#i'm thinking i'll get to s7 sometime next week though. against my better judgment i am in fact excited for it. lol

[incesthemes]

final thoughts: supernatural season 6

what an interesting season. i think what i'm most surprised about is how strikingly different this season is compared to its predecessors. maybe i only picked up on it because i knew in advance that the showrunner shifted from kripke to gamble, but i still think it's fascinating to see how much can change just be putting someone new in charge.

i don't remember how i felt about season 6 the first time i watched it, but rewatching it now it definitely feels like "the beginning of the end" to me. like it's clear that it's all downhill from here, now that the original concept and plot has run its course. i wouldn't really say it's bad, but it lacked the cohesion and direction that the original 5 seasons had.

my main critique is probably that it felt like it jumped all over the place. it felt like there were three small plots shoved into one season, rather than being one overarching plot with smaller arcs. the eve thing in particular disappoints me, since she was only around for a few episodes before she got got. it calls into question her authority and power and makes her seem like not as big a deal as they said she was. mother of all monsters? yeah, nbd. got her in one try. i would have liked to see more failures or consequences on sam and dean's part as they tried to take her down—maybe even make her the season 6 big bad and then focus on cas's bullshit in season 7. idk, i think it could have been handled a lot better, but as it stands eve doesn't really stand out to me as being a monster more threatening than, say, a vampire. hell, a vampire posed more threat to the winchesters than eve, since dean actually got turned by one and suffered the consequences of it.

(i really liked the vampire episode. they should do more like that.)

i TRULY don't understand the whole "burning demon bones" nonsense. it's set up to be some great way to gank a demon, as if they don't have a demon-killing knife AND exorcism spells. i tried to rationalize it at first as like "well this way they don't have to be near the demon" which should work for lesser demons who can't teleport—but hello? crowley can. and he does. "oh but he was in the devil's trap" then use the demon-killing knife? throw it at him. idk it just seemed like a very weird thing to introduce, and the pomp and circumstance it got really seemed overblown compared to what it actually is: another mundane option for killing demons to put in their arsenal.

i think they could have stood to put a little more foreshadowing in the early episodes of this season, too. when cas started getting shady all of a sudden it felt more like an about-face than a revelation, so i would have preferred more puzzle pieces be presented from the start.

i DO really like how they develop the soul in this season, and what their philosophy about souls is. the idea that "caring" is the primary function of the soul. like sympathy, empathy, desire, worry—all the emotions that connect you to another person, basically. that's an interesting way to play the idea of a soul, and i mostly like how it was executed. i was expecting "soullessness" to be more demonic in nature, so i like that the show makes a poignant distinction between "corrupted soul" and "no soul." my major critique here is regarding sam's lust for women, which seems extremely contradictory to the established worldbuilding. like having a sex drive independent of emotion is fine, but there are many moments in the season where sam checks out women or watches them appraisingly, which indicates some level of desire—and why would a guy with no soul care about sexual attraction? doesn't make a lot of sense. this is where i really think the writers muddied the distinction between demonic and soulless, and i couldn't help but roll my eyes every time they whipped out another one of those moments.

oh and i liked all of the crowley/bobby interactions. few and far between, but god they did a great job with it. i like their parallels (why do they have the same favorite curse. that's so unnecessarily homoerotic), and the tension between them is the exact type i like in my ships. there's a maturity and age to them which gives their interactions a nice spice and flavor, so i hope there are more moments like these in season 7 too.

overall though i think the season was pretty lackluster. it makes sense in a lot of ways since they're scrambling to find a plot after the original story finished, and it's definitely a transitional season. but i realize now that there's a very big reason why i remember so much of the first 5 seasons and so little of anything past that. but i believe that's the gist of my thoughts. season 7 is next! since i clearly don't know when to stop lmao