Stranded in Deadwood
Some Opinions You May Not Want to Hear About Frontierland
Unlike (apparently) the rest of fandom, I was less than impressed with this episode.
Not that it was bad. It wasn't. It was fine. And when I say "fine", I mean fine in the most mediocre sense. It was amusing. Had some great snark. I almost fell out of my chair @ "I only watched Deep Space 9." Also laughed out loud at "Time to pick up the kids at Frontierland" and "Can't leave the idjits stranded in Deadwood." Very funny. And the posse snark ... Jensen played that perfectly.
But I was expecting more. A lot more. And perhaps that's the problem. As a born-and-bred Western fan, I had as high hopes for this episode as I have for Cowboys and Aliens ... I sure hope C&A delivers more. Because this delivered standard. Fine. A Western version of SPN mediocrity.
Where The French Mistake could not have been a more perfectly articulated take on a much-loved fannish trope, and My Heart Will Go On was a heartbreaking and beautifully executed episode spun around the concept of time futzing by angels, Frontierland was neither.
Yes, the boys looked awesome. And yes, they both did a good job. And yes, it was fun watching them cowboy up as fishies out of water, particularly with both being notoriously Texas born and bred and proud of it.
Yes, there was plenty of snark, and most of it was funny.
Yes, the production values were awesome, so this looked great as a Western, even while it felt like SPN on a Western set.
But here's my biggest problem I suppose: it didn't mean anything. It didn't have any stakes, and the story didn't carry any emotional weight.
The monster story was an excuse. Take out "phoenix" and plug in any other monster name you want to plug in and you're good to go. Plug-and-play monsters as an excuse to put the boys in cowboy hats. There's no lore build-up about the phoenix being the answer to the Mother of All problem, and no justification for why phoenix ashes might have some effect on her. There's no effort to find a way to locate phoenix ashes in their own time/location, there's just the "let's beam them out!" trump card solution that is the begin-all, end-all failure of involving angels in the SPN universe in the first place.
Time travel is your FIRST solution to the "first time we've heard that" unvalidated revelation that phoenix ashes will supposedly burn the Mother of All for no apparent reason other than because we read it on the hunter version of the internet? You don't even bother to put any effort into finding out what a phoenix is, and if there might be twelve thousand of them nested up somewhere in Louisiana before you go summoning commander-in-chief-of-a-war-for-the-future-of-all-things Castiel to demand that he bend time and space because hey, why the hell not? After all, you've got an angel on a leash so you might as well use him.
Again, let me say here for the record, in case it might sound otherwise, I didn't hate this episode. It was fine. Middle of the pack for the SPN collection. Enjoyable enough to watch as long as you don't expect it to be more than it is: 45 minutes worth of don't-look-too-hard-for-meaning entertainment. And that's okay to have every now and again in your series. But for an episode that was hyped THIS HARD for what it was supposedly going to be? And one that had so much potential to be great but only managed ... fine? And one that is being more-or-less universally (as far as I've seen, at least) hailed as brilliant, wonderful, squeeful, perfect, etc?
Yeah. Not for me it wasn't. And for many, many reasons. Which is what I'm speaking to here: why this episode let me down in my expectations that it would rival The French Mistake or My Heart Will Go On on the subject of "THIS is why I keep watching this show despite long stretches of episodes I decline to comment on because I have nothing positive to say about them."
And in that venue, here are my basic beefs, in no particular order:
1) The monster is a plug-and-play excuse to go back in time.
2) Time travel is the FIRST option to explore to get the ashes of a monster that supposedly affects The Mother of All according to ONE book, with no other verification or even hint of outside verification that this bit of mythic minutia as just discovered.
3) Castiel is evidently now Dean's bitch who drops his angelic war the moment Dean whims him up, and who can and will bend time into a pretzel whenever Dean whims it because he & Sam and Bobby don't want to bother to even try and find a solution that doesn't require angels to bend time and potentially change history in ways that might butterfly effect Ellen and Jo back to life again.
4) Castiel kills his angelic "friends" and first lieutenants as if they are nothing more than red shirts on a show Bobby doesn't watch. Castiel's angelic "friends" and first lieutenants also betray and try to assassinate Castiel, their "we chose you as our new god" champion, with a similar amount of thought and regard.
5) Samuel Colt is so underused as to be criminal. And a joke. This is the man who built a railroad track devil's trap and created a colt that can kill any supernatural thing, but he's not motivated enough by whatever reason he originally BECAME a hunter to ride a couple hours to shoot a phoenix when a guy from the future comes and tells him the future depends on the outcome of this monster's destruction.
6) The monster isn't a monster. He isn't demonstrably evil or anti-human to any degree. He was MARRIED to a human, and loved that human so much that he's avenging her murdered during the commission of an attempted rape. He didn't kill the whore witness. He wouldn't kill Dean if Dean would step aside. He is no more monster than John or Dean or Sam or Bobby ... but we're going to kill him with the colt anyway because we need his ashes. (Hint: This is my REAL beef with the episode, and why I resent it rather than just feel disappointed by its failure to live up to its hype and promise).
7) Dean is so caught up in his virtual reality experience of Westworld that he can't consider that a gunfight with a gunman of the era might prove fatal to him, nor that he can't have a gunfight at the same time as he's being recalled and still complete his ash mission.
8) Dean beats a gunman of the era in a quick draw contest because, evidently, he is Dean.
9) Dean drops the colt for any reason. Any reason at all.
10) An angel putting his hand inside a nuclear reactor would seem to beg that the angel would explode, not the nuclear reactor. Or at the very least, leak light from his grace hole.
I could go on, but I won't because, as I may have mentioned once or twice, I didn't actually hate this episode. But I do think it failed as anything but the skin-deep stunt episode it is. And I do resent it, if not for failing to live up to its hype, then certainly for being so thoughtlessly indifferent to, and careless with, the moral ramifications of its own story and the SPN lore it would try (and fail) to leverage as justification that this episode was anything more than a stunt pitch to put Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki in cowboy hats for the sake of hearing the fangirls squee.
Damn shame. With just a little bit of actual thought put into the writing, it could have been so, so, so much more. And it should have been.
Edited to Add: The one thing I did love madly? That the bartender was an Elkins. That was a nice detail to drop in there: good historical precedent for why Daniel Elkins is the guy who ended up with the colt in John's time, particularly given --- accepting the ludicrous notion that Dean would drop the colt for any reason at all, including running for phoenix ashes -- that once Dean vanished in the 1800s, there was a gun lying in the middle of the thoroughfare unattended with a nosy bartender no doubt watching the exchange of gunfire from his saloon vantage point.
.