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carveredlunds · 2 years

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inspired by this post and this post (and probably others i’ve seen over the years but can’t remember! if you’ve talked about this idea before, chime in!) and the fact that i’ve just watched “the man who would be king”. but why didn’t season 15 have more meta episodes?

we had “atomic monsters”, where becky called out chuck’s bad writing, which was kind of meta, and we had “the heroes’ journey”, a send-up of sam and dean’s plot armour that ground the dramatic tension of the season to a screeching halt and was played for laughs. i guess we had chuck watching tv screens in “galaxy brain”, and several references to chuck ‘cancelling shows’, but the meta was shockingly light for a season where god is your final antagonist.

why didn’t we have sam and dean look directly into the camera, like castiel does in “the man who would be king”? they could have looked directly at the camera, begging the audience to let them go (because what was the ‘point’ of season 15 if not to be a commentary on how it had become a shambling and zombified version of its former self, with the characters desperately fighting for freedom?)

instead of whatever the heck “the heroes’ journey” was, why not go the opposite way with it, and go full existential horror with the idea of plot armour? instead of having sam and dean lose their plot armour, why not increase it? have sam and dean on a regular hunt, and sam gets stabbed, but he doesn’t die, because chuck doesn’t want him to go out this way. or dean gets horrifically injured, but it just heals by itself, in front of his very eyes, because chuck doesn’t want his favourite toy to be broken.

why not have them become aware that they’re in a tv show? have them say they’re going somewhere one scene, and then suddenly, the scene changes and they’re there, but maybe sam says to dean “what just happened?” because they insta-travelled. they didn’t drive or walk. (side note: an episode of “doctor who” called “forest of the dead” did this, and it was so creepy.) or how about the brothers become aware of background music? suddenly, the music goes all tense and scary, and tfw look around wildly for where it’s coming from, before a monster of the week shows up.

and, to take that further, imagine having chuck interact directly with the scenes themselves? imagine something absolutely wild happening. like in “proverbs 17:3”, we open on one of chuck’s planned endings. sam is dressed all in white, clearly possessed by lucifer, and dean shoots him in the head, only for him to sit back up again. the scene freezeframes, and chuck steps into the shot and says “nah, too old school” or something like that, and rotates his finger, and the scene rewinds like an old video tape, and another ending plays out. the big thing here? this isn’t alternate universe sam and dean, but our sam and dean, playing out endings for a while until chuck gets bored and leaves or something.

sam and dean did talk about free will and destiny and yada yada yada, but they never truly acknowledged the cosmic horror of being two very special bugs in a jar that god has personally kept alive and suffering for his own entertainment. the season 14 finale set up such an interesting and self-aware situation that season 15 never followed through with. the penultimate episode was literally what was left of tfw, alone on a dying planet, the only characters on an empty stage, and the absolute mind fuckery of that was never really talked about.

for a show as meta as “supernatural” that had iconic episodes like “the french mistake”, lines like crowley’s ‘castiel, haven’t seen you all season’ in “caged heat”, and so many directly paralleled shots to past episodes, season 15 could have really gone full meta, but they were cowards.

#spn #spn meta #sophie speaks #sophie talks about spn

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