Review: SPN 9x13 The Purge
Iffy episode with a few good points.
"Iffy," you ask, "but SV, how is it iffy?" Well, I don’t want to sit here all day, so let me give you a few bullet points.
- the plot ending: send the Latina back to Peru? Seriously? As a political statement, having two Latina/o characters in the whole episode, of whom one is a criminal and the other gets deported (and is supposed to be happy about it because the alternative was getting killed, even though she didn’t do anything wrong) is one hell of a nasty message. Accidental subtext? Still subtext. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a political debate about this going on. I live on the other side of the ocean, and I still know this is fucked up. “But the Latina part is secondary! It’s about supernatural creatures, SV!” Oh yeah? Let me repeat: she didn’t hurt anyone. In fact she performed a much sought-after service. And last we saw, harmless monsters get left in peace to get on with their lives these days. Hell, Garth decimated a farmer’s livestock and no one cared, even though that’s an actual crime, unlike helping people to lose weight. (In an admittedly gross way, but as the cop said: most people struggling with this issue probably wouldn’t care even if they knew.) So this doesn’t even make sense within the show’s mythology, unless you actually want to argue only American monsters get to stay in America? In which case, sorry, we’re having this political debate again, you know, the one you wanted to pretend doesn’t exist, because your position in it makes you look bad?
- the lack of consistency: kill all monsters or not? The debate is as old as the show, and obviously necessary, but could we maybe not have the main characters switching viewpoints on this every couple episodes for absolutely no discernible reason - other than that the writers obviously don’t give enough of a shit to watch the others’ episodes/read their scripts/otherwise coordinate vitally important aspects of character development? This season has been chock-full of unnecessary retcons and continuity fuck-ups like this and it bothers the shit out of me!
- related to that: where the fuck is Cas? Can we at least get some sort of explanation why he’s not around? Some acknowledgement he exists, maybe?
- promiscuous, magic gypsy woman is magic and promiscuous; because we needed more ethnicity-related shittery in this episode
- weight issues: while the episodes wasn’t as awful with the fat jokes as I’d feared, it was still full of unnecessary clichés: the woman desperate to fit into her wedding dress, the woman eating her relationship trouble… because everyone knows women’s only goal in life is relationships (even if they’re cops with murder cases on their hands, apparently), and they’ll only ever lose weight for men, not because they have health issues or face discrimination on the job, or anything else that concerns themselves, right? *makes yarking noises* In the beginning, we also had the gross assumption that clearly the pretty girl would automatically prefer the slim guy over the fat one. And while they at least tried to refute that, having her icy look shut down Dean when he tries to make it about sex, it went oddly wrong, because what we saw of the guy, he was an asshole who cheated on something as good-natured and silly as an eating-competition and gloated afterwards, so it seems unlikely that she loved him for his personality. So wtf is the message here? Even non-superficial women are illogical and have bad taste?
But! I said there were things I liked as well, and I did! Let’s have more bullet points, shall we?
- Non-boring.
- Well-filmed.
- Bechdel pass! Wow! (I’m barely half-sarcastic about being pleased at this, so it stays on the plus side.)
- Plenty of oral fixation fodder. >.>
- Dean hating / messing up / slacking off on his kitchen duty was actually funny.
- Dean and roofies, because ouch. Nice try with the kidneys, but I don’t buy it. 99% of the time, that’s not why people slip you something. Not in the first world, and not if you’re that pretty. There’s a painful story there that I’d like to hear, because it would explain a lot about Dean’s characterisation over the years. Sure, it’s not the first time Dean has been implied to have been a victim of sexual assault, but it’s the first time nothing supernatural was involved, and it’s also a much clearer implication than anything we’ve gotten so far. It also gives me hope that someday they’re going to give a non-subtextual canon nod to the prostitution backstory that Jensen Ackles has been hinting at as a background for how he plays Dean. (Not that I’m actually holding my breath. *sigh*)
- The whole episode has consistently coded Dean as female: calling himself “the lunch lady”, making him the one concerned with roofies (not to mention getting hit with them), getting jibes about “flirting with the fitness instructor”, being the one to put himself into the girl’s shoes and clearly imagining having sex with the fat guy, getting sexualised via powdery donut in the same way they do with the hot woman, Sam calling him out on lying about his age, right after Dean says women lie about age and weight… It’s hardly the first time that sort of thing happens - and it’s done mostly for laughs, as usual - but it’s rarely been that much in one episode. It’s not unproblematic, but it is interesting.
- Dean and alcoholism. The constant presence of the whiskey bottle as an indicator of how badly off he is even while he plays it down was very well done. “Guzzling one’s feelings”, indeed! It continues from where Crowley found him in that bar when they went on their search for Cain (though it was dropped in the Garth episode, for no apparent reason, iirc). We haven’t seen Dean drink this heavily for a long time and it’s something we clearly need to pay attention to.
- Dean and Sam. I can’t say I agree with Sam on every count, but it’s high time he says what he thinks so they can work on it and make progress. The whole codependency issue has been boiling along under the surface for a long, long time, and shoved under the carpet whenever it reared its head. Now it looks like they might actually deal with it for once, and I need them to not go back to the status quo on this. But to resolve it anything near satisfactorily, both boys need to address their criticisms, and in the past it’s mostly been Dean who’s gotten to do that. I could go on about this. I think I might need an extra post for it, though, and that has to wait till after I figure out how to get my new (read “new”) washing machine to work.
"Iffy," you ask, "but SV, how is it iffy?" Well, I don’t want to sit here all day, so let me give you a few bullet points.
- the plot ending: send the Latina back to Peru? Seriously? As a political statement, having two Latina/o characters in the whole episode, of whom one is a criminal and the other gets deported (and is supposed to be happy about it because the alternative was getting killed, even though she didn’t do anything wrong) is one hell of a nasty message. Accidental subtext? Still subtext. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a political debate about this going on. I live on the other side of the ocean, and I still know this is fucked up. “But the Latina part is secondary! It’s about supernatural creatures, SV!” Oh yeah? Let me repeat: she didn’t hurt anyone. In fact she performed a much sought-after service. And last we saw, harmless monsters get left in peace to get on with their lives these days. Hell, Garth decimated a farmer’s livestock and no one cared, even though that’s an actual crime, unlike helping people to lose weight. (In an admittedly gross way, but as the cop said: most people struggling with this issue probably wouldn’t care even if they knew.) So this doesn’t even make sense within the show’s mythology, unless you actually want to argue only American monsters get to stay in America? In which case, sorry, we’re having this political debate again, you know, the one you wanted to pretend doesn’t exist, because your position in it makes you look bad?
- the lack of consistency: kill all monsters or not? The debate is as old as the show, and obviously necessary, but could we maybe not have the main characters switching viewpoints on this every couple episodes for absolutely no discernible reason - other than that the writers obviously don’t give enough of a shit to watch the others’ episodes/read their scripts/otherwise coordinate vitally important aspects of character development? This season has been chock-full of unnecessary retcons and continuity fuck-ups like this and it bothers the shit out of me!
- related to that: where the fuck is Cas? Can we at least get some sort of explanation why he’s not around? Some acknowledgement he exists, maybe?
- promiscuous, magic gypsy woman is magic and promiscuous; because we needed more ethnicity-related shittery in this episode
- weight issues: while the episodes wasn’t as awful with the fat jokes as I’d feared, it was still full of unnecessary clichés: the woman desperate to fit into her wedding dress, the woman eating her relationship trouble… because everyone knows women’s only goal in life is relationships (even if they’re cops with murder cases on their hands, apparently), and they’ll only ever lose weight for men, not because they have health issues or face discrimination on the job, or anything else that concerns themselves, right? *makes yarking noises* In the beginning, we also had the gross assumption that clearly the pretty girl would automatically prefer the slim guy over the fat one. And while they at least tried to refute that, having her icy look shut down Dean when he tries to make it about sex, it went oddly wrong, because what we saw of the guy, he was an asshole who cheated on something as good-natured and silly as an eating-competition and gloated afterwards, so it seems unlikely that she loved him for his personality. So wtf is the message here? Even non-superficial women are illogical and have bad taste?
But! I said there were things I liked as well, and I did! Let’s have more bullet points, shall we?
- Non-boring.
- Well-filmed.
- Bechdel pass! Wow! (I’m barely half-sarcastic about being pleased at this, so it stays on the plus side.)
- Plenty of oral fixation fodder. >.>
- Dean hating / messing up / slacking off on his kitchen duty was actually funny.
- Dean and roofies, because ouch. Nice try with the kidneys, but I don’t buy it. 99% of the time, that’s not why people slip you something. Not in the first world, and not if you’re that pretty. There’s a painful story there that I’d like to hear, because it would explain a lot about Dean’s characterisation over the years. Sure, it’s not the first time Dean has been implied to have been a victim of sexual assault, but it’s the first time nothing supernatural was involved, and it’s also a much clearer implication than anything we’ve gotten so far. It also gives me hope that someday they’re going to give a non-subtextual canon nod to the prostitution backstory that Jensen Ackles has been hinting at as a background for how he plays Dean. (Not that I’m actually holding my breath. *sigh*)
- The whole episode has consistently coded Dean as female: calling himself “the lunch lady”, making him the one concerned with roofies (not to mention getting hit with them), getting jibes about “flirting with the fitness instructor”, being the one to put himself into the girl’s shoes and clearly imagining having sex with the fat guy, getting sexualised via powdery donut in the same way they do with the hot woman, Sam calling him out on lying about his age, right after Dean says women lie about age and weight… It’s hardly the first time that sort of thing happens - and it’s done mostly for laughs, as usual - but it’s rarely been that much in one episode. It’s not unproblematic, but it is interesting.
- Dean and alcoholism. The constant presence of the whiskey bottle as an indicator of how badly off he is even while he plays it down was very well done. “Guzzling one’s feelings”, indeed! It continues from where Crowley found him in that bar when they went on their search for Cain (though it was dropped in the Garth episode, for no apparent reason, iirc). We haven’t seen Dean drink this heavily for a long time and it’s something we clearly need to pay attention to.
- Dean and Sam. I can’t say I agree with Sam on every count, but it’s high time he says what he thinks so they can work on it and make progress. The whole codependency issue has been boiling along under the surface for a long, long time, and shoved under the carpet whenever it reared its head. Now it looks like they might actually deal with it for once, and I need them to not go back to the status quo on this. But to resolve it anything near satisfactorily, both boys need to address their criticisms, and in the past it’s mostly been Dean who’s gotten to do that. I could go on about this. I think I might need an extra post for it, though, and that has to wait till after I figure out how to get my new (read “new”) washing machine to work.