SPN mini-commentary

[xparrot]

Regarding SPN 5x12 and 5x13:

5x12: a criminal waste of a good body swap. Phooey.

5x13: DANGIT SHOW, why'd you have to go and do that? I liked Anna, quite a lot - rebellious angels of all stripes are a major draw for me. Having her go evil (and stupidly evil no less - she actually achieved her objective, she killed Sam, and then rather than go and immediately scatter his atoms across the cosmos - back in time, no less, it probably would've taken some effort to straighten that out - she continued to go for the brutal murder. ARGH.) and then get killed is just annoying.

I also believe this means that every single female character who appeared in more than two episodes is now dead. Seriously, show, the hell? Even Castiel h/c can't make up for that.

(not to say that I didn't enjoy those bits. But I would've enjoyed them a lot more in a different context.)



Also finished s4 Buffy/s1 Angel. Yay friendship! Yay h/c! Yay Spike in tweed on a swingset! (Joss Whedon is a Twin Peaks/David Lynch fan, y/y?)

Comments

[sholio]

Oh, SPN. XD I've pretty much disengaged emotionally with the show; I'm just not surprised at any stupid thing it does anymore. I did roll my eyes so hard they almost fell out of my head at Anna being all horror-movie-monster with John and Mary in the mechanic garage (i.e. standing there and glaring ominously rather than just wiping them out, when she's supposed to be all super-badass -- she came back 30 years and can't just pick up a tire iron?), but I've decided that getting emotionally invested in supporting characters isn't really worth it for this show.

One thing I was saying at someone else's LJ ... well, I'll just paste my comment rather than trying to paraphrase:

I think it's becoming more and more obvious that what they should have done to make [the mytharc] work -- what they started to do back in season two and then pulled away from for some reason -- is to world-build like crazy, because what they need at this point, I think, is a large cast of supporting players and world-building concepts to draw upon. Instead, they've been introducing supporting characters and artifacts Maguffin-style and then getting rid of them, which doesn't really leave them much to play with. At this point they're pretty much just reduced to going in circles with both the plot and Sam & Dean's interactions with each other.

... which is really where I'm at with the series: it feels like they've been retreading the same territory with Sam and Dean for two seasons now (if not longer), and they just don't have the universe to support the long-arc plot that they're trying to do. They've already plumbed the depths of their main characters' relationship to each other ad infinitum, and their relationship with their parents, and now they're left with the claustrophobic results of having systematically killed off everyone else who's important to them (except for Bobby, but that's another relationship that's pretty much been plumbed to its depths) and having nowhere left to go emotionally.

I did, somewhat against my will *g*, really enjoy the Castiel h/c and his loyalty to Sam (though, I really didn't feel like the show had adequately set up for it -- "Sam is my friend" since when?).

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

A resounding YUP to all of this - I've disengaged as well; the only emotion SPN can really evoke in me anymore is frustration; it's not really even irritation anymore. I'd let myself get a bit fond of Anna mainly because I thought the show had forgotten about her...should've learned my lesson from Ellen & Jo.

As to everything else you say, oh, yes, I had the same thought before. SPN is an amazing explanation of why you cannot tell an epic story with 3 main chars (I'm thinking Sam & Dean and then Bobby and Cas as a 1/2 each :P) It locks those main chars into repeating patterns, and at the same time it focuses the audience's view so tightly that we don't get a sense of scale. Epic stories are about saving the world/universe, but Sam & Dean's universe is really really tiny, and we haven't been given much reason to care for the rest of it.

That's one of the reasons I like Castiel, because he's newer, and his relationships with Sam & Dean haven't been fixed yet - those bits of Castiel h/c, though not as extreme as what happened with the Winchesters even within the episode, were some of the most h/c I've enjoyed on SPN for seasons, because they were new and different. But yeah, him being friends with Sam was out of left field (easier to explain from the Dean/Cas perspective, really - "I can't let you kill my boyfriend's brother, I'll never get sex again!")