Lawdy, Lawdy ...
After a season filled with one great episode, two half-way decent episodes (if I'm being generous), and 9 craptastic mockeries of what once was, we now have ... two great episodes. THANK you, Supernatural. For reminding me why I'm still willing to hang on by my fingernails long after I should have just turned off the lights and gone home.
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I did, too. Very much. Which was another relief for me, as much of Jensen's mugging over the last season and a half, while amusing in its own right, has been so character-antithetical as to render Dean into Jensen for several seconds right in the middle of an episode that required me to believe he was Dean to work.
So while I've rarely seen Jensen mug in a way that didn't make me chuckle for its pure Jensen-ness (and I inevitably find both Jen and Jared very amusing as themselves), it has also become (when it wasn't S1-3)just one more symptom of everything I feel is wrong with the show: that Jensen, being the consummate and extraordinarily talented actor he is, is so unmotivated by the piss-poor writing to maintain the integrity of his characterization that he continually breaks that characterization on screen in ways he wouldn't do if the writers were giving him character-appropriate Dean mugging to do.
So while the extended over-the-top scream in fear at the cat in the "Dean's a fraidy cat" episode and the arms-up "Pudding!" schtick in the "Dean's crazy" episode were both funny moments in terms of Jensen-is-a-funny-guy, bothy of those moments were episode-ruining moments in terms of how much they shattered the suspension of disbelief required to make SPN work. And the primary difference between how I reacted to them (I dissed the scream bigtime, while I reviewed the "Pudding!" lines as one of the highlights of the crazy episode) has to do with the integrity of the characterizations as a whole in the respective episodes/seasons where they appeared.
Because the scream? Pissed me off at JEN. It wasn't necessary; the Dean writing was right there in that script for him, so it was a failure of self indulgence of him as an actor to play it that way (which is something I rarely say about Jen ... either that he's self indulgent as an actor or that he doesn't have spectacular instincts when it comes to playing comedy because, as a rule, he is not and he does.) Whereas the "Pudding" thing? The writing of both the season and the episode had been so consistently not-Dean that Jensen at least giving Dean a little life for a moment came as a welcome break in the depression of watching not-Dean try and pass himself off as Dean and fail.
All of which I note to say this: the whole sword-in-the-stone schtick? I thought was brilliant, both in the writing and in Jen's hilarious play of it. And never for a moment did I see JENSEN tugging on that stone. It was DEAN as fueled by Jensen's mad skilz with comedic material. As a matter of fact, the whole scene prompted me to say, "Jensen is frakking brilliant at physical comedy." Because his instincts in that scene? Added so much to what the scriptwriter could have accomplished with another actor. And yet it was still very much acting on Jensen's part, as the way he played it all was absolutely DEAN, not Jensen.
Which is what impressed me so much about Jensen as an actor in the first 3 seasons of SPN. I actually consider him one of the best actors working today, which is part of why it is so disheartening for me to watch this show and have the writing be so off-character with Dean, even if the episode itself is otherwise reasonable, that it is excruciating to watch Jensen play "I missed it by THAT much" not because he isn't acting his ass of to be Dean, but rather because the writing missed Dean by 70% and he can only manage to pull it back from 30% Dean to 75% Dean with acting alone and no support from dialog or action.
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The problem with that is the writers tying this "mother" concept to the alpha vampire's "mother of all" statement and Crowley's "alphas are the key to finding purgatory" deal. The mother of just dragons isn't (or defies all lore if it is)the mother of all monsters/demons, so it would have worked much better if they'd played this episode as utterly divorced from the whole alpha thing, particularly as, since there were 3 of them, they didn't play any of these dragons as alphas. So 3 dragons trying to raise the mother of dragons from purgatory? Would have been made of win. But the implication the episode made explicit that they were resurrecting the "mother of all" referred to by other alphas just mucked the waters up again on the whole Lilith thing ... which they'd already more-or-less screwed the pooch on by playing Lilith as a rival demon to Lucifer rather than a relative peer of Lucifer who might be really peeved at him for considering her "children" (Lilith being the mother of all demons in virtually all lore) to be cannon fodder to his agenda.
Had they originally played Lilith as wanting to destroy Sam because Lucifer was killing her children off left and right so she wanted to fuck up his plans by destroying his vessel? Again, made of win. But they didn't go there. Instead, they played her as a more ambitious version of Meg in some kind of power struggle with Lucifer over dominion of hell -- a struggle that would have been no struggle at all, given how easily Lucifer toasts demons with just a wink and how clear they made it that once he no longer needed them to be his pawns, Lucifer would destroy all demons period. So playing her as a powerful demon rather than a "fallen human" who might be believably technobabbled into some kind of parallel power to a fallen angel? Utterly made of fail. But that's how they did it, which was more or less the beginning of the end of their mythos integrity as far as I'm concerned. Up to then, they had a tapestry going. After the introduction of Lilith? They had a macrame planter they were trying to pass off as a tapestry by calling it a tapestry.
Which, going back to the notion that what the dragons resurrected was the mother of dragons rather than Lilith ... I don't know if they're going Lilith or not with what they did just because that ship sailed way back in S3.5 so unless they are willing just ignore their canon to this point (which, to their shame that I can't rule that out as their plan here), they've kind of cut themselves off from playing the mother of all alphas as Lilith ... the only saving grace of that failure being that Lilith being the mother of all DEMONS gives them a little wiggle room that she isn't who the alpha was referring to because the alphas are technically MONSTERS, not a DEMON. But if they're going with the mother of dragons here being the mother of all MONSTERS, thus tying her into the "mother" statements made by the vamp alpha, then they utterly failed in playing the dragons who raised as 3 individuals dragons rather than any of them being the alpha dragon.
Because clearly -- given how much none of the shifter rules or the vamp rules in terms of what hurts them or what their powers are -- none of these guys were alphas or the sword wouldn't have damaged the first one, killed the second one, and the first one wouldn't have been a "peer" of the third one if the third one was the alpha. So they eliminated even the "we didn't say it but we meant it" loophole of thinking one of those dragons was the alpha and the other 2 were just helping him. So the mother of all is raised by a couple of non-alpha dragons when all the alphas that want her back can't find her and/or raise her?
Yeah ... NO. All while still noting that this episode worked like gangbusters for me DESPITE all this existing in the background because, like SPN of the first 3 seasons, I can forgive them all sorts of canon slips and logic failures if they just give me my Winchesters and let me enjoy what they are doing storywise, even if I can poke hella holes in it later. Which they very much did this episode ... for me, at least.
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I'd recommend watching Reign of Fire, which as far as I'm concerned, is the Jurassic Park of dragons, both visually and conceptually. As well as being one hella good and entertaining movie. :)
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