Reaction: Supernatural 4.11 - Mild pondering included.
Spoiler and Theorizing Timeline
OMG, the whole hiatus and this is all the spoilerage I have for this episode?
-Nov 11th Widely disseminated comments from Jim Beaver's Myspace. Bobby will not be appearing in this episode.
-Sometime in December Somewhere. Title "Family Remains". Okay, so possibly more skeletons from the Winchester closet, but I do hope they're going to use the other implication of 'remains' as well, in that "When all else is gone, family remains" sense. *nods* Which makes me even more miffed at the absence of Bobby.
-Jan 8 [Hunh. Didn't expect to carry that spoiler forward... *is confused*]
-Jan 15 AM [Delayed crack theorizing results in intriguingly possible, yet completely erroneous theory, which has been retroactively removed lest it morph into another damned plot-bunny.]
So woo! No spoilers, really! Thank you to everyone who kept things under cuts! You rock!
Reaction to Supernatural 4.11 - "Family Remains"
Heh. The local affiliate for the CW has changed. It's now JoyTV. This seems appropriate *nods* Kinda short and missing details because it's only two watchthroughs, but I have SCHEDULE FROM HELL upcoming at work and if I don't post a reaction tonight then I won't get it posted until... March. :-P
-Oooo... houuuuuuuuse. *grabby hands*
-Yes, skeezy man. Turn the lamp on and off. That will make the electricity work.
-Home Sweet Home thing in blood. Bet Kripke's been waiting for a chance to do that for years.
-Sleeping in the car! YAY!
-Also third canon use of Yahtzee! as an affirmative by Dean. Yay for continuity!
-A month of non-stop, relentless hunting. Oooo. Can we get a montage? No? so, date-wise that makes this about... what? Mid-December? Unless there was time that passed before the month of relentless hunting, but it doesn't seem that way.
-Awww, sleepy grumpy Sammy. He looks about six with that expression. *tousles his hair* Hee! He must be folded about double to fit in the back seat of the Impala.
-Stratton, Nebraska, was it? Under 400 people. How does a town that small have a better webpage than a local village near me with about a ten times as many people?
-Aw. That face on Dean after Sam lies down to go back to sleep. Deeeeean....
-Heh. Sold sign. Are they gonna surprise the new owners or be surprised? That was kind of fast too... Hey, how long's this guy been dead, did they say?
-Hey! It's the house from Faith with a new paint job, isn't it? The exterior? Maybe not. Stairs might be different. Hmm.
-They're being waaaa-aaatched. *smirks at Monster cam*
-Man, the linoleum in that kitchen is crap. Look at it, all peeling up there in the corner and brown and cruddy. That'll knock as much off the saleability of a house as being right under a major set of power lines and a recent death.
-Ooo, a blocked-over pass-through? No, a dumbwaiter. Okay, guys, save yourselves a lot of annoyance and just bust in the dumbwaiter now. You'll be doing it later anyway, it's a rule. If there is a dumbwaiter, or anything plastered up or blocked over, it will be significant to the plot. It's, like, a law.
-Hee! Smirky Dean!
-... wow. Either someone in the writing room is an old school cyberpunk fan, or legal totally fell down on the 'checking names' job. Bill Gibson? As in William Gibson? Seriously?
-Only last week, the house got inspected, so after purchase? Dumbass. Well, unless these people had a lightning fast lawyer, financing, realtor, moving company, and so forth and went from inspection a week ago through purchase and financing to moving in today.
-OH NOES! IT'S A DEAD ZONE??? Okay, that's it, they're screwed! HA!! Guess Verizon's doing some more subtle product placement, eh? XD
-Stanwyck and Babar?? A cartoon elephant, Dean? O.o
-*insert lewd side-reference to Dean's trunk here if you absolutely must*
-"Go away family, you have asbestos in the walls and there's fines and things. Shoo!" Yeeeah, that's totally not gonna hold 'em.
-See, now, me? After the family left, I'd go straight back into the house and bust in the dumbwaiter undertake a fast and thorough search of the place while I still had access to it. And then bust in the dumbwaiter.
-Monster Cam again! Someone or something is definitely physically present in the house.
-Yeah, little monster-chow. Move in and bond with the thing in your closet. Gah. IDIOTIC CHILD!! He's got First Victim tattooed all over him, except he's under the age of majority, so he'll be fine and one of his adult family members will cack in his place. I'm betting on the spare Uncle the nuclear family thoughtfully brought along doing duty as an ablative shield.
-Baseballs and doll heads. Not a typical mix of playthings, but I'd say some variation on 'lost/neglected' child.
-I gotta say, I love the casting done for the guests. They're awesome, they're playing it straight and serious and not in an "Oh god, I'm in a horror show on the CW, I wonder what's on the craft services truck today?" way.
-"We tell 'em the truth."/"Really?"/"Naw, not really." HA! *hugs the dialog*
-I am very much liking the air of tension they are managing to build. Very nice.
-HANDLICKING MONSTER!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA! Also EW!!! Never pat anything or let it lick you without seeing what it is first. This is a good rule to live by.
-Aw, crap, the dog got out. It's toast, isn't it? Yep, poor dog. Monster-girl can die now. :-(
-Omg, she screwed with the Impala and took the guns too?? She's totally dead. Thou shalt not screw with the Impala. It's more than a law, it's a commandment.
-Also to do all that in that short amount of time, she is lightning fast!
-Yay, salt! \o/
-I'm thinking that there's a lot of stuff their realtor never told them about the place. Bad realtor! No cookie!
-This is feeling a little like "Roadkill" in that it's a kind of intro to Supernatural-ish. Might be the amount of time we're spending with the guest cast, might be the 'Better than Scooby-Doo' exposition, but feels like "Roadkill" I don't recognize any of the guest actors from anywhere else; are any of them 'stunt-casts?'
-Oh, Dean. *pats gently*
-... Hey, where's Sam gone?
-Oh, I totally bet the creepy girl is salt-proof. She's physical, the monster cam shots earlier made that clear. Yep! Not a ghost. So, ghoul, maybe? Or just a Bender-style abandoned child?
-Oooo! "Humans." \o/ I can't even explain why.
-Oh yeah. Large group of people with a murderous chick after them and no one keeps an eye on the youngest and (hypothetically) most vulnerable member of the group. Although who knows, maybe the kid's got a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
-Bet there's a trap door in the shed coming underground from the house...
-"Smell that?"/"Every day." Ooo, and awww.
-Running around in the walls! Yay! And there's a hole. There's no way he's gonna fit- HOLY CRAP. Okay, that was cool.
-Oh ho! Two figures painted in blood on the wall. *sings* Two people in blood on the wall, two people in blood, / if only one person is chasing you all, / why are there two people in blood on the wall? *stops singing* That plus the statistic that severed doll heads and baseballs rarely have a crossover fanbase among children.... I call a brother-sister team of wall-dwellers. *nods*
-Uh oh. Ted's wandering around on his own, aaaand, yep, Ted's dead. Good job bringing a spare relative to soak up the plot-mandated damage, Mr and Mrs. Gibson and offspring! Well done! *golf clap*
-Oh, hey, there's some trace of PTSD there of some kind for Dean, isn't there? He looks a bit extra squirrelly.
-"Why this happens?" Does your family have Weirdness Magnet and everywhere you go you get haunted? Whoa, wait up. ANDY???? Not our Andy? Oh! Please, I don't even know or care how, please let these random house-of-death-buying idiots be in some way connected to Andy Gallagher! If we can't have him in person, I'll take a backstory or cross-reference! No, no, wait. Ted can be a version of Andrew so it's the Uncle or some other non-Andy Gallagher relation. *shakes finger at writers for casually tossing the name Andy around*
-"The last God-forsaken thing I do", hunh Dean? Ow.
-Pregnant. Yep. I know where that's going. :-P
-"Like you know what Hell's like." Wow. Dean's kinda chippy. That month of solid hunting was obviously not long enough for him to process things yet. Or he's got part two of a "what I did in Hell" coming up, because the self-loathing is coming off him in waves, and yet in a way that doesn't quite jive with the end of 4.10. Dean's got something else to say. And he doesn't want to say it, or have anything to do with it.
-Nightvision Cam is weird, green and grainy, and I'm really not sure why they're using it there if it's not representing how the creepy girl sees, and it doesn't seem to be since she's visible on it. Unless it's a second person watching...
-[OH WOW! I just noticed, the new tv carrier in my area, not only does it not shoot bright green crap all over the screen, it doesn't have a station bug!!! The little doohickey in the corner. Nothing! *glomphs new channel and never ever wants it to change*]
-Mmmm. Raw rat. Nummy. :-P
-See, guys? Bust in the dumbwaiter first, and you'll sidestep straight to the end. Or at the very least you would've found your gear and weapons. *nods*
-"I will. Let me." Dean's a leeeeeetle bit off the rails.... he's not coping well. There's also the "you are an untrained civvie moron, and I've been hunting weird crap my whole life. Get outta the way." factor, but this is a more personal issue, I think. This will be interesting to watch. God I love Jensen Ackles' acting!
-HA! Brother! My earlier singing was justified. *nods*
-That kid is gonna need some serious therapy. They both are.
-Where'd they get all the spare tires? Ooo! Maybe they snagged all the spare tires from the other vehicles, or grabbed the ones they figured would make it from Nebraska to South Dakota to pick up new tires at Bobby's, since he's probably still in the Caribbean.
-Ah, chat time under a bridge instead of on the roadside. Uh oh. Dean's not eating. This is bad, y'all! O.O
-'I enjoyed it.' OOOOO. Really? I can hear the capslocking in some circles from here. It seems a little bit of an afterthought of a scene, but really, I prefer this progressing now rather than another few episodes of "what's eating Dean" in this case. It moves his character arc along. Now we know, in a nutshell, what's happened, we can move on to the next phase, and keep the character and mytharc rolling. *nods*
-Actually, I was thinking about this earlier in the week. One thing Dean does, is he adapts. Like the Production Assistant thing, like jail in Folsom Prison Blues. Dean adapts. After he gave in and got off the rack, he probably started adapting to Hell. It's not pretty, and it's not heroic and it's not a common thing to have one of the heroes of a story admitting stuff like this, but... I can accept it. From here, I can see how there could be some really juicy character and mytharc development in the wrks. It's part of a larger arc and character process, I am certain, and I trust Kripke and Jensen to pull this off. *nods*
-Awwww, lookit Sammy's sad little puppy faaaaaaaaace!!!!
-[OMG AND JOYTV HAS REAL FULL-SCREEN CREDITSAND NO FRIGGING PROMO!!! *hugs new and aptly-named station*]
NO SPOILERS IN COMMENTS, OR REFERENCES TO ANY PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL OR PREVIEWS FOR UNAIRED EPISODES, PLEASE.
ETA: Will check F-list later tonight, work is evil, gah.
OMG, the whole hiatus and this is all the spoilerage I have for this episode?
-Nov 11th Widely disseminated comments from Jim Beaver's Myspace. Bobby will not be appearing in this episode.
-Sometime in December Somewhere. Title "Family Remains". Okay, so possibly more skeletons from the Winchester closet, but I do hope they're going to use the other implication of 'remains' as well, in that "When all else is gone, family remains" sense. *nods* Which makes me even more miffed at the absence of Bobby.
-Jan 8 [Hunh. Didn't expect to carry that spoiler forward... *is confused*]
-Jan 15 AM [Delayed crack theorizing results in intriguingly possible, yet completely erroneous theory, which has been retroactively removed lest it morph into another damned plot-bunny.]
So woo! No spoilers, really! Thank you to everyone who kept things under cuts! You rock!
Reaction to Supernatural 4.11 - "Family Remains"
Heh. The local affiliate for the CW has changed. It's now JoyTV. This seems appropriate *nods* Kinda short and missing details because it's only two watchthroughs, but I have SCHEDULE FROM HELL upcoming at work and if I don't post a reaction tonight then I won't get it posted until... March. :-P
-Oooo... houuuuuuuuse. *grabby hands*
-Yes, skeezy man. Turn the lamp on and off. That will make the electricity work.
-Home Sweet Home thing in blood. Bet Kripke's been waiting for a chance to do that for years.
-Sleeping in the car! YAY!
-Also third canon use of Yahtzee! as an affirmative by Dean. Yay for continuity!
-A month of non-stop, relentless hunting. Oooo. Can we get a montage? No? so, date-wise that makes this about... what? Mid-December? Unless there was time that passed before the month of relentless hunting, but it doesn't seem that way.
-Awww, sleepy grumpy Sammy. He looks about six with that expression. *tousles his hair* Hee! He must be folded about double to fit in the back seat of the Impala.
-Stratton, Nebraska, was it? Under 400 people. How does a town that small have a better webpage than a local village near me with about a ten times as many people?
-Aw. That face on Dean after Sam lies down to go back to sleep. Deeeeean....
-Heh. Sold sign. Are they gonna surprise the new owners or be surprised? That was kind of fast too... Hey, how long's this guy been dead, did they say?
-Hey! It's the house from Faith with a new paint job, isn't it? The exterior? Maybe not. Stairs might be different. Hmm.
-They're being waaaa-aaatched. *smirks at Monster cam*
-Man, the linoleum in that kitchen is crap. Look at it, all peeling up there in the corner and brown and cruddy. That'll knock as much off the saleability of a house as being right under a major set of power lines and a recent death.
-Ooo, a blocked-over pass-through? No, a dumbwaiter. Okay, guys, save yourselves a lot of annoyance and just bust in the dumbwaiter now. You'll be doing it later anyway, it's a rule. If there is a dumbwaiter, or anything plastered up or blocked over, it will be significant to the plot. It's, like, a law.
-Hee! Smirky Dean!
-... wow. Either someone in the writing room is an old school cyberpunk fan, or legal totally fell down on the 'checking names' job. Bill Gibson? As in William Gibson? Seriously?
-Only last week, the house got inspected, so after purchase? Dumbass. Well, unless these people had a lightning fast lawyer, financing, realtor, moving company, and so forth and went from inspection a week ago through purchase and financing to moving in today.
-OH NOES! IT'S A DEAD ZONE??? Okay, that's it, they're screwed! HA!! Guess Verizon's doing some more subtle product placement, eh? XD
-Stanwyck and Babar?? A cartoon elephant, Dean? O.o
-*insert lewd side-reference to Dean's trunk here if you absolutely must*
-"Go away family, you have asbestos in the walls and there's fines and things. Shoo!" Yeeeah, that's totally not gonna hold 'em.
-See, now, me? After the family left, I'd go straight back into the house and bust in the dumbwaiter undertake a fast and thorough search of the place while I still had access to it. And then bust in the dumbwaiter.
-Monster Cam again! Someone or something is definitely physically present in the house.
-Yeah, little monster-chow. Move in and bond with the thing in your closet. Gah. IDIOTIC CHILD!! He's got First Victim tattooed all over him, except he's under the age of majority, so he'll be fine and one of his adult family members will cack in his place. I'm betting on the spare Uncle the nuclear family thoughtfully brought along doing duty as an ablative shield.
-Baseballs and doll heads. Not a typical mix of playthings, but I'd say some variation on 'lost/neglected' child.
-I gotta say, I love the casting done for the guests. They're awesome, they're playing it straight and serious and not in an "Oh god, I'm in a horror show on the CW, I wonder what's on the craft services truck today?" way.
-"We tell 'em the truth."/"Really?"/"Naw, not really." HA! *hugs the dialog*
-I am very much liking the air of tension they are managing to build. Very nice.
-HANDLICKING MONSTER!!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA! Also EW!!! Never pat anything or let it lick you without seeing what it is first. This is a good rule to live by.
-Aw, crap, the dog got out. It's toast, isn't it? Yep, poor dog. Monster-girl can die now. :-(
-Omg, she screwed with the Impala and took the guns too?? She's totally dead. Thou shalt not screw with the Impala. It's more than a law, it's a commandment.
-Also to do all that in that short amount of time, she is lightning fast!
-Yay, salt! \o/
-I'm thinking that there's a lot of stuff their realtor never told them about the place. Bad realtor! No cookie!
-This is feeling a little like "Roadkill" in that it's a kind of intro to Supernatural-ish. Might be the amount of time we're spending with the guest cast, might be the 'Better than Scooby-Doo' exposition, but feels like "Roadkill" I don't recognize any of the guest actors from anywhere else; are any of them 'stunt-casts?'
-Oh, Dean. *pats gently*
-... Hey, where's Sam gone?
-Oh, I totally bet the creepy girl is salt-proof. She's physical, the monster cam shots earlier made that clear. Yep! Not a ghost. So, ghoul, maybe? Or just a Bender-style abandoned child?
-Oooo! "Humans." \o/ I can't even explain why.
-Oh yeah. Large group of people with a murderous chick after them and no one keeps an eye on the youngest and (hypothetically) most vulnerable member of the group. Although who knows, maybe the kid's got a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.
-Bet there's a trap door in the shed coming underground from the house...
-"Smell that?"/"Every day." Ooo, and awww.
-Running around in the walls! Yay! And there's a hole. There's no way he's gonna fit- HOLY CRAP. Okay, that was cool.
-Oh ho! Two figures painted in blood on the wall. *sings* Two people in blood on the wall, two people in blood, / if only one person is chasing you all, / why are there two people in blood on the wall? *stops singing* That plus the statistic that severed doll heads and baseballs rarely have a crossover fanbase among children.... I call a brother-sister team of wall-dwellers. *nods*
-Uh oh. Ted's wandering around on his own, aaaand, yep, Ted's dead. Good job bringing a spare relative to soak up the plot-mandated damage, Mr and Mrs. Gibson and offspring! Well done! *golf clap*
-Oh, hey, there's some trace of PTSD there of some kind for Dean, isn't there? He looks a bit extra squirrelly.
-"Why this happens?" Does your family have Weirdness Magnet and everywhere you go you get haunted? Whoa, wait up. ANDY???? Not our Andy? Oh! Please, I don't even know or care how, please let these random house-of-death-buying idiots be in some way connected to Andy Gallagher! If we can't have him in person, I'll take a backstory or cross-reference! No, no, wait. Ted can be a version of Andrew so it's the Uncle or some other non-Andy Gallagher relation. *shakes finger at writers for casually tossing the name Andy around*
-"The last God-forsaken thing I do", hunh Dean? Ow.
-Pregnant. Yep. I know where that's going. :-P
-"Like you know what Hell's like." Wow. Dean's kinda chippy. That month of solid hunting was obviously not long enough for him to process things yet. Or he's got part two of a "what I did in Hell" coming up, because the self-loathing is coming off him in waves, and yet in a way that doesn't quite jive with the end of 4.10. Dean's got something else to say. And he doesn't want to say it, or have anything to do with it.
-Nightvision Cam is weird, green and grainy, and I'm really not sure why they're using it there if it's not representing how the creepy girl sees, and it doesn't seem to be since she's visible on it. Unless it's a second person watching...
-[OH WOW! I just noticed, the new tv carrier in my area, not only does it not shoot bright green crap all over the screen, it doesn't have a station bug!!! The little doohickey in the corner. Nothing! *glomphs new channel and never ever wants it to change*]
-Mmmm. Raw rat. Nummy. :-P
-See, guys? Bust in the dumbwaiter first, and you'll sidestep straight to the end. Or at the very least you would've found your gear and weapons. *nods*
-"I will. Let me." Dean's a leeeeeetle bit off the rails.... he's not coping well. There's also the "you are an untrained civvie moron, and I've been hunting weird crap my whole life. Get outta the way." factor, but this is a more personal issue, I think. This will be interesting to watch. God I love Jensen Ackles' acting!
-HA! Brother! My earlier singing was justified. *nods*
-That kid is gonna need some serious therapy. They both are.
-Where'd they get all the spare tires? Ooo! Maybe they snagged all the spare tires from the other vehicles, or grabbed the ones they figured would make it from Nebraska to South Dakota to pick up new tires at Bobby's, since he's probably still in the Caribbean.
-Ah, chat time under a bridge instead of on the roadside. Uh oh. Dean's not eating. This is bad, y'all! O.O
-'I enjoyed it.' OOOOO. Really? I can hear the capslocking in some circles from here. It seems a little bit of an afterthought of a scene, but really, I prefer this progressing now rather than another few episodes of "what's eating Dean" in this case. It moves his character arc along. Now we know, in a nutshell, what's happened, we can move on to the next phase, and keep the character and mytharc rolling. *nods*
-Actually, I was thinking about this earlier in the week. One thing Dean does, is he adapts. Like the Production Assistant thing, like jail in Folsom Prison Blues. Dean adapts. After he gave in and got off the rack, he probably started adapting to Hell. It's not pretty, and it's not heroic and it's not a common thing to have one of the heroes of a story admitting stuff like this, but... I can accept it. From here, I can see how there could be some really juicy character and mytharc development in the wrks. It's part of a larger arc and character process, I am certain, and I trust Kripke and Jensen to pull this off. *nods*
-Awwww, lookit Sammy's sad little puppy faaaaaaaaace!!!!
-[OMG AND JOYTV HAS REAL FULL-SCREEN CREDITSAND NO FRIGGING PROMO!!! *hugs new and aptly-named station*]
NO SPOILERS IN COMMENTS, OR REFERENCES TO ANY PROMOTIONAL MATERIAL OR PREVIEWS FOR UNAIRED EPISODES, PLEASE.
ETA: Will check F-list later tonight, work is evil, gah.