#sry 4 enjoying women's wrongs and hating runs of unwatchable episodes way more than a messy season arc that can't pick a landing to stick

[shinelikethunder]

i know that the most convenient shared reference point for splitting SPN into eras is by showrunner, but subjectively, the instinctive way my brain wants to divide it up is into just two shows: six seasons and change of a show powered by whatever the fuck is wrong with kripke and gamble, and then eight or nine seasons of a show powered by whatever the fuck is wrong with dabb and buckleming.

yeah carver was showrunner for some of those and gamble was hanging on by her fingernails in one, but there's... idk, a derailment that happens in s7. where the show's coherence, its plausibility as a continuation that's at least trying to build seamlessly on what came before, kinda falls down and never gets back up again. and this seems driven, not primarily by showrunner agenda (in fact the hallucifer arc is IMO the last shambling remnant of SPN v1), but by dabb/loflin and buckner/ross-leming stepping up as the meat-and-potatoes midseason episode writers + both duos getting bolder (or less tightly edited) about their worst tendencies.

(tbh i'm curious what carver's tenure would've looked like with a different set of writers taking point on the anchor episodes that weren't openers/finales, because haphazard execution of intriguing concepts was like theeee hallmark of s8-11. but all the same. carver and dabb eras and late gamble era feel grouped, to me, by similar implementation issues dragging down distinct overall approaches. aka "whatever the fuck is wrong with dabb and buckleming," which also includes more and more of their personal narrative kinks as the seasons go on.)

anyway none of this has any objective backstop to it that i can point to, beyond "gosh look at where the Writing Crimes Georg duos started getting handed entire mini-arcs." mostly it's just this vibe that s6 and some of s7 were still cooking in s1-5's kitchen? an attachment to the continuity there, which beats out the conceptual tidiness of "kripke era" as a line to draw between "classic" SPN and everything else. or, to be petty and specific, a sense that 7x03 and the dumbshit subplot it instigated were the shark-jump that SPN never even tried to recover from, after which it functionally became a different show that was far more loosely held together than its predecessor.