One of the [Many] Reasons I Love Supernatural
Well-developed characters.
I didn't need flashbacks to let me know that something like that happened when Dean and Sam were kids (right down to Dean giving up his Lucky Charms). It was inherent in the way that the characters have been portrayed so far.
You could say that's bad because it makes the show redundant and predictable, but I say there's good predictable and bad predictable. I mean, it's easy to be unpredictable- just write inconsistently and have the characters do things that do not fit with what we know about them. But this show can't do that because we learned everything there is to know about the brothers Winchester from the pilot episode.
From the get-go we know what Dean and Sam's relationship is with each other and with their father. It's like a picture (if you'll pardon my crappy simile) that's really fuzzy and out of focus, but you can still make out certain shapes and basic connections, and then the picture becomes clearer as time goes on. Details are filled in as we focus on various bits of the family portrait, but the point is that it all fits. It works because they aren't experimenting. They're not still trying to figure out what the characters are about. They save save their fiddling and meddling for the structure of the show- the structure of the monster, but the characters are unaltered.
Sure, there are slips in continuity, but at the core of the show are the characters of Dean and Sam and they are continuous, whole-- no surprises, no twist ending-- just good, well-written, well-acted characters whose history is so evident, and yet still I revel in it as it is revealed to me. Because it's not 'ruining' the end of the story, it's introducing you to the beginning of the story which is what makes you care about the end to begin with.
Plus Daddy Winchester looked sorta like Elvis! Hee!
I didn't need flashbacks to let me know that something like that happened when Dean and Sam were kids (right down to Dean giving up his Lucky Charms). It was inherent in the way that the characters have been portrayed so far.
You could say that's bad because it makes the show redundant and predictable, but I say there's good predictable and bad predictable. I mean, it's easy to be unpredictable- just write inconsistently and have the characters do things that do not fit with what we know about them. But this show can't do that because we learned everything there is to know about the brothers Winchester from the pilot episode.
From the get-go we know what Dean and Sam's relationship is with each other and with their father. It's like a picture (if you'll pardon my crappy simile) that's really fuzzy and out of focus, but you can still make out certain shapes and basic connections, and then the picture becomes clearer as time goes on. Details are filled in as we focus on various bits of the family portrait, but the point is that it all fits. It works because they aren't experimenting. They're not still trying to figure out what the characters are about. They save save their fiddling and meddling for the structure of the show- the structure of the monster, but the characters are unaltered.
Sure, there are slips in continuity, but at the core of the show are the characters of Dean and Sam and they are continuous, whole-- no surprises, no twist ending-- just good, well-written, well-acted characters whose history is so evident, and yet still I revel in it as it is revealed to me. Because it's not 'ruining' the end of the story, it's introducing you to the beginning of the story which is what makes you care about the end to begin with.
Plus Daddy Winchester looked sorta like Elvis! Hee!