#not on us blame the writers for either intentionally making it weird or like idk being freud stans or smthn?? | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thegirlwholied · 4 years

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Omg I can’t with sams grey wig I just burst out laughing it was so bad😳 and he just looked constipated. On a different note though I had the same thought as you that the masked men were gonna be normal, which would have given it a different spin. And I kept thinking during deans death scene that he was pranking Sam - it felt so weird to kill bc of being impaled something when he’s survived so much worse. But I guess that might have been the point idk

Old Man Sam looked like he was wearing a Halloween professor costume! Some blame must go to the makeup department but, I’m sure they tried. Putting them in that situation is down to writing.

I can’t believe I’m about to give the Vampire Diaries finale, another show I skipped MANY seasons of, credit... but at least when doing *their* afterlife ending & indicating characters eventually died of old age they did not go the cheesy bad makeup route! LOST’s finale also looking pretty good in comparison now. (Afterlife endings are not my jam, to say the least, but out of the afterlife endings that come to mind, LOST’s is solid).

Tell-not-show does have some advantages! There is a time to tell and a time to show! There is a time to leave things mysterious and open-ended and a time to spell shit the fuck out!

For instance, that Jack!God let there still be vampires around. Why he left them around, OK, I still think we could have used at least a line of speculation there, but leave that a question. That he left them around -- spell it out! Especially when we see Sam & Dean looking for ‘weird stuff’ and all they find initially is a pie festival. We don’t even know if there’s anything to find anymore!

& when the villains of the episode did not do anything that clearly marked them as supernatural and not crazy cult evil humans -- until we see that guy wake up with the bullet in his head, we can’t be sure Sam/Dean are right, that they are vampires, because we’ve gotten no post-Jack confirmation monsters are still around! Did the writers just assume the audience would assume all the ‘hunting things’ are automatically back? Or were they intentionally trying to make us wonder if Sam & Dean are killing humans for a sec?? I lean toward the latter, as the episode played with a few too many trying-to-be-clever fakeouts.

I think it’s a mistake that weakened the writing, either way, and a minor example of the episode’s overall issues. Supernatural used to be masterful at the balancing act between showing & leaving to the imagination: the ultimate example being Castiel’s shadow wings & that whole season 4 premiere really. Did we really need to see Sam in hospice, or couldn’t Bobby’s line about time passing differently have cut it? Did we need more from the son than the tattoo and a pull-away shot of him from behind, in flannel with long hair? Did we really?

Meanwhile we went from Sam going to Austin, apparently to fight on alone, to Sam-with-son, with zero transition. We get Faceless Wife, with not even, y’know, a phone call to or from Eileen or a line confirming if she’s alive or dead. Those... might have been more useful to show.

I agree how simple the death is was definitely the point. It was a poorly-delivered point.

So okay, it’s the ‘one good day’ ending. And I’m quoting Spike’s speech on Buffy in calling it that. How does a Slayer lose, how does a Slayer die? And that speech is precipitated by Buffy having a close call: she gets beat, on a random patrol, by one random vampire. Not multiple vampires, not a super-vampire, and it jars her, leading her to look into what happened to her predecessors. What’s ultimately, presumably, going to happen to her, no matter how many stronger foes she’s taken down. All the bad guys need is one good day.

In and of itself it’s a good concept. It’s a pretty natural concept for the Winchesters. Except where in the story it’s placed makes it feel wrong; it both had too much and too little buildup (the wrong kind of buildup!); and the execution was just... horrible.

Namely, the ‘one good day’ ending does not work the same week you beat God, or even a god. And especially not when new!God is basically your kid who loves you. A handwave of ‘hands off’ doesn’t cut it. And it was a handwave ~ very generic, no specific rules of the road of what Jack can and cannot do or why he’d choose not to save them.

...I also kind of feel we passed the ‘one brother lives a normalish life without the other’ cutoff a good few seasons ago ago. It was believable enough when we leave Dean there in s5 - painful but it worked! The pain was part of why it worked! But they’ve re-committed to the forever fight so many times now, it’s too *late* for the ending to feel right with just one of them. Also to what extent is Sam’s life normal v. still active in hunting? I’d rather have a sense of that than how he died!

So, so many tweaks could have improved this episode. So. Many. On a big-picture level, yes, I wish the entire thing was totally different. But assuming we’re stuck with the same basic bones you could *still* fix so much.

I keep thinking how satisfying the opening scene would have been, with a young mother & father home with their two young boys, if that scene ended with Sam & Dean busting in and saving them. That’s what they do, that’s the whole point: to keep from what happened to their family to happening to others.

If more time had passed, between their fight against *God* and the random fight that takes Dean down -- there is a time to montage and a time not to montage!

Instead of Sam & Dean’s random morning, we could have gotten them back on the road for an indeterminate stretch, we could have seen them going through pictures & trying to find the precious few they’ve actually taken with Castiel & Jack, interrupting a crossroads deal, exchanging emails with Claire or Jody etc -- there are ways to include characters even when you can’t actually show them! -- that also would have worked better.

And then, if you were going to ‘one good day’ it, then imho it should have been more classic. On Buffy, ‘classic’ is the Slayer v. one, ordinary vampire - that’s the whole point of fearing that day. I guess Supernatural’s writers decided a nest of very un-vampiric vampires wearing creepy masks was ‘classic’ for them. But especially after the first hour of looking back at the show’s roots... not much of an urban legend, there. That’s what I missed the most in these last eps: the sense of legend.

#supernatural #supernatural spoilers #answers #the happy few

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