Supernatural 8x04
I wanted to love this episode so badly, guys. It can be a difficult concept to pull off, but it's rewarding when it happens. But. This is not one of those times. I made the comment on twitter yesterday that Arrow didn't break my suspension of disbelief half as much, and that's a show where the main character apparently learned criminology on a deserted island and wears green eyeshadow to conceal his identity.
I want to rewatch this. I want to pull it apart and create a transcript and look at the execution and see exactly where it seemed to be the wrong editing choice, where it seemed to be the wrong writing choice. Watch more found footage horror and see what other choices you can make.
1. If you're going go all in for a format, stick to it: With the montage scene at the end, who edited that? Was it Kate? Did she sit around with all the bloody bodies, putting the final touches on the complete product? I'll allow for them to have a much faster computer that compiles and exports files faster than I've dreamed of, this is television after all, but there were a lot of scenes that simply don't make sense for found footage. Lots of angle changes that seem to assume that there were four or five cameras in the room, and even if Brian was editing as he went, it wouldn't make sense for him to edit in those images for the story he was trying to tell.
2. Okay, you're going with a trope, but it still has to make sense, in-story. So many cameras. So many ruined cameras. I kind of want to do a camera lens death count, plus a count for the number of high quality mics and tiny cameras he had hidden throughout the episode. And why were Kate and Michael filming that much? Especially Michael, who Brian claims doesn't seem to know anything about filming. Why would he have his very own camcorder, separate from Brian's? Kate makes a little more sense, in that she likes filming, but there's a difference between liking to film things and filming every piece of your life.
3. Characters are still important. We should have a reason to root for them. And Nice Guy tropes make me want to punch people in the face. I hated them all. Michael the least of all, actually, since his only real crime was being a bit of a plain dudebro. I'm hoping that we were supposed to hate Brian, I really am, because he was the sort of revolting nice guy trope that's really gross, but thankfully unraveled at the end. Kate didn't really have much of a personality other than being stupidly devoted to Michael, which a) I could see as a possible reaction to Brian being a creeper and not really caring about her personality as part of the narrative because she's hot and not interested in him and b) still makes relating to her very hard.
Mostly, the problem I had was the point of view character was the type that isn't very perceptive of anyone else except in the ways that other people are keeping him (in his mind) of achieving his goals. He resents Michael because he gets the girl. He resents the girl because she's not interested in him. Despite the fact that he's nominally Michael's best friend, he doesn't seem to respect him that much, or the person he's potentially in love with. It can be tricky to show this and still get the personality of the characters across, and I don't know if there was enough time to do this. But while watching it, I kind of fell prey to falling into Brian's narrative, thus hating Kate and Michael, but still hating Brian because dude is a huge fucking creeper in training, and Nice Guy tropes are so prevalent that I can never trust if that's the intention or not.
Make me like one of the characters. Please. Supernatural can do really good one-off characters, and has done so in the past! I don't think the bar is that high.
4. Genre blindness makes the obviously-a-baby-Jesus cry. WHY DIDN'T IT OCCUR TO ANYONE THAT WEREWOLVES WERE A POSSIBILITY!?! Werewolves. In the top three monsters in popular American culture (the other two would be ghosts and vampires). They had an idea that something out of the realm of normal possibility was going on because of a bite, and they didn't think of werewolves? This seems like the easiest part to fix: either make it a much less obvious monster this week, or have them perform a test that works in some popular culture work but not in the Supernatural universe (for example, if it had been a vampire and they tried crosses and holy water). There were other cases of genre blindness, but that was the biggest case.
5. This is possibly-not-a-problem, but, uh. I read Lord of the Flies for English... in 8th grade and freshmen year of high school. Do people really read that in college courses? AV clubs are high school thing, too-usually in college you just have people who work in the AV labs or film majors, I think. Also, with the teacher, I like to think he gave Brian the bite just because Brian proved that he did the reading and paid a least a little bit of attention during the lectures.
I don't know. I'm still thinking about this, and I liked the ending a lot. But, it seems to me that the better way to tell this story would be: same opening (which I loved), some found footage but not a conclusive picture, Sam and Dean find Kate in the house, she reveals some of the story but doesn't reveal how she survived, they figure out she's a werewolf (from her point of view), and she reveals the final part, they have the conversation about whether or not to let her live in front of her, let her go. Most of the footage would be the same, just in a different order. They didn't have to have everyone carrying around and destroying expensive camcorders the entire time, just Brian and maybe Kate. It'd give Kate a chance to have a personality outside of love interest who doesn't have the 'sense' to stick by the right guy.
There's other possibilities, too! And there are probably major issues with mine, because I haven't tried writing it or thinking it through all the way. Found footage horror is hard, and horror characters can also be difficult (much like romance characters, you often have to make them just stupid/blind enough that there's an actual story). But argh, this episode was frustrating. I'm looking forward to next week.
I want to rewatch this. I want to pull it apart and create a transcript and look at the execution and see exactly where it seemed to be the wrong editing choice, where it seemed to be the wrong writing choice. Watch more found footage horror and see what other choices you can make.
1. If you're going go all in for a format, stick to it: With the montage scene at the end, who edited that? Was it Kate? Did she sit around with all the bloody bodies, putting the final touches on the complete product? I'll allow for them to have a much faster computer that compiles and exports files faster than I've dreamed of, this is television after all, but there were a lot of scenes that simply don't make sense for found footage. Lots of angle changes that seem to assume that there were four or five cameras in the room, and even if Brian was editing as he went, it wouldn't make sense for him to edit in those images for the story he was trying to tell.
2. Okay, you're going with a trope, but it still has to make sense, in-story. So many cameras. So many ruined cameras. I kind of want to do a camera lens death count, plus a count for the number of high quality mics and tiny cameras he had hidden throughout the episode. And why were Kate and Michael filming that much? Especially Michael, who Brian claims doesn't seem to know anything about filming. Why would he have his very own camcorder, separate from Brian's? Kate makes a little more sense, in that she likes filming, but there's a difference between liking to film things and filming every piece of your life.
3. Characters are still important. We should have a reason to root for them. And Nice Guy tropes make me want to punch people in the face. I hated them all. Michael the least of all, actually, since his only real crime was being a bit of a plain dudebro. I'm hoping that we were supposed to hate Brian, I really am, because he was the sort of revolting nice guy trope that's really gross, but thankfully unraveled at the end. Kate didn't really have much of a personality other than being stupidly devoted to Michael, which a) I could see as a possible reaction to Brian being a creeper and not really caring about her personality as part of the narrative because she's hot and not interested in him and b) still makes relating to her very hard.
Mostly, the problem I had was the point of view character was the type that isn't very perceptive of anyone else except in the ways that other people are keeping him (in his mind) of achieving his goals. He resents Michael because he gets the girl. He resents the girl because she's not interested in him. Despite the fact that he's nominally Michael's best friend, he doesn't seem to respect him that much, or the person he's potentially in love with. It can be tricky to show this and still get the personality of the characters across, and I don't know if there was enough time to do this. But while watching it, I kind of fell prey to falling into Brian's narrative, thus hating Kate and Michael, but still hating Brian because dude is a huge fucking creeper in training, and Nice Guy tropes are so prevalent that I can never trust if that's the intention or not.
Make me like one of the characters. Please. Supernatural can do really good one-off characters, and has done so in the past! I don't think the bar is that high.
4. Genre blindness makes the obviously-a-baby-Jesus cry. WHY DIDN'T IT OCCUR TO ANYONE THAT WEREWOLVES WERE A POSSIBILITY!?! Werewolves. In the top three monsters in popular American culture (the other two would be ghosts and vampires). They had an idea that something out of the realm of normal possibility was going on because of a bite, and they didn't think of werewolves? This seems like the easiest part to fix: either make it a much less obvious monster this week, or have them perform a test that works in some popular culture work but not in the Supernatural universe (for example, if it had been a vampire and they tried crosses and holy water). There were other cases of genre blindness, but that was the biggest case.
5. This is possibly-not-a-problem, but, uh. I read Lord of the Flies for English... in 8th grade and freshmen year of high school. Do people really read that in college courses? AV clubs are high school thing, too-usually in college you just have people who work in the AV labs or film majors, I think. Also, with the teacher, I like to think he gave Brian the bite just because Brian proved that he did the reading and paid a least a little bit of attention during the lectures.
I don't know. I'm still thinking about this, and I liked the ending a lot. But, it seems to me that the better way to tell this story would be: same opening (which I loved), some found footage but not a conclusive picture, Sam and Dean find Kate in the house, she reveals some of the story but doesn't reveal how she survived, they figure out she's a werewolf (from her point of view), and she reveals the final part, they have the conversation about whether or not to let her live in front of her, let her go. Most of the footage would be the same, just in a different order. They didn't have to have everyone carrying around and destroying expensive camcorders the entire time, just Brian and maybe Kate. It'd give Kate a chance to have a personality outside of love interest who doesn't have the 'sense' to stick by the right guy.
There's other possibilities, too! And there are probably major issues with mine, because I haven't tried writing it or thinking it through all the way. Found footage horror is hard, and horror characters can also be difficult (much like romance characters, you often have to make them just stupid/blind enough that there's an actual story). But argh, this episode was frustrating. I'm looking forward to next week.