Stumbling towards canonisation: the Project.

[whit_merule]

I tried to reflect on season seven generally. I honestly did. But the thing is? I don't feel like I've got a handle on it.

I don't feel like I've followed the emotional arc of any character since season 5. And I've tried, honestly I have. I want to feel that I can trust the writers with their own characters (and forget that I never really connected

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[whit_merule]

And then, of course, you have the whole thing where he probably never wrote any of it down himself, so everyone who did was writing their own version of it anyway. :) I've seen literary scholars insist on, for example, Hamlet actors doing That Speech nice and fast without meaningful pauses on the grounds that the early printed versions of the play don't have much punctuation in them, so clearly Shakespeare wanted it read fast, which completely ignores the context of both composition (plays are VERY collaborative, even nowadays when we think the author is a sacred idea) and of printing (Shakespeare was dead by then, it was just his friends handing a bunch of much-revised papers to a printer, and typesetters had a lot of discretion when it came to layout and frequently change things like spelling, punctuation, word choice, and even change verse to prose in the interests of fitting things onto a page).

... Um. Sorry. I went off on a tangent, didn't I?

Anyway, the point is, I rather like television precisely because it does have that sort of collaborative feel to it, which I'm accustomed to seeing in pretty much any literature but that after 1920ish. And usually it works well for Supernatural. Just, not always, lately. Granulated is a very good term for season 7, and I think they didn't do themselves any favours by combining the looser overall plot arc (or, you know, just less compelling villains) with all those mini-hiatuses: it DID make it much harder to keep track, or even to care, than if we'd only had to put the book down once before picking it back up (as it were). And you're right, there have been brilliant moments and stories in the last two seasons by any estimation - it's certainly not like all the talent has disappeared with the end of the Reign of Kripke, or anything like that. But is it necessary, I wonder, to have a single authorial grand vision in order to get something like that overall arching coherence of plot and story, like we had in seasons 1-5?