SPN Episode Reaction: Bloodlust
Okay, I think I might have officially spent more frakking time changing out my user pics than I have posting in the last two weeks. Y'all gotta shoot me cause I’ve gone over the edge. Iconlust, I think they call it.
Which segues nicely into Bloodlust, don’t you think?
It’s funny what burns a show into your soul. Or at least, I find it funny.
What’s the difference between a show you love to death, and one you can’t live without? (Other than the apparent psychological dysfunction of there being any show on TV you can’t live without, obviously.)
For me, it’s Faith. And Bloodlust.
To be perfectly honest, there are a LOT of TV shows I seriously love to death. But there really aren’t that many I consider to have hit that "can’t live without" plateau (because, more or less, I’m a psychologically sound individual … something you will have to take my word on because I’m not providing references to verify). So far, let’s see, I can count two. No, wait, three. Hold it, four. Yeah. Four. In a lot of years of watching TV and writing commentary on TV and squeeing in fangirly ways over TV; I’ve found four shows that have burned themselves into my soul.
#1: M*A*S*H. I don’t think I have to explain that, do I?
#2: China Beach. If you know the show, you know Dodger Winslow is a character from that show, which should at least begin to clue you into what, exactly, about that show created an indelible sigil on my soul.
#3: Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years. I could write for months on the emotional complexity of this show, but I won’t because I’m writing about Supernatural right now, thanks.
#4: Deadwood. Changed my life. Forever. And ever. And ever.
So now I’ve got to cop to #5: Supernatural. Who’da thunk it? Certainly not I.
And certainly not through the avenue of an episode like Bloodlust. After loving this show to ridiculous degree (some might even say to death) for more than a year now, how does an episode like Bloodlust change things? How does this episode burn the whole show of Supernatural indelibly into the forever and ever of me?
The funny part to me is that it isn’t the writing (that would be Deadwood). It isn’t a single character’s journey (that would be China Beach). It isn’t the emotional complexity of the dynamics between an entire cast of emotionally dysfunctional and complex characters (that would be Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years). And it isn’t even the gut-breaking social statement made week-in and week-out about the human spirit and what it can/will/might not endure if it is thrown into a hell where ridiculous hijinks are the only weapon capable of fending off even a portion of the collateral damage soul napalm wreaks on those who sew back together what man blows asunder (that would be M*A*S*H).
To be perfectly honest, I’m not yet 100% sure I know what the hell it is. But I do know one thing: it evidently takes two episodes of like nature to accomplish it.
Along the lines of other things I find funny about Supernatural hitting this list with Bloodlust is the same thing I find funny about the other episode it paired off to put my soul to scar tissue (Faith): Neither one of these episodes, if push comes to shove, would be the one I’d name as my favorite episode to date.
Sure, they’re both rocking episodes, not only in the writing, but also in the execution. And Faith would even be the runner up in the swim suit competition and absolutely hands down the Miss Congeniality winner. But if you put John’s fate on the line as a penalty for lying, I’d probably have to say Devil’s Trap was my favorite SPN episode of all. And The Benders would have to be a neck-and-neck option with Faith (although John Dennis Johnston takes a hell of a hit on swimsuit scores where Julie Benz would kind of rule that category). Meanwhile Wendigo, Shadows, Provenance, Hell House, Dead Man’s Blood and In My Time of Dying would all be in a dead-heat tie with Bloodlust if it came down to a race for the wire to stay in the money.
I love them all for different reasons, and more-or-less equally. Kinda like your kids with very different personalities. You love one because he cracks you up. You love another because her brain squees you with delight. You love a third because he is just the coolest kid you’ve ever met, and you wonder how in the hell he ever ended up to be yours. You love a fourth just because she has a heart the size of Montana. And of course, you love the fifth just because the little bugger is spookier than hell in a way you would never expect a kid to be spooky, and he reminds you of yourself when you were that age.
But that's kids, and we're talking TV episodes (and yes, I get the irony of this); so back to the whole soul burning thing: Why does Bloodlust change things?
Close as I can come to it is this: both Faith and Bloodlust speak to the soul of the issue of both the content (paranormal activity) and the subject (family) of Supernatural. Faith speaks to those subjects in the context of how they relate to spirituality, and Bloodlust speaks to them in the context of how they relate to morality.
Which, between them, means this: Good versus Evil and Wrong versus Right. That’s soul food, my friends. And the way they’ve handled it eats me alive.
How do they handle it? Unflinchingly. Unreservedly. Articulately. Intelligently. Fearlessly. Complexly. Respectfully. And most of all, they stupendously fail to take the easy, obvious road of what everyone wants to tell you is the right answer and what very few people are willing to admit is actually only the politically correct answer.
Faith does this by failing absolutely to invoke God in any way, shape or manner as the hand behind Dean’s healing. It would have been SO easy to go there. So obvious to take Sammy’s stance of after all we’ve seen, how can you not believe? So obvious to make this a place for someone interacting with the story who you find later wasn’t really there … Touched By An Angel’s version of A Stir of Echoes.
So easy to say yes, John blesses holy water with a rosary and the invocation of Christ’s name flinches demons, so God is the whole frakking point of the master the Winchesters serve. And as such, the saving of one of them from imminent death by form of apparent miracle must be one of them well-spoke-of mysterious ways in which God is so oft accused of working. But they never go there. Reapers. Demons. Ghosts. But no God. Because once God shows His face, the whole point of faith becomes moot. Which, of course, is the whole point.
And that is the HARD answer, but the only RIGHT one. And they SO toed that line to absolute perfection with Faith, even to the degree of putting Layla on that line and frakking dooming her to her fate as the believer whose faith must carry her when miracles don’t occur if it is to also carry her when they do.
Which brings us back to Doe … or Bloodlust, as the case may be, if you’re not in a musical about World War II and a family of singing holy terrors.
Cause the easy answer for Bloodlust is they ain’t human, they must be evil. Or the easy answer is you go over the line into obsession about hunting evil (or non-human), and you turn out to be a monster yourself. And neither of those is the answer they give.
How much I frakking love who Gordy turns out to be is beyond my ability to effectively articulate - which, in and of itself, is kinda impressive because I’m a pretty articulate chick. But Gordy is so John in so many ways, and yet so the definition of where John did not go. But where Dean could have. So much the thin line between Good and Evil, between Right and Wrong.
This line is hinted at in Dead Man’s Blood, and is one of the reasons that show makes my faves list. That single line the boss fang puts out there about being hunted mercilessly by those considering themselves to be doing the work of good, and why do they (vampires) have any less right to live than anyone else does was so non-vamp in the reality of prey versus predator and how it plays in the natural world.
Are predators evil? If they are, Humans are the worst of the lot. Or are predators simply survivors at the top of the food chain? If they are, Humans are the most effective of the lot.
And perhaps this is where my already Faith-ignited soul started charring to the sweet smell of barbecue right there in my frakking living room: Because any show that effectively articulates the fast, deadly and counter-intuitive rapids and riptides of the difference between Good versus Evil and Right versus Wrong is speaking to me with incantations that will leave indelible mark on me where I live, and write, and breathe, and think.
Where I am.
In my soul.
And that is where Bloodlust hits me. Why? Because Gordy is driven to the wrong of revenge by the good of killing bad things. And he is motivated by the right of making the world a safer place while doing the evil of killing anything he considers evil without choosing to distinguish the truth of its inherent evilness. And Dean goes along for the ride, only pulling out of the nosedive because his pain-in-the-ass conscience won’t shut the frak up (and yes, I’m talking Sammy not Jiminy Cricket).
At the risk of being accused of self indulgence by quoting something I wrote in a fic once, I’m going to do exactly that. And I’m going to do it not only because it is something that took longer to write than the rest of the fic put together because such an intensity of mental juggling went into actually configuring it exactly the way I wanted it to read (and I don’t want to think that hard again … ever); but also because it very much speaks to exactly what I am talking about. It speaks to the struggle to serve good by using means virtually indistinguishable from evil, with the only difference between your application and their’s being the master served in the doing. And it speaks to how difficult it is to walk the line between good and evil by command of the reality of right and wrong (rather than the social dictates of right and wrong) without falling over it, for when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back.
So in speaking to that issue through John perspective, this is how I chose to say it then, and how I’d chose to say it now, as my thoughts on it remain the same:
It’s a bit like hunting a werewolf. It would be so much easier - knowing as you always do, what they are, that they are -- to just put them to a salt and burn and be done with it. But there’s a code of ethics in the game of hunting. A way of doing things that is studied and right as compared to a way of doing them that opens the hunter to the same evil as poisons those he puts to the match in the name of good and evil.
And in that way of doing things, there’s a need to sit with the monster you hunt, to look it in the eyes in full reach of its capacity to maim you, to slaughter you; and to see it turn. To see it be that which you already know it to be. To see it with your own eyes, in a way you cannot later deny yourself, when the acid of conscience finds you as it always does, seeking avenues to erode deeds done in service of good to atrocities committed by sin of hubris to believe yourself worthy to the role of judge, jury and executioner.
If a hunter is to live with himself after the hunt, he must see the monster as the monster it is before he puts it to its fate. Any shadow of doubt left unaddressed -- even if that shadow is not true doubt, but rather merely the absence of undeniable verification of the obvious -- dooms the hunter to the eventual fate of becoming that which he hunts.
Evil begets evil. The catalyst of insemination required for such births to breach into being from those who were once as you and I is less the capacity to commit the unthinkable than it is the willingness to do so. And in that willingness to commit the unthinkable, even in the name of good rather than evil, it all too often becomes those who hunt evil without the proper rituals to protect against the contagion of its virulent communicability that fall prey to begetting in themselves the image of those they prey upon before seeing, for themselves, that which cannot be denied.
At least, that’s the way it works according to Pastor Jim.
John Winchester, on the other hand, was more of a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of guy. There were times he simply wasn’t willing to expend the effort it took to bait something into the open when he could see it so clearly in the dark.
Perhaps that portended his own eventual doom; but if it did, then so be it; because the way he had it figured, everything in life was a balance. And the tipping point for the balance between lie-in-wait and kick-ass-and-take-names would always be different for pastors than it would be for Marines.
The reason I re-quote the above is to say here the same point I was making fictionally there: John Winchester walks that line of Good and Right as it exists between Evil and Wrong at the peril of his own soul, mostly because of his willingness to indulge expediency combined with the reality that he is driven by such dark obsession as a need for revenge.
Darkness begets darkness. To be driven by such darkness as rage and revenge is to risk becoming that which you hunt. This is the fate John courts; but from all apparent accounts, evaded. This is the fate Gordy has equally courted; and to which he has obviously fallen victim.
His rage, his obsession for revenge has tipped him over the line. He has become that which he hunts, even as he still hunts it under auspice of it being a force for the greater good.
And Bloodlust plays that card sublimely in the articulation of how Gordy fails his own agenda to serve good by being a hunter poisoned by his own darker nature; and by how Gordy strives to bring Dean along with him via the tapping of similar traits in Dean to the end of creating Dean in his own tainted image; and by how apparent the Gordy hunt will now evolve from the deadly pursuit of the fang who did his sister, to all fangs who do evil, to all fangs period, to those who interfered with his mission: the Winchesters brothers, fellow hunters and warriors on the side of Good.
Because you KNOW the whole wordless way Gordy is from the time Dean ties him to the chair is exactly every threat a real hunter wouldn’t make about how much he intends to see Dean die for what he is doing: betraying Gordy in not failing to his own darker nature as Gordy has.
Dean looked into the abyss. The abyss looked back. But Sam had a hold of his brother’s belt, so Dean didn’t fall.
But he would have.
Which is the whole point. And the whole brilliance. Because we all know the kind of guy Dean is. The hero he is. And how much his darker nature serves him in his doing of Good, and how much that nature is an essential part of why he can do what he does, and why he will do it, and why he is so damned good at doing it.
But still, the price of that darker nature that is Dean’s key to being a warrior for Good is the susceptibility that same nature represents to the seductions of serving his own agenda rather than the agenda of Good that is his only redemption from the tactics he must employ to be successful, his only salvation from the Evil he touches with such intimate familiarity in the name of serving Good.
The force is strong in this one. All the better to turn him to the dark side, my pretty.
So there ya have it, I guess: How an episode like Bloodlust adds Supernatural as #5 to a list heretofore numbering only 4 in the entirity of my embarrasingly extensive list of TV shows I've loved to death.
Bloodlust may not be my favorite episode of Supernatural to date; but it will likely turn out to be the most influential one of the whole series for me. Why? Because it turned me. It became for me. In Bloodlust, I see Supernatural be that which I already knew it to be. I see it with my own eyes, in a way I cannot later deny myself.
Faith told me to pay attention. Bloodlust closed the deal. The ride before, between and around those two episodes has been - and will no doubt continue to be - great fun and full of wonderful story telling, spooky ghosts and ghoulies, great characters, great acting, great commentary on the nature of family and the dynamics of need and love as they exist between siblings, and tres dramatic plot developments the ilk of which are always the benchmark of TV shows I end up loving to death.
But it’s different now, too. Supernatural has scarred me in a forever way. It is burned into me in ways that won’t heal even after the wounding is long over, and Jensen is a frakking grandfather of three and Jeffrey Dean has finally played a role he actually survives.
Rather, it exists as a part of me now. Something elemental to the way creativity is capable of, but seldom does, shine a light to the text of the world and my perceptions of that world. Shines a light to the text of who we are and my perceptions of who we are.
And, too, it was a great episode. I mean, Dean "accidentally" running Gordy’s head into the wall? That’s entertainment.
Funny how it just happens to be art, too.