I am claiming this before the episode airs!
This post will contain speculative spoilers and references to the promo for this week’s upcoming episode of Supernatural. I’m LJ-cutting it all for those on my flist who would prefer not to see such things. :-)
Do you guys remember the end of season 2? When I was thinking of writing a Supernatural spec script and then the show stole my idea with "What Is and What Should Never Be"?
I came up with a new idea after that. Like the first, my central thematic focus was on Dean and fear, something I’ve been dying to explore. Considering that Dean’s worst fear (losing Sam, not being able to save or protect him) had already occurred in "All Hell Breaks Loose," I had to dig around to come up with anything that might conceivably be that frightening.
When I saw the preview for this week's episode, I just about fell off the couch.
A "fear disease" or "fear demon" episode probably had to happen at some point. And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it except that the promo really seemed to indicate that the episode will head in the direction I had planned: Dean getting frightened, Dean seeing what’s not there, Dean seeing things instead as a horrific vision of his deepest fears.
I still wouldn’t have blinked....except for the glimpse of SAM WITH YELLOW EYES. OMG.
Because that was going to be my climactic moment.
Here’s a note from my files, dated June and then 7/5/07:
Additional notes re: fear demon idea:
I just had a scene pop into my head. Sam and Dean are tracking whatever-it-is they think they’re after (there’s been a crazy escalation of stuff since the simple beginning, and Dean thinks Sam is acting weird--fear demon is messing with them, but they don’t know this yet). It’s getting really tense, and suddenly Sam turns and his eyes flash yellow. It’s a fear Dean hasn’t even articulated to himself (and thus more convincing): what if the YED was right? Sam came back wrong-and not just wrong, but with part of the YED anchored into him. Dean killed the YED, but he didn’t kill it enough, and it’s been in Sam this whole time. GAH.
7/5/7 addition: OMG. If this happened, how would Dean react? We’ve seen him utterly unable to kill Sam (per his father’s request), or even contemplate that. Would this situation crack that resolve? Because Dean made the deal that let the YED survive its demise? He screwed up, he made a bigger mistake than not saving Sam, and now he has to fix it? [Not sure this would track, but could he try to use the deal in reverse to kill the YED-in-Sam? Start trying to break the deal, so the crossroads demon will come kill Sam again, and the YED with him?]
The horrific thing being that Dean is being played by this bastard fear demon. Sam’s not the YED; Dean’s deal didn’t go that wrong; and Dean still needs to save Sam, not kill him. Wow. I think the structure of this episode needs to significantly change, to play this up.
You can ask anyone in my writer’s group; they saw a version of the outline I created from this basis (in Sept. 2007).
An additional note I made after getting comments from my writer’s group:
>>>How do both boys perceive the other’s fear moments? Dean is imprisoned/dying when Sam “sees” the crossroads demon, but how does Sam handle being mistaken for Yellow-Eyes-in-Sam? Maybe it’s literally what I imagined before: a filter across reality. I mean, the other victims see what isn’t there at all; maybe in this case, working Sam and Dean against each other, the ghosts use their movements to correlate with the fears. I.e., Sam *is* facing Dean, trying to placate him, talking to him, but Dean is hearing the voice of Yellow-Eyes mocking him (“you thought I was joking when I asked if you were sure this was 100% pure Sam? There’s no need to lie when the truth is so tasty”), not Sam’s confusion and pleading. Visually? Maybe kind of like the ouija board scene in “In My Time of Dying,”round and round showing the different points of view, aurally and visually; maybe like in that Heroes episode where we see the visions of Matt and Nathan, how they coincide and why, the reality underlying the lies.
Basically, this is me staking a claim to having come up with an awesome idea well over a year before the show went there. We’ll see how close it is once Thursday rolls around. :-)
Do you guys remember the end of season 2? When I was thinking of writing a Supernatural spec script and then the show stole my idea with "What Is and What Should Never Be"?
I came up with a new idea after that. Like the first, my central thematic focus was on Dean and fear, something I’ve been dying to explore. Considering that Dean’s worst fear (losing Sam, not being able to save or protect him) had already occurred in "All Hell Breaks Loose," I had to dig around to come up with anything that might conceivably be that frightening.
When I saw the preview for this week's episode, I just about fell off the couch.
A "fear disease" or "fear demon" episode probably had to happen at some point. And I wouldn’t have thought twice about it except that the promo really seemed to indicate that the episode will head in the direction I had planned: Dean getting frightened, Dean seeing what’s not there, Dean seeing things instead as a horrific vision of his deepest fears.
I still wouldn’t have blinked....except for the glimpse of SAM WITH YELLOW EYES. OMG.
Because that was going to be my climactic moment.
Here’s a note from my files, dated June and then 7/5/07:
Additional notes re: fear demon idea:
I just had a scene pop into my head. Sam and Dean are tracking whatever-it-is they think they’re after (there’s been a crazy escalation of stuff since the simple beginning, and Dean thinks Sam is acting weird--fear demon is messing with them, but they don’t know this yet). It’s getting really tense, and suddenly Sam turns and his eyes flash yellow. It’s a fear Dean hasn’t even articulated to himself (and thus more convincing): what if the YED was right? Sam came back wrong-and not just wrong, but with part of the YED anchored into him. Dean killed the YED, but he didn’t kill it enough, and it’s been in Sam this whole time. GAH.
7/5/7 addition: OMG. If this happened, how would Dean react? We’ve seen him utterly unable to kill Sam (per his father’s request), or even contemplate that. Would this situation crack that resolve? Because Dean made the deal that let the YED survive its demise? He screwed up, he made a bigger mistake than not saving Sam, and now he has to fix it? [Not sure this would track, but could he try to use the deal in reverse to kill the YED-in-Sam? Start trying to break the deal, so the crossroads demon will come kill Sam again, and the YED with him?]
The horrific thing being that Dean is being played by this bastard fear demon. Sam’s not the YED; Dean’s deal didn’t go that wrong; and Dean still needs to save Sam, not kill him. Wow. I think the structure of this episode needs to significantly change, to play this up.
You can ask anyone in my writer’s group; they saw a version of the outline I created from this basis (in Sept. 2007).
An additional note I made after getting comments from my writer’s group:
>>>How do both boys perceive the other’s fear moments? Dean is imprisoned/dying when Sam “sees” the crossroads demon, but how does Sam handle being mistaken for Yellow-Eyes-in-Sam? Maybe it’s literally what I imagined before: a filter across reality. I mean, the other victims see what isn’t there at all; maybe in this case, working Sam and Dean against each other, the ghosts use their movements to correlate with the fears. I.e., Sam *is* facing Dean, trying to placate him, talking to him, but Dean is hearing the voice of Yellow-Eyes mocking him (“you thought I was joking when I asked if you were sure this was 100% pure Sam? There’s no need to lie when the truth is so tasty”), not Sam’s confusion and pleading. Visually? Maybe kind of like the ouija board scene in “In My Time of Dying,”round and round showing the different points of view, aurally and visually; maybe like in that Heroes episode where we see the visions of Matt and Nathan, how they coincide and why, the reality underlying the lies.
Basically, this is me staking a claim to having come up with an awesome idea well over a year before the show went there. We’ll see how close it is once Thursday rolls around. :-)