(27) The Brothers Winchester
Nov. 27th, 2009 06:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
constanceSince there's no CW affiliate in my miniature city, I watch Supernatural not on Thursdays, which is when it airs, for those of you who don't actually follow it and don't know these things (i.e., just about everyone on my friendslist); I download it and watch it on Fridays. Which means that today is Supernatural Day around here, and since the show is on hiatus until January, I am feeling a little bereft today. A little at loose ends. And while I've filled the empty hours as best I can, I can already tell it's going to be a seriously long couple of months, especially since my one fandom friend is off on hiatus herself, inconsiderately traveling the world.*
And I'm supposed to be talking about Sam and Dean, and I'm taking a while to get to them, I know, but before I do, I feel as though I should offer up a general frame of reference here: I love fictional characters the way I love people, in the sense that once I start, it never really stops, despite their flaws and failures. That's not to say I don't get frustrated or angry with them, not to say I don't wish during the hard times that I could quit them, but the sad truth is that I'm not really built that way. It sucks, but there it is. So that, for example, not even the last (and weakest) Harry Potter book was enough to turn me off completely, or indeed at all. My love for Harry is as painfully sharp as it was when I picked up the first book, over a decade ago.
And it's the same for Supernatural. After years of commitment, this is the first season that I'm finding seriously frustrating. The show's never been consistently extraordinary -- excellent episodes are jumbled together with mediocre ones and even the odd terrible one -- but throughout the first four seasons, Sam and Dean have been the show's anchor. Their relationship has always transcended the particulars of the show itself, so that even a bad episode is worth watching, even a season spent watching the two of them failing each other in the most spectacular ways is worth investment.
Until this season. These days the Sam-and-Dean relationship is all over the freaking place, friendly one week and strained the next, and only a couple of their approximately 1,249 issues have been addressed, much less resolved, and the season, supposedly the last, is half over. And I'm willing to believe that the erratic Winchester dynamic is intentional on the showrunners' parts -- these are guys who hardly ever talk about the important stuff, and when they do they tend to say the wrong things to each other, and thanks to the last season they are broken just about beyond repair, so it's not as though a shaky, on-again-off-again reconciliation isn't within the realm of possibility -- but the fact that I can't tell if it's a flaw in the writing or just seismic shifts within the show jerking the guys' levels of tolerance around, that's a failure, I think.
(And, you know, that's not even getting into the (literally) godforsaken apocalypse, which is ostensibly underway but which the show is treating with an inefficiency and lack of urgency that I'm frankly finding a little baffling.)
But despite my frustration, I still love the show, and most particularly Sam and Dean. Up until recently, I was pretty firm in my belief that these two characters are among the richest, most finely-developed, most realistically-written and -portrayed (this is saying something, considering the fact that they're two guys randomly roaming the country in a classic muscle car killing paranormal evildoers) characters I've ever seen on television. I honestly don't think I've ever seen character evolution develop so slowly and organically on a TV show, not even in a show as rich and complicated as, say, BSG, where characters shifted and changed, but in a jerky, disorderly way as the story dictated. Here, it's the characters driving the story, which is obviously as it should be, considering how firmly and exclusively Sam and Dean are its core, and for four seasons, it was just so deftly done. And so I'm doubly frustrated so far this season with the writers' seeming inability to find their footing with them, especially since they've been so surefooted up to this point. They were patient and courageous enough to spend an entire season systematically dismantling their two main characters' faith in themselves and each other! Surely they can help them get their shit together over the course of this one! I guess this is why I'm willing to buy that my frustration is being deliberately fostered; I can't quite believe the showrunners are falling down on the job as epically as they seem to be so far.
If I'm being deliberately strung along, though, there had better be a gigantic payoff. I MEAN IT.
Anyway. I am way overinvested, the way I tend to get. And I love the show, love its core focus on the weirdly haphazard mythology of a young immigrant country like the US, love that the boys personify both America's insularity and its itinerancy, love most of the peripheral characters that we've seen over the course of five seasons. But for me it will always come back to the cohesive (if not always accordant) unit of Sam and Dean, which unit I adore with a devotion pretty uncomplicated for such complicated characters. I want them to survive this season intact and with a renewed closeness, and for their survival and repair to make sense within the context of the story, and I hope, hope, hope that's not too much to ask.
________________
* Also, now is a good time to mention that I've friended a few new folks recently, and just in case you are reading this and are curious about why I've friended you with a journal almost entirely unrelated to fandom, this is why: I'm jonesing for fandom fixes, kind of pathetically since we're a single week into the hiatus, and you've written meta that makes me happy. No harm, no foul, I hope.
And I'm supposed to be talking about Sam and Dean, and I'm taking a while to get to them, I know, but before I do, I feel as though I should offer up a general frame of reference here: I love fictional characters the way I love people, in the sense that once I start, it never really stops, despite their flaws and failures. That's not to say I don't get frustrated or angry with them, not to say I don't wish during the hard times that I could quit them, but the sad truth is that I'm not really built that way. It sucks, but there it is. So that, for example, not even the last (and weakest) Harry Potter book was enough to turn me off completely, or indeed at all. My love for Harry is as painfully sharp as it was when I picked up the first book, over a decade ago.
And it's the same for Supernatural. After years of commitment, this is the first season that I'm finding seriously frustrating. The show's never been consistently extraordinary -- excellent episodes are jumbled together with mediocre ones and even the odd terrible one -- but throughout the first four seasons, Sam and Dean have been the show's anchor. Their relationship has always transcended the particulars of the show itself, so that even a bad episode is worth watching, even a season spent watching the two of them failing each other in the most spectacular ways is worth investment.
Until this season. These days the Sam-and-Dean relationship is all over the freaking place, friendly one week and strained the next, and only a couple of their approximately 1,249 issues have been addressed, much less resolved, and the season, supposedly the last, is half over. And I'm willing to believe that the erratic Winchester dynamic is intentional on the showrunners' parts -- these are guys who hardly ever talk about the important stuff, and when they do they tend to say the wrong things to each other, and thanks to the last season they are broken just about beyond repair, so it's not as though a shaky, on-again-off-again reconciliation isn't within the realm of possibility -- but the fact that I can't tell if it's a flaw in the writing or just seismic shifts within the show jerking the guys' levels of tolerance around, that's a failure, I think.
(And, you know, that's not even getting into the (literally) godforsaken apocalypse, which is ostensibly underway but which the show is treating with an inefficiency and lack of urgency that I'm frankly finding a little baffling.)
But despite my frustration, I still love the show, and most particularly Sam and Dean. Up until recently, I was pretty firm in my belief that these two characters are among the richest, most finely-developed, most realistically-written and -portrayed (this is saying something, considering the fact that they're two guys randomly roaming the country in a classic muscle car killing paranormal evildoers) characters I've ever seen on television. I honestly don't think I've ever seen character evolution develop so slowly and organically on a TV show, not even in a show as rich and complicated as, say, BSG, where characters shifted and changed, but in a jerky, disorderly way as the story dictated. Here, it's the characters driving the story, which is obviously as it should be, considering how firmly and exclusively Sam and Dean are its core, and for four seasons, it was just so deftly done. And so I'm doubly frustrated so far this season with the writers' seeming inability to find their footing with them, especially since they've been so surefooted up to this point. They were patient and courageous enough to spend an entire season systematically dismantling their two main characters' faith in themselves and each other! Surely they can help them get their shit together over the course of this one! I guess this is why I'm willing to buy that my frustration is being deliberately fostered; I can't quite believe the showrunners are falling down on the job as epically as they seem to be so far.
If I'm being deliberately strung along, though, there had better be a gigantic payoff. I MEAN IT.
Anyway. I am way overinvested, the way I tend to get. And I love the show, love its core focus on the weirdly haphazard mythology of a young immigrant country like the US, love that the boys personify both America's insularity and its itinerancy, love most of the peripheral characters that we've seen over the course of five seasons. But for me it will always come back to the cohesive (if not always accordant) unit of Sam and Dean, which unit I adore with a devotion pretty uncomplicated for such complicated characters. I want them to survive this season intact and with a renewed closeness, and for their survival and repair to make sense within the context of the story, and I hope, hope, hope that's not too much to ask.
________________
* Also, now is a good time to mention that I've friended a few new folks recently, and just in case you are reading this and are curious about why I've friended you with a journal almost entirely unrelated to fandom, this is why: I'm jonesing for fandom fixes, kind of pathetically since we're a single week into the hiatus, and you've written meta that makes me happy. No harm, no foul, I hope.
