SPN 10x14: I love you so much I'm going to yell at you a little
I'm happy to say it, but as someone who has mentally and emotionally checked out of the SPN since Carver has run amok with everything, it feels like this seaon has FINALLY started. After 11 episodes of I don't know what (mindless foreplay? meandering set-up? filler blah blah blah blah?), an episode featuring the awesome twins, Jody and Donna, and a fandom-love-fest a la tear-inducing Wayward-Son-singing episode, it feels like there's FINALLY a direction to this season. We've FINALLY found traction and there's FINALLY something tangible and valuable at stake instead of just a vague, worrisome issue to handwave at. FINALLY the writers have stopped telling us what we should be concerned about ad nauseum and have FINALLY showed us The Story. Maybe Carver's FINALLY giving me (us?) a reason to believe some of the story that he's been trying to sell for the last 13 episodes?
To be honest, Carver has totally undermined my trust in his storytelling abilities. He's the king of emotional manipulation and bait-and-switch, contorting the emotional story around contrived plot points and then shoving in unearned brother moments as if that would distract from the weirdness that came before. But worse than anything else, I feel he's been for 2.5 seasons crafting the characters around the story and not the story around the characters, priming them for his "end game", shoving them into narrative arcs that don't take into consideration the broader context of who the characters are (or had become over the last 8+ years prior to his tenure as Showrunner), or worse, completely neglecting the logical ramifications and emotional/psychologic consequences of his own stories on the characters themselves, leaving the impression that he thinks the plot is the king of the show, not the emotional story, which is an insult because clearly this show was built on the Emotional Story of Sam and Dean (OMG, run on sentence! Look at me, I guess I'm feeling good enough about Show to finally be pissed off at it rather than sit in frustrated, grumpy, I-don't-care-enough-to-even-get-mad silence! \o/\o/\o/)! Screw that. This show IS the Emotional Story of Sam and Dean. Carver don't mess with it! *fists*
And, well, I guess I just figured out in a convoluted, super ranty way why I've been so freaking pissed at what Carver has done since S8: he's been slowly stomping all over why I loved SPN so much. It's the emotional story that resonated with me. In the early seasons, even if the MotW plots were hinky and questionable, some of the through-going story arcs were thin and warrented some arched eyebrows, and there were loads of anvils flying everywhere (not that that's changed at all), I always found the emotional story to be solid, familiar, indentifiable, and consistent. It was SPN's anchor. Regardless of what was going on in the surface plot, there were Sam and Dean in an emotional tug-of-war of good intentions and familial love. For me, it was easy to forgive plot weirdness when I felt was the most valuable part of the story made sense. But in recent seasons when why the characters were doing what they were doing and how they felt (or seemingly didn't feel) about it stopped making sense or became a vacuum of silence, it was impossible NOT to overlook the plot gymnastics that were forcing the story in a certain direction (the Sam and Dean role reversal that seems to finally being taking off, which only took 2.5 years of clunky character manipulation to get to ... ugh).
*breathes* *looks at the time* *is suddenly sleepy*
Wow. My intentions were just log in and write something sort of happy (happy in the sense that OMGYAYFINALLYSOMETHINGHASHAPPENEDONSPN!!!!!!!) and rave about Sgriccia's directing and how awesome Tim Omundson was. But then all of that *points to everything above* happened unexpectedly. Huh. So, well, sorry if any of that squashed anyone's Show Love. Just because I have issues, doesn't mean I'm not happy that other people are enjoying SPN for entirely different reasons than me.
But it remains to be seen how what's been eluded to this episode will play out, or even if it'll be followed through on in a sensical, internally consistent way. Execution has been dismal. I'm not investing in huge boatfuls of hope, but there's enough there that I still keep watching and apparently am ready to have a party (that then turns into a rant fest) whenever anything happens that remotely pings my I-WANT-TO-LOVE-SPN-AGAIN-GIVE-ME-A-TEENYTINY-REASON! button. This show. Argh. Love/hate/love/hate/love/love/hate/love/love/love.
To be honest, Carver has totally undermined my trust in his storytelling abilities. He's the king of emotional manipulation and bait-and-switch, contorting the emotional story around contrived plot points and then shoving in unearned brother moments as if that would distract from the weirdness that came before. But worse than anything else, I feel he's been for 2.5 seasons crafting the characters around the story and not the story around the characters, priming them for his "end game", shoving them into narrative arcs that don't take into consideration the broader context of who the characters are (or had become over the last 8+ years prior to his tenure as Showrunner), or worse, completely neglecting the logical ramifications and emotional/psychologic consequences of his own stories on the characters themselves, leaving the impression that he thinks the plot is the king of the show, not the emotional story, which is an insult because clearly this show was built on the Emotional Story of Sam and Dean (OMG, run on sentence! Look at me, I guess I'm feeling good enough about Show to finally be pissed off at it rather than sit in frustrated, grumpy, I-don't-care-enough-to-even-get-mad silence! \o/\o/\o/)! Screw that. This show IS the Emotional Story of Sam and Dean. Carver don't mess with it! *fists*
And, well, I guess I just figured out in a convoluted, super ranty way why I've been so freaking pissed at what Carver has done since S8: he's been slowly stomping all over why I loved SPN so much. It's the emotional story that resonated with me. In the early seasons, even if the MotW plots were hinky and questionable, some of the through-going story arcs were thin and warrented some arched eyebrows, and there were loads of anvils flying everywhere (not that that's changed at all), I always found the emotional story to be solid, familiar, indentifiable, and consistent. It was SPN's anchor. Regardless of what was going on in the surface plot, there were Sam and Dean in an emotional tug-of-war of good intentions and familial love. For me, it was easy to forgive plot weirdness when I felt was the most valuable part of the story made sense. But in recent seasons when why the characters were doing what they were doing and how they felt (or seemingly didn't feel) about it stopped making sense or became a vacuum of silence, it was impossible NOT to overlook the plot gymnastics that were forcing the story in a certain direction (the Sam and Dean role reversal that seems to finally being taking off, which only took 2.5 years of clunky character manipulation to get to ... ugh).
*breathes* *looks at the time* *is suddenly sleepy*
Wow. My intentions were just log in and write something sort of happy (happy in the sense that OMGYAYFINALLYSOMETHINGHASHAPPENEDONSPN!!!!!!!) and rave about Sgriccia's directing and how awesome Tim Omundson was. But then all of that *points to everything above* happened unexpectedly. Huh. So, well, sorry if any of that squashed anyone's Show Love. Just because I have issues, doesn't mean I'm not happy that other people are enjoying SPN for entirely different reasons than me.
But it remains to be seen how what's been eluded to this episode will play out, or even if it'll be followed through on in a sensical, internally consistent way. Execution has been dismal. I'm not investing in huge boatfuls of hope, but there's enough there that I still keep watching and apparently am ready to have a party (that then turns into a rant fest) whenever anything happens that remotely pings my I-WANT-TO-LOVE-SPN-AGAIN-GIVE-ME-A-TEENYTINY-REASON! button. This show. Argh. Love/hate/love/hate/love/love/hate/love/love/love.