quick thoughts - SPN & TVD
- I thought for a second that the season was going to be about them figuring out that they get to have friends and allies? I understand why they didn't before, because if the guys had something resembling a decent support network there are way too many points where the plot wouldn't have gone where it needed to go (and on an in-universe level, it makes sense that the angels and demons were killing off everything that was a threat to the Master Plan). But now I really do feel like they'd stay together even if they did have another choice.
- HA HA, she got all Hemingway with (on? DIRTY!) them all. So cracktastically awesome. So of course she was dead before we even met her. Even for SPN that's harsh. This show really has a kink about women begging to be offed because they know they're ~monstrous and unnatural. After Madison? And Ruby and the girl from Jus en Bello? And Lilith? And Leonore? This doesn't ever get tired?
- Soulless is still my special angel. I don't know if it's a solid character touch or just kind of heartbreaking that Sam thinks he needs to explain sex with soullessness, though.
- So, I'm okay with characters having the "just gone" perspective? It just seems a little bit silly from Bobby, who knows about heaven, hell, and purgatory.
- After everything, still, Sam is trying to accept events as they happen and make things work; Dean is reliant on BECAUSE JUST BECAUSE. And again, Dean will get the Daddy-Knows-Best treatment, because his convictions are dramatically convenient. 'M not sure what place some nebulous "natural order" has on Team Free Will, but okay. I really don't think I'd be bothered if Dean's unflaggingly reliable instincts were teased out as a discrete thing on their own? But as it is, I feel like the narrative keeps expecting me to assume that Patriarch Figure = Good Judgment, and everyone who steps out of line enough that they have the perspective to think to question that deserves what they get. I don't know if it's really good or catastrophically failtastic storytelling that I'm having such a strong reaction to the idea of Lucifer, even more throughout this season than I did in S5. I swing back and forth between viscerally hating him on Sam's behalf and thinking "dude had a point."
- This felt like a S1 episode? It was really all about the MOTW, with the slight added twist that one of those monsters was Bobby's manpain. There was very little actually about the guys, which meant that while Dean managed not to piss me off more, I didn't really have my way into the story with Sam either. Nice to have a little bit of a break from the big arc stuff, I guess? I'm not big on S1, so.
Switching gears to TVD, I'm still mostly meh'd about the episode, but I do think I understand it better in context of the season and of Damon's arc, having read a couple of reviews from the D/E contingent of my f'list, which clarified a lot of it that I missed in my apathy toward the pairing.
Damon is the performer, right? He does everything by narratives. It was the prodigal son narrative his father wrote for him, only Guiseppe didn't want him back, so that story crumbled. Then Katherine came along and he decided to remake himself into her huntsman, and when Katherine abandoned him, Sage rolled in and showed him how to be this kind of Byronic douchebag figure. So Sage's death kind of signifies a transition in Damon's internal psychonarrative processes, and leaves the opening for that scene on the balcony. Damon Salvatore is, once again, existentially lost. Rose is an excellent parallel to him - someone who also lived her lfie by narratives and found herself having lost her will to live without them. But this 'trying to be good' narrative is a new one for him, a new one that he won't find particularly comfortable. The one narrative that won't have fallen apart, okay I have become an endgame shipper, but the only one of these that's resistant to collapse is Katherine.