Is It Just Me?
Once upon a time, there was this girl who stretched herself waaaaaaaaaay out on a limb like someone lying on their belly on the half-thawed ice of the deep, blue sea in order to testify to all her nay-saying peers about this little supernatural show that could. Could be profound. Could be intense and terrifying for all the right reasons instead of all the wrong ones. Could be character nirvanna, cast with actors capable of taking the ride. Could be quippy and snarky and smart. Could be complex and deeply thought out instead of just a mindless boofest. Could be scary and entertaining and *gasp* horror and still be one of the top three shows on the air. Could be a worthy contender to the empty throne of XFiles and Miracles and Carnivale.
Could be.
So ... is it just me, or did anyone else get wet when that ice broke right-the-fuck through?
First, let me say that I liked this episode MUCH better than the last one. Or perhaps more accurately, disliked it less than the last one. Yeah, the first half bored me silly, and I didn't buy the yappity-yap enough to take the time to poke holes in why this rang so character bland, if in-character at all. I'm willing to conceed that might actually be related to the fact that I'm sick as hell and in a grumpy mood, so the lack of snap to the dialog itself threw me so far out of giving a shit that I didn't give it as much lattitude to catch me as I normally would. If that's the case, maybe I'll feel less "why are you wasting my time with this?" in the re-watch, but I kinda doubt it.
That being said, I actually liked the second half quite a bit ... which is a pretty good trick to accomplish after you've already lost me to the point the first half had. Unlike many, the hamburger stuff didn't put me off at all. In fact, I found it kind of horror-funny and very much true to some of the stuff they did in S1 that made me key in on the show in the first place. The fact that it was hamburger instead of somebody's flesh, but yet they played it like he was glutting out on something deeply gross ... that kind of amused me. And actually put me back into the frame of mind to give the episode a chance again.
And the delimma they framed was interesting. And complex, as compared to simplistic. And kind of heartbreaking in many ways. And they carried it off pretty well ... liked the mix of pathos and "is he, isn't he" they managed to capture. And I liked Travis: both the way he was played and the way he was written. And I thought the guy who played Jack rocked hard in the role. I felt his pain ... and his hunger.
Okay, I'm out of stuff I liked. No, wait, I liked that Dean belted Sam a second time after he'd belted him the first. Nice. And I liked that Dean went after Ruby with the Demon killing knife. Um ... anything else? Uh ... nope, that's it.
So here's the core of what makes me insane about this episode, and about the growing trend in SPN general that is making me regret stretching myself out so far on that ice. Who's actually minding the details here, boys?
Used to be, when you started picking at the details of an SPN episode, what you got was a really cool second layer of detail and interesting stuff. Mythos. Legends. Sigils that actually mean something. References to places where cool things happened. There were layers upon layers of "stuff" that the show put in there that didn't really pick up on screen to the casual viewer, but for nuts like us, it was there when you started picking. And all that detail? Made their world REAL. Made their mythos REAL. They wove both their story lines and their monsters into the tapestry of Americana folklore effectively enough that you had to spend some time with a seam ripper to split the fiction from the legend.
And that was freakin awesome. It made the show live. It made the show breathe.
But now? Now they don't even seem to be thinking through the most basic of logic lines. They don't consider anything but the most obvious of interpretations of what they're doing. They can't remember their own mythos. You pick at the details and you get ... nothing.
To quote Meg, "Thin, man. Very thin."
Let me demonstrate. I'll use this episode because it's fresh in everyone's mind; but I'll also caveat this with the fact that my source of ... distress? ... is that these kinds of failures are not isolated events. They are becoming the norm in SPN storytelling, and that kills me in a way that offing John didn't.
So you've got Travis. Great character. Well played. Well written. Issue one: forgetting your own mythos. The boys were raised in isolation from the hunter community to such a degree that, when confronted by Ellen, they're stunned to find out there's a hunter community at all. And along comes Travis. Known him for ten years, not just since John died and we realized there were other hunters to get to know. Jim. Bobby. Travis. How many more "we didn't know there was a hunters subculture, but hey, all these people know about evil and are hunting it, too" friends of the family are we going to run into? Mind your fucking details. Easy fix. Sam: Yeah, I'm taller, but you're not an insurance salesman, either. I guess we all change, eh? Travis: Hey, don't blame me. Your daddy had his rules. Or any of a thousand other one-line drops that fix this. Or just leaving out the "we've known you since you were 15" would have done it, cause we could have bought Travis was an intro from Bobby or Ellen that Sam was using while Dean was dead. But no. Such an indifference to their own mythos that they don't think through the simplest of things in terms of the story they've already told.
But hey. I can handwave that despite the fact that this kind of detail consistency is what makes the universe REAL in S1 and S2 to a degree that it no longer is. All in all, relatively minor, eye roll, "I wish they'd get their shit together" kind of thing.
Which brings us to issue two. A much deeper, more troubling issue, and pretty much the nutshell of everything I'm seeing now in SPN that defines it as, at best, a mid-stream entertaining show rather than the top-of-the-line piece of genre great it could have been (and once was, dammit).
So Travis. Good guy. Moral. Hunter. Destroying evil. Really sorry he has to torch the wife along with the rangaru, but hey, he learned his lesson about letting the baby live. So he's going to burn her alive, too. Sorry about that. Hate to do it. But gotta be done. Why? Because he doesn't have 30 years to wait around and catch the baby when he goes into metamorphosis, so he's got to take care of business now or all those people who die in 30 years will be on his hands.
So, major logic flaw AND the absolute worst unthinking, only look at the surface and never even bother to poke your idea to see if it holds water gaff I've seen in awhile. You're going to burn an innocent woman alive to get to the unborn baby she isn't even far enough along to be showing yet? What? You don't have nine months to wait around until the baby is born so you can kill the monster and not the innocent woman? Or what about any of thirty-odd drugs you could inject her with on the sly sometime over the next nine months that would cause a spontaneous abort? How 'bout giving her a front row seat to the moster her husband is and letting her decide not to carry his rangaru spawn to term for herself? How 'bout setting yourself up to adopt the kid yourself, then do with him/her as you will? A thousand solutions to this that don't include burning a woman alive to get to the fetus inside her.
And while we're on the subject, you learned your lesson, Travis? How? Jack hasn't killed anybody. You've suffered not one whit for not killing his father's kid when the boy was just a kid. You make that choice then, because you couldn't face killing an innocent kid, but you can't face that choice again now? Because ... it had such horrible consequences for you, that choice did? You had to hunt something down and kill it before it killed anything else thirty years after you could have killed it. Yeah, damn, I can see where that would haunt you forever not to have killed that kid when he was five and just a kid. And considering how horrible this turned out, Jack not having killed anyone before you caught up with him and started lurking in the shadows to watch him come into his rangaru heritage, I can absolutely see where you'd be willing to burn an innocent woman alive to keep that horrible consequence from happening again.
WTF? Where's the logic here? Where's the "lesson learned' that motivates this dire an action? Where's the humanity in a hunter who would seek alternate ways to eliminate the monster, if he did feel the monster had to be eliminated now rather than waiting for the 30 year mark, without also killing the innocent mother?
So let's move on to lack of complexity. Lack of soul. Lack of everything that made Faith what it was, that made IMToD and Dead Man's Blood and Wendigo what they were. This isn't a failure of choice, this is a failure of opportunity. The great show this was becoming wasn't created by writing stories that could happen. It was created in finding the opportunities to write stories where the profound happened. Where Layla had to die to stop the reaper, and Dean had to suffer the weight of that. Where Hailey tells the whole world to fuck off, that's her BROTHER out there and she's going out to find him, even if it means she and her other brother die in the process. Where Luthor could have just picked another nubile wench to fuck for a new millenium, but instead, is so bonded to Kate that he dies trying to save her, the lament of "you've hunted us to extinction, we have as much right to exist as you do" still hanging fresh in the air.
And how is the failure of that profound sensibility demonstrated here? You have a man agonizing over what he has become. A victim of his own biology. A good man, who would never want to be what he obviously now is. You have a loving wife. A devoted wife. And ... the wife runs off, leaving her monster husband behind without ever knowing if there is any way to save him or not and you have Jack rushing Sam instead of eating Dean. Where's the profound there? Where is the RIGHT solution, as compared to "this makes a stopping point" solution?
Where is Jack, so hungry he can't resist the lure of Dean's blood, Sam calling to him from wherever he is still restrained that he doesn't have to do this, that he can resist it, that he can be what he wants to be. Where is Jack turning to Sam, looking at him as the monster he has become, saying "You said there's no going back." Sam saying "You don't have to do this. You don't have to kill my brother." Jack saying "I had no choice. He was going to burn my wife alive." Sam saying "This isn't what you are. You're a good man." Jack saying "This is what I am now." Sam saying "Please don't kill my brother. I need him. He's all I have." Jack saying "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." Then either a) Jack picks up the torch and torches himself, choosing who he is rather than letting it choose him OR b) Jack heads back for Dean and the still restrained Sam spontaneously combusts him with his mind, then follows it saying "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry, but I had no choice, you were going to kill my brother ..."
Or alternatively, the wife DOESN"T run off. Instead, she gets freed and stays, trying to help her husband, trying to figure this out, showing that desipte the mother who would beg Sam to kill her Lilith-infected daughter and two dozen other S3-S4 examples of family "I love you until you scare me" non-loyalty, that there ARE people on the planet other than the Winchesters who would do whatever it took to save their loved ones, and not every woman immediately runs to her own safety the moment she's set free (remember Kat?). And in the process of this, SHE ends up with the torch, and she says they can find some way to cure this, they can figure out some way around it, and instead, Jack tells her she has to do for him, so she does. Or she hands him the torch and bears witness (or walks away) as he does.
A thousand other profound ways to turn this delimma into something that makes a statement on the inherent heartbreak of this situation rather than just killing the monster because that's the way the horror story ends; and every one of them, a missed opportunity untaken.
And herein lies my disillusion with this episode. Herein lies my disillusion with the vast majority of S3, and what looks to be the same-ole same-ole starting up again in S4. And the worst of it is in how these same dynamics are applying themselves to the Sammy mythos.
You have Sam exorcising demons with his mind to save people, and THAT MAKES DEAN WANT TO HUNT HIM?!?!?!?!? Why the fuck would he do that? Would he hunt Missouri simply because she's psychic? A human has the power to throw a demon out of the host it is inhabiting, and he's using that power to save people who are possessed by a whole passel of demons that were recently set free upon the world. But he's evil and must be destroyed for using that power to do exactly the same thing Dean and Bobby are doing with Latin?
Where's the fucking logic in that?
Not that it isn't a slippery slope. It is. That's the whole point. Clearly, the implication is that Ruby is tempting Sam into developing his demon powers by showing him a way to turn those powers to good, knowing that eventually, all this practice will be turned to bad end because absolute power corrupts absolutely. And yes, absolutely, Dean should be scared silly about that, and perhaps even belting Sammy to get his attention to say "stop that!" But "what you're doing makes me want to hunt you"?!?!? Which part, Dean? The killing demons part or the saving possessed people part? Which one of those makes you want to hunt him? Is it the "even God doesn't want you to do this" part that makes you want to hunt him? Doesn't that make you the drunk or the whore in Houses of the Holy who took the word of an angel manifesting saying "I am an angel of the Lord, don't question me, just kill that guy cause God wants you to"? Dean isn't that guy. Dean doesn't have blind faith. Dean knows something is up with Castiel, and maybe he IS an angel of the Lord because damn, that whole "pulling me out of hell" thing was pretty convincing, and those wings are hella awesome. But he's suddenly the ultimate authority on what God wants and what God doesn't want just because he says he is? Especially for a guy like Dean who has professed never to believe in God in the first place, let alone angels?
My frustration runneth over.
I'm going to stop here just because if I don't, I'm going to end up deconstructing ten episodes out of the last two seasons that have the same fundamental flaw that is taxing me here. And that isn't really necessary. This episode pretty much gave me the whole argument in one place. It presented a delimma with the potential to actually make a profound episode rather than just another monster munch fest, and it actually handled that delimma pretty well from all surface appearances. But when it comes to looking past that first-glance impression? When it comes to scratching the gloss to see if the shine is just skin deep, or if it goes all the way through?
Supernatural used to shine like a dark beacon in the night, the light of it unique in how consistent and real and profound it was while speaking to things like family love and responsibility and grief in the framework of horror stories set on the back roads of Americana. The joy of the show was in layer after layer of details and logics and thinky-thoughts that were so deep you couldn't dig through them with a spade, let alone scratch the surface only to find out the whole thing was little more than a hollow rabbit renigging on a chocolate promise.
I don't know what happened, but I do know it happened. Supernatural isn't the show it used to be. All the "could be" it once had is starting to smell like rank "wanna be," and I don't like it. And I especially don't like it when the construct of the show still supports the kind of mythos it was originally hanging. And when both the lead actors and at least one of the secondary leads are more than capable of handing anything the writers can give them.
This is a failure of overview. This is a loss of the forest for undue attention afforded to individual trees. And it needs to stop. Someone needs to take a step back and look at the big picture here. Someone needs to start poking these scripts BEFORE they get into production and saying "You know, the logic of that doesn't really work because ..." or "You know, in episode #123 we actually established that ..."
So there you have it. Little girl stretched out on a limb, feeling the limb cracking like a big dog behind her. I need my show back. I need the depth of mythos and constructed reality that smelled and tasted and felt real; not this weekly exercise in "if you look pretty enough, no one cares what you actually think." I realize this is CW, but SPN used to have a soul, and I'm not seeing that any more. I need to see it again boys. I really, really need to see it again; because I'm feeling a little bit like someone made a crossroads deal here, and what they kissed the demon for wasn't quality, it was ratings.