on SPN; or, OMG WTF NO.

[xparrot]

Okay, so I've been watching Supernatural since its first season. For the first couple of seasons I was there for the pretty boys and brotherly h/c, but for years now I've been into it for the trainwreck factor, as the show doesn't so much go off the rails as blow them up, with big sticks of dynamite, twirling its metaphorical mustache as it pushes the plunger to send everything spiraling down into the abyss. It's bad, is what I'm saying, on nearly any axis of bad; and I laugh when I watch it, in between fits of screaming OH JOHN RINGO NO.

As of this last episode, though, I'm starting to suspect that the showrunners themselves are not only out to make bad TV but are actually intentionally trying to kill the show off, in a brutal and sickening way. Or maybe that was just the episode? Because, all jokes aside, what the everloving fuck, show.

When I said, "Oh, Dean gets to stab Jewel Staite!" I WAS FUCKING KIDDING.

...Yeah. Jewel Staite. Was on Supernatural, playing the monster of a week. Who is also a sweet single mom who gets stabbed by Dean, while she is begging him to spare her (because the killing she did was to save her young son's life.) Oh, and did I mention she was going by the name "Amy Pond"?

I DON'T EVEN.

It's almost brilliant in how horrifically wrong it is. Not satisfied with killing off every single female character who's ever appeared in more than a single ep, now they are actually going out and finding beloved female characters in other properties to kill off, too. It's just. Wow.

I'm seriously wondering if the game plan is that by the end of this season the Winchesters are the monsters everyone is hunting down. (Crowley gets together a heroic gang of past monsters resurrected from Purgatory, and they save the world from Dean?) Because by now? I would genuinely enjoy that!

Comments

[sholio]

... seriously?

Um.

... yeah. I got nothin'.

I finally hit the point with SPN at the end of last season where I really don't even care enough to watch the show to mock it (and for the occasional good episode that they manage to dredge up), and now I just read other people's horrified/amused/snarky episode recaps to see what fresh hell (ha.) I'm missing.

I was about to say that I can't remember the last time a show went so completely out of its way to set on fire and then trample on everything that originally drew me to it, but then I realized, oh, wait, Heroes. Which I just watched back in July. And it self-destructed a lot faster. At least SPN gave us a couple of good seasons before it began its slide into epic suck.

[joonscribble.livejournal.com]

Really? Amy Pond? REALLY?! Way to hit two shows in one go, SPN.

I'd long turned a blind eye to the rampant misogyny on this show b/c the show itself seemed too ridiculous to take seriously enough to say it commits misogyny. But this latest episode was yes, so ridiculously over the top that I now call FLAMING BALLS OF WTF SHENANIGANS on it. I also have to applaud the hilarity of Dean letting the son live. Because, you know, he's a kid. And he's a guy.

THANKS, SPN. Here's hoping Cthulhu!Castiel rises up soon and obliterates you all.

[aerynvala.livejournal.com]

It was definitely Amy Pond. The shit of it is, I was loving this episode right up until the last 10 minutes.

I've had to stop watching. I'm not angry, like I was with Smallville, I'm just sad and worn out. But when I look back, I always had issues and reservations that I had to force myself to overlook. I just can't overlook them anymore.

[rosalui.livejournal.com]

Lol. I sort of adore SPN - I used to watch, like, Xena, I can adore things that I'm attached to for all their WTF plotlines - and I can deal with cheesy/crazy/whatever.

But the way the women on the show get dealt with has always bothered me. I haven't watched this last episode yet, but I bet it'll bother me too - and seriously, as much as I love deep, messed-up characters who are forced to make decisions within the grey area? Yeah, they're definitely taking it too far here.

....And borderline plagiarizing, like, the Moff and Gillan cannot be too happy about what they just did.

Ew.

[astridv.livejournal.com]

lol wow. Okay this isn't the least bit funny but this: When I said, "Oh, Dean gets to stab Jewel Staite!" I WAS FUCKING KIDDING. made me laugh in spite of me... it's just so grotesque. I mean, you couldn't make this shit up.

I dropped the show at the beginning of season three because of its issues but it seems like the issues have grown into ISSUES!!!1! I'm seriously wondering, are the writers consciously trying to be as offensive as the possibly can, or are they having some big-ass blind spots?

My policy toward SPN has been to ignore as a whole and just cherry-pick the occasional crack ep when the friends list recommends it... more fun that way.

[kimberlyfdr.livejournal.com]

I guess I'll be the dissenting opinion ;) The focus of this season is to delve more deeply into the mental issues haunting the Winchesters. Unlike before, when they could kill the bad guy or end the spell, these are real-life issues that they have to deal with and learn to work through.

Sam's mental instability (hallucinations) isn't going to go away, he just has to learn to cope with it and deal with it in the best way he knows how (though using pain as a touchpoint is not healthy). He's not okay, but he's trying to live through the complicated combination of who he is now and what that means.

From Dean's side of things, his depression and alcoholism reached such a point that he has to break. All the issues that have been weighing on Dean's shoulders his entire life has finally broken him. The big tipping point, and the reason he's in the headspace he is at the end of this ep, is the broken trust. He went from being a hunter who saw only black and white, good and evil, to trusting other beings to sometimes be good (Lenore and Cas, for example), but that trust got blown out of the water when Cas turned, so he's shut down. He's back to his "supernatural creatures are evil, kill them" mindset with no room for change. He is shutting down and he's on a path of self-destruction.

I highly commend SPN for tackling these types of issues this season (and for having the thread of Dean's disintegrating mental state since he got back from Hell in Season 4). This isn't an easily won battle, but one that they're confronting the best way they know.

[lukita.livejournal.com]

U_U SPN, I sorta had to quit it back in early S2 cause I got bored, then Misha came on and I just youtube the crack or watch whichever episodes with the highest crack content.

Who's Amy Pond?

[cookiemom6067.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry - what's the significance of Jewel's character's name?

ETA: Sorry. Note to self: "IMDB is your friend. So is Google."

[stitcher2ficcer.livejournal.com]

Geez, the more you've talked about this show in the past year or two the more glad I've been that I let it drop from my routine after third season. I had already begun to feel by then that it wasn't worth my time, but at least I didn't feel as though I had wasted dozens of hours watching unsatisfying and steadily deteriorating TV in hopes that it would eventually turn around and aspire again to the level at which it had started.

Given this last, how can you not cut your losses and move on to something new?

[calcitrix.livejournal.com]

I never watched it, but I can tell a show is completely batshit insane by the works that show up on the popular page at deviantArt* and the occasional LJ explosions when someone rants on a comm about some fic or other. But I didn't know it was this terrible. :/ I'm glad it's terrible for you in an entertaining way.

*By which I mean dress-up Sam/Dean paperdolls, checklists of how you can tell you're obsessed with Sam/Dean, Dean's fake Facebook page, drawings of just Sam's hair by season, and manips of them in dishes of food (????).