#she was literally introduced in the same ep as cas | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

holyhellpod · 3 years

Photo

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving.

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold.

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show.

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit.

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it��s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins.

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art.

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural, he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag.

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living.

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism.

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to.

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it.

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light.

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line.

Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence.

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade.

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome. I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else.

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half.

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves.

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome.

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight.

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer.

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it.

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace.

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar.

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says:

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean.

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to.

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas. Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna.

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life.

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs.

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.”

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it.

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do.

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another.

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it.

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours.

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay?

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas.

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure.

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar!

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.”

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

#transcripts #supernatural #supernatural podcast #<60mins #this is first and foremost a podcast about cas and misha collins

12 notes · View notes

marlborodean · 3 years

Text

annotation for my "destiel but it's just one direction playlist," mainly for my sister who hasn't seen supernatural but you guys can read it too if you want :^)

DIANA // 4x01, "Lazarus Rising"

this episode introduces Cas :) Castiel speaks Enochian but when he was trying to speak to Dean he was instead causing radio static and shattering windows :) he gripped Dean tight and raised him from perdition :) he knew all of Dean’s soul just from touching him :) he left his handprint burned into Dean’s skin :)

Notable Lyrics:

how could someone not miss you at all?

i never would mistreat you, no, i’m not a criminal. i speak a different language but I still hear your call

let me be the one to light a fire inside those eyes. you’ve been lonely, you don’t even know me, but I can feel you crying. let me be the one to lift your heart up and save your life. i don’t think you even realize, baby, you’d be saving mine

it’s only been four months but you’ve fallen down so far

i wanna reach out for you, i wanna break these walls

we all need something. if i could hold you, swear i’d never put you down

KISS YOU // 4x07, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester"

the only reason i have for this is the pure tension between Dean and Cas in this ep, which includes Dean staring at Cas's mouth and licking his lips :)

Notable Lyrics:

i just wanna take you anywhere that you like, we could go out any day, any night. i’ll take you there

tell me how to turn your love on. you can get anything that you want

if you want me to, let’s make a move

HEY ANGEL // 4x10, "Heaven and Hell"

in this ep, there is a female angel who is. i mean she’s just there to mirror what Cas will become. she is a fallen angel who rebelled because she fell in love with humanity :) and Cas talks to her, tells her that “for the time, i feel…” later in the show there’s another angel that says Cas’s “true weakness is involved. he’s in love! with humanity" :) also in this ep, the female angel and Dean have sex. clearly if Cas was a woman they would’ve been in a relationship long ago :)

Notable Lyrics:

hey angel, do you look at us and laugh when we hold onto the past? hey angel, tell me, do you ever try to come to the other side?

i wish i could be more like you. do you wish you could be more like me?

i see you at the bar, at the edge of my bed, backseat of my car, in the back of my head

BETTER THAN WORDS // 4x22, "Lucifer Rising"

in this ep, Dean is kept in a beautiful white room (which they call the green room #theatrekidvibes), and everyone understands the tension between Dean and Cas to be needlessly horny :) Cas defies heaven's orders to help Dean :)

Notable Lyrics:

more than a feeling, crazy in love. every time we touch, i’m all shook up. best i ever had, hips don’t lie, you make me wanna—

how deep is your love? god only knows

i don’t know how else to sum it up, there’s no way i can explain your love

everyone tries to see what it feels like, but they’ll never be right

YOU & I // 4x22, "Lucifer Rising"

Castiel literally invented free will. the prophet Chuck couldn’t predict Castiel’s actions :) he said “you guys aren’t in this story!” and Cas replied “we’re making it up as we go” :)

Notable Lyrics:

we can make it ’til the end, nothing can come between you and i. not even the gods above can separate the two of us, nothing can come between you and i. we could make it if we try

EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU // 5x03, "Free to Be You and Me"

in this ep, Castiel thinks he is going to die the next day so Dean takes him out for a fun night :) and Dean says it’s the first time he’s laughed that hard in a long time :)

Notable Lyrics:

you know i’ve always got your back, so let me be the one you come running to. just call my name, i’ll be coming through. on the other side of the world, it don’t matter, i’ll be there in two

there’s something about your laugh that makes me want to have to. there’s nothing funny so we laugh at nothing.

every minute’s like the last so let’s just take it real slow. forget about the clock that’s ticking

you have always been the only one i wanted

i wanted you to know without you i can’t face it

WHY DON'T WE GO THERE // 5x03, "Free to Be You and Me"

same ep, but this is placed here because Dean said to Cas, “there are two things I know for certain. One: Bert and Ernie are gay. Two: you are not gonna die a virgin, not on my watch.” you connect those dots :)

Notable Lyrics:

think about all the places we could go if you five in tonight. just let me set you free

we’ve got all night, and we’re going nowhere. why don’t you stay? why don’t we go there? let’s take a ride out in the cold air, i know the way, why don’t you go there with me?

ONCE IN A LIFETIME // 5x04, "The End"

in this ep, an angel zaps Dean to five years into the future where he meets his future self and future Cas. there was HEAVY subtext that they were together :) at the end of the ep, after he sees his future self die and ultimately destroy the entire world, he is zapped back to present time (where it is safe) and Castiel is there waiting for him at the side of the road in the middle of the night :)

Notable Lyrics:

once in a lifetime, you were mine

when i close my eyes, all the stars align and you are by my side. once in a lifetime, it’s just right. we are always safe, not even the bad guys in the dark night could take it all away

DRAG ME DOWN // 6x20, "The Man Who Would Be King"

this fits anywhere between 4x01 and this ep, which is when. when Dean finds out that Cas had betrayed him and was working alongside the king of hell behind his back :) so as long as this is placed before That Scene, it's fine :)

Notable Lyrics:

i’ve got a fire for a heart, i’m not scared of the dark, you’ve never seen it look so easy. i’ve got a river for a soul, and baby, you’re a boat. baby you’re my only reason

if i didn’t have you, there would be nothing left. the shell of a man that could never be his best. if i didn’t have you, i’d never see the sun

you taught me how to be someone

all my life you stood by me, when no one else was ever behind me. with your love, nobody can drag me down

WOLVES // 6x20, "The Man Who Would Be King"

the war with angels is oncoming, so Cas is trying (trying) to do lots of damage control with that, which means killing angels and demons alike that are after the Winchesters. there's a great scene here :) idk it fits here somehow my brain is too big to be confined by the English language

Notable Lyrics:

in the middle of the night when the wolves come out, they head straight for your heart like a bullet in the dark. one by one, i take them down

i keep on holding tight now, ‘cause your body’s telling me don’t let go

just getting my demons out, wouldn’t ever doubt. your beauty could start a war as you walk in the dining room

i wish it wasn’t true, but the whole world’s trying to get a piece of you, and my heart keeps fighting in this battle of fools

INFINITY // 6x20, "The Man Who Would Be King"

since Cas is trying to prevent the war, much like Aziraphale, he is deemed a failed and fallen angel! :) but then Dean finds out Cas has been working with the king of hell behind his back! :) Cas says "It sounds so simple when you say it like that. Where were you when I needed to hear it?" and Dean replies "I was there. Where were you?" :)

Notable Lyrics:

down to earth, keep on falling when i know it hurts

now i’m one step closer to being two steps from you, when everybody wants you

i was there for you. all i ever wanted was the truth. how many nights have you wished someone would stay?

FOOL'S GOLD // 7x02, "Hello, Cruel World"

i see this as Cas POV as he decides to sacrifice himself and let the Leviathans destroy him, before he leaves Dean ahahaha! i see it in this point in time because Cas loves Dean but assumes Dean doesn't feel the same, but! as we see, Dean keeps Cas's coat (because he loves him)

Notable Lyrics:

i know in my heart, you’re not a constant star. i let you use me from the day that we first met, but I’m not done yet, falling for you. i knew that you turned it on for everyone you’ve met, but i don’t regret falling for you

i know your love’s not real, but that’s not the way it feels. that’s not the way you feel

HALF A HEART // 7x02-7x21

literally every time Cas dies, Dean becomes inconsolable and loses all will to live and succumbs to raging alcoholism :) in season 7, when Cas dies, Dean keeps his jacket. for months. :) also applies to 13x01-13x05

Notable Lyrics:

so your friends [have] been telling me, you’ve been sleeping with my sweater, and that you can’t stop missing me. bet my friends [have] been telling you, i’m not doing much better

i’m missing half of me, and being here without you is like i’m waking up to only half a blue sky. kind of there, but not quite. i’m walking 'round with just one shoe. i’m half a heart without you. i’m half a man at best, with half an arrow in my chest. i miss everything we do. i’m half a heart without you

forget all we said that night, it doesn’t even matter

though i try to get you out of my head, the truth is i got lost without you

GIRL ALMIGHTY // 8x17, "Goodbye Stranger"

very closely tied to the imagery of the episode rather than the story. the bright light as Cas overpowers his brainwashing, Dean kneeling in front of Cas. not to self-promo but watch my Religion AMV to see what i mean!! it's visceral stuff :)

Notable Lyrics:

her light is as loud as many ambulances as it takes to save a savior

am i the only believer? there’s something happening here. i hope you feel what i’m feeling too

i get down on my knees for you

STRONG // 8x17, "Goodbye Stranger"

Castiel has been brainwashed into betraying Dean again, to the point where he was forced to participate in hundreds of simulations where he has to kill Dean :) so when the time comes where he’s told to kill Dean, he suddenly can’t do it :) know why? because Dean tells him “Cas, it’s me. We need you. I need you.” :)

Notable Lyrics:

my hands, your hands, tied up like two ships. my heart, your heart, sit tight like bookends. pages between us written with no end. so many words we’re not saying. don’t wanna wait til it’s gone

i’m sorry if i say ‘i need you’

when i’m not with you, i’m weaker. is that so wrong? is it so wrong that you make me strong?

WHERE DO BROKEN HEARTS GO // 9x03, "I'm No Angel"

Cas loses his grace so now he is human. for some reason i don’t remember, Dean tells him he can’t stay at his place anymore. now Cas is homeless! :) and so Dean regrets it and goes to look for him :) also side note but there is some fan headcanons or theories that Cas had to resort to sex work to make money :/

Notable Lyrics:

counted all my mistakes and there’s only one standing out from the list of the things i’ve done. all the rest of my crimes don’t come close to the look on your face when i let you go.

the taste of your lips on the tip of my tongue is at the top of the list of the things i want

love was something you’ve never heard enough

now i’m searching every lonely place, every corner calling out your name, trying to find you, but i just don’t know. where do broken hearts go?

are you sleeping by yourself? or are you giving it to someone else?

tell me where you go when you feel afraid. tell me, will you ever love me again?

I WANT TO WRITE YOU A SONG // 11x03, "The Bad Seed"

no thoughts only the scene of Dean wrapping a blanket around Cas :)

Notable Lyrics:

i want to write you a song, one that’s beautiful as you are sweet, with just a hint of pain for the feeling that i get when you are gone

i want to lend you my coat, one that’s as soft as your cheek, so when the world is cold, you’ll have a hiding place you can go

everything i need i get from you, giving back is all i wanna do

MOMENTS // 11x23, "Alpha and Omega"

this song is like...every time Dean or Cas is about to sacrifice himself/DIE and they get emotional about it. this is an Exemplary episode that fits well with this song because a) they had time to make this plan, which means they would have time to say goodbyes and be ~intimate~ abt it, and b) the hug towards the end when Cas casually says "I could go with you," offering to DIE alongside Dean :)

Notable Lyrics:

shut the door, turn the light off. i wanna be with you, i wanna feel your love. i wanna lay beside you. i cannot hide this, even though i try.

trembling hands touch skin, it makes this harder. and the tears stream down my face

if we could only have this life for one more day. if we could only turn back time

i’ll be your life, your voice, your reason to be. my love/my heart is breathing for this moment in time. i’ll find the words to say before you leave me today.

don’t wanna be without you

there’s a pile of my clothes at the end of your bed as i feel myself fall, make a joke of it all

NO CONTROL // 12x23, "All Along the Watchtower"

this could honestly go anywhere, but i’m placing it in here in the chronology because it’s Cas charging blindly and headfirst into battle with literal Lucifer to protect Dean :) good moment contextually because before Cas ran away to help this woman give birth, he had a pretty cozy domestic life with Dean :) it's important to note that this does get him killed, which does lead to another grieving wife phase for Dean :)

Notable Lyrics:

beside you i’m a loaded gun. i can’t contain this anymore. i’m all yours, i’ve got no control. powerless, and i don’t care it’s obvious. i just can’t get enough of you. the pedal’s down, my eyes are closed

i don’t want to wash away the night before, and the heat where you laid, i could stay right here and burn in it all day

THROUGH THE DARK // 14x14, "Ouroboros"

this is not about the gay gorgon, folks, it's about the Ma'lak Box. Dean is crushed by the responsibility of having to lock himself in a LITERAL box to prevent Michael (the archangel inside his mind) from taking over

Notable Lyrics:

you tell me that you’re hurt and you’re in pain, and i can see your head is held in shame, but i just wanna see you smile again

i’ll be here for you. i will carry you over fire and water for your love. i will hold you closer, hope your heart is strong enough

i wish that i could take you to the stars. i’d never let you fall and break your heart

you tell me that you hurt, it’s all in vain, but i can see your heart can love again, and i remember you laughing so let’s just laugh again

CHANGE MY MIND // 15x03, "The Rupture"

Dean is being a pissy lil bitch because their child died and Castiel can’t deal with it so he leaves :) there’s a lot of stress in their relationship because they both have horrible communication issues. it boils down to Dean thinking like “i want people to just want to stay instead of leaving. i shouldn’t have to ask for that.” and Cas thinking like “i want people to tell me they want me around. i need that verbalized reassurance.” this is canon :)

Notable Lyrics:

the end of the night, we should say goodbye, but we carry on while everyone’s gone

never felt like this before, are we friends or are we more? as i’m walking towards the door, i’m not sure

if you say you want me to say, i’ll change my mind. ‘cause i don’t wanna know i’m walking away if you’ll be mine. i won’t go

IF I COULD FLY // 15x09, "The Trap"

Dean and Cas have to go to Purgatory to retrieve an Ingredient~ they get separated and the portal is about to close and Dean gets desperate so he gets on his knees and prays to Cas :) closure of 15x03 breakup scene, because Dean says “I should’ve stopped you. You’re my best friend, but I just let you go. ‘Cause it was easier than admitting I was wrong.” :) Dean cries more than one tear, one of his most vulnerable moments in the show (rivaled only by the scene where he tells his mom he hates her). this scene is viewed by many, including jackles, as Dean's love confession especially because he evidently wanted to say something more to Cas's face but Cas cut him off :)

Notable Lyrics:

if i could fly, i’d be coming right back home to you. i think i might give up everything, just ask me to

i hope that you listen, cause i let my guard down. right now i’m completely defenseless

for your eyes only, i’ll show you my heart. i’m missing half of me when we’re apart. now you know me

WALKING IN THE WIND // 15x18, "Despair" and 15x19, "Inherit the Earth"

“Despair” is the episode where Castiel confesses his love too Dean. Dean says “Why does this sound like a goodbye?” and Cas replies “Because it is.” :) reminiscent of the way their son Jack (who is a mirror to Cas) tells Sam and Dean “I'll be in every drop of falling rain, every speck of dust that the wind blows, and in the sand, in the rocks, and the sea.” :)

Notable Lyrics:

if you’re lost, just look for me. you’ll find me in the region of the summer stars

the fact that we can sit right here and say goodbye means we’ve already won

goodbyes are bittersweet, but it’s not the end. i’ll see your face again and you will find me

yesterday i went out to celebrate the birthday of a friend, but as we raised our glasses to make a toast I realized you were missing.

SOMETHING GREAT // 15x18, "Despair"-15x20, "Carry On"

Cas pov for 18 and Dean pov for 20 :) Cas saying "the one thing I want... It's something I know I can't have." :) and then Dean missing and wanting Cas back after he died, saying to God, "Cas. You gotta bring him back," yet again falling back into bad alcoholism and depression and suicidal ideation :)

Notable Lyrics:

i want you here with me like how i pictured it, so i don’t have to keep imagining

the script was written…i want to rip it all to shreds and start again. one day i’ll come into your world and get it right

you’re all i want, so much it’s hurting

TRULY MADLY DEEPLY // Post-Canon mwah!

This is what it would have been like for Dean in the version of Supernatural that totally definitely does exist, in which Jack brought Cas back to life and Dean and Cas were reunited and Dean tells Cas he loves him too and then they live a domestic and safe life and Dean is still shocked every morning that he wakes up next to the love of his life :)

Notable Lyrics:

i can’t believe that you are here and lying next to me

like all those days and weeks and months i tried to steal a kiss, and all those sleepless nights and daydreams where i pictured this

somehow you kicked all my walls in, so say you’ll always keep me

should i put coffee and granola on a tray in bed, and wake you up with all the words that i still haven’t said? and tender touches just to show yo how i feel, or should i act so cool like it was no big deal?

#i think my sister is probably asleep right now so i'll update yall on her response later #i'm insane i'm so sorry #ej.pdf #spn #for lisa!

14 notes · View notes

janiedean · 3 years

Note

I’m not in the spn fandom, but I’ve seen some people say it’s homophobic while others are saying that destiel is canon. What’s that about?

oh boy where do I start

I’ll try to make it brief but you’ve gotta keep this stuff in mind:

this show went on... at least six years longer than it should have like post s8 it was obvious they were trying to cobble ideas together to air something and by s12 it jumped the shark to a level where it was just ridiculous, so basically everything that’s happened since more or less around then was filler to keep the breathing machine on until the cw laid it to rest

the whole deancas thing came out in a context where... right guys i’ve been there since SEASON THREE WAS AIRING I REMEMBER SHIT so let me tell you that basically until cas was introduced the only fandom ships with a traction were pretty much different declinations of win/cest with the j2 rpf stuff taking like... 99% and 99% of fps and rpf respectively because there was literally no other main and like... not everyone was gonna be into sibling/parental incest or rpf obviously but anyway when castiel showed up basically deancas was the only other m/m ship that actually wasn’t incest floating around and it went big very very soon

now, they had planned to keep cas around as a guest for like some ten eps and then he should have been replaced with another angel character who basically was a human woman who realized she actually was a fallen angel and cas should have died in like s4 ep 10 and anna (the other char) should have been dean’s guide into stopping the apocalypse except that the writers realized castiel was very well-received and the ratings spiked up so they went like QUICK QUICK SWITCH didn’t kill him off and basically gave him the part anna was supposed to have

now now, dean and anna fucked in part two of her two-parter introduction arc lmao or was it even part one but anyway she was supposed to be a love interest and they thought S5 would have been the last so you do your math

then: they’re at S15 and obviously they didn’t go there but

spn fandom also is like... toxicity™ incarnated like before voltron and su there was spn fandom, all the sides were terrible, the side that harassed the actors was worse and like.... sadly a bunch of exclusively j2 people who did harass the actors were also preminent winc/esters and put money into cons and there was a whole circus I can’t even begin getting into but like basically the least dramatic thing that could happen was that the cw would release pictures of dean and cas on their own for promotional reasons and the smm would get a bunch of verbal abuse tweets BECAUSE WHERE IS SAM YOU LOST THE SPIRIT OF THE SHOW

also there were campaigns to fire misha which almost worked for s7 then they saw the ratings dropped when he left and QUICK QUICK LET’S RESUSCITATE HIM lmao

also jensen always was like nah dean’s straight I act like they’re friends but he’s also the guy whose wife got continuously harassed by people who thought she was a cover for his secret rship with jared and so on and like he obviously thinks all shippers are out of control and honestly I can’t even blame him for it since from what I gather some ppl started trailing his kids after school I DON’T KNOW but that’s that

on the other side misha never made a mystery that he played it like cas was in love with dean like he said it at cons pretty much and like..... regardless of everything if there’s one thing misha collins wouldn’t do is milking it for clout bc honestly the guy is a solid ally and has a bi wife/used to be in a poly rship and always put his money where his mouth was re lgbt support so there’s that too

now... back in 2011 and s8 where there was a scene that was the exact EXACT same shit that happened when they canonized my marvel comics #1 ship (like srsly except the marvel ship kissed at the end of that scene) I went like ‘okay they know the undertones they’re obviously marching on it but seeing how this show is and how the fanbase is if it ever goes canon either it’s one sided or it ends with sam becoming a research guru and dean and cas drive off in the sunset hunting monsters without actually saying it out loud’ and it would have been like... soft-not-quite-there canonization but regardless I also said if that ever happens it’s gonna be in the last fifteen minutes of the finale because they don’t want the fandom drama to actually hit them in the face and how to put it, the writing has been a joke for seasons but I can’t even...... blame them for it bc honestly I was tired of fandom drama in S7 imagine working on that since 2005

so like I’m 100% not surprised that whatever’s going down is going down when it’s three episodes from the end actually I’m surprised it didn’t happen in the last ten minutes

now: if cas tells dean openly that he loves him and the context is that he got a curse that sends him to hell if he loves someone (idk I didn’t check the specifics BUT) then it is at least one-sided canon black on white and you can’t say they didn’t make it canon

if he goes to hell and he stays there and that’s it... that’s homophobic and bad and they could have just queerbaited their way through it

except that in this dumb show everyone went to hell twice and came back and cas was introduced as having saved dean from it bodily, so like... if this was a well-written show and they weren’t cowards they’d have dean doing the same for him and realizing he reciprocates getting over his 30+ years of emotional constipation and in that case... wouldn’t be qb

now I’m not betting money on that but they also did this... three eps before the end which sets them up to do it actually so I DON’T KNOW but before deciding it’s homophobic as a whole I’d see how it plays out also bc again this was nEVER gonna happen before the end but the fact that the end kept on being pushed and it wasn’t like... nine seasons but fifteen just made it look ridiculous and like it took them years to get there when if they had been axed in S10 when it would have been merciful.... maybe it wouldn’t have been

so like... either way I wanna see how it plays out but as stated, called in 2011 it could have gone like this the moment we got in the final stretch :)))

anyway: it’s confirmed canon on one side so it’s canon imvho

/shrug

#welcome to my ted talk #otp: don't ever change #i mean.... dkjgkjds #also fun fact: jensen ackles owns my s8 dvds lmao #THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH DEANCAS BEING CANON BUT #Anonymous #ask post

31 notes · View notes

qwertyfingers · 3 years

Note

hi it's watch order anon again i sent the time travel ep ask before you answered the tng watch order one (after i saw your post about it taking a while) and i was actually thanking you for recommending spn eps to me (because i'm also the spn watch order anon) and talking about spn time travel episodes (which i am going to look up you don't have to rec any to me if you don't want to). thank you VERY much however for the tng time travel rec list i'm adding them to... the list

OH IM STUPIT KLSGJCHGFG

well, here we have: FITZ’S FUN-RANKED LIST OF SUPERNATURAL TIME TRAVEL EPS (TAKING A ROUNDABOUT DEFINITION OF TIME TRAVEL TO INCLUDE ALTERNATE UNIVERSES BECAUSE THEYRE FUN IN THE SAME WAY OKAY)

IMPORTNANT DISCLAIMER: S5E4 The End is theeeeee iconic Supernatural time travel/au ep but do NOT be led astray you HAVE to watch this one with context. do the full deancas lazarus rising to the end speedrun you will NOT regret it I PROMISE

S6E15 The French Mistake THEEEEEEEEE episode of all time amongst thee show of all time. they KILL eric kripke ONSCREEN

S3E11 Mystery Spot - LITERALLY a timeloop fanfic. EXTREMELY good. fave pre-Cas episode for me.

S5E8 Changing Channels - brings back mystery spots MOTW and makes him even more powerful. iconic behaviour, great episode.

S6E17 My Heart Will Go On is fun hijinks-y but admittedly has very little on-screen time travel. Balthazar is in it though and I like him

S6E18 Frontierland - Dean and Sam send themselves back in time AND it’s a cowboy episode. VERY star trek

S13E16 Scoobynatural - IT COUNTS I THINK. Semi-related, S8E8 Hunteri Heroici involves a guy who make cartoons come to life with his mind. It’s a very fun and very pretty episode and Cas and Dean r gay, well worth watching <3

S4E17 It’s A Terrible Life - Zachariah traps Sam and Dean in alternate reality where Dean is a (heavily implied out queer) businessman of some sort and wears fruity suits. Sam is there I guess. One of its finest Gay Homophobia episodes and genuinely very fun to watch.

S11E14 The Vessel - Dean wears a fruity little sailor outfit and Casifer (Lucifer who is possessing Castiel and the Winchesters don’t know yet - it’s a whole story arc) fists Sam’s soul just for funsies. The ONLY reason Casifer couldn’t get on that boat is because if Cas saw Dean’s fruity sailor outfit for more than a minute he would have lost his MIND and Lucifer woulda had to leave his vessel sharpish.

S8E11 LARP and the Real Girl - I think the title speaks for itself really, I think this counts! Charlie Bradbury (Felicia Day’s character) is in it and she’s cool and gay and Dean wears chainmail <3

S7E12 Time After Time I can’t remember that much about this ep but Dean does wear a very good 40s suit including a shoulder holster <3

I really want to tell you to watch the Belphegor episodes (S15E1-S15E3) but none of it would actually make sense I’m just obsessed with them bringing a messy gay bitch demon into Jack’s body literally top 10 Supernatural Gay Homophobia Moments in my onion.

S8E12 As Time Goes By - Sam and Dean’s grandfather jumps forward in time to find them, and introduces them to the history of the Men Of Letters, whose house they will steal in the next episode

S4E3 In The Beginning - This and the next episode are only ranked so low because I don’t care about Mary and John drama. HOWEVER. Zachariah sends Dean back in time to meet his mum before she married John and Zachariah very possibly fucked her. There are a LOT of memes about this now.

S5E13 The Song Remains The Same - Anna tries to stop Sam from being born. This entire concept is VERY funny to me. As is Sam and Dean showing up on the doorstep of their mum and dad, who do not have children yet, telling them their real names and saying ‘it’s a family name’ when John points out that Mary has relatives with the same name. Comedic genius I don’t care about the rest of the episode but from what I remember it’s pretty good.

S14E13 Lebanon - this episode is bad because it tries to redemption arc John BUT. it gave us [spoilers] 1) lesbian steve jobs ted talk sam 2) Dean trying to placate alt-Cas who never got to know him by doing the ‘Cas....’ and gentle touch thing and alt-Cas just going ham and obliterating his ass 3) Dean choosing to go back to their world (with Cas <3) over staying in this universe with his Dad because he’s not worth it <3

There are several flashback eps to Dean and Sam’s childhoods, but as you can imagine these are all pretty sad and not the kind of thing you wanna watch For Funsies. The wiki has a list of those here.

The longest alt-universe arc is the Apocalypse World - a world where the Angels and Demons successfully orchestrated their plan to cause the apocalypse and are steadily wiping out the last of the human population. This isn’t overall a “fun” arc, but is v interesting and pique your attention if you like time travel and AU content. The wiki lists all the episodes here.

#I LIKE THAT THIS IS MY JOB NOW #IM GENUINELY HAVING A REALLY GOOD TIME MAKING EPISODE REC LISTS IT MAKES MY BRAIN HAPPT #spn #watch lists

16 notes · View notes

littlehollyleaf · 4 years

Text

(I had a really long, detailed version of this....... but Tumblr ate it D’: so this is... heavily abridged, sorry!)

Tagged by the ever lovely @castiel-saved-me-from-myself <3

pick 10 ships without reading the questions

Interesting... ok!

1. Dean/Cas (obviously)

2. Aziraphale/Crowley

3. Nygmobblepot

4. Foxma

5. Babitha

6. Amy/Rory

7. Nomi/Amanita

8. Eve/Flynn

9. Catradora

10. Cosima/Delphine

1. Do you remember the episode/scene/chapter that you first started shipping 6?

I think I started shipping Amy/Rory during the Venice fish monster ep - cos that was when I felt Amy really did love him back and they had a future together. Before I suspected that her running away with the Doctor was a sign she and Rory weren’t right for each other.

2. Have you ever read a FanFiction about 2?

Only read a handful of Ineffable fic. Overall I’m perfectly happy with the canon alone.

3. Has a picture of 4 ever been your screen saver/profile picture/tumblr?

Yes I’ve had Foxma themed phone backgrounds and a tumblr header :)

4. If 7 were to suddenly break-up today, what would your reaction be?

Disbelief and disapproval. Nomi and Amanita were one of the great constants of Sense8 for me. I think a break up would be out of character for them tbh. Plus it would be denying the black and trans characters a rare example of a happy ending, which would suck.

5. Why is 1 so important?

I wrote such a detailed thing about how DeanCas is not only important to me personally but also how I feel it’s been important for TV/media in general... ugh, tumblr!

In a nutshell - this ship helped me better myself in various ways. It introduced me to fandom, which boosted my confidence and independence via increased socialisation; it encouraged me to write more, which improved my writing skills; meta discussions educated me on lots of issues, inc. but not limited to abuse, sexuality, gender identit, autism and racism.

I also genuinely believe that the loud and open fandom support of the ship has been a significant help in the ongoing battle for more and better queer rep in media.

6. Is 9 a funny ship or a serious ship?

Serious! Catra and Adora’s relationship is a core part of the whole show, relating to lots of the wider themes of abuse, toxic behaviour, growth and forgiveness. Plus the significance of a same sex romance involving the lead character in a CHILDREN’S CARTOON really cannot be overstated.

(but it is also cute and funny sometimes :p)

7. Out of all of the ships listed, which ship has the most chemistry?

I’ve spoken before about having issues with the concept of ‘chemistry.’ If I ship characters it’s usually because I find the combination of their characterisation and story arcs interesting/compelling. I often don’t notice (or I guess care about?) chemistry.

So I think I’m not qualified to answer this one.

8. Out of all of your ships listed, which ship has the strongest bond?

Agreeing with @castiel-saved-me-from-myself here - you can’t really beat the Ineffables millenia long romance :)

9. How many times have you read/watched 8’s fandom?

I’ve rewatched The Librarians 2 or 3 times now. It’s DAFT. But it’s fun. And Eve and Flynn make me feel warm and fuzzy.

10. Which ship has lasted the longest?

Again, as @castiel-saved-me-from-myself said - it’s gotta be the Ineffables, both within AND outside of the story, since Good Omens was originally published over 30 years ago and the Zira/Crowley shippers have been going strong all that time. Otherwise it’s DeanCas.

(though idk if Catradora was a ship back when the original She Ra cartoon was airing, or when the original cartoon was made, so it’s possible that is also a contender!)

11. How many times, if ever, has 2 broken up?

Lol at @castiel-saved-me-from-myself for getting Nygmob for this one, as their relationship is, like, 90% break up :P

For the Ineffables though it’s basically just the once - when Zira chooses Heaven over Crowley. Not made such a Big Deal in the book IIRC, but in the show it’s the infamous Bandstand Break Up scene.

All other separations are only minor, temporary squabbles imo. Which is what makes the Bandstand scene so PAINFULLY, BEAUTIFULLY, ANGSTY AND EMOTIONAL and why I love it so!

12. If the world was suddenly thrust into a zombie apocalypse, which ship would make it out alive, 2 or 8?

I figure angels and demons probably can’t be killed by zombies, so the Ineffables are the most likely.

But Eve and Flynn did actually face off against zombie-ghost things in an alt universe during a whole Loom of Fate plot and survived, so I think they’d probably also make it.

13. Did 5 ever have to hide their relationship for any reason?

No, Babs and Tabs were always open about being together, even when Tabs was also in a relationship with Butch.

I might argue they hid the depth of their feelings for each other though, even from themselves, and instead made out what they had together was just a casual ‘friends with benefits’ type thing.

Though Tabs did hide things a little when she sent assassins after Jim cos she blamed him for putting Babs in a coma. She clearly knew her brother would disappprove, which is why she didn’t tell him what she was doing. I guess that kinda counts as hiding her relationship with Babs? She was trying to conceal how much Babs mattered to her?

14. Is 4 still together?

Lol, Foxma were never together (ALAS!). But the show did end with their lingering fondness for each other intact I think.

15. Is 3 canon?

Is Nygmobblepot canon? Rather a touchy question for the fandom tbh.

If we are talking EXPLICIT canon - then no.

They never got a kiss or a MUTUAL love declaration (and they had a controversial ‘we’re brothers’ exchange in the penultimate episode) - ergo there is not enough, imo, to say they ended the show officially romantically involved.

However, Ozzie DID EXPLICITLY DECLARE HIS ROMANTIC LOVE for Ed, and that was never rescinded. There is also LOTS OF SUBTEXT floating around Ed to imply he reciprocates. Plus they did end the show together as clear Partners in Crime.

So is Nygmob subtextual canon?

I would say yes.

But explicit, CANON canon?

A frustrating no that fandom remains, understandably, critical about.

16. If all 10 ships were put into a couple’s Hunger Games, which couple would win?

I think a toss up between Nygmob and Babitha - because everyone else has too many morals that would hold them back from killing :p

(and since Ed and Oz have both bested Babs and Tabs in the past I lean towards them... but it would depend on when in Gotham canon the games were happening!)

17. Has anybody ever tried to sabotage 10’s ship?

Breaking up Cosima and Delphine was a LITERAL PLOT POINT of Orphan Black at one point, so very much yes! I forget the details (the show got very twisty, with lots of different organisations working on different agendas in the shadows), but I’m pretty sure Delphine was shot because she was protecting Cosima. I remember it BROKE MY HEART and I thought it was a casebook example of Bury Your Gays. But, spoiler: it wasn’t ;)

18. Which ship would you defend to the death and beyond?

Going with DeanCas, because I think that, historically, it’s the one that’s been in most need of defending.

19. Do you spend hours a day going through 1’s tumblr page?

Not anymore I’m afraid. Though 3 or so years ago I used to spend most of my free time on DeanCas and spn meta. Ah, nostalgia.

20. If an evil witch descended from the sky and told you that you had to pick one of the ten ships to break up forever or else she´d break them all forever, which ship would you sink?

Foxma. Because while I adore the idea of a messy, confused ~something between them, in my heart I know that Foxy deserves better :P

I was too tired to bother with tagging the first time I completed this - DEF not gonna bother now!

Play if you want - it’s fun :D

#a true but boring story #about me

8 notes · View notes

mittensmorgul · 4 years

Note

hm i love both ships and am seriously invested in rowena as a character so my two cents is it's not just age but because she was introduced as a villain and a mother? i love eileen too though, she's adorable and i remembered how much i like her when she came back this past ep. apparently it's not hard for this show to make me ship things...

Lol, yeah, I mean… I just want Sam HAPPY. Period. Bottom line there.

And god he just looks so broken right now. I’m… not inclined to ship anything, really, so I’m always shocked when a show makes me actually want a thing to happen. I mean, the first thing I ever shipped hard enough to seek out fandom was Dean and Cas. So it really takes some doing to get me invested in a ship beyond recognizing what the story is doing. I just… don’t usually care to that degree, you know?

And for two whole episodes, I super did care about Sam and Eileen, because if you go back and look at all the meta written after 12.17, they directly paralleled Sam and Eileen’s relationship and interactions throughout the episode to Dean and Cas. And then she died. And didn’t come back. And Sam moved on, and had been building something very different with Rowena. She wasn’t the enemy anymore. She wasn’t even just a reluctant ally. She’d become a friend, family even. It was the same sort of slow relationship growth that Dean and Cas had.

I saw someone suggest that Saileen wasn’t like Destiel, love at first sight, but a quiet introduction, and literally… she tried to stab Sam in the heart. And just… since when was Destiel (outside of shippy gif sets and fanfic) love at first sight? I mean… Dean spent most of s4 mistrusting Cas. They certainly weren’t friends right off the bat. If anyone thinks they were, I would suggest going back and rewatching s4 without the shipper goggles on. They had to EARN that, and there have been a lot of setbacks in their relationship over the years that they overcame by learning to trust one another.

That’s how I see Rowena’s relationship with Sam.

I love both characters, too! And I’m trying to disregard ALL of the shipping stuff when talking about all three of them– Rowena, Eileen, AND Sam. Because I’m also invested in each of their individual arcs and happiness first and foremost.

But either way, (bearing in mind that I’m 99% convinced Rowena will be back, and not as a ghost or a demon or whatever, but completely alive again), if either of these ships is destined to go canon, I’ll be happy for Sam, you know?

#spn s15 speculation #spn 15.06 #samwitch #saileen #honestly as long as the show makes it seem logical i'd be happy for sam no matter what #i just can't see that he's actually happy YET i mean... we shall see #Anonymous

31 notes · View notes

destiel-love-forever · 5 years

Text

Season 11: What’s worth watching

This is the second of 3 installments (season 10, season 11, season 12) because I think 13 and 14 are worth watching fully **I personally LOVED season 14, I haven’t loved one that much since season 5** && plus, this way you can watch the very final season of Supernatural without being confused!

Thanks to @longkissgoodnightbatmanandtwofac for asking me to do this. I actually really enjoyed it <3

Season 10 HERE

Season 11

Ep. 1 is… eh. I feel like you have to watch it, since it introduces you to ‘The Darkness.’

Ep. 2 isn’t worth watching in my opinion. The angels still have Cas/torturing him for info - they say he’s not their brother because he’s always picking the Winchesters over heaven (duh… you’re just now figuring this out??). We meet the new “Death” which is pretty important - her name is Billy, and she has it out for the boys. Promises that the next time they die, she’ll be the one to reap them, and they won’t be coming back. Baby Amara is going crazy/eating souls. They do the angel needle-in-the-head brain hacking thing to Cas, but then he escapes, kills them, goes to the bunker. And Crowley steals Amara to raise as his own.

Ep. 3 You don’t need to watch this either. Rowena is recruiting witches, Cas is at the bunker still dealing with his curse (boys helping him), they have to keep the poor guy chained up because they can’t control his curse/reactions yet. ** Cas is super adorable all cuddled up in his blanket that Dean’s always wrapping him up with. Amara is a kid now (like 9 or 10ish yo). Crowley is feeding her souls and giving her an education (basically watching hitler speeches and shit like that). Rowena cures Cas.

The last 5 minutes are worth watching. It’s Dean/Cas. You get some adorableness with Dean cupping sick Cas’ cheek, and some happy feelings with the boys at the bunker.

Ep. 4 is a MUST WATCH. Shot entirely from Baby’s perspective, and is just overall amazing.

Ep. 5 I didn’t like this ep. at all. In fact, I don’t even think I watched the entire thing when the season aired. There is a little Ghostfacers reference by the couple that gets killed at the beginning, though, which is cool. Shows at the very end of the episode Amara watching Dean the whole time and she says this creepy, “Bye, Dean. I’ll see you soon.”

Have I mentioned yet that I hate the darkness/amara? I do. I hate her.

Ep. 6 Not worth watching either. Amara is still walking around all barefoot and creepy, eating souls. Papa Crowley is mad. Sam wants to bring Cas in to help with the Amara hunt and Dean isn’t happy about it, wants him to get a break since it’s been rough for him lately (awww). Cas has been binge watching TV (he’s watching a show that’s the equivalent of Jerry Springer or Maury, one of those “the results are in and you are the father!” shows). Dean teases him for it and Cas gives him some sass. Dean’s super worried about him. Cas tries to get himself to leave the bunker and gets a huge anxiety attack/flash-backs to when he hurt Dean under the spell, when he killed the angels, then when Dean beat him up and almost killed him when under the influence of the mark of cain, breaks down and can’t leave the bunker. Cas eventually leaves, tracks down Metatron who has been videotaping crap to see to the news. He interrogates Metatron about the darkness. Metatron breaks and tells Cas that God had to give up the only thing he had ever known in order to create the world - his sister, which is Amara. Dean & Sam show up to Crowley’s to kill Amara, Crowley tries killing Dean, Amara stops him. Dean can’t get himself to kill Amara. Amara points it out to Dean. She cups his cheek and is all creepy talking about how linked they are/how neither of them can fight their connection and it’s weird because she’s in a teenaged girls body and just… ew. Ew. Ew. EW. She says she came there to settle a score “the oldest score,” which is obviously talking about god. Oh, and Sam is getting weird visions about Luci in the cage. I know that was a lot of info, but I’m serious, the episode just isn’t worth watching in my opinion.

Ep. 7 I have to say this is worth watching, because Donna is in it, and who doesn’t love Donna?!? Plus, it’s a good old fashioned hunt, which is so rare in this season.

Ep. 8 Is a good one too. It’s a flashback episode, which anyone who knows me knows those are some of my fav.’s. Plus, it’s a pretty funny hunting episode.

Ep. 9 Pretty important episode, so I’d suggest watching it. Big for plot. Amara is killing preachers left and right to piss God off. Sam is convinced talking to Lucifer will help because of his visions he’s been having, so he and Dean go to Crowley to see if they can talk with him somehow (Dean’s obvi not happy bout that). It is kind of entertaining watching Amara with the bible and trying to understand why all these people believe in him/think he’s great/yada yada.

Ep. 10 Isn’t terrible. A continuation of a lot of the same stuff going on in 9. There’s some great Dean/Cas in this ep. so I’ll give it that. Post whump hurt comfort between the two of them is always my fav. Kind of a cool ep. bcuz it’s Luci and Sam walking through memories. A huge thing happens at the end, too.

Ep. 11 Not that great of an ep. But it has a character that turns out to be a bit of a fan favorite, so I’d watch it for her (Eilene). Also, Lucifer/Cas is interesting. Misha does a great job there. There’s a bit of character development/insight with Dean, too.

Ep. 12 This is a MUST SEE. Ep with Jodi, Claire, and Alex. Great dynamic to see. Plus a nice classic hunting ep. And, of course, the awkward family dinner at Jodi’s where the sex talk comes up? That’s just fantastic. Probably the best of the whole damn season. I loved it.

Ep. 13 Honestly, this is boring as all hell. (in my opinion). I will say there’s a part where the monster shows people their deepest darkest desire, and it appears as Amara. Dean tells that to Sam and is very conflicted/hates it, and Sam points out that Amara is the sister of God, and it’s not Dean’s fault, because she picked him and now he feels these things because of her power. Says Dean can’t be blamed or judged. And he tells Dean that he believes him that Dean doesn’t actually want her, and that he wants her dead, but that Amara is controlling him. Which is like YEEEEEEEEEEEES. Because I hate Amara, AND I hate the whole Amara/Dean weird romance-esque type thing. This is literally the only plot, though. For the whole ep. They talk about this, and then Dean tells Sam Sam has to be the one to kill her when it comes to that because of the control Amara has over him, and Sam promises he’ll handle it. Save yourself 41 minutes and don’t watch it.

Ep 14 This one is interesting. It has some time travel/Dean sent back to WWII times. Badass woman of letters in this ep that Dean gets to meet. Plus, Lucifer as king of hell is hilarious. Some decent plot going on here too.

Ep 15 Honestly, I hated this ep. I also hate anything related to WWE and that shit too, though, so I dunno. Maybe you’d like it? It felt extremely pointless. Crowley escapes hell, goes to find a new weapon (Aaron’s rod), but Luci tricked him into thinking he escaped just so he could get ahold of the weapon. But then Crowley tricks Luci back, uses weapon against him. But then runs out of juice, and Luci is able to disappear. So. Basically. All that fucking happens is Crowley gets out of hell.

Ep 16 This is a cool one because it involves flashbacks from when Bobby and Rufus hunted the same thing. We find out why Rufus gave Bobby that battle of Jack with the note that Jodi and Sam found in that episode from way back when, when they fought the time god. (I wanna say that was s9, but I’m honestly too lazy to look atm)

Ep 17 This is a good one if you have time/feel like watching. Not really any plot, though. Dean takes some pills and overdoses in order to talk to Billy, and Billy mentions something called ‘The Empty’ that’s waiting for Dean when he dies. Tiny little thing mentioned there. BIG THING way later on in the series. Like… 3ish season from now? Other than that, though… eh.

Ep 18 This one should be watched. Very plot heavy. If you feel like skipping it, you can read the paragraph below, it’s not vital to watch. Rowena is alive, explains how she survived (a magic thingy). She’s helping heal Amara. Crowley went and got the horn of Joshua for the battle against Amara, says he’ll give it to the boys if they promise to help him exorcise Luci from Cas and put him back in the cage. Luci is up in heaven terrorizing the poor angels. Has decided to become the new ruler up there. Amara attacks heaven with her dark smoke crap. Luci just giggles. Rowena is afraid of Amara/starting to fear her/regretting working with her. Rowena sends the boys a message that she’s alive, they work together to trap Luci. There is a great scene in here (starts around 26 minutes into the ep.) where Dean uses a spell to try to talk to Cas inside Luci. It’s so sad :( && Luci mocks Dean for being so upset/sad. Crowley possesses Cas’ vessel, so then all three of them are in there. There is some adorableness there when Crowley tries to tell Cas to eject Luci and Cas tells him no, but then when Crowley explains that Dean wants him to do it, Cas is like ‘oh, maybe I should then.’ Luci gains control, tries killing Amara with the horn of Joshua, doesn’t work. Like at all. She takes Luci captive and tortures. Dean and Sam agree to go find Cas and bring him home.

Ep 19 MUST. WATCH. This is the gay hunters ep that got everyone so excited. And for good cause. Who doesn’t love seeing two manly hunters in love with each other, and who doesn’t love seeing Dean’s reaction to that?!?

Ep 20 is a must watch as well. You meet God, which is - ya know - a big fucking deal. It’s also a very entertaining/well-done ep.

Ep 21 I’d say you have to watch this one too. Dean & Sam meeting God. Or, well, re-meeting him I suppose. There is SO. MUCH. EMOTION. In this ep too. Sam & Dean (even Luci) have so much to address when it comes to God. All of the things they’ve been put through. Their feelings of being betrayed. Abandoned. Especially Dean. Oh, my poor baby Dean. I just… he has such a hard time in this ep, but it’s a great ep. Much needed. Well done. Among other things. I could talk about this ep for a really long time, but I’ll just stop there. Oh, and a new prophet pops up, which is always great. He’s not my favorite (no one can replace Kevin) but he’s fucking hilarious, so that’s nice.

Ep 22 Have to watch this too. If not for ALL THE PLOT, then for Luci and God going at it. Oh my. Such a great situation (And Misha did so so so well at it). Luci locked in his room listening to loud music like a pouty teenanger. God cooking pancakes and drinking coffee from ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ mug. I mean, Dean and Sam have to do a family therapy session for the two. Who doesn’t want to watch that?!?

Ep 23 From there, ya might as well finish off the season.

#supernatural #season 11 #what to watch

5 notes · View notes

emilywatchescursedshow · 3 years

Text

Ep 1 - Pilot

ooh starting with a flashback very good

blonde babies. wow what a happy family hopefully nothing goes wrong... oh i forgot that sam is the point of view character bc literally all the media i consume is about Destiel/Dean’s closeted bisexuality

oooo no theres SPOOKY TIMES happening in this nursery. creepy standing over cradle in trenchcoat like you do. what could be happening in this house? oh no the guy standing over the cradle was not her husband!! and Sam’s ,,, oh he’s fine apparently. hopefully he hasnt been infected by ghoul juice

oh right i forgot about this scene look at those graphics on the fire consuming her body. what was his plan and also how did he make it out of the building he got fireballed. was this just like, targeting Mary for no reason? was there a motive for this spn hijincks? also love how she’s named Mary, not subtle at all

OH MY GOD DID SAM GET INTO STANFORD I DID NOT KNOW THAT. ah yes Sam’s so smart, let’s have these college kids talk about Sam’s family so we can understand they’re not on good terms anymore

spooky bead door frame OH NO ITS JACKLES YES KICK EACH OTHERS ASS WOW

wow we’re really already going hard on the being a dick to women. “whatever you want to say you can say it in front of her” and her tiny boyshort panties apparently bc we’re not letting her go change ,,, can’t wait for this lady to be dead at some point, probably the end of the episode

a HUNTING trip

let’s go find daddy.

oh wow giving a nine year old a gun is pretty awful.

the theming of “what’s the point on trying to stop a force that we literally can barely make a dent in” is already introduced, I wonder how often that comes up later (contrast to like, Buffy and this same thing). Also interesting seeing the brothers interact now and knowing where they come from when I know how it ends. Interested to see also how they develop Sam’s relationship to his mom when he literally did not know her, he was like 6 months old when she died. So any relationship he would have to the concept of mom would be from his dad/brother talking about her/her being a symbol in his life.

Sam saying “Dad let you go on a hunting trip by yourself” when 5 minutes before he told Dean he could do it himself & Dean responded “I don’t want to” make up your mind show

oh there’s JARGON on this show “did you know there’s EVP on that?” will we learn what that is?

wow i wonder if he’s going to make his interview by monday

she’s still in her panties. i wonder if they cast her to look like his mom on purpose. i bet he did not tell her where he was going.

ooo spooky woman. i want this dress. uhoh she doesn’t show up through the windows! look at the tiiittttiiieeessssss “a girl like you” and then she proceeds to hit on him,, this man is clearly dating someone. oh i see he’s trash. uhoh she’s gone! spoooky!! attacked by bird, spooked, then promptly flees. oh oops and now he’s getting murdered. i wonder if we will understand any of the villains’ motivation.

Jackles is definitely turning in a performance. There’s a lot of lip acting happening.

stalking around the crime scene with weird vocal intonations,, i hope they do this every episode. either everyone else is short or these two are aggressively tall

the worst lit diner in all of CA. These two people are clearly witches. Interesting how local legend is just exactly what we saw happen to the guy

Dean doesn’t know how to use a computer amazing character moment

i wonder if their dad got freaky with the dead mother

obligatory family business conflict

i wonder if Jackles’ lip movements are being purposefully contrasted by Jadeleki’s total lack of lip movements

why has dean made no attempt to wipe off his face

dirty dean, uh oh this hamburger has gone bad, must be old

“woman in white” whatever that means

pentagram count 2 I think

uhoh sam is having memories about his family and smiling i wonder what this means for his INTERVIEW ON MONDAY

the brothers are separating hopefully nothing bad happens to one of them

cannot get over Jackles’ face acting. maybe i missed the jadelacki boat here only for jackles lip and eye movements on the squarest face crafted by god on man

obvious lie to the happy marriage question i hope this man didnt drown the kids “by accident.” women in white lore. happening now. oh husbands unfaithful. i see so we’re murdering unfaithful men. do they have to be unfaithful before they meet constance or does she just tempt them. 5-10 sec shot of a mans face contorting in anger lovely

oh no dont put shackles on dean in a leather jacket while he pouts his little mouth oh noooo dont you dare and then he breaks out oh nooooooooo

jadelacki,, has he been unfaithful to the mom stand in? i thought she just targeted unfaithful men why is this happening. oh i see she’s going to assault him that’s so coooooooooooh wowwwwwwwwww

wait what is happening?? oh we’re shooting a ghost and it’s working???? YESS DRIVE STRAIGHT INTO THE FUCKING HOUSE!!! AMAZING I LOVE IT GREAT THINKING

they dont have any salt how are they going to stave off the ghost

or her kids are here bc they’re also ghosts, not sure if i should be happy abt this oh there’s some melting happening those were some cool stills

uhoh dean is scowling and pouting in his leather jacket uh ohhhhhhh uh ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

yeah we shot a ghost and it worked for some reason let’s just lampshade that i guess (still dont know if im using that word right)

let’s see where daddy is. too late daddy is dean

lets go to the interview even tho we didnt find dad at all

character moment for the car, only one headlight

oh no is the lady gonna be dead. did she freeze bc all she was wearing was panties. oh wait its CA def not

“we made a hell of a team” yeah bc dean doesnt know how to use a computer

uh oh better not be his girlfriend taped to the ceiling and on fire

i wonder how long she was up there

are we going to discover why jadelackis girls get immolated?

ok so he’s on the team cool

what an episode

#spn s1e1 #supernatural #supernatural liveblog

0 notes

elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

Text

13x08 watching notes

You guys, I literally can't cope with Sam dressing like this much longer. I am being personally attacked. WHo EVEN SELLS ORANGE PLAID.

expectations: best case scenario, some literally unholy lovechild of 7x20 and 12x12.

Heists mean side characters and good heists mean fun side characters. From the promo stuff it looks like we have a couple of quirky side characters, who aesthetically vaguely reminded me of the Doctor Who bank heist episode from the Clara period of the show, just because quirky side characters to bolster a heist episode. It's probably quite easy to beat the mood and justification of ridiculousness from Doctor Who, especially peak Moffatt era nonsense, out of the water, but this is Glynn so I'm expecting good characters, good characterisation, but pooossibly some random plot hole or some sort of back and forth of characters/scenes that's hard to follow that doesn't necessarily hurt the episode but does make it a headache later :P

[note with hindsight: *just hands Glynn a trophy for it and walks off*]

It's essentially the same thing you forgive under Dabb vs cars (aka not a problem unless you make it one), but it doesn't really lend itself to writing a heist either so this is in no way the same level of "Uhoh" as a Buckleming episode but it is a hmmm I hope people aren't arguing in circles about some way the plot worked and ignoring the good stuff when I get online comment :P

I wasn't sure how this fit into the overall picture of wtf the demons were up to before yesterday, but with the promo scene with Bart, selling him as essentially the new (I mean... potentially since season 6) king of the crossroads but maybe not styling himself that way, we may or may not get another overt canon dive like 12x12 showed us how Crowley got his upgrade, to tell us how long this guy has been around behind the scenes (and SENSIBLY staying off the Winchesters' radar), but this character very literally is Crowley2.0 as people have been calling him in the sense that he is what Crowley was when we met him both with the actual job title AND narratively, and in this case probably very content with his job as it is especially with the danger at the very top, and I hope for his sake he doesn't get ambitious, because it would be great to have a character like this survive just for story stability - yeah even though he's another white dude might as well just lump it unless this episode immediately replaces him with someone better but intent on doing the *exact same* job properly - just to have some stability and a second player in the Hell storyline. Especially if they maintain an uneasy relationship with him that he really is the last resort for help Crowley really wasn't since like season 10.

It establishes another position of power in Hell's hierarchy and it's a fairly safe job where a smart demon can accrue a lot of power - Crowley was shown to have a whole bunch of resources and a lot of it predating becoming King of Hell, specifically because it was stuff gathered as a crossroads demon/through controlling that flow of trade. TBH it's better placed than whoever is trying to lead the demons because they have all the resources. I think in 11x23 Crowley said his minions took everything and ran? This dude would be one of the key placed people to do that because he has all the stuff and connections to all the souls collected in deals. Whether that comes up or not I'm just going to assume he did :P

Anyway in the story it creates another character where we basically already know everything about how they function, because Crowley, both on a random world building and originally how Crowley was in the narrative sort of level. It sucks he's getting replaced on a "I did actually quite like him most days" level, and it's definitely a "get 2 people to do the same job 1 man was doing" thing but then the writing had been so bad to Crowley for a couple of years since they ran out of things for him to do that maybe stripping back to basics to get the narrative role he used to offer without all the baggage is sensible >.> If a character takes on so much of a life of their own they can't do the stuff they used to offer without it being an issue like removing any tension about giving them magic things they couldn't obtain themselves, or offering sincere opposition and attempts to kill them from the throne of Hell, then unfortunately for Crowley, this is a great choice. Asmodeus represents all the shit I didn't like that they kept making Crowley do, Bart represents the side of Crowley introduced by Edlund and maintained at least until Edlund left the show (Crowley was his baby even more than Cas was - he just dipped in to write the best Cas episodes but he introduced and pushed Crowley as a character... funnily enough at the end of season 8 both their natures were changed dramatically and permanently). Based on 1 promo scene, I have to admit, Bart is all the bits of Crowley I liked best, while coming across as a bit of a cheap knock off in the way he tries to butter up to the Winchesters, a bit too knowing, a bit too under-informed, while Crowley ran loops around them just in their opening conversation.

OMG it's sleeting so I am going to roll the dice and get a lift to yoga from the same person who plain forgot to pick my mum up and take her wherever they were going for about 2 hours last week when I wisely decided to get the bus. See now I have extra time, the episode is downloaded, but... I don't have enough time. Nooo way :P

Other generic pre-ep thoughts: this concept is goofy but I seriously don't trust it to stay that way because you never trust this show to stay that way. We haven't seen Asmodeus in a non-BL episode and while he is essentially their pet character he's still plot relevant. I'm not exactly on the side of "we HAVE to get Casmodeus before this is all said and done" as in I'd really love it but it seems so easy to bungle in a BL episode. On the other hand, just because Cas is locked up doesn't mean we can't see Misha in an episode while this state of affairs continues (and just because there's no spoilers doesn't mean it's not happening) and Glynn having a crack at Casmodeus sounds like a perfect set up for the kind of stuff we'd want to see out of it, and be a curveball to throw in here.

I'm just going to assume we're not seeing Mary again for a while and this is all set in the main universe.

I assume Jack isn't in the episode but we may or may not get a lead on him at the end, or else be left on "well we have a lead/half a lead on him" because I sort of feel like if he literally breaks the universe next episode after this he'll be pretty easy to find again :P

This may all be some way to force some conversations about how Dean and Sam feel about Jack on the other side of the turning point, especially if it's our last chance for them to be in the limelight until the other side of Wayward Sisters midseason fun. And if Jack has broken the universe next episode, we need to have their current stances laid out before they go rushing in to deal with that. So this could be a fairly light episode for character discussion.

HI back from yoga

the recap immediately gets into Jack stuff so hey maybe he is in the episode, maybe it's just explaining better why he is not in this episode because the reason why NOT is just as important.

Then just way too much having to recap last episode to get us up to date on what Sam and Dean have been through with all that. I like that they included that Ketch said he was his own twin considering Dean says "twinsies" in the promo scene, as, of course, this may be a really important theme. Twins that aren't actually twins. Cas and the Empty, Ketch and "Alexander", Dean and Crowley2.0, Dean being fed up of things that look like other things and the shapeshifter & ghoul...

Anyway. "NOW" - Cambridge, England. Okay then. Suuuuuuuuuuuuuuure. *rubs a Union Jack on it to make it more British*

This is your weekly reminder to read these notes in a shrill British accent.

Whoever this is outside looks like she's up to something.

This mueseum:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130991708770/justanotheridijiton-jerry-wanek-on-supernatural

I'm not gonna read into that immediately because its been completely dressed up for the vampire!Dean episode and it's been polished up for this episode. But we get a long look at the stained glass roof and that was a centrepiece for the vamp episode.

*she continues to be up to something*

Wow, great security. Bust open a door and no alarms go off? It's the 2nd door that doesn't work, after Dean failed to get the automatic door to open for him in 13x05.

Mmmm drawers of old scrolls and spooooky writing.

Just... shove it in your handbag.

Oh yep she's a demon, that's surprising.

This is a great way to do a robbery, tbh. Ethics about possession aside, you can burn a vessel and let them take whatever physical damage or legal ramifications of being found in the room where something was stolen, but if you run into problems, just possess the next person. Especially someone with clearance, if you couldn't find them earlier...

I suppose her not being able to open the door earlier was an omen for her not having all the information - not knowing that Bart was going to stab her as soon as he had what he wanted from her, and that she wasn't working for Asmodeus's whim at all, but Bart was going rogue with it. This is another suggestion of the dramatic irony at work - Dean couldn't open the door, he had no faith, and it seemed like to HIM that no one was helping him. But of course Cas had already come back, the automatic door had opened in that sense, but he didn't know so he's encountering this block. This demon powers through it as well without setting off any alarm bells and she should have had some about the whole double cross coming. Likewise, Dean's surprised by Cas's return.

Bart establishes himself as a Crowley-alike instantly, by having a random demon minion to double cross, and to go to the Winchesters. He already has Dean on speed dial which means his number must get circulated among the demons, or Bart has sought it out already from their sources. Whether he's had it a while and just decided to pounce...

I guess it's also like the opposite of Cas phoning him and we don't hear that side of the conversation - I mean we hear Dean on the phone here, but we're staying on Bart's side of the camera, and he's enticing him in with what he needs to find Jack. Again, more dark mirrors of stuff that's already happened... Dean getting a lot of phonecalls he needs to follow his faith on.

Dean immediately on screen in his bi plaid doing that thing with the gun that's... suggestive. Sitting there obessesively cleaning his gun.

Sam emerges, in a shirt that is going to be a Problem.

*mutes Sam*

Sam was the one who talked to Cas. I wonder if Asmodeus phoned Sam up rather than the other way around. Like, don't be suspicious, just check in every day and see how they're doing... Just phone one of the brothers at random.

Anyway we already know, of course, that it's not Cas, and here we are with more dramatic irony, the same problem as Casifer before they knew, and it's underlined by Sam being the one to talk to Casmodeus instead of Dean. Fewer opportunities based on what we see on screen for Dean to work it out.

And now we see the other side of the phonecall, tracking back in time to show us the same thing over again, but now we have Dean's POV on it too and he's not at this disadvantage, at least, with the way it's all been set up. He gets to snark back etc although Bart has the right word to stop Dean hanging up on him.

I do like the snark about Hell street locations :P

Sam's like "a demon!" whispered even though it's obvious and I think Dean clued into it which means once again Sam's being the GA, or a filter for them, and even though he says it silently, he's still spelling out what he thinks it is when it's blatantly obvious to us what it is as we watched the cold open and his side of the start of the phone call already.

"if I had a way to find *your boy*" - that parenting theme again, and he's addressing it to Dean since that's who he thinks he's solely on the phone to.

We get a look at a ton of shop fronts and I suppose they're all made up?

The Smile Diner is already incongruously happy - more irony, just that it's all smiles for what would be an understandably tense meeting.

Anyway: "BANGTOWN beauty & barber" "Fine art bartending LEARN TO BARTEND", a restaurant...

A Chinese-owned phone shop "Ketaiya" which I suppose is selling phones, as it says "iphone8.8" in the window but also would fit an idea of calling home, as shops like this exist for most immigrant populations, as a place where they can make cheap phonecalls home. In this part of the country I'm most used to seeing Arabic, Slavic or Eastern European versions of this but I assume it's the same deal. We get cage imagery over the front of this shop, obviously as protection for it as it has a bunch of iphones in it, but the idea that Cas can't call them because he's in prison is right there, and it makes him the lil green mascot in the window.

And then the smile cafe is the next thing along. :)

"He could work for Asmodeus" smart, but wrong *as far as we know*, and Sam is like "what if he's telling the truth", so this scepticism seems to be flipping their roles from last episode, buuut on the other hand Dean is being defensive and practical and Sam is again entertaining things villains tell them.

"After Crowley I told myself no more demons" it STILL sounds like bitter but civil exes. And you'd bet that "after Crowley" is not "in the last month since he died" but "since that time we had a wild elopement"

but hanging a lampshade on exactly what Bart is doing for them in the narrative, and of course that Dean is going to be predisposed to see him as a Crowley2.0 exactly as we do, so that adds even more depth to the promo scene.

Sam like "you said we need a miracle, maybe this is it" and then Dean calling out that demons don't give miracles - they give deals they can SELL as miracles. Who of the two of you has been jerked around more by demon deals? Oh yeah the one of you who sold your soul because your father's demon deal spiritually broke you already. (I mean yeah Sam has had it PLENTY hard in other ways but Dean and crossroads demons is a very different story to Sam)

"Let's hear the guy out." "And after that we kill him."

I continue to be enraged that Dean is wearing sensible black and at least MUTED purples and Sam's wearing the orange jacket and a plaid with like, hazard day glo orange strips sewn into it.

:) Smile Diner :)

it's horrifying, but it has homemade burgers. I have no clue if this is something they scouted out or repainted but the brickwork having yellow lines is like WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING in film language, like DO NOT ENTER police tape coding. IRL it would be whimsical, especially with all the smilies. On screen, it it horrifying. There's red signage and green neon boxing the window I think they're gonna sit in, and red and green are the poison codependency colours I think? According to Zerbe? I don't know if that's the dynamic here but it's certainly not GOOD, especially boxed in by yellow and black hazard warnings.

There's a pretty bridge and a sunset/rise in the sign. It's incongruous to the smile theme at least because it doesn't directly relate to smiling, and is just a random image. I would assume it's symbolic in some way... Cas is of course the sun, this does mimic the Gas n Sip logo (especially as it has a maroon version), and the road seems to lead away from the sun across the bridge. They're not helping Cas going in here, that's for sure :P

Lots of potted plants in here, and one behind Bart.

"The famous Winchesters!" "Some random demon." Dean is in a power play with him and now they're face to face rather than at a disadvantage over the phone, he's gonna win this one. Watch.

Bart offers a nickname to them, which could be a power play to say hey I'm so powerful we get on nickname terms because I allow you and you should be grateful or whatever, but his name sounds like an old powerful demon name (he and Asmodeus both have old school "us" endings to their names) and so he's actually neutering the part that makes his name sound powerful and impressive. He may be preempting Dean's infamous nicknaming habit, but Dean does it to be dismissive or to humanise. And he's not gonna get the latter treatment :P

Again, offering them to sit and then trying to get Dean on his side with pie - gesture after gesture of power, being the one in control, and knowing them, and the pie is the first sign he's done his Winchester Homework, which bad guys notoriously get wrong or misread. In this case, he's got Dean down as the stupid dumb muscle who can be bribed with pie, and I assume missing aaall the complexity of why demons fear him so much.

He labels Dean a "disrupter" when Dean has been tasked with maintaining the natural order. Dean has only ever tried to STOP bad stuff happening, and though he's ACCIDENTALLY helped unleash a bunch of stuff, it's never been because he WANTS to. He's helped cause a lot of the disruption in Hell with his actions, but that's because Hell is bad and he wants to stop it doing bad things. In general Dean's big victories have been to try and secure the natural order staying as it is, with his two biggest victories being Swan Song and settling things with God and Amara.

I love how the framing here has all that green light behind the Winchesters, but aside from a line of green behind Bart's head, he's got this innocent white flowery wall and some roses behind him.

Again, Sam snatches up the spell, Dean doubts immediately, I guess if not that the spell is real that why a demon would just GIVE it to him without ulterior motives. Just be upfront about the ulterior motives :P

He re-introduces himself as first a cross-roads demon and then THE cross-roads demon, a clarification again. He doesn't say king of the crossroads, but he does smirk at Dean, and says helping people is what he does... Yeah, to a degree. They have to PAY for it. But it's that smarmy salesman charm, this time mixed with someone who looks like a thug boss, the sort who dresses nice but has goons.

I mean we KNOW he does, but his look is very typical of nice suit, close-cropped hair, and just generally heavy set like he's used to being intimidating more than relying on his words, when you go to cast this guy.

Dean says they don't listen to/help demons, just kill them, and for one thing Bart's got to know about Crowley, but he says "How Dean of you" like he knows Dean is the one who just threatens to/will kill demons and not think about it. I mean Dean could be showing he's learned from experience. But of course then, the great meta about him negging Dean, by switching focus to Sam, who's already been established even before they get in the diner that he's going to be more willing to listen, that he's the "smart one" aka the one more likely to make a bad decision by listening to people he shouldn't while trying to help.

And, of course, Dean eats his pie, and we already made the parallels to other scenes like this in diners, but Ishim stands out the most, throwing money at Dean to shut up and buy himself some pie. In this case the pie is already here, and Dean's allowed to be suspicious but also eat the pie because hey, it's here.

Bart treated Dean like he was the stupid pie guy so Dean, who doesn't trust him an inch, acts like the stupid pie guy, while not giving any ground. He is not bribed by the pie, but Sam can't believe Dean's eating it.

There's a world of metaphor there about Dean and seduction. Because of course Bart came on strong to Dean, but Dean wasn't buying that either, the coded second layer of the conversation about him being Crowley2.0 and thinking maybe he can find a way to unlock Dean's interest in dudes... by offering pie of course. Doesn't work like that, you have to earn it. And the coming on too strong is the first weakness he has in not measuring up to Crowley, despite how it all seems like he has the ~perfect plan~ in place.

They're STIIIILL in these shirts

Wow, that's some old Biblical stuff. Guess that explains why Dabb tweeted that, pretty quickly. I don't know much about the Queen of Shiba but the idea she's a nephilim is kind of amusing.

I'll have to leave that to the experts but anyway, more douchey guys, although this time King Solomon is keeping tabs on someone like a dick, so um. Welcome to the club of symbolism this part of the season? I assume this is the same guy from the Song of Solomon that we saw Jack glance at in 13x02, and it's more romantic stuff as well.

Sam's like "Jack is out there in the world, and he's alone and he's scared and he's dangerous", which is exactly Dean's stance from 13x01 saying better to keep Jack in the Bunker with them so the only people he'd hurt are them. Yes Sam still seems to care about Jack, but he is also now valuing him practically, and seeing he's dangerous, and it's caused this flip in his attitude to one mirroring Dean's but obviously with much less hate and upset about what happened to Cas etc

Heist HQ!

Quirky random demons! Hat and headphone demons.

Hahahah they're called Smash and Grab. Smash has flowery DMs so I love her. Grab is wearing that hat voluntarily so I am not so sure about him at all.

PS: in America has flipping the bird with 2 fingers become a thing or was that a peace sign? When I was a young'un I was told that you always had to do peace signs palm out because showing the back of your hand with the exact same gesture was as bad/worse than giving someone the finger.

Is Smash human? Since he said Grab is a demon that leaves an empty space over what she is.

Lol, Dean realising it's a heist. "What is this, a heist? Hold on, is this a heist?"

Hahahahahha his favourite My Little Pony... Come on Dean, you kept the little pony you cut off that car in 7x06. You literally can not throw stones in this house.

Luther Shrike looks like if he was on UK TV he'd be played by the guy who played Walder Frey (David Bradley).

There's some stuff on the board that looks like the Sumerian(?) that Kevin translated the angel tablet into. Since we already had Kevin back on screen, it seems superfluous to mention, but it gives me a 4 in a row for mentioning Kevin in an episode this season so BINGO and more dramatic irony that Sam and Dean don't know he's responsible for Lucifer coming back, or, indeed, that Lucifer is back.

(With a bonus grumble from me that it's a reminder, in this season about a nephilim, that we still don't know what the angel fall spell's specific wording was)

Oh boy the "hell and back" thing. Ouch. So we're apparently delving THIS now? Is this penance for 11x10 and Dean not seeming too bothered to go back down there aside from token nervousness about the whole thing in the acting? Anyway getting flashbacks to that out of the blue... Look I am a smol sensitive Dean girl you can't just throw that at me. D:

It's interesting the perhaps king of the crossroads can't swing this with a random soul. I would assume it's specifically blood of someone CONDEMNED to Hell and saved/brought back. And woah I have it paused right after the flashback to collect myself, but either this has to get a Cas mention or it's one heck of an empty space in the story that Cas saved Dean and is the reason he's viable for this.

And lol lol lol lol see above like THREE PARAGRAPHS AGO I am never ever going to be over the angel fall spell and the fact it required grace in such... suspicious... circumstances of nephilim and cupids, and the whole theme of clarification, and how we have these such specific spells - virgin blood in 12x22, archangel grace last episode, and human who has been to hell and back now...

I'm just saying, I'm gonna be on my deathbed when I'm 150 like "the angel fall spell needed the grace of an angel in love with a human, come fight me, Carver" and then I give up the ghost just so I can go beat him up in the afterlife.

Bart beams at Dean, wanting his blood. Dean offers it up just to get this over and done with, but he says, no, straight from the tap and anyway you two are extremely competent in a weird crisis, why the heck would I not exploit that I need your manpower for this?

Shrike is human who has been to hell and back - obviously a dark Dean mirror because apparently he's a sadist and murderer, and Dean's entire thing is whether he's a killer or not for doing this job he does and I have gifsets and meta blahing on and on about that but yeah basically 2x03 set up that for Dean about how you do the job because you like/need killing or you do it to save people, and his torturer arc, and his Mark of Cain/demon descent... Nuff said for now.

UGH so Sam pulls Dean aside and says, "we want that spell - we NEED that spell" which is a huge clarification, and literally the want/need theme you are probably aware I bang on about a weeeeeeeeeeeee little bit. In general it's the "use your words" theme which does not harm Sam for the reminder but also is a huge Destiel theme because the need/want thing is from the crypt scene/10x19 with the call out on the crypt scene from Dean's subconscious and the ongoing issue of whether Cas feels needed or wanted, with the fact he feels "needed" called out in OH WAIT 13x04, aka last time out for Glynn... the fact the clarification is coming now in the other direction is because this is a Sam thing anyways, and - UGH I have it paused with him on screen and he seems to have an even worse shirt on? - it's not about Destiel subtext for him it's just using your words and in general bolstering the presence of the theme. Of course they don't just want the spell for kicks, they have a serious reason for needing it. In fact Sam's concern about Jack going from emotional concern for Jack himself to seeing Jack as a dangerous crisis is encapsulated in turning a desire into an obligation.

"He'll never see us coming"

"they're coming"

More dramatic irony, immediately showing us that on the other side of the story the bad guy has more information than they think he does, and that they aren't going to have it as easy as they think. That Bart has already been made as a traitor and that Asmodeus knows his next move will be exactly this.

Asmodeus may not even be *on screen* in this episode and he's being written as more intelligent than he has been in both Buckleming episodes, which is super unfortunate that he's supposed to be an intelligent character and we have to judge the characterisation of these unfortunates who are main BL property off their depiction in OTHER episodes...

And yeah Shrike may chat with demons but he has demon traps, exorcisms memorised and he toes the line of a horrible human being but not demonic himself, but such a hair's breadth away that demons and demon interactions and generally knowing wtf is going on with demons is just his life.

He has a really pretty grate which I think is specifically in the hall so that he can exorcise demons out through it. It probably goes straight to Hell

His windows also have bars on them which look like random jumble to an unfamiliar eye but are of course iron warding

I think he also has grapevines. He lives on a vineyard with barbed wire and demon traps on the gates.

The metalwork is the coolest thing in this episode and this episode is not half bad so far

Oh my god Dean called out poor Smash for her amazing boots and called her "Winona" - she DOES bear a passing resemblance, but hey leave the boots alone.

Anyway that moment just to show they're top and tail under a blanket in the back of the Impala which is pretty funny to me - I'm never sure you can actually fit anyone in there like that but they want to prove me wrong.

I'm like 1000% sure Sam's ruse doesn't work, because Shrike knows they're coming but he's let in anyway because why not. Let's have some fun. Interesting that Sam's the one made to do this. Having to lie and we already KNOW he's been caught out.

Anyway more focus on the boots... 3 times and I'm super worried we're gonna have to identify some remains by the flowery boots >.>

Or more positively it could be used to fuck with us in some way

"Dean? Don't get dead." "you too." Aw.

Is Grab in the trunk of the car?

Iron warded door. Yeah, that's normal.

For these guests, the rug is pulled back, the demon trap is plain to see on the floor. We see Sam from above, like he's being watched.

Shrike's front room/office is like Metatron's desk? I swear he had that lamp. Cuthbert's house... I swear that's Bobby's wallpaper or one in a similar hue with appropriately similar patterns to at least make a sort of sense of familiarity.

Awww Dean and Smash. He calls her weird but then spots she's drinking the delightful sounding does what it says on the tin NERVE DAMAGE, and then he says he used to live on it as a kid, despite its illegal amounts of caffeine.

Ew and she's getting it expired on ebay.

Dean, she may be bonding with you, but don't drink it. It's literally called Nerve Damage.

Welp

he's gonna be bouncing off the walls after 1 sip

OH they have to summon Grab I guess?

"Cool."

Hahahaha

Dean's babysitting the weirdoes.

Heh, calls Dean "chief"

HAHAHAHA Smash told Grab off screen that Dean was just a pretty face :P

WHOOPS looks like Dean just got puppeted by his own blood. Like a couple of weeks ago or something I was writing about a worst case scenario for Jack's powers being that they completely overwhelm him and he's like, inside waiting to be busted out, perhaps as a conclusion of the crypt scene/swan song repetitions from an external evil possessing and controlling to an internal force making it happen - a slow process but it really has switched, and it has been a fairly smooth slope down :D

Also that was hilarious. Poor Dean.

Dean's being poisoned with NERVE DAMAGE and Sam's being poisoned with homemade gin. If that's what it really is.

Hahahahahah Sam picking up a basilisk fang. We've all seen Harry Potter

LOL Sam knows random knowledge about basilisks and gorgons. Of course it's a test, and Shrike would know what it was, but good on Sam for recognising it. I watched Tall Tales so recently I'm still giggling about him recognising a crocodile belly scale, but now I just think Sam has an affinity for identifying the weirder monsters. He must have read a load of junk about them in the MoL bunker.

His persona as the collector guy wanting to sell to Shrike is basically Sam but with a bit more nervous bluster, which might be explained by knowing how dangerous this guy is and that Sam is having to pretend. He's not even wearing clothes as a get up here.

OH BOY Sam's big gambit is Ruby's knife... I remember in my 8x02 watching notes (hi Dabb) I was amused that they kind of forget that that knife is one of the most valuable things they own and they just dropped it in the weapon bin with a warning, rather than considering even trading it for the tablet or whatever even as a ruse... Just the idea they go around laden with magical artefacts that help them all the time like this which would actually be priceless to collectors - like in 12x06 Asa having an angel blade on blue felt in a glass case.

I don't think there's been a strong bias about which one of them has an angel blade and which one still uses this knife in fights since Carver era, but Dean took it to Purgatory, while Sam seemed to have more consistent possession of it for a while, Dean was the one who wrangled it from Ruby in 3x16 and sort of formally took ownership of it on behalf of the Winchesters.

Given the emotional background to this season of Sam's powers being explored through Jack, though, it is interesting (since they have enough angel blades they could just swap to using them all the time instead of this knife, which is a relic of Sam's darkest times) to just give it up, but quite aside from its worth to the right market, it has an enormous emotional weight of the season 3-4-5 drama for the Winchesters, and remembering it as Ruby's knife ties it to Sam. He still uses her knife and keeps her memory close, perhaps just as a reminder. But that weight is there and bringing it up is a reminder of all that, because so often we just see it as a tool, but this is asking us to stop and CONSIDER what that knife actually means, how much it's worth, and how even though they could stop using it these days, they don't, but what it would mean to Sam to give it up.

Dean reeeally not getting along with Grab. Who, of course, is the demon in this mix. The fact Smash is not a demon is only brought up in that scene where Dean is talking about her working with demons - it's taken for granted that she's human and perhaps that is the default, but not when you're expecting a room full of demons as we might be when meeting them. So. More empty space fill in the blanks, use context and people using or not using definitions to not be surprised that she's human.

Anyway Grab calls Sam stupid and Dean gets so angry he stops and turns around even though the spell's been dragging him along so there's a ridic Swan Song mirror for the collection - while "puppeted" by the spell, "defensiveness" of his brother halts Dean's progress...

Aaaand he's off again. Not enough? :P

Hey creepy underground cellars. That's never bad.

LOL Dean gets called HANDPUPPET

Mr Fizzles can tell when you're being a liaaaaaaaaaaaaaar

"I will kill you." "I bet you say that to all the girls." Awww and here was I thinking Dean wouldn't get flirted with any more this episode.

That was literally from the Crowley handbook - 9x10/9x11 made a huge point out of it.

This murder cellar connects to 12x01, 12x12, and 12x20, with the cellars being where Sam was kept and the twig people were made, and 12x12 for the basement Ramiel kept his shit in. Crossing them all over into this is super fun.

I guess this is where Smash does her thing?

GREAT door.

I hope that thing doesn't bite

It almost certainly bites

Oooh Shrike thinks Sam is a demon.

He didn't see him not get stuck in the demon trap out in the hall.

He has some of the info but not ALL of the info - in this way, while Bart sent them to deal with curveballs, Sam has turned out to be the curveball instead.

Ow that's a big hole to blow in the books, that were nearly Sam.

He conveniently slides back to his knife.

On the other hand re: curveballs, if Shrike thinks he's a demon, that shotgun blast wouldn't have killed a demon but it will kill a Sam.

Sam just goes and stabs the dude.

"As long as I'm on my property I can't die."

Well that's annoyingly cheaty

I wonder if it's symbolic of something but I can't instantly link it to anything so I have to move on.

There's something very like the Cain stuff with Dean in 9x11 between Sam and this guy, especially as they matched up as equals in knowledge about gorgons or whatever earlier.

MAW

DEAN LOOKS INTO THE MAW

Dean does not like spiders.

Hard same.

Why is he always so relatable

I'm cackling so much at his reluctance to put his hand in there. It's like the not wanting to go in the hole in 13x06 but so much funnier because... spiders.

There was an eel tank at the local aquarium when I was a kid which had a game EMBEDDED in the side of the eel tank to put your hand in and feel what an eel feels like.

I'm having, like. PTSD flashbacks to this and the Tiger Head in the museum which terrified the living daylights out of us as children and we wouldn't even go past it because it looked so fierce with its big open mouth

this is literally combining two of The Most Horrifying Things about my childhood into one

Plus biting for blood = needles to draw blood which is a rather more recent thing what with recently coming down with a mystery chronic illness and spending 2 years fishing around for a diagnosis via endless blood drawing, so put that one on the list

I believe in you, Dean. You're stronger than me.

He's stronger than me

I love him more than I have ever loved him in this exact moment

He had to account for the fact that Shrike might regularly go in here so of course it won't take YOUR HAND or something.

Of course it's a massive suspense thing for a teeny weeny pinprick. Of course.

This is like the dead opposite of the Werther Box - it's just a key for the lock, not like... the entire murderous thing Cuthbert designed

NINJA reflexes to save Smash there

Bye Grab. You were a dick.

OH NOES Shrike is here, with the demon knife, covered in blood. That's not worrying for Dean to see AT ALL.

Smash just legs it.

Awww she seemed to care about Grab at least a little... They had matchy matchy names.

Dean wants to go watch Game of Thrones.

Walder Frey knock off prefers to read the books

how did Sam get here.

I'm gonna assume like... not!Sam for now, since he saved the day so fortuitously.

Bart lurkin' outside.

Not surprising at all that Smash has a deal with him. I doubt he's letting her off easy, either, she's going to be sent right back.

Does Shrike just walk through this thing and ignore all the darts because they can't kill him?

"Shrek"

Sam sure has some quick and easy insights into the keypad.

"Like in Entrapment"

"Did you just say Entrapment?"

... Did Sam just get busted over his pop culture knowledge, by Dean, slower on the uptake than what I thought was weird for Sam?

Omg they're sending Shrike through because the darts can't kill him. This is ridiculous

That *was* ridiculous, but funny

Winchester problem solving.

Awwwww Smash is back, if it's really her.

Sam figures out she has a deal.

He also has a real side-eye of Dean. If he's actually Sam I got to re-evaluate him through this section :P

If not, I have another case of something impersonating Sam while doing The Eyebrows

More horrifying: this is Sam actually doing The Eyebrows

Oh god it's full daylight all of a sudden and Sam's plaid

is orange

under the orange jacket

I hate Sam Winchester

undying feud levels

Guess this is the edge of the property where he can't be killed? Be hilarious if they get him over the line somehow to kill him

STUNT DRIVING

Suddenly backstory and emotional music plays.

Starting to think nothing’s up with Sam though, like, if he actually was replaced or not, because it was really funny imagining it and not letting them get the drop on me if it happened, and Sam being called out on his references etc, but we're getting pretty far into it all like leaving the property, having this moment, etc, so maybe it was just a fake out and Sam BAMF'd himself free off-screen or was never even tied up

Seems to just be a story of life, though that Shrike's kid died so soon after he was saved, and it was a "waste" of a demon deal. He seems like he must have already been a certain sort of person to know how to MAKE the deal...

What's in the trunk...

Ooh I wondered if it would be as soon as Bart wasn’t forthcoming. So a 6x04 parallel as well (or 6x10, which dealt a lot more with them having to work for Crowley).

Oooh they were off the property. WHOOPS. It *was* the gates. I thought so but I didn't figure he'd be so stupid to face them head on.

Although it was over Bart's bones so it was a risk he had to take to leave?

And now we have a new problem :P

Awww poor Smash

And there's the rest of the spell. Do they take it?

Oookay I was thinking Sam would have to be Sam for this part and he and Dean are making emotional decisions together and Sam's picking the correct path so... I guess I have to assume 100% this is Sam again? Mittens isn't talking to me about stuff from this episode like there's too many spoilers for her to humour me about stuff. Even what I thought were silly things.

And now Smash/Alice is in peril after they made the decision that they do not want to get involved in Bart's shit because he's a shitty person.

Bye bye Bart :3 Nice move, Dean.

So basically, yep, Bart tried so hard to be what Crowley was to Dean in their opening interaction and all his set up to come across as like... something Dean had been missing? That Dean might WANT a demon ally to be on the hook with/have on his hook, even just have on his SPEED DIAL, because to him that probably meant being able to manipulate the Winchesters and so on...

But as I figured from the opening, he just completely underestimates them, including that Dean is way way way waaaay smarter than he gives him credit for, so OF COURSE Dean wins by outsmarting him, by doing what soulless!Sam STOPPED Dean from doing in 6x04 and just torching Crowley on the spot because what did they REALLY owe him and how much loyalty could you really have from a demon as uneasy business partners... So Dean outwits him, and in a move almost exactly like 13x06 he sets up the tools and someone else gets the kill but it's Dean who outsmarted the monster.

And whooops half of half a spell? Not even half... it's all gone.

Whoooops. Well at least they saved Alice. And they're putting her on a bus, as they usually do with characters they won't see again.

There's like 2 minutes left, which is always an ominous sign.

Anyway *waves goodbye to Alice*

*Dean pats Sam on the shoulder and we get the last look at Sam smiling*

Aaand to the Bunker, where Dean is getting them some beers while wearing his black Henley.

Like the whole thing resolved with that dude and Bart is dead and all (... they better find someone to replace him although constantly subbing in random "I'm the new king of the crossroads" characters might get a bit ridiculous, we know there's going to be an opening someone will take... I really hope that was a cue to get us to whoever takes over... If not they just make it even more frustrating that I’ve been waiting 7 years to know if someone replaced Crowley or he was doing both jobs, and now it’s made even more clear there’s a job for a secondary powerful demon in hell to show up in this role and the head crossroads demon is a serious position with power and such... It’s such a frustrating hole in the world building to overlook and I've been over-thinking it for longer than I’ve been on tumblr by a good few years.)

anyway Sam n Dean are talking

Is Sam going to explain how he escaped from being knocked out and showed up with perfect timing, or was that the plot hole?

Nah, they just have a nice talk about the job and how saving people is fun, and all. And Dean being optimistic. Yay! It's a similar call out to 13x06 and why Dean was so obscenely happy in the cowboy room, but Sam is now seeing that Dean is permanently feeling better even in ridiculous situations, and his mood really has permanently resettled to optimism and cheerfulness again and it is NOT just the cowboys.

Okay so I probably need to watch the last part of the episode again but I am now weirdly curious about what happened to Sam - though we know he's great at escaping things, but Shrike put his life into doubt to Dean, and we had no reason to assume he'd leave Sam in a place where he could easily get out, I'm guessing now that the way he showed up looking like he COULD have just killed and/or maimed Sam with that bloody knife, and I even pointed out that to DEAN'S eyes it would look sooo much worse than if it was as simple as Shrike knocked Sam out, and immediately legged it to the safe to check on it while just hoping unconsciousness would be enough to keep Sam down. (He has an iron skull after being knocked out so many times - like that thing where you kung fu your hands to have tons of micro fractures in order for the bones to heal stronger? That's Sam's head.)

He seemed to be put into question after he showed up again and I began to doubt it again as soon as they left the property because it would make no sense to leave Sam behind and just take a fake with them for the emotional resolution of the episode. Especially once they got into it and it was blatantly a straightforward emotional resolution to the episode that Sam had too much of a stake in for it NOT to be him at that point.

BUT Dean questioned Sam's reference to a thing right after he showed back up, while Sam was coming up with some hilarious ideas for solving things in a way written which you COULD think he was not!Sam and someone with more info/their own stake in this (e.g. the worry Asmodeus was coming) just because it was Sam at his most mercenary to come up with the "just send the guy who can't die over the traps to spring them all" plan... We KNOW Sam can be like that but at the same time... Sam being like that can also be some other person who would think like that as the LEAST WORST thing they thought that day instead of the actual worst.

Anyway it was all set up in such a way that Dean calling out something he didn't expect about Sam means he's questioning the people around him when they behave uncharacteristically - because he KNOWS his loved ones. He understands when they aren't behaving like themselves. He gets a secret out of Sam that he watched something he'd never normally watch just for Catherine Zeta-Jones, which Dean has to concede, while struggling with how much to mock Sam. It's interesting they use the empty space of Sam arriving without explanation to cast him into doubt, then have him doubted, verbally putting something out there that Dean stopped to question what Sam was saying. They brush it off, and it ends up being nothing, but considering the looming possibility of Casmodeus - and the fact that Sam started the episode saying he'd talked to Cas so they have literally been decieved THIS episode without knowing it (and Dean didn't get to verify if it was Cas or not - another reason to phone Sam instead of Dean)...

I wonder if it is leading up to Dean calling out Casmodeus about not being Cas? That this fake out might have been a time it really was Sam, but we and Dean were given a set up to doubt Sam was there in one piece, us with dramatic irony and Dean with just plain not knowing, and so they could play with this concept and it just tapers off - maybe we take the reaction about C Z-J as proof, maybe we eventually decide Sam has to be Sam after all and there's nothing going on here because he's involved earnestly in the emotional decisions at the end of the episode.

But it was interesting. Unlike with Ketch and his twin, it was the sort of set up where I wasn't certain we wouldn't finish the scene and then cut to Sam tied to a chair and bouncing it over to a nearby sharp object to saw himself free and run and stop the drama, at least until the end of that part of the episode. Once we were back out in the clear light of day it was like Sam's disgusting plaid was all the proof we needed it was really him :P

#13x08 #season 13 spoilers #*quietly sets Sam's wardrobe on fire*#my stuff

68 notes · View notes