Season Three Thoughts!
1) I quite like that Dean turns up to meet with this girl he knew when he was like, twenty, and even though it's not spelled out, I think he kind of expected her to be exactly the same, the way he pretty much is. What I mean by that is that he's still doing what he was doing when he was 20; hunting things, having random hook-ups, and he kinda expected her to be still doing the same, and that he'd be able to just hook-up with her for a weekend again. It's the tethercat principle. And while the episode was all about "Jeez, maybe Dean did accidentally father a son," there is also this undercurrent of most people's lives when they're 19/20 have radically changed by the time they're reaching thirty. They're married, maybe getting ready to/already have kids. But's Dean's life now is pretty much exactly the same as it was ten years ago, and he's going to be dead in a year. His life has never changed since he was four years old. Once that occured to me, it lent the episode a really sad tilt.
2) I get that they're trying to make Ben like Dean in that scene with them at the party so he, and you, think that maybe Ben is Dean's son, but seriously? What eight-year-old talks like that? I could just about buy it if it was his twelth birthday or something; if he was on the cusp of puberty. But what eight-year-old talks about "hot chicks"? Seriously. He's still at the age where members of the opposite sex are riddled with grossness.
3) Blonde!Ruby really irritates me, in a way that Nu!Ruby didn't, and I think I've worked out why.
I got the first three seasons for my birthday in 2009; I bought the fourth when I was about halfway through the second and knew I loved it, so I didn't have any gaps in between episodes until I'd gotten caught up with Season Five. That meant that what I got of blonde!Ruby was seven episodes of her, pretty much back to back, whereas I got eleven episodes of nu!Ruby. Because I had longer with Nu!Ruby, and no breaks in between where the character "settled" for want of a better word, she always felt like the "real" Ruby (the same way that brunette Meg feels like a completely different character from blonde Meg, but we'll come to that later). So whenever I'm watching Season Three Ruby, I feel like I'm just waiting for proper Ruby to show up.
I also think there's a problem with inconsistant writing. No matter the meatsuit, Azazel, for instance, always felt like the same person, just looking different. But 3!Ruby and 4!Ruby feel like two completely different people. For one thing, 3!Ruby was much more suited to Dean; if it was him she was trying to manipulate, then 3!Ruby was perfect. But it wasn't.
I get around my annoyance with this by creating the headcanon that this was all deliberate on Ruby's part; she saw her original persona wasn't working with Sam, so, having gotten to know him better, took on a new one that worked better with him; it was less caustic; still sarcastic and bitchy, but more gentle with Sam himself; someone he would be more likely to turn to after Dean's death.
4) I was always disappointed that more wasn't done with the whole Mary's friends disappearing thing.
5) I also never really appreciated how creepy this episode is; the idea of your child being replaced by something, and you can't even work out what is seems to want. You don't know if your real child is even still alive. The child's father dies in some freak accident, round about the same time as your child changes. And no one will believe you, of course.
6) Also, the scene where the mother tries to kill her changeling daughter is immensely disturbing on so many different levels. It harks back to what I was saying in my season two recap, about families of the demon-possessed etc never knowing what happened to make their loved ones suddenly kill a bunch of people. Imagine if she'd succeeded in drowning the changeling. What would have happened to her. People would see what appeared to be a good mother, with no history of abuse, just snap after her ex died, and drown her child. And any talk about the girl being a "monster that you can only see in the mirror" would only further prove that she'd had a pyschotic break
7) Ah, Dream A Little Dream Of Me, another one of those episodes where I forget how much I love them until I watch them again.
8) I love Dean's conversation with himself, especially the realisation that "MY FATHER WAS AN OBSSESSED BASTARD! ALL THAT CRAP HE LAID ON ME ABOUT PROTECTING SAM, THAT WAS HIS CRAP!" If only it had stuck.
9) "HEEEAT OF THE MOMENT!"
10) That gargling is hilarious.
11) "Oh, Sam, you know I get all tingly when you take control like that."
Don't we all, Dean.
12) "I shot the sherrif."
"But you didn't shoot the deputy."
Sam's face when Dean says that.
13) Hendrickson was really awesome when he was a good guy. He could have gone on to be a recurring character as a hunter. That would have been utterly awesome.
14) When Ruby says "Do you know how to fight a battle? You strike fast and you don't leave any survivors, so no one can go running to tell the boss" I found that kinda ironic, seeing as it's now my canon that she is the one who told Lilith, so the boys would be more inclined to listen to her next time. Such cunning! *evil chuckle*
15) Oh Sammy, I repeat; you're so sexy when you're stern.
16) "I see they improved your face."
"Yeah, right back at you."
Boys. Banter more.
17) "Do you want a poem?"
"Moment's gone."
Then he gives Sam a beer. THIS IS HOW REAL MEN DEAL WITH THEIR "FEELINGS".
18) I love that even after they have the fight about Benton, Dean still tells Sam to be careful, and Sam says it back.
19) I apparently have a kink for the boys calling people "sir." And people call them "boy."
20) Yay, Rufus!
21) So, thoughts on Bela. I have much the same problem with Bela that I do with blonde Ruby, in that we didn't really get to see enough of her. She was written as a massive bitch, and then we find out that she was abused by her father, and the way she acts makes more sense. But we don't find that out until about fifteen minutes before she dies, so it falls kinda flat. If they'd introduced her backstory earlier, the audience would probably had more sympathy with her; because we'd see her more as a female Dean in that she's acting cocky to mask her feelings. They could have established that she was abused and killed her parents in the episode with the ghost ship; they didn't even need to show that she sold her soul; *that* could still have been the big reveal. But I at least felt I didn't have time after the reveal of her past to sympathise with her before she was killed off.
22) The problem with this season being so short is that you get to the second to last episode and Dean has three weeks left, and you're thinking "Whoa, when did that happen?" Because the episodes kinda feel like they go from case to case, they don't make it feel like it does in Doctor Who, for example, that they're having adventures in between each episode, and we're just seeing the exciting ones/the ones where things went wrong/the ones where things happened that were relevant to the story arc. So it feels like Dean had a year, and then he had three weeks within a very short amount of time, and the tension didn't really get built up properly.
I think it's a shame that this season fell during the writer's strike, because even though I enjoy it a lot, it had the potential to be so much better than it was.
23) The boys singing Bon Jovi together is adorable. They have many talents; singing is not one of them. And then it gets sad, as so many of the funny moments on this show do. I have freaking emotional whiplash.
24) So I'm totally convinced that Ruby and Lillith plotted together to get Sam and Dean to where Lillith was when Dean's deal ran out. So Sam could see Lillith gloating and it would fuel his rage and desire for vengeance against her, so it would be easier for Ruby to manipulate him into using his powers.
Also, I am feeling really unwell today. I started work yesterday (my first day of actual work ever, and my first day of having to do something responsible all day in four years.) So yay me! I mean, they're not paying me or anything, but nevertheless. It's a good start. But it seems to have left me feeling really rundown today. I have a killer headache, and I feel kinda nauseous and just generally fatigued. Soo...sympathy, flist? Please?