OMG DEEEEEEAAAAAAAANNNNNNN
So. Supernatural season 4 premiere. There would have been a lot more capslock if I had typed this up two hours ago, right when the show ended. But after I called the mother unit and got done squeeing, I crashed hard. So it's bed for me veeeery soon. But I have to write my immediate response for posterity!
DEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN! Out of hell so soon, are we? Okay, so the first five minutes got leaked officially at ComicCon and I got the full dish on them at the SPN panel at DragonCon, but I did NOT expect it to be real. I knew Dean woke up in his coffin, clawed his way out, went to a gas station and got food and water and money, etc. I thought it was going to be like, a recurring dream of getting out of hell, and that that was going to BE hell -- always *this* close to being free, but then waking up chained and flayed and all that. But clearly I was overthinking it, because, well... that was it. Dean climbing out of the ground WAS him getting out of hell. So I'm already going, WTF Kripke, WTF? But I'm intrigued and the show can do no wrong for me at this point.
New title card with the flashing crow wings? Gorgeous. Maybe my favorite after the fire. I do miss the fire. Last season with the swooshy clouds and pentagram and lightning was too much overkill... but it did carry the feel of the season 2 finale pretty well (the s2 finale was also too much overkill). Needs a title card with a nice punch to it. Fire was good. Wings are good.
Oh yeah, the "previously on" segment didn't really do it for me. Kinda glad Kripke didn't go with yet another repeat of Carry On Wayward Son, which, while being PERFECT the first time it was used, sort of loses its impact with multiple uses. But Shook Me All Night Long? Playing over Dean getting ripped to shreds by invisible hellhounds? Not so much. Can't see the connection. It was good for a bemused laugh, but not much else.
BEST MOMENTS. Apologies for much netspeak. I'm too tired to think straight.
Sam put an iPod jack in the Impala. WTF SAM. "I told you to take care of her, not douche her up!" LOL, indignant Dean. Bobby attacking Dean on sight -- the knife proof -- and then the little splash of holy water, the pause, the spit, the "I'm not a demon, either" from Dean with that tired, sore and a little bit pissy delivery from Jensen. ILU Jensen. I foresee Dean being my favorite this season... I waffle back and forth all the time. They're both my favorite, but Sammy keeping secrets is making me sad. Anyway, that's for later -- other best moments -- "YOU'RE NOT INVITED." *snort* Biiiig Winchester brother hug! Poor Dean gets attacked by everyone. (Well, when you fight the undead all the time, it's a reasonable reaction...) Um... I'm running out here. I'm sure there were more.
But the rest of my squee is more indepth. Okay. Sam and Dean always yin each other's yang and vice versa, and they each shift to accommodate the other changing. Season 1 - Sam is the nice guy college boy, meek by nature (but ironically rebellious to his family) but set on fire with a new transformative anger with the events of the pilot (Jess, being dragged back into the hunt). Dean is his opposite, outgoing and often reckless (but ironically obedient/loyal to his family), and he wants Sam to just be plain old Sam, but to hunt with him. Dean has no reason to change; he thinks if he can get the family together again, it can be like it was before Sam ever left. Dean pushes Sam.
Season 2 - Dean telescopes completely and his recklessness becomes life-endangering on purpose. He's been talked into willingly accepting his death, expecting and welcoming it, and he doesn't understand, after that, why he isn't dead already. He's still alive but he doesn't feel worthy of that, or of Sam. Sam shifts to accommodate that -- his meekness has evaporated and we realize that it was mostly a construct to make him feel normal and harmless, like he wanted to be when he went off to college -- a normal, harmless occupation where he found a normal, harmless girlfriend, etc. His meekness has gone and the geekery is subdued, and both are replaced with a new construct of Sam, the one that had been building all throughout season one under the surface -- the result of that "transformative fire" (literally -- John and Dean had their transformative fire with Mary, but Sam's came later in life), that anger he'd been sitting on for a whole season. Sam pushes Dean.
Season 3 - Sam is still pushing Dean, but Dean isn't moving. By making his deal, Dean's gotten the chance to re-fulfill the broken deal he'd been set up for in the season 2 premiere -- accepting his death. He's committed the suicide he thought he wanted. It takes him all season to shift back around the whole 180 all over again, and he ends the season understanding that he never wanted to die, and he certainly doesn't want to die NOW. Sam keeps pace -- it's like the two are circling each other. Sam pushes and pushes, but when Dean doesn't move, he gives up. He goes off and finds a third party, Ruby. His anger and hardness become more pronounced and he thinks that he has to "become" Dean to take over when Dean dies, but Sam's understanding of Dean's role in their working relationship is off by miles. Sam's got another new construct, the "Dean" construct, now. Mystery Spot cements it -- Mystery Spot strips away all the melodramatic possibilities for Sam's potential reaction to Dean's death. No more woobie!Sam after that. And when Dean finally does realize that he doesn't want to die, that he wants to reassume his role, Sam easily slips back into his old Sam-ness, but only for an episode or two. Then Dean dies.
And here we are. People are already complaining that Sam didn't seem to react enough to Dean's resurrection. I propose that he reacted exactly as he would/should have, considering he's still carrying around the memory of his experiences from Mystery Spot. He's tried mourning Dean. He's tried fighting for Dean's life. He's tried being relieved at Dean's miraculous "resurrection" every morning, Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday. He can't do it anymore. It's implied that he went through so many repetitions of that Tuesday that he reached a point of not caring -- and when you care as much about your brother as Sam Winchester does, that's a LOT of repetitions, a LOT of helplessness to cope with and carry around for months. So Dean dies again, and it's for real and Sam knows it, but after a few days, maybe those months after the fateful "Wednesday" in Mystery Spot finally come back to him full-force. He remembers being blank and hard and dead inside, and he also remembers that even though it hurt, it was also the only way he could deal with being alone. So he goes back to that. It's a safety net.
He's reliving Mystery Spot -- and here you go, Dean's miraculously alive again. Well, that's a shocker. Not like it didn't happen a bajillion times already.
I think it will hit Sam later. He needs to be able to separate reality from that particular repeating nightmare, but he hasn't done it yet because he knows it's going to hurt too much to face reality -- to face Dean -- head-on. I think we get a little bit of that in the way Sam nonchalantly blows off the suggestion that he did something stupid that brought Dean back to life. Because you KNOW that deep down, Sam has SUCH MASSIVE MAN-GUILT over the fact that not only did he NOT bring his brother back to life, he also disobeyed his brother's dying wishes and is in the process of learning how to be a crazy superpowered demon general thingymajig, AND he's still hanging out with the chick whose "body" (of the time) actually KILLED Dean. (There's a visual and psychological association there with "Ruby" killing Dean, even though Lilith was in Ruby's stolen body at the time.) And there's the fact, no matter how illogical, stupid, needlessly martyr-ish and potentially suicidal both John and Dean were at the times that they made their respective deals, there is an added irrational guilt in Sam's mind that "*they* were willing to go that far to save each other and to save me -- but I couldn't even return the favor by offering up my own life for Dean's." I say irrational because A) Sam DID try but no demons would cut a deal with him, and B) Sam understands that Dean and John were both being illogical, stupid, needlessly martyr-ish, and potentially suicidal, and Sam doesn't want to be those things.
So anyway. Sam's underwhelmed reaction to Dean returning. I think it's understandable. Sam has shut down a lot of himself as a coping mechanism, and what he's left turned on he's chosen to focus on Ruby's power-control lessons. Compare Sam of Lazarus Rising to the Sam of early season 1 -- almost all of that humanity has been burned away by the transformative fire. I think of it like a disease. Dean is so resilient because he caught this thing while he was young, and the young are better able to cope and develop immunities. John caught it as an adult, and it destroyed him. 20+ years in the doing, but eventually he gave up, walked back into that burning house and died with Mary, leaving Dean alone with the injunction to "take your brother and run" -- with an added bonus; "kill your brother if he goes bad." Sam, like John (the two are much more alike than Dean is to either of them, and the likeness between Sam and John is why they never got along), caught the disease later in life. The nursery fire was too early to affect him. Jess is to Sam as Mary is to John, but Mary was *not* to Dean as either of the above. Dean recovered. Sam and John don't. They're too old; it's like they caught chickenpox as adults, and it's cut them down at the knees in a way chickenpox doesn't do to children. Sam's losing his humanity - not yet in the sense of becoming a demon, but I think it's kind of implied that he has to lose his humanity *first*. When he has his demon powers, *and* he's lost his ties to Dean (as will happen if he keeps ignoring and lying to Dean), *then* he will be no-better-than-a-demon!Sam. And then, I think, we will see Sam vs. Dean. Season 5, maybe, which Kripke did say was going to be the last season.
From a writerly standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. You set up two polar opposites and you make them care deeply for each other due to ties beyond mere common ground, of which they share little. Deeper ties. Blood, family, childhoods, assumed senses of abnormality and self-loathing. Then you drive wedge after wedge between them and watch them come out on top each time -- but each time it's a closer and closer shave -- until one time they just don't. One time, the wedge is too wide, the gap is too deep, the separation goes on for too long, and they just can't overcome it. Dean being in hell for four months was that wedge, augmented by Sam's experience in Mystery Spot. Then a third party has to remove the wedge because the brothers literally can't; they can no longer overcome their problems on their own. And the relationship is just not the same, it's distanced, it's full of half-truths and an unwillingness to tell each other what's happened in the time they were apart. Dean can't remember; Sam is too guilty and too emotionally shut down. A lot of the episode is the brothers on their own, or interacting with third parties. Bobby is there for support and exposition, the classic deuteragonist who makes it possible for the story to be told through dialogue rather than narration only. (Oh, Theatre History class, how smart you make me feel.) Ruby is Sam's new mentor. You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family, right? Until now, the brothers have felt that family was enough; they didn't need to choose other friends. Now they have to; Sam had to, because he knew he couldn't stand being completely alone again, as in Mystery Spot. Dean will have too because Sam is too distanced from him now.
And oh, this brings me to my favorite thing. Castiel. Cas-ti-el. It is about damn time there was an inhuman, superpowered element on the opposite end of the scale to balance out the poor humans fighting the overwhelmingly too-powerful demons. They got the Colt and later Ruby's knife, sure, so killing individual demons got easier, but there is no way in hell (pun not intended) that just Sam, Dean and Bobby with a gun and a knife could ever have taken on a demon ARMY. Which is exactly what Yellow-eyes set free on the earth. There are hundreds still out there, unbeaten. I know Kripke once said that angels wouldn't come into play because he wanted hunters to be the angels of the world, but I'm really glad he's gone back on that, because I much prefer the idea that hunters are just, like, uber-concentrated humans and there are angels and demons balancing out the extremes. "Good Omens"? Exactly what I'm talking about. Aziraphale and Heaven, Crowley and Hell, and Adam the Antichrist in between, who is so intensely human that he encompasses all balance and is the only one with the inherent right to make choices on behalf of humanity. Angels are not necessarily any better than demons; neither are human, and neither understand what is "good" for the human race, only what is good for themselves and their respective bosses.
And Dean! Recruited by an angel even though he's the brother that has no faith! Oh, the delicious foreshadowing -- in Faith, both the healer and Layla say they sense an unfulfilled purpose in Dean which was why he was chosen to be saved. In Houses of the Holy, Dean says Mary used to tell him that angels were watching over him (and Mary, not John, was the one who we know to have had some kind of supernatural connections before the fire happened. She knew demons existed beforehand but she still told Dean about angels).
And then poor Sam, wanting to have faith for so many years growing up, letting that faith in God/inherent goodness/the power of normality/a guiding hand all together lead him to leave his family and try to live a peaceful life. Poor Sam, doomed by no fault of his own to be transformed, *even in the innocence of infancy*, into a kind of plague-carrier for the demonic disease. So add some resentment to Sam's list of beefs with Dean, especially once Sam finds out that Dean got picked for the team Sam had always rooted for and Dean had never particularly liked. Another wedge. They can be smaller wedges again now -- the gap is already too wide to overcome. No little addition or subtraction is going to make it bridgeable, not yet.
I do want to believe that by the end of the show, Sam and Dean will have had their ultimate showdown, but they will have also grown enough to realize that they can bridge that gap if they choose to. And I think that they will choose each other in the end, which is the point, really, of the ultimate battle between good and evil -- that humans, being human, always choose neither or a little of both, rather than agreeing fully with one extreme or the other.
So there's my much-longer-than-anticipated ramble on how much I loved the premiere and how flipping excited I am for the rest of this season and the next one! I think it's going to be good. *fingers crossed* And I'm just so happy to be excited about the show again, because season 3 was probably my least favorite so far. (Season 2 just kicked so much ass; hands down the best season yet.)
Also I feel the need to pimp out spn_heavymeta for not only having the best name EVER for a meta community but for flagrantly feeding my inner overanalyist. Delicious, delicious overanalysis of silly entertainment dramas. Oh how I love thee, ridiculously long essays on John, Dean and Sam's respective displays of the tenets of PTSD... Second-by-second breakdowns of the use of "White Rabbit" in the cold open of "Hunted"... Adorable discussion of the Weechesters at Christmas which made me all woobie because WEE!SAM IS SO HURT. WEE!DEAN IS SO SAD. THE AMULET! AWWWWW. *hugs them*
Anyway. Right now I am so gung-ho for SPN that I could probably write a few essays of my own. I've already spent way too long staring at the cover art of the three season boxsets and one piece of tie-in comic cover art and picking out all the symbolism in the four images. The comic art (with John & the boys at about 10 & 14, by the looks of them) and the first season are the most interesting. They both have the same background -- Impala, bag of rock salt -- but the sky is different and the placement of characters is fascinating. Dean remains in the same place but John vanishes and Sam moves inward towards the center of the picture to fill the gap he left, and don't get me started on the symbolism of Dean carrying guns and Sam always being pictured with a sword, sickle, dagger or other bladed weapon. More personal/intimate killing method, bloodier, more traditionally medieval -- representative of knights, but also as torture devices, and where the "knight" became the cop and cops have guns which are more impersonal, blades are still common in torture scenes, are "bad" weaponry, not a thing "armed good guys" like cops condone... Sam often carries curves blades, i.e. symbolic of Death - sickle, scythe - and of claws Sam hasn't unsheathed, the demon powers; the implication is that his potential evil is medieval, cruel, intimate -- all the demons we've seen have been very intimate creatures -- possessed!Sam in Born Under a Bad Sign was much more intimate than human Sam ever behaves. The transition from the Colt to Ruby's knife is just SO interesting... and I need to shut up.
There may be one or more essays later. Perhaps over this weekend, if I don't spend all my time doing dramaturgy for To Kill A Mockingbird or WRITING MY EPIC CROSSOVER. Holy crap, I'm working on it again. I just need to make it stop sucking so bad in my head. Like, I think it's better on paper than I ever believe it is... I just CAN'T MAKE THEM BEHAVE. Stupid Dean and Gwen and Jack. Stupid Tosh. Ianto and Sam are the only two characters who are making any sense to me right now.
Anyway. Must shut up. So tired.
sleeping,
-rave
DEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNN! Out of hell so soon, are we? Okay, so the first five minutes got leaked officially at ComicCon and I got the full dish on them at the SPN panel at DragonCon, but I did NOT expect it to be real. I knew Dean woke up in his coffin, clawed his way out, went to a gas station and got food and water and money, etc. I thought it was going to be like, a recurring dream of getting out of hell, and that that was going to BE hell -- always *this* close to being free, but then waking up chained and flayed and all that. But clearly I was overthinking it, because, well... that was it. Dean climbing out of the ground WAS him getting out of hell. So I'm already going, WTF Kripke, WTF? But I'm intrigued and the show can do no wrong for me at this point.
New title card with the flashing crow wings? Gorgeous. Maybe my favorite after the fire. I do miss the fire. Last season with the swooshy clouds and pentagram and lightning was too much overkill... but it did carry the feel of the season 2 finale pretty well (the s2 finale was also too much overkill). Needs a title card with a nice punch to it. Fire was good. Wings are good.
Oh yeah, the "previously on" segment didn't really do it for me. Kinda glad Kripke didn't go with yet another repeat of Carry On Wayward Son, which, while being PERFECT the first time it was used, sort of loses its impact with multiple uses. But Shook Me All Night Long? Playing over Dean getting ripped to shreds by invisible hellhounds? Not so much. Can't see the connection. It was good for a bemused laugh, but not much else.
BEST MOMENTS. Apologies for much netspeak. I'm too tired to think straight.
Sam put an iPod jack in the Impala. WTF SAM. "I told you to take care of her, not douche her up!" LOL, indignant Dean. Bobby attacking Dean on sight -- the knife proof -- and then the little splash of holy water, the pause, the spit, the "I'm not a demon, either" from Dean with that tired, sore and a little bit pissy delivery from Jensen. ILU Jensen. I foresee Dean being my favorite this season... I waffle back and forth all the time. They're both my favorite, but Sammy keeping secrets is making me sad. Anyway, that's for later -- other best moments -- "YOU'RE NOT INVITED." *snort* Biiiig Winchester brother hug! Poor Dean gets attacked by everyone. (Well, when you fight the undead all the time, it's a reasonable reaction...) Um... I'm running out here. I'm sure there were more.
But the rest of my squee is more indepth. Okay. Sam and Dean always yin each other's yang and vice versa, and they each shift to accommodate the other changing. Season 1 - Sam is the nice guy college boy, meek by nature (but ironically rebellious to his family) but set on fire with a new transformative anger with the events of the pilot (Jess, being dragged back into the hunt). Dean is his opposite, outgoing and often reckless (but ironically obedient/loyal to his family), and he wants Sam to just be plain old Sam, but to hunt with him. Dean has no reason to change; he thinks if he can get the family together again, it can be like it was before Sam ever left. Dean pushes Sam.
Season 2 - Dean telescopes completely and his recklessness becomes life-endangering on purpose. He's been talked into willingly accepting his death, expecting and welcoming it, and he doesn't understand, after that, why he isn't dead already. He's still alive but he doesn't feel worthy of that, or of Sam. Sam shifts to accommodate that -- his meekness has evaporated and we realize that it was mostly a construct to make him feel normal and harmless, like he wanted to be when he went off to college -- a normal, harmless occupation where he found a normal, harmless girlfriend, etc. His meekness has gone and the geekery is subdued, and both are replaced with a new construct of Sam, the one that had been building all throughout season one under the surface -- the result of that "transformative fire" (literally -- John and Dean had their transformative fire with Mary, but Sam's came later in life), that anger he'd been sitting on for a whole season. Sam pushes Dean.
Season 3 - Sam is still pushing Dean, but Dean isn't moving. By making his deal, Dean's gotten the chance to re-fulfill the broken deal he'd been set up for in the season 2 premiere -- accepting his death. He's committed the suicide he thought he wanted. It takes him all season to shift back around the whole 180 all over again, and he ends the season understanding that he never wanted to die, and he certainly doesn't want to die NOW. Sam keeps pace -- it's like the two are circling each other. Sam pushes and pushes, but when Dean doesn't move, he gives up. He goes off and finds a third party, Ruby. His anger and hardness become more pronounced and he thinks that he has to "become" Dean to take over when Dean dies, but Sam's understanding of Dean's role in their working relationship is off by miles. Sam's got another new construct, the "Dean" construct, now. Mystery Spot cements it -- Mystery Spot strips away all the melodramatic possibilities for Sam's potential reaction to Dean's death. No more woobie!Sam after that. And when Dean finally does realize that he doesn't want to die, that he wants to reassume his role, Sam easily slips back into his old Sam-ness, but only for an episode or two. Then Dean dies.
And here we are. People are already complaining that Sam didn't seem to react enough to Dean's resurrection. I propose that he reacted exactly as he would/should have, considering he's still carrying around the memory of his experiences from Mystery Spot. He's tried mourning Dean. He's tried fighting for Dean's life. He's tried being relieved at Dean's miraculous "resurrection" every morning, Tuesday after Tuesday after Tuesday. He can't do it anymore. It's implied that he went through so many repetitions of that Tuesday that he reached a point of not caring -- and when you care as much about your brother as Sam Winchester does, that's a LOT of repetitions, a LOT of helplessness to cope with and carry around for months. So Dean dies again, and it's for real and Sam knows it, but after a few days, maybe those months after the fateful "Wednesday" in Mystery Spot finally come back to him full-force. He remembers being blank and hard and dead inside, and he also remembers that even though it hurt, it was also the only way he could deal with being alone. So he goes back to that. It's a safety net.
He's reliving Mystery Spot -- and here you go, Dean's miraculously alive again. Well, that's a shocker. Not like it didn't happen a bajillion times already.
I think it will hit Sam later. He needs to be able to separate reality from that particular repeating nightmare, but he hasn't done it yet because he knows it's going to hurt too much to face reality -- to face Dean -- head-on. I think we get a little bit of that in the way Sam nonchalantly blows off the suggestion that he did something stupid that brought Dean back to life. Because you KNOW that deep down, Sam has SUCH MASSIVE MAN-GUILT over the fact that not only did he NOT bring his brother back to life, he also disobeyed his brother's dying wishes and is in the process of learning how to be a crazy superpowered demon general thingymajig, AND he's still hanging out with the chick whose "body" (of the time) actually KILLED Dean. (There's a visual and psychological association there with "Ruby" killing Dean, even though Lilith was in Ruby's stolen body at the time.) And there's the fact, no matter how illogical, stupid, needlessly martyr-ish and potentially suicidal both John and Dean were at the times that they made their respective deals, there is an added irrational guilt in Sam's mind that "*they* were willing to go that far to save each other and to save me -- but I couldn't even return the favor by offering up my own life for Dean's." I say irrational because A) Sam DID try but no demons would cut a deal with him, and B) Sam understands that Dean and John were both being illogical, stupid, needlessly martyr-ish, and potentially suicidal, and Sam doesn't want to be those things.
So anyway. Sam's underwhelmed reaction to Dean returning. I think it's understandable. Sam has shut down a lot of himself as a coping mechanism, and what he's left turned on he's chosen to focus on Ruby's power-control lessons. Compare Sam of Lazarus Rising to the Sam of early season 1 -- almost all of that humanity has been burned away by the transformative fire. I think of it like a disease. Dean is so resilient because he caught this thing while he was young, and the young are better able to cope and develop immunities. John caught it as an adult, and it destroyed him. 20+ years in the doing, but eventually he gave up, walked back into that burning house and died with Mary, leaving Dean alone with the injunction to "take your brother and run" -- with an added bonus; "kill your brother if he goes bad." Sam, like John (the two are much more alike than Dean is to either of them, and the likeness between Sam and John is why they never got along), caught the disease later in life. The nursery fire was too early to affect him. Jess is to Sam as Mary is to John, but Mary was *not* to Dean as either of the above. Dean recovered. Sam and John don't. They're too old; it's like they caught chickenpox as adults, and it's cut them down at the knees in a way chickenpox doesn't do to children. Sam's losing his humanity - not yet in the sense of becoming a demon, but I think it's kind of implied that he has to lose his humanity *first*. When he has his demon powers, *and* he's lost his ties to Dean (as will happen if he keeps ignoring and lying to Dean), *then* he will be no-better-than-a-demon!Sam. And then, I think, we will see Sam vs. Dean. Season 5, maybe, which Kripke did say was going to be the last season.
From a writerly standpoint, it makes a lot of sense. You set up two polar opposites and you make them care deeply for each other due to ties beyond mere common ground, of which they share little. Deeper ties. Blood, family, childhoods, assumed senses of abnormality and self-loathing. Then you drive wedge after wedge between them and watch them come out on top each time -- but each time it's a closer and closer shave -- until one time they just don't. One time, the wedge is too wide, the gap is too deep, the separation goes on for too long, and they just can't overcome it. Dean being in hell for four months was that wedge, augmented by Sam's experience in Mystery Spot. Then a third party has to remove the wedge because the brothers literally can't; they can no longer overcome their problems on their own. And the relationship is just not the same, it's distanced, it's full of half-truths and an unwillingness to tell each other what's happened in the time they were apart. Dean can't remember; Sam is too guilty and too emotionally shut down. A lot of the episode is the brothers on their own, or interacting with third parties. Bobby is there for support and exposition, the classic deuteragonist who makes it possible for the story to be told through dialogue rather than narration only. (Oh, Theatre History class, how smart you make me feel.) Ruby is Sam's new mentor. You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your family, right? Until now, the brothers have felt that family was enough; they didn't need to choose other friends. Now they have to; Sam had to, because he knew he couldn't stand being completely alone again, as in Mystery Spot. Dean will have too because Sam is too distanced from him now.
And oh, this brings me to my favorite thing. Castiel. Cas-ti-el. It is about damn time there was an inhuman, superpowered element on the opposite end of the scale to balance out the poor humans fighting the overwhelmingly too-powerful demons. They got the Colt and later Ruby's knife, sure, so killing individual demons got easier, but there is no way in hell (pun not intended) that just Sam, Dean and Bobby with a gun and a knife could ever have taken on a demon ARMY. Which is exactly what Yellow-eyes set free on the earth. There are hundreds still out there, unbeaten. I know Kripke once said that angels wouldn't come into play because he wanted hunters to be the angels of the world, but I'm really glad he's gone back on that, because I much prefer the idea that hunters are just, like, uber-concentrated humans and there are angels and demons balancing out the extremes. "Good Omens"? Exactly what I'm talking about. Aziraphale and Heaven, Crowley and Hell, and Adam the Antichrist in between, who is so intensely human that he encompasses all balance and is the only one with the inherent right to make choices on behalf of humanity. Angels are not necessarily any better than demons; neither are human, and neither understand what is "good" for the human race, only what is good for themselves and their respective bosses.
And Dean! Recruited by an angel even though he's the brother that has no faith! Oh, the delicious foreshadowing -- in Faith, both the healer and Layla say they sense an unfulfilled purpose in Dean which was why he was chosen to be saved. In Houses of the Holy, Dean says Mary used to tell him that angels were watching over him (and Mary, not John, was the one who we know to have had some kind of supernatural connections before the fire happened. She knew demons existed beforehand but she still told Dean about angels).
And then poor Sam, wanting to have faith for so many years growing up, letting that faith in God/inherent goodness/the power of normality/a guiding hand all together lead him to leave his family and try to live a peaceful life. Poor Sam, doomed by no fault of his own to be transformed, *even in the innocence of infancy*, into a kind of plague-carrier for the demonic disease. So add some resentment to Sam's list of beefs with Dean, especially once Sam finds out that Dean got picked for the team Sam had always rooted for and Dean had never particularly liked. Another wedge. They can be smaller wedges again now -- the gap is already too wide to overcome. No little addition or subtraction is going to make it bridgeable, not yet.
I do want to believe that by the end of the show, Sam and Dean will have had their ultimate showdown, but they will have also grown enough to realize that they can bridge that gap if they choose to. And I think that they will choose each other in the end, which is the point, really, of the ultimate battle between good and evil -- that humans, being human, always choose neither or a little of both, rather than agreeing fully with one extreme or the other.
So there's my much-longer-than-anticipated ramble on how much I loved the premiere and how flipping excited I am for the rest of this season and the next one! I think it's going to be good. *fingers crossed* And I'm just so happy to be excited about the show again, because season 3 was probably my least favorite so far. (Season 2 just kicked so much ass; hands down the best season yet.)
Also I feel the need to pimp out spn_heavymeta for not only having the best name EVER for a meta community but for flagrantly feeding my inner overanalyist. Delicious, delicious overanalysis of silly entertainment dramas. Oh how I love thee, ridiculously long essays on John, Dean and Sam's respective displays of the tenets of PTSD... Second-by-second breakdowns of the use of "White Rabbit" in the cold open of "Hunted"... Adorable discussion of the Weechesters at Christmas which made me all woobie because WEE!SAM IS SO HURT. WEE!DEAN IS SO SAD. THE AMULET! AWWWWW. *hugs them*
Anyway. Right now I am so gung-ho for SPN that I could probably write a few essays of my own. I've already spent way too long staring at the cover art of the three season boxsets and one piece of tie-in comic cover art and picking out all the symbolism in the four images. The comic art (with John & the boys at about 10 & 14, by the looks of them) and the first season are the most interesting. They both have the same background -- Impala, bag of rock salt -- but the sky is different and the placement of characters is fascinating. Dean remains in the same place but John vanishes and Sam moves inward towards the center of the picture to fill the gap he left, and don't get me started on the symbolism of Dean carrying guns and Sam always being pictured with a sword, sickle, dagger or other bladed weapon. More personal/intimate killing method, bloodier, more traditionally medieval -- representative of knights, but also as torture devices, and where the "knight" became the cop and cops have guns which are more impersonal, blades are still common in torture scenes, are "bad" weaponry, not a thing "armed good guys" like cops condone... Sam often carries curves blades, i.e. symbolic of Death - sickle, scythe - and of claws Sam hasn't unsheathed, the demon powers; the implication is that his potential evil is medieval, cruel, intimate -- all the demons we've seen have been very intimate creatures -- possessed!Sam in Born Under a Bad Sign was much more intimate than human Sam ever behaves. The transition from the Colt to Ruby's knife is just SO interesting... and I need to shut up.
There may be one or more essays later. Perhaps over this weekend, if I don't spend all my time doing dramaturgy for To Kill A Mockingbird or WRITING MY EPIC CROSSOVER. Holy crap, I'm working on it again. I just need to make it stop sucking so bad in my head. Like, I think it's better on paper than I ever believe it is... I just CAN'T MAKE THEM BEHAVE. Stupid Dean and Gwen and Jack. Stupid Tosh. Ianto and Sam are the only two characters who are making any sense to me right now.
Anyway. Must shut up. So tired.
sleeping,
-rave