supernatural spec
This was driving me up a wall! But Crowley's Dr. Mengele was played by Laird! Non-BSG-people (a) WHY ARE YOU DEPRIVING YOURSELVES, WATCH IT IMMEDIATELY and (b) will recognize him as the guy from Crossroads Blues.
I’m mostly excited but a little bit nervous about the introduction of the guys' grandfather. I’ve found kind of a tentative peace with John since I thought him through last summer. As long as I avoid the John girls who - UGH - romanticize and defend his abusive parenting, I can look at him as one of those unpleasant-cautionary-tale type characters (because yeah…I get it, a lot of it, and so I think that makes me particularly unforgiving of someone willing to do that to children).
I’ve been imagining his backstory as being basically like You-Know-Who’s as we were going to see it on Caprica? He reads to me like someone who was an emotionally (though not materially) coddled only child who didn’t have to learn interpersonal conflict-resolution skills until he joined the military at a still-formative age, and so his only framework for people not agreeing is for one of them to bark out orders and the other one to obey. Then he had kids - plural - and had to learn that other human beings exist outside of their power dynamic with HIM, and his wife was out of the picture as a buffer, so he was just a fucking terrible father.
The “only child” bit of that is pretty key because, maybe I want to be a little rosy-eyed about sibling relationships right now, but ugh, if John had understood what it was to have a brother or sister and still played his boys against each other the way he did…I don’t think this could become morally worse, but it would feel like a little bit more of a betrayal, if that’s even possible.
This is all conjecture is thematically pretty relevant. Since his last appearance back in S5, it looked as if John would be preserved as the distant God-figure; we had to be denied enough information to give our criticisms of him a shape. If he’d had a decent, normal childhood, then his treatment of the boys becomes clearly egocentrism and sadism; if he’s replicating an abusive childhood of his own, then he becomes just like his kids, a human being who couldn’t determinate his way out of his own past.
In terms of the tones of the last several…eras, I guess? of the show, the handling of John has made sense, and what makes sense in S8 is for us to learn a little more about him. The first couple of seasons, they were idealizing him as the figure he presented to them - they assumed strengths and weaknesses alike were wonderful.
What we saw was that John was terrified that not only would he not only be able to protect his boys, but that they would see him as weak. What the boys saw was a distant figure they could never reach, one they were sure would reward them with love and security if only they could just do things right. He seems to have known instinctively how to leverage that avoidance to present himself as strong and silent, though we can look in from the outside and see the cracks in his front.
As the need for a more complex hero became a little more pressing, they got to know John not as a father but as a peer - and as a much better person than he’d been a father. He was brave, he loved their mother and his second family (the hunter emotional home base they’ll both come around to having eventually), he didn’t approve of his own actions when there was no need to rationalize them.
And now we’re going to meet his father. S8 is the season where there’s not really an apocalypse hanging right over their heads, and so they can figure out their family issues in a way they’ve never been able to before. Henry (?) might well offer us as demystifying, humanizing a peek behind the curtain as moving in with Mr. Big.
It could be that the Winchesters are, like the Campbells, a long line of hunting families; maybe he belonged to a branch that knew these things might be real but didn’t do anything about it until forced. Maybe vessel lines really are cursed to be dogged by or drawn to the supernatural. Maybe he was the product of a bond like Mary's with his, or Sam's with Jess, where one partner was deliberately hiding their involvement with the supernatural from the other. And wouldn't that be a kick in the head, if he was raised like that and then unknowingly fell into it with Mary? TRAGEDY.
Or I guess it could be a total flop. But I think the concept fits too well with an already-sharp season to be careless. I'm really intrigued.
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