Oh, my God.
Feb. 18th, 2008 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
constanceOkay, yeah, so as far as I know, only like 2.5 of the people on my friendslist have ever been even a little interested in Supernatural, but I'm posting this willy-nilly, so feel free to skip it if you have no idea of what I might be talking about.
I've been meaning, ever since I first read Shalott's Punxsutawney, to write a post about another bulletproof kink of mine -- ye olde Groundhog Day motif -- because I don't care how tired a conceit it is by now, I don't care how badly-written or -characterized or -plotted it is, the idea of reliving certain do-over bits of your life, the idea of having an approaching-infinite number of chances to make things right, God, those things make me drunk with pleasure and longing. The number of times I've wished I'd been given that chance, oh man.
It hits me at my most vulnerable, this trope, and it was a brilliant idea fifteen years ago, and it's a brilliant idea now, and when it's well-written, like Punxsutawney, well.
And I've been meaning to write up the post, but it wasn't until this morning, when I finally got around to seeing the latest episode of SPN, that I realized that the time had come. And just about every sci-fi show out there has tackled this one before, I know, but none of them have ever stopped my heart the way Mystery Spot does. It takes this theme and spins it around and time goes on and on and it took forever for me to realize that in spite of the many comic moments (Death by electrocution, with Dean's skeleton showing through his skin á la Tex Avery! Death by Tacos! "Sam Winchester wears makeup! Sam Winchester cries his way through sex!"), what we were working toward was the opposite of the usual happy ending: we were heading for the stripping down and rebuilding of Sam in the most heartbreaking way possible, by taking away his anchor, over and over again. By the time it became clear to me -- watching Sam slogging away at his isolated, numbed, compulsively diminished life in the post-Dean months -- that there wasn't going to be a happy ending, that there was no way Sam could possibly recover completely from this, that if there were once any small chance that Sam would ever get back to the pursuit of the ordinary life he was after in California, it had pretty much disappeared by the time the Trickster gave Dean back to Sam apparently for good... by the time I got to this point, the show had really clawed its way down my throat.
And that hug. And the fucking tears in Sam's eyes as he begs the Trickster for Dean. And the panic in Sam's voice as he tells Dean he can't go outside alone, after it's all over. It's a perfect bookend, in a way, to last week's episode, and now both boys are sitting on these enormous things, and I can't see either of them confiding, and the rest of this season is going to be pretty goddamned bleak, isn't it.
It kills me that Ruby has been trying to toughen Sam up for weeks, and in one day (kind of) the Trickster has Sam ready to go, ready to fight, a hundred times colder and more efficient and tunnel-visioned than his father was. The most I'm hoping for now is that Dean can keep Sam human, that Sam can do the same for Dean, because they'll never be whole now. They are well and truly broken. And I can only remind myself that in a universe where everything, as they've been at pains to remind us in the last two episodes, is mutable, that everything can change with a literal snap of the fingers, even the impossible is possible. Because I think what I want from this show is now officially impossible.
Still loving it, though.
I've been meaning, ever since I first read Shalott's Punxsutawney, to write a post about another bulletproof kink of mine -- ye olde Groundhog Day motif -- because I don't care how tired a conceit it is by now, I don't care how badly-written or -characterized or -plotted it is, the idea of reliving certain do-over bits of your life, the idea of having an approaching-infinite number of chances to make things right, God, those things make me drunk with pleasure and longing. The number of times I've wished I'd been given that chance, oh man.
It hits me at my most vulnerable, this trope, and it was a brilliant idea fifteen years ago, and it's a brilliant idea now, and when it's well-written, like Punxsutawney, well.
And I've been meaning to write up the post, but it wasn't until this morning, when I finally got around to seeing the latest episode of SPN, that I realized that the time had come. And just about every sci-fi show out there has tackled this one before, I know, but none of them have ever stopped my heart the way Mystery Spot does. It takes this theme and spins it around and time goes on and on and it took forever for me to realize that in spite of the many comic moments (Death by electrocution, with Dean's skeleton showing through his skin á la Tex Avery! Death by Tacos! "Sam Winchester wears makeup! Sam Winchester cries his way through sex!"), what we were working toward was the opposite of the usual happy ending: we were heading for the stripping down and rebuilding of Sam in the most heartbreaking way possible, by taking away his anchor, over and over again. By the time it became clear to me -- watching Sam slogging away at his isolated, numbed, compulsively diminished life in the post-Dean months -- that there wasn't going to be a happy ending, that there was no way Sam could possibly recover completely from this, that if there were once any small chance that Sam would ever get back to the pursuit of the ordinary life he was after in California, it had pretty much disappeared by the time the Trickster gave Dean back to Sam apparently for good... by the time I got to this point, the show had really clawed its way down my throat.
And that hug. And the fucking tears in Sam's eyes as he begs the Trickster for Dean. And the panic in Sam's voice as he tells Dean he can't go outside alone, after it's all over. It's a perfect bookend, in a way, to last week's episode, and now both boys are sitting on these enormous things, and I can't see either of them confiding, and the rest of this season is going to be pretty goddamned bleak, isn't it.
It kills me that Ruby has been trying to toughen Sam up for weeks, and in one day (kind of) the Trickster has Sam ready to go, ready to fight, a hundred times colder and more efficient and tunnel-visioned than his father was. The most I'm hoping for now is that Dean can keep Sam human, that Sam can do the same for Dean, because they'll never be whole now. They are well and truly broken. And I can only remind myself that in a universe where everything, as they've been at pains to remind us in the last two episodes, is mutable, that everything can change with a literal snap of the fingers, even the impossible is possible. Because I think what I want from this show is now officially impossible.
Still loving it, though.
