lore. I suppose season 10′s teasing of Men of Letters vs Grand Coven would have been a more urban fantasy story and stuff if there was any actual development of it like 8x12 also plays on these tropes, with a secret society in the middle of the city, so other MoL related episodes do similar (though, like, 9x16, Cuthbert’s house is in the middle of nowhere, deliberately). The BMoL’s little snippets of life in Britain are similarly in this trope so we have Urban Fantasy style enemies in season 12... Hm. Hi Dabb :P Anyway since Carver era the show’s completely shed its original genre save for in the MotW episodes, when it comes to format (I saw it best described as action-adventure) and setting (hi Bunker as a home base instead of Bobby’s or dusty cabins & decrepit houses) and feel (so garish) and I guess it’s interesting to look at the way this has changed. (I am not so fascinated with this idea that I’ll do the rest of the rewatch analysing everything by these standards, but I guess I’ll keep on mentioning it when the show goes in this direction and eventually have a clearer list of episodes with this feeling to explore...)

Back to Bloodlines... They make a good start by having an actual city here, and apparently meaning to film on location and to use it in the story.

Sadly then pretty much everything else in the premise lets this episode down, as far as I remember, and, well, the entire world judged it when they watched it. :P I think I stumbled once across a confused and sad Tumblr user who really loved this episode and wished for more, and I think there’s some really good points like the main character being a black kid, that WOULD have made it a good show and worth a chance, but... eh, the story didn’t have any bite to it. It wasn’t picked up. And now it sits in the middle of this season like a lead balloon.

Starting with, the kid having his girlfriend fridged in the first scene in typical Supernatural style, because of clinging to the old tropes and trying to replicate the old show on top of the new one. This is something I saw described repeatedly as the biggest weakness with this episode - especially coming in season 9 carver era fatigue about the emotional loops (that will only get more tiring), people were just not interested in repeating the same old story over and over... When this aired I was still reading reviews and articles more than fandom to try and figure out what the reaction was supposed to be, but I seem to remember a pretty universal agreement here :P

This does, however, give us our first “in” on examining wtf Dabb is doing... He has been sitting fairly quietly since he joined the show and honestly when I joined fandom I saw posts explaining who he was and why he would have been the right pick to take Bloodlines away if it had been picked up (and no one had noticed he’d already written I guess at that point the second most number of episodes of anyone but Gamble, who he overtook some time in season 10 and is of course still going strong :P) - a lot of the writers like Robbie and Edlund and Carver were discussed fairly often as well as constant mentions of Kripke and Gamble. I found it pretty amusing that 3 years later people were still having to explain who Dabb was when he suddenly got handed the entire show, never mind any time one of his episodes came up and everyone was like !! who wrote this!!!!

Anyway, this is really giving us the example of how he works with mirrors and character re-use and basically repeating elements of the old story anew and as Mel says, “the only certain things in life are death, taxes and Dabb mirroring himself”.

And THAT is relevant to the story now, because now he has his hands on it, and ALL the story belongs to him, everything is picking up the old elements of the story and subverting them completely. The deeper we go into season 12 the more the old story is pretzeled in on itself... (I’m so in love with this article, and read the stuff after the initial episode recap, listing like 30 Cas episodes and how 12x10 references and subverts their themes and events...)

To get back to this fridging of Tamara, I don’t know if it was lesson learned here reading all the complaints about re-frying the show for Bloodlines, or he was just able to be more clever with the trope since it was already established and waiting to be flipped, but since Bloodlines starts with a fridging, Dabb era officially starts with the great un-fridging of Mary, which this moment is mirroring, by giving up a protagonist with the appropriate manpain to be a lead in a world running on Supernatural’s rules...

Makes you wonder how Bloodlines would have gone if the woman hadn’t been "killed for narrative symmetry” but been allowed to be her own person - gone through everything with the guy, and generally existed alongside him subverting the rule that women are for manpain... >.>

Having to use Home of the Nutty because I never downloaded this episode to have a personal copy to not have to fuck around with DVDs to get gifs and screenshots, but:

They have a blue and a pink screen above their heads, colour-coding them. It’s obviously hideously cishet to label them blue and pink for dude and lady, but with all the more subtle pink n blue colouring often around Dean (the wall in 10x05) or stuff like the blue and pink diner in 12x10 which I’m still chewing on, I kind of like the plain text version of this. Possibly because this episode is such a keycode to other things in the show like the ridiculous Destiel parallels, setting up basic visual information in Easy Reading mode is pretty amusing to me.

Ennis goes to talk to the restaurant guy to do the typical ring in the champagne thing. Despite seeming to know him, he’s brushed off rudely when some monsters show up and they’re going to their private section of the restaurant (a splitting of the two worlds - Ennis in the muggle one) and he sees a glimpse in the mirror of a monster (I assume the body guard is a wraith because mirrors and messed up faces). Mirrors also being the portal between worlds, and Ennis has had his first glimpse that something is not quite right - is now someone who is “marked” by the supernatural for having now been given his first little hint the world is not as it seems.

This actually reminds me of 6x01, where Dean was slowly eased back into being a hunter by hearing nothing more than a scream and going to investigate it - while doing so he passed through a lot of dust sheets which metaphorically stood for the same thing - the veil between worlds that Dean was going to move from the normal back to the supernatural

We then get the little intro to the supernatural as it exists in Chicago. They have an established subculture, various types of monsters all coming together to enjoy this goffik atmosphere. Enoby would love it here. :P There’s even a vampire biting a willing victim (dude vampire, lady victim. keep on playing those tropes literally straight) which feels right out the imaginings of a Twilight fan. This is also where RICH monsters go. I suddenly am thinking of a serious class divide - these are monsters who can afford to come to a fancy establishment, are probably all connected to these monster families who run the city some way or another and have the relative luxury to behave as themselves in large gatherings and to create a subculture. A LOT of the monsters Sam and Dean meet get by on very little, have abandoned places as hideouts and generally are grubbing around on the streets for a meal. These monsters can afford to cover up that they eat people, and can buy in to this society. Sleek clubs are a world of difference from the grubby bars that hunters make their homes away from home.

So, again, feeling nothing like the show we normally watch, and many of the types of monsters prettied up. The shapeshifters use magic to change their appearance and it’s clearly a high society type of monster because they’re not messy, they can change at will in a very slick way and not depend on copying other people, so they are allowed a sense of self - a flexible one, but one that they can make their own, nonetheless. The alpha shifted this way, so I would suspect to even remotely try to connect them to the show’s lore, their family must be shifter royalty, close to the alpha in, well, bloodline, and clearly doing something to preserve that purity and magical transformation. They probably disown their kin who transform in the gross way - who knows, maybe some of the angry, violent shifters we’ve met in the past have been rejects from this family, angry about being shoved out into the world without any support? :P The first shifter we ever met back in 1x06 was particularly angry about rejection and lack of belonging and feeling like a freak.

Anyway, just more ways in which these monsters are so far removed from the ones that made Supernatural what it is. They don’t have the sort of raw, honest angst and existential horror about their monstrous-ness that they should. They don’t personally FEEL monstrous, in that outcast and lonely way. I think the shifter, who DIDN’T have to kill to eat, but killed anyway, was a good way to explain a lot of the monsters on the show - any of the ones that embrace killing, even if it’s not overtly spoken, it’s because of the way they’re made to feel like monsters. Any that can get away with blending with humanity (I just watched 7x03 for example) have a choice to try and find a way to live within society (like the vampires in 2x03, all with night jobs, living peacefully) and even then being a monster sets them apart and presents them with difficulties, especially when hunters are drawn to them by accidents or carelessness and they have to defend their right to exist in society...

In 12x09 I was flipping out about how Dabb is so great at establishing side characters (and I was thinking about a lot of the interesting ones I’ve passed in this rewatch as well) but yeah no not here. This shifter and werewolf are presented as jackasses and then everyone’s fighting because the slashy hand blade guy comes in (I can not remember which other fictional character he blatantly ripped off now but I remember seeing on my dash the comparison and it was embarrassingly direct :P) so there’s no investment here because, well, despite showing us there might be a more interesting world of monsters, these guys were not it. And now they’re dying and it’s like, so?

Ennis attempts to propose to Tamara and it’s really sweet and pretty corny and typical romance. There’s not much reason to be invested in them either, which is all the more obvious when Tamara is literally a throw-away character as the bad guy chucks her aside and she bangs her head so it’s not even TARGETED fridging, like Mary and Jess were so obviously killed by whatever the main story would be.

Also because the last 2 episodes I watched were 12x09 and 12x10 I have now watched 3 episodes in a row where a black woman gets killed >.>

Ugh

Like, tiny good thing: if this had taken off, it would have been a show with a black lead. Who is really cute and giving it his all.

But. Meh. Fuck that trope >.>

Anyway, blah blah introducing the uninteresting shifter bloke who is the stand-in Dean. He’s at college but doesn’t feel interested in studying so he steals the answers - all laid back and fun until he gets a call that there’s been a death in the family to drag him back into all their drama. Sort of season 1 Dean swapped with Sam’s place, if you squint. Way too rich :P

Some shipping between Ennis and David would have been cool - Ennis has the mysterious last words from David’s brother to lead him to him, eventually, but there’s girlfriends everywhere, that message was ABOUT Violet.

Season 12 has laid it on thick with the inter-species forbidden love nonsense for angels, though, that this was originally paralleling Dean n Cas. Guess Dabb has a thing for it :P

ENNIS I know what I saw.

DETECTIVE FREDDIE COSTA And you're sure? I mean...sure? 'Cause, what you're tellin' me... About this faceless whatever-it-is?

ENNIS That thing had claws.

FREDDIE Look, maybe you got confused. You know, maybe -- maybe it was some banger with a knife.

ENNIS I know what I saw.

FREDDIE I am trying to help.

ENNIS By calling me a liar?!

This exchange is pretty stupid when you consider a black kid being cross-examined by police. He does know them - the guy references his old man, and I’m vaguely remembering was his dad a cop? So he might be a bit more comfortable with them, but he’s still in a dodgy position, and arguing that it was a “thing” is a terrible idea to “invent” a monster because it just makes him look suspicious.

However it does fit the trope that Ennis is suddenly really credible to monsters after seeing a few things, and now is in that stage where he’s still freaking out about monsters maybe being real. He has to hold onto the memories of what he saw - he can’t question it or lie because he needs to preserve the memories properly, so he doesn’t think he’s gone crazy. Because he’s going to investigate further and he knows holding onto the monster thing is the key to finding out what REALLY happened, and the authorities dismissing it is dismissing the best lead they have.

This of course does fit with the season 9 theme of narratives and stories, because it turns the whole “non-existence” of monsters into a narrative people tell themselves to make them feel better, and certain people discover the “subtext” - the literal world of monsters living hidden beneath our own - and now read the world completely differently. People deny the monsters exist, don’t pick up on the clues, ignore the subtext... And people like Ennis who suddenly discover how to read into it, or the Winchesters who are always searching for cases intentionally reading between the lines to find monsters...

In this case the Urban Fantasy mode of hiding monsters overlaps completely with the horror way that Supernatural uses them, so these are compatible worlds. The genre shift is really like, looking at it through a different lens. Interpreting the same subtext in a different way, but still, importantly, seeing beyond the surface layer.

Blah blah Ennis has messed up history with his father, hey guess what fitting the profile nicely :P

Sam and Dean conveniently show up now we know everything we need to know about Ennis to let him interact with the bridge between 2 worlds. Dean dismisses the cop by telling him they just won’t tell him what they’re investigating - refusing to let him in on the story.

We see Sam and Dean from the outside eyes; if you never saw this show before they’d just be weird FBI agents with implausible names who swooped in, took a statement, and swooped out: the suspicious enemy who are probably going to cover it all up (if you still think they’re FBI and have those sort of resources :P) They also listen to what Ennis has to say but then dismiss his story too - “there’s no such thing as monsters” Dean tells him (which is ironic for where Dean is at too). Of course there’s the 2nd level at work that we all know who Sam and Dean are and that this is just drawing attention to the fact another story is at work, a knowing nod that there’s a subtext at work here.

The next scene also establishes that the detective also knew about monsters, so now we know Ennis is being played by multiple sides, all telling him that there’s no such thing. All motivation that he has to get to the heart of it because he KNOWS he’s been lied to. The cover up of the world of monsters is the real plot tension at stake, because of course the first step for a muggle human hero in these sort of stories is the discovery phase, so he has to reach this sort of block at first, where he’s made to doubt.

I suppose it also makes Sam and Dean shown in a light where they’re no better than the monsters; everyone has a stake in keeping it from muggles - whether to protect them or to stop the monsters being exposed.

MARGOT Yeah, you'll what? David, come on. You don't want this. You ran away to be a human. You always had a soft spot for 'em. Look, you're out. Stay out.

David being paralleled with all of TFW here. He leaves the family for several years and now the dad is dying... They’re trying to mimic Dean’s carefree yet sensitive swagger with him, and of course it wouldn’t be Supernatural if the “good monster” didn’t have a massive soft-spot for humans and wanted to be like them and live like them, so parallels that endgame for Cas.

In the love story he parallels Dean, though, while at the moment the Sam and Cas stuff is most obvious, of course he ends up mimicking the 6x20 scene from the Dean perspective. There’s a brief mention of her, establishing David was in an inter-species romance and that she’s now being married to someone else. At the moment in the end of season 9 Dean and Cas are in a weird place - I wouldn’t say a break up like some of their others, but Cas is also answering a call to help his family, gathering an army, and Dean is super weird about them. And of course, in a Dabb episode, building up to the “us or them” with Hannah, who was vaguely coded as a romantic threat to Dean in the love triangle - the jealousy was played off a lot more on his side than anything that happened between Cas and Hannah, in the long run. Anywho that’s all waiting to happen, so it’s paralleling Cas’s supposed split loyalty, which also, because of 9x18, we know he was already forced into.

I think the djinn should have been actually middle eastern but oh well way past the point of judging this episode - why am I even trying :P

Violet shows up wearing a heart pendant... wow subtle

(Too much heart etc)

(Mary parallels? She used to have a heart pendant, right? Before she started wearing the ring instead)

She’s also wearing cream, which is beige-ish.

Just to establish these are not nice people, her brother(?) tells her her job is to be silent and pretty. A token figurehead - powerful but only as an image they wield. Which I think is sort of what Metatron does with Cas, because 9x14 showed him he couldn’t beat him down or have him subservient to another angel - he had to be in charge. But Metatron was in charge of the story, so Cas just had to look pretty, play his part, and Metatron would handle the rest >.> Cas is currently “ensnared” in this since he answered the call at the end of 9x18.

Ennis walks through the city looking around vaguely suspiciously - maybe wondering who is a monster or not around him. The whole transformation of the world part, where he learns to see it with new eyes and to open his eyes to the fact it could be more than he’s noticed before. Perception is the key, and this makes a GOOD follow up to 9x18 telling us how to read a story.

He goes for the gun, obviously already seeking revenge, and discovers silver bullets - his father kept them, a first sign that he is Right and monsters exist coming from an authority figure he ACTUALLY trusts.

(And in the wider scheme, also reminds us that in this world there are a lot of law enforcement who one way or another learn about the supernatural and carry on enforcing the law but with juuust a little extra knowledge to help them out)

Unnecessary flashback of Tamara dying is unnecessary. Thanks Singer. This kid playing Ennis was selling it really well without that being randomly inserted in his Sad And Lonely Revenge Look

Do the authorities know about the massacre? Did they just... Ask the people at the restaurant what happened and they were like, nah, just that random guy who staggered around outside and died, nothing to do with us, and the police never investigated?

The owner comes in with a mop and bucket. No CSI for monsters :P

I like that Ennis has changed into a camo jacket - nice symbolism about becoming a soldier on the path to being a hunter and getting revenge.

Awww he wastes almost all of his dad’s silver bullets. They don’t work on vampires, mate.

Dean making fun of the food supplies they stock of parts of humans to eat. More monsters being normalised, having a structure to feeding and therefore a supportive subculture. It’s almost like how we eat meat without knowing the animals it came from personally. In both season 6 and 7 the idea of humans as herd animals for monsters to eat was a threat, briefly with Eve, all season with Dick. Turns out organised monsters in cities have been doing it all along. The difference is it’s already in place, instead of the potential horror of it being done. I’m really not a vegetarian but try looking at it from that perspective of a cow walking into a meat cold store :P

Blah blah getting the monsters talk from Sam and Dean. Dean is flippant about killing the vampire but doesn’t seem super weird about it because there’s no time for the Mark of Cain arc, Ennis just gets to think Dean is more of a dick than he might have

Ennis now at a crossroads to become a hunter, do the whole revenge thing, or just go back to his regular life (which he says is ruined, in that whole “burn everything down to motivate the hero” way that, as I said, was really rubbishly done to be convincing here. Like yeah he lost his girlfriend but it’s not like how Sam got shoved onto the road :P Failing to match up to the original story by just being not very committed to character drama over world building... I also think there’s just no developing the dynamic of the characters soon enough - Sam and Dean were back on screen together almost immediately after the title card. They had the whole pilot to show us their development. Now we see tiny establishing scenes for each of the characters and even Ennis’s journey is pretty weak, and it’s just not enough)

SAM Ennis, listen. I get it. Believe me, I've been there. But what we do? It's messed up. So do yourself a favor and stay out. You can get hurt, too.

Wow. Powerful incentive. No showing, just telling :P

Anyway NOW Ennis and David are talking, or, Ennis is yelling and waving a gun. David is Mr Exposition so their actual character dynamic building is pretty low. I suppose it mirrors after Sam stops the “intruder” in 1x01 they have a good long talk about how their life works for the sake of exposition, but it felt much more natural than “what are you doing in my room” “there are 5 monster families running the city...”

David and Violet stand and stare at each other and get really sad.

VIOLET Is the real butler okay?

DAVID He's resting. Locked in a closet.

Thanks Dabb, yeah, this episode IS really heterosexual.

Thinking of which,

DAVID And I was there. Where were you?

Casually throwing in that old 6x20 dialogue between Dean n Cas. I think this would be less suspicious if there wasn’t another chunk of receycled dialogue somewhere else in the episode...

Anyway it’s interesting because dialogue snatching aside, rather than the context of 6x20 they’re talking about running away together to start a new - human - life. Cas was human this year and Dean ran off to see briefly but in the end they never got their act together and Cas was dragged back into the mix. Likewise it parallels all the times Sam or Dean ran off and made a normal life with Jess, Amelia, or Lisa, and took themselves out of the world of hunting. I was saying 9x09 quietly teased the El Sol go someplace better poster behind Cas when Dean was talking to him at the bar - the last time Cas was human and Dean saw him. Their chance to be together now just a dream. And it would have been a human life together.

This is actually effective subtext for this season on top of mirroring 6x20. Dabb IS good at this part :P

blah blah new characters save each other’s lives, still more concerned about girlfriends

“blah blah five monster families” (again)

*Dean makes fun of the concept*

DEAN And sometimes you got to work with the bad guys to get to the worse guys.

Oh hello the entire reason behind Dean’s downfall this season :P

Played straight here. Ennis is not in trouble like Dean is. We’re just ignoring the main plot.

I like that filming on location means that they can have exterior shots that capture the recognisable city skyline when they go to the grotty abandoned buildings places

DAVID I lost someone, too, okay?! But I'm trying here.

ENNIS I'm sorry about your brother. He spoke about you at the end. He said, "David, I'm sorry. I didn't have a choice."

DEAN All right, you guys can kiss and make up later. We got work to do. Come on.

I suppose Dean ships it.

The whole “I don’t have a choice” theme coming back around here. Justifying really terrible decisions and in this case being the reason that het!DeanCas aren’t together. Which considering this entire season has been just “I did what I had to do” followed by terrible decisions that keep Dean and Cas from each other, yeah.

Those lights with the cages around them are in the creepy guy’s murder basement.

He’s also, of course, a blatant Metatron mirror, once more trying to construct a story, in this case using the Cas parallel character to kick off a war -

IRV Why should I believe you? You're dead. Tomorrow, they will find pieces of you all over town. Oh, won't the doggies be mad?

VIOLET That's what you want. You're trying to start a war.

He’s also dressing up as a monster (in this case, the “good” guys since he’s trying to disrupt a status quo which is the second best thing to “no monsters at all” :P) and mimicking their kills; Metatron cosplays as Cas briefly, and of course disguises a ton of angel deaths as Cas’s work.

Werewolves would be a lot better on this show if they weren’t terrible. I mean, just because their powers are rubbish and filming Violet attacking this dude was painfully bad fight choreography. She kinda slow mo leaped at him and then sat on him growling a lot. David power-of-love talks her out of killing the weirdo. I guess her being overcome with rage is also a Mark parallel since this will be kind of how Dean stabs Gadreel and has to be restrained except that moment had dignity and tension (though I think Dean stabbed him in slow mo too, at least it wasn’t AWFUL slow mo :P)...

Anyway here’s a scene with a werewolf overcome with rage to go with the Garth story immediately after Dean gets the Mark, and 8x03 and 8x04 weirdly mirroring each other AND what is to come in a season and a half, and of course 10x04 being a back-to-business werewolf story. I can’t remember any others connected to big moments in this arc but I might have blanked them out, and there is a werepire right after Dean gets the Mark off and all that action dies down :P

Oh wow I forgot this ended with Ennis just shooting the guy. Yay revenge? There’s probably quite trite commentary here which this show dealt with years ago about actions defining what is monstrous and conveniently omits that Dean’s headed right into the cosmic toilet as a result of revenge missions, and there’s a very on the nose line:

ENNIS I only see one monster here.

The show always uses some other means to kill a human monster than a Winchester doing it (unless we’re going seriously bad places - Thinman anyone? :P) just on principle that killing humans is a bit more ethically dodgy; Ennis falls under that rule on THIS show but say this was the start of HIS show... already crossed a line. Oops. Seems like he’d also be falling in with the monsters anyway since this is a set up to be BFFs with Violet and David as the good monsters on his side who like humans and the natural order, buuut. It’s all pretty silly. These poor characters are under developed for the sake of later development, but don’t have any interesting hook to make them worth that development so they never got their show? I guess?

Ending all the actual drama such as it was with 6 minutes to spare, we now have the long conversation between Violet and David about their relationship. Here’s the bit where Violet shows up to run away with David wearing a trenchcoat. Subtle.

SAL 'Cause he's my little brother, Violet. It's my job to protect him. It's my job to keep our blood pure.

I somehow feel like this is calling out Dean somehow but aside from the obvious “big brother does terrible thing to protect little brother” that this season kicked off with that is being critiqued I’m not sure what the bloodline part could even be metaphoric for. Possibly you could ignore the “brother” part and look at it as Gadreel having Cas kicked out the Bunker (or, well, Dean doing it because Gadreel) to protect Sam, so he mirrors both characters here - the douchey big brother shifter, and being paired off against Violet with the romantic parallels.

Also amused about the angel lore from 12x10 and that’s pretty obvious now, but also I guess, wondering what would happen if a werewolf and shapeshifter had a baby. Could the 2 meet without knowing it, hook up, and produce a mutant offspring? - I guess I was also right about the shapeshifters being weird about their bloodline because I’d guess they’re always one bad match away from the sticky gross shapeshifters :P

Blah blah “David wants to go straight” blah blah “i love him”

blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

VIOLET I don't know. I should go.

DAVID Sure, right. That's what you do best.

Sure wish Dean n Cas kissed like that after saying lines like that.

Well they’d probably have a ton more chemistry.

They last-minute reveal a sibling for Ennis just in case (hey, a sister, who we never will see :P).. Now we’re clear of actually having to WATCH this episode I do feel bad we don’t have a show for them, you know, if we started again from scratch, ditched the monster war thing, and let them figure out being hunters in the city together >.>

*Dean dragged away from this silly story by Cas* Thanks, Cas, you saved them more times than you can ever know.

Always sad that was such a terse conversation but I guess Mark!Dean is the least likely version of Dean to answer the phone with an accidental “hey Babe” so there’s not much point lingering on their phonecalls.

Did they have to time that take waiting for a train, or was it just a coincidence? Train symbolism in season 9 is a thing.

Ennis goes off to get given a ton of main character nonsense heaped on him about starting being a hunter, wearing the ring of his dead partner around his neck, and since we weren’t done stealing elements from the early seasons, getting a mysterious phonecall from his (supposed?) dead father. I really feel sorry for that kid :P He did not deserve *gestures vaguely at everything*

#9x20 #spn rewatches #weird rewatching #Dabb vs cars #my stuff

22 notes · View notes