My buddy, you have made An Error, but let’s do this shit. To any SPN fans who have wound up here through Ye Olde Search Function, I encourage you to stop reading now.
I watched up to about halfway through Season Five before I decided that I could Do It Better (I think this is the novel you’re talking about, anon, unless it’s Earth is where the trouble comes from), and dragged myself up to about halfway through Season Seven before I packed it in and gave up, resigned that the parts of the show I loved were about four to five seasons dead. So like that’s the information I’m working on here.
So, obviously, lots of people have lots of legitimate complaints about Supernatural, including treatment of queer characters, characters of color, and women, as well as their fairly rampant history of queerbaiting. And lots of people have covered this in more competent detail than I could ever manage, so like google “sexism in Supernatural” or something and you can do your own reading there. Hell, if you want to do it the lazy way, you can knock out two of the above with this one article in friendly, easy-to-read Buzzfeed format. To the nominal credit of the people involved, I will add that the cast seems acutely aware of these problems and finds it distasteful, HOWEVER the problems persist and therefore that credit is minimal. Anyway. These things are covered much more thoroughly by many other people who are far more cogent than I could hope to be, so I’m going to leave those alone.
Instead, my rant is mostly summed up as “YOU CALL THIS SHIT STORYTELLING.”
So there are four basic parts to this rant, or rather four basic flaws that form the fundamentally weak foundation of Supernatural as a narrative.
- Failure to commit to a single cohesive narrative
arc, also known as “SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF
THOSE” syndrome
- The persistent and erroneous belief that
character death = character development and narrative progression
- Inability to commit to a major change of
paradigm, also known as out and out narrative cowardice, which I personally
call “flinching during Plot Roulette”
- Total incapacity to put their characterization
where their script is regarding the Winchester brothers and the other major players
*cracks knuckles*
POINT THE FIRST
Right, so first it’s the story of Sam having strange powers and their dad being MIA, which segues pretty naturally into the story of Sam potentially being the Antichrist, and then there’s Dean’s sacrifice of his soul, which at very least holds up even if it sort of acts like the previous plotline about their dad’s soul didn’t happen. Up until this point, I was pretty comfy. I had some complaints covered below, but I was copacetic. Season Three is largely about getting rid of the contract on Dean’s soul. Okay, seems legit, you have a tangible problem with potentially serious consequences. Now, having had not one but TWO seasons which were easily summed up with ‘so Sam is mebbe the Antichrist or at very least Antichrist-adjacent,’ I made what I thought was a logical leap and went “well, gee, if I was mebbe at the very least Antichrist-adjacent, I would leverage the fuck out of that to do something about my apparently beloved brother’s soul.” Even when they didn’t go with that (news flash: I wrote that novel my damn self and amazingly it worked out 100x better, narratively speaking, because it’s fucking logical), I was still kind of like “gosh sure is a good thing they remembered that they spent two entire seasons building up to Sam mebbe being Antichrist-adjacent.” And there’s the whole drama with Ruby which I just…am very uncomfortable with for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that it’s a very thinly veiled endeavor to rehash the same ‘Sam being afraid of losing touch with humanity’ plotline as Seasons One and Two but without having to worry about really altering the paradigm, see Point The Third, and also because it’s really intensely literal about the concept of having a female character exclusively as a prop for consumption. And Castiel shows up and a thousand ships are launched, blah blah blah, and then after the end of Season Four…we never hear from Sam’s powers again for more than a couple lines.
As of about Season Four, the focus of the show abandons Sam and shifts tangibly onto Dean, who is now The Interesting Character because he has Been Through Hell (literally). Furthermore, we are now given Dean’s POV on any quandry between him and Sam, which is a personal complaint because I honestly just think it’s sloppy. Season Four is mostly dealing with angels being assholes, which is really not as original as SPN likes to think (Good Omens did it first and Good Omens did it better, get out of my face), plus Dean being the Righteous Man and the question of the oncoming Apocalypse (sure is interesting how we spent two seasons building up to Sam being Antichrist-adjacent). The Apocalypse is less oncoming and implied to be more ongoing by the end of Season Four. So Lucifer escapes and Season Five is pretty much About That, involving the fairly unhelpful description that Dean is Michael’s ‘sword’ and they’re the true vessels of Michael and Lucifer, culminating in Sam being locked in the Cage because presumably someone realized that, hey, we have two main characters and we must make them both Interesting Characters. Season Six is 50% about finding Sam’s soul and figuring out how he got out of the Cage (sure would be helpful if we’d spent two seasons building up to Sam having inhuman powers and being Antichrist-adjacent) and 50% a wicked inexplicable plot about the Mother-of-All and some kind of fucking jigsaw monsters and…Alpha monsters? But that never really gets explained in a pertinent way except that they needed to ante up because they beat the Devil at the end of Season Five. Oh, and a bonus 50% of some bullshit with Castiel and Crowley and ~Scheming~. And then Castiel gets possessed by Leviathans (?) from Purgatory, which he opened with Crowley (??) who he then betrayed (???), and Castiel decides He’s God Now and also dies (????), and somehow these metaphysical more-powerful-than-angels badder-than-Lucifer things are sensitive to fucking Borax.
And it was at this point that I stopped the show in the middle of a fight scene like 1/3 through Season Seven and actually said out loud “Gosh it’s almost like you need someone who’s Antichrist-adjacent to help you out here” before turning off the TV. And then I stopped watching and got better taste in TV and blew through writing a 250K novel in 18 months of being a full-time student because I was powered by pure bitter spite.
Now, here are the two major things that matter about this whole deal. First of all, the first plotline is the most reliably coherent, although some degree of cogence lasted up until about Season Five—we understand why Lucifer wants out of Hell, we understand to some extent why Dean and Sam matter on the cosmic scale, we get pretty bored of watching Castiel do heel-face and face-heel turns like he’s on a Lazy Susan but like logistically it all makes a reasonable degree of sense. That being said, the whole plotline of Seasons Four onward would make a lot more sense, would it not, if they remembered that they’d spent a good solid two seasons and change (Season Three, intermittent, Season Four, major) designing an Antichrist-like character who is now the last survivor of that batch of experiments. Then, instead of having Sam and Dean just be Inexplicably Special, you have Dean (who can still be the Righteous Man!) acting as the foil for Sam being forced into increasingly dark choices, and Sam who’s a viable candidate for Lucifer-puppet because he’s part demon. Or, alternatively, Sam who maintains his stance as the gentler of the two despite his demon blood, which would add a lot more depth to Supernatural’s fanatical hardon for the Angelic Asshole trope. Honestly I rewrote the entirety of this show one time, predicated on the assumption that they actually went with the idea of Sam as the Boy King, and I think it would be much less haphazard. (Basically: hey, what if Sam actually used his status to strong-arm Dean’s deal into being dissolved, as it’s implied that he’s totally capable of doing that and totally willing to sacrifice his own humanity for his brother, and then Heaven sent Castiel to kill Sam, which would add a fuckton of legitimacy to Castiel’s Lazy Susan and Dean’s antagonism. But no. Instead there’s monsters whose only vulnerability is fucking Borax.)
Second, and far more critical, is the total failure to commit to a single plotline. Okay, Sam’s status as the possible Boy King is a major plot point for two seasons, not so much for the third season (he literally…a demon straight up tells Sam that he could have an army if he took up his position and it never occurs to him that he could use that to help Dean), more so in the fourth season, and then it never comes up again. Even when it is unarguably pertinent to the situation—Lucifer! Fucking Lucifer possesses Sam and drags him to Hell and he comes back soulless and yet none of the writers ever, not once, went “Gosh, maybe we should remember those seasons we spent developing Sam into sort of the Antichrist? Maybe including at least a minor nod to that or somehow wrapping up the plotline would help cohere our current trainwreck of a plotline?” Nope, it’s just left as a loose thread, flapping in the breeze with all the subtlety of a limp dick. It’s like Supernatural is actually a Frankenshow of two shows with the same characters but totally unrelated plotlines—maybe when Lucifer escapes he shunts them all sideways into an alternate universe and there’s another show somewhere with a Dean whose brother has never been even a little bit demonic and died through normal hunter shenanigans suddenly having to deal with Sam the possible Antichrist, and that’s the show that an alternate me is still watching.
And this is an ongoing problem. Sam’s powers are just the major point that I always latch onto, because, first, I always think the phenomenon of “well fuck me sideways I might be obligated to end the world and ain’t that a messy thing” is pretty great (I really, really like Hellboy), and second, IT’S FOUR SEASONS OF WORK YOU CAN’T JUST ABANDON IT. But seriously. Just. Throw a dart, you’ll hit a loose end. Because Supernatural is the equivalent of that one fucker we all hate in sitcoms—you know, the guy who’s dating a great girl he totally doesn’t deserve, but he can’t ~commit~ so there’s all this ongoing Drama™. Except that in Supernatural, not only can they not commit, they accidentally defeated their biggest gun—the literal Devil—less than halfway through their series! Whoops! Quick, someone call up Satan’s cousin twice removed who’s even worse and more evil than he is! And sensitive to Borax!
No, no, I’m kidding. We all know that Satan’s cousin twice removed, who’s even worse and more evil than he is, is actually named Metatron.
Fuckin’ Supernatural.
POINT THE SECOND
I know this is going to come as a shock, but rampant character death does not actually qualify as a legitimate way to progress your narrative or develop your characters. In order, the major players (nominally on the Winchesters’ side) who die or seem to die in the first five seasons are Sam’s girlfriend, John Winchester, Ash, Sam, Bela, Dean, (Dean several times in Mystery Spot), Ruby, Castiel, Jo, Ellen, Sam, Anna, Sam, Dean, Gabriel, Castiel, Bobby, and sort of Sam with the whole Cage thing. And those are just the people with arcs that extend over more than a season (except for Sam’s girlfriend). It’s entirely possible, even probable, that I missed some. That does not include the one- or two-episode characters whose deaths we’re supposed to observe as emotionally wringing, nor does it include the frankly vast numbers of civilian casualties. So, for the ease of reading, we’re going to divide ‘character death’ into ‘reversible character death,’ which is largely the prerogative of the primary trio, and ‘permanent character death,’ and we’re going to talk about why there are real problems with the way Supernatural treats both of them.
First of all, the problems with reversible character death are obvious—there are no fucking stakes! Like, arguably the stakes are ‘the whole world,’ but obviously not (see Point The Third), so practically speaking the stakes should be life or death, because the show tells you that the stakes are life or death. Now, sometimes resurrection is an important plot point, I get that, in my spite novel there is, in fact, a resurrection. But here’s the thing. Either you have to straight up establish a revolving door policy and change your stakes (example: the show Forever, where the point is that the MC is immortal and would very much like to not be immortal anymore), or you can only use that resurrection once. You use it once, and you still get the emotional gut punch of “Oh God, they’re dead” and the flood of relief when it proves that they’re not dead after all. You use it more than that, and the audience becomes complacent that, well, you won’t really kill them. By the time you’re on a level with Supernatural, it just…doesn’t matter? A major character dies, but your audience has already hit compassion fatigue because of the death rate, which I’m about to cover, so there’s not really any oomph to it.
The problems with permanent character death are significantly different. Now, I myself am a Happy Ending person (like…the world sucks …let me have my happy fiction), but even I recognize that a certain percentage of the characters in a story or show like this one are basically just cannon fodder (it would be great if it wasn’t so consistently the women, POC, or LGBT folks, but whatever). The problem is that it’s constant. And not just “well that person’s a corpse because that’s what vampires do to people” or “some kid pissed off the local spirit and now they’re six feet under,” it would be totally fine and reasonable if that situation was an every episode thing (it…kind of is, that’s kind of the point). But every few episodes, we’re expected to get attached to a one-off character and then be deeply affected when they die. Take, say, Season Three: you have the hunters Isaac and Tamara in the first episode, Casey and Father Gil in the fourth episode (some flexibility as they’re demons, but we’re supposed to be shocked and horrified that Sam kills them both), Callie in the fifth episode, Gordon in the seventh episode (again, we’re supposed to be horrorstricken that Sam kills him, even though it’s clearly self-defense), all the civilians in the twelfth episode, Corbett in the thirteenth episode, and finally Bela, who admittedly has had some nominal presence for a while. This does not include any Winchester trauma, which you’re always supposed to be deeply affected by. I’m sorry, but after a season or two of being expected to work up that kind of emotional upset between five and ten times over the course of thirteen to twenty episodes, your audience is going to burn out and start to lose emotional engagement.
So, basic summary: the Anyone Can Die trope does not play well with main characters who are on a Revolving Door of Death, because it means that minor characters don’t matter because Anyone Can Die, while major damage or trauma to the main characters doesn’t matter either because they’re on a Revolving Door. You can’t kill your main characters once (or more!) a season and expect people to still…worry about them.
On a more strictly structural note, using character death as the primary way to drive character development is just fucking lazy. It’s just an indicator that the writers don’t actually know how to progress their character development in any other way, which is a major problem because, since they only develop the characters through the deaths of others, they have to hit the Personality Reset button fairly regularly to make it look like things are actually happening to the people who are supposed to be developing. Which, in case you were curious, is why you feel that overwhelming sense of déjà vu when the Winchesters get into a huge blowout fight about ‘don’t sacrifice yourself’ in about the third-to-last episode, followed by one of them sneaking out to sacrifice themselves, followed by the other one being angry about it. It’s the same goddamn script, it’s just that Sam’s hair is probably longer and Dean is probably scruffier. Furthermore, the fixation on developing characters with the deaths of others means that basically every character is fair game but NO ONE’S DEATH HOLDS MEANING, because of the above, which means that SPN’s ‘character development’ turns into this recursive self-congratulating circlejerk of killing someone, developing Sam and Dean accordingly, and then somehow regressing them so that the writers can do it over again and be proud of themselves for Such Dynamic Characters, Much Develop, So Change, Wow.
And I feel like the reasons that character death =/= narrative progression should be pretty clear from the rest of this rant, but basically if you’re killing someone to progress your plot, it needs to be a solveable death (emotional payoff is what makes walking away from a book satisfying, such as catching a murderer) or a terrible tragedy that drives the characters to great acts or both. Supernatural is basically a horror/fantasy murder mystery, so it would be fine if they stuck with that model, but they keep trying to sell the deaths of any number of major players and many many minor players as this great and terrible tragedy that’s pushing the Winchesters forward. And like, I’m sorry, but if you commit within the first episode to a dead mother and a dead girlfriend and a missing potentially dead father, you’ve already pretty well maxed out your terrible tragedies. Find a different motivator, or else it looks like your characters just leave huge amounts of collateral damage and refuse to take responsibility. Or, alternatively, it looks like the individual deaths don’t matter to your main characters, which is NOT going to help with making your audience give even a single fractional fuck.
TL;DR: Character death is a powerful tool that rapidly loses its weight and import if you overuse it, and can make your audience disinterested and emotionally detached if they’re expected to care every time. Slow your motherfucking roll, stick to a MAXIMUM of one resurrection per character unless their immortality is an explicitly discussed plot point (at which point their deaths need to not matter much anymore), and remember that you can progress your plot in literally any other way before you go for a shock-value death.
POINT THE THIRD
Don’t be a little bitch in your writing. Honestly it’s that simple. I’m gonna get into it some more, but that’s the gist of it. If you already know what I mean, great, skip to the next point, because the TL;DR is “don’t be an infant.”
This is something that plenty of shows are guilty of (Merlin, anyone?), but SPN is terrified of actually changing the paradigm. The show must always include a certain list of things:
- The Winchesters in the Impala, which, sure, I’ll grant you that
- A home base, also totally reasonable
- Monsters to fight, fair enough
- A masquerade (meaning ‘civilians do not know about magic’), which should honestly have broken down after, like, Season Two when they accidentally release massive numbers of demons into the world
- A world to have the show happening in, which is a problem since they started the Apocalypse in Season Four
Now…listen.
It’s fine, even necessary, to have some fixed points in a narrative. It offers a way to anchor your characters against the ongoing changes that the plot demands. That, however, is very different from being too much of a coward to alter the paradigm of your story when the major driving force is a change of paradigm.
The first major change of paradigm they cop out on is Sam’s powers. If Sam was the Boy King, this hypothetically Antichrist-esque position in the cosmic dichotomy, that would radically alter the dynamic. Sam would automatically be the most powerful being in any given room unless he was in a room with a respectably high-ranked angel or demon, and he would certainly be able to go toe-to-toe with most of their targets on their own terms. Telekinesis is an exceptionally good power, guys, like, as powers go—even disregarding his position in the hierarchy, Sam would be pretty strong in his own right. Which, I’d like to point out, can be a really thrilling change to a narrative, because it means that you have this additional layer of ‘well, how do we deal with the fact that Sam doesn’t like being this strong, how do we deal with the way demons and monsters have started to view him as more us than them’ and would give a much more legitimate basis for the question of humanity that they shoehorn in later with the Ruby plotline. Buffy has its flaws, but at least it frequently brings up ‘hey, Buffy might be ostensibly human, but she operates on the level of her enemies more than on the level of her allies’ as an issue that she thinks about. But they don’t do that in Supernatural, they bail completely on the Sam plotline because they panic about the implications of having such a powerful character. And then they bring in fucking Castiel like that’s not exactly the same problem cloaked in ‘well, noninterference.’ Like, please, that ship has fucking sailed, choke down your anxiety and figure out how the rules of your powerful character work, and then let them be powerful. It’s gonna be okay. Deep breaths. If you make an OP character, that’s fine, you just have to actually deal with it rather than having their powers be an asspull every time the main characters are in Real Trouble (*angry sigh* Merlin).
The second one they balk at is the unveiling of the supernatural world and oh my God it is constant. But let’s deal with the biggest and most improbable of these here: Season Goddamn Two, where they bust open the doors of Hell and unleash some thousands of demons into the world. Like, is that as many demons as it could be, in comparison to your six to seven billion humans? No. But it’s still a huge population and is implied to be accompanied by a huge uptick in various other supernatural happenings and is furthermore really visible. The Devil’s Trap is suggested to pass through at least a couple towns and it’s a big flashy event, so like…sure, maybe people write it off as swamp gas or what have you, but sooner or later people who have had demons exorcised or seen some vampire/werewolf/etc shenanigans and lived to tell about it are going to start running into each other. They start hearing people say “it’s like she’s a totally different person” and they take that seriously rather than writing it off. They were maybe saved by a hunter who confirmed that the supernatural exists and they maybe tell that person that, hey, something like that happened to them, maybe they could come take a look around. Maybe they could call the person who helped them out. And you end up with this fucking Ponzi scheme of The Great Truth, where each person who’s in the know finds one or two more people who’ve seen evidence and brings them into the loop, and then they find one or two more people who’ve seen evidence. And for every person who’s determined to call it bullshit or think they’re insane, you’re going to get one who saw that person turn into a hairy monster and murder someone, or who was possessed by a demon, or who witnessed black smoke merge with their spouse and turn them into a killer. So you get this whole rickety network of amateurs who’ve…kind of learned the thing. And like any Ponzi scheme, sooner or later it collapses.
Basically the point is: there is a limit to the parts per million of The Great Truth that can be present before that shit becomes common knowledge. Look at any available government conspiracy for confirmation. The more people you tell, the looser the rules of ‘secret’ become, so if you have a big flashy visible disaster that involves drastically increasing the number of uninitiated civilians who are aware of The Great Truth…you’d better be ready to deal with that. What I’m saying here is that by Season Seven, you’ve not only had this whole demon situation for a while, and increased those numbers several times with various disasters, but you’ve also had at least one big flashy disaster in a city. So the Winchesters should pretty much be able to walk into a given town and wander into the church or the bar or something and go “So, I heard there’ve been some weird murders” and have at least one person come up to them later and be like “Yeah it’s a ghost here’s all the information but I have no idea how to get rid of them.” And when the Winchesters go *gasp* “How do you know The Thing” the person should look at them like a fucking moron and go “It literally rained blood last year, everyone in this time zone knows The Thing and also it’s evident that the end is pretty seriously nigh, so get on that.” Commit to your big flashy disasters, you cowards, or at least have the decency to make it an ongoing Sunnydale joke.
Far more crucial is the fact that they bail on the end of the world…let’s see. End of Season Four is when the Apocalypse properly gets underway, so they balk at the end of Season Five (Lucifer and the Cage), end of Season Six (Mother of All and Purgatory), and like minimum once by the middle of Season Seven (Godstiel) as well as at the end of Season Seven (Leviathans, I am now past where I kept watching), end of Season Eight (Metatron, angel tablets, falling angels), presumably end of Season Nine from what I understand of the summaries online (some…war on Heaven nonsense), and based on the trend I’m guessing that Seasons Ten through Thirteen keep to the model, do you understand my point here. These aren’t even all the near-Apocalypses that they avert. Off the cuff, I can think of the Croatoan virus (…twice? Three times?), as well as three out of four Horsemen within episodes of each other. They’re probably averting the Very Serious and Catastrophic End of Days two or three times a season by Season Five, and that number only goes up. This is very similar to the character death thing: quite simply, if the audience is expected to get that worked up multiple times a season, and brace for that kind of disaster multiple times a season, you are inevitably going to bore them. Your plot has to be intensely recursive so that you can ‘reset’ and avoid a new Apocalypse the next season, which gets boring, because it feels like you’ve been there before, similar to how using character death to advance character development demands that you hit the Personality Reset button on the regular.
Furthermore, repeating the same level of disaster over and over and OVER again means that it starts to lack emotional weight, and your characters start to seem really, really stupid if they don’t start to treat things accordingly. One of the things I thought of constantly during the last, say, season and a half that I watched of Supernatural was a quote from Buffy, specifically from Riley who I usually very much dislike but who NAILED this particular thing. “When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.” And that’s the running joke in Buffy! That they literally deal with an Apocalypse every few episodes, and they lampshade it, and the characters respond accordingly—Buffy and the Scooby gang start to act cavalier, almost unimpressed, about each new disaster. Like “well, we saved the world, I say we party.” That’s a direct quote from Buffy (IN SEASON ONE NO LESS), and Supernatural could stand to take a page out of their book with that one. By Season Seven, the Winchesters seem like they have somehow missed out on the last decade of their own lives because they always act so shocked and horrified that somehow someone could try to end the world. Like! Yes, yes they could and yes they would, welcome to the party boys! Please try to get in touch with your own history on this subject!
So the highlights here are: don’t be a fucking baby about your writing. If you’re writing toward a big paradigm shift, you need to recognize that you’re playing Plot Russian Roulette, and you have to pull the trigger. Change the paradigm of your narrative and deal with the fallout like a fucking adult, you tepid fools, you limp-necked cowards, you ink-stained walnuts.
POINT THE FOURTH
Listen very carefully. Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the Winchesters promising eternal brotherly devotion and saying things like “you’re my brother, man” and vowing to always have each other’s backs.
Now wait a moment longer, and listen very carefully. Do you hear that? It’s the inevitable sound of the Winchesters stabbing each other in the back and/or throwing each other to the wolves because they’re feeling pissy, and then getting a whole (static! See Point The Second!) “character arc” about how distraught they are.
All right, y’all, I don’t have siblings so maybe I’m wrong, but I do write a lot and I think I’m right, and you should probably put your characterization where your script is. If your primary relationship that you expect people to care about is fraternal devotion, you should maybe not have those people cheerfully feed each other into metaphorical woodchippers. Like. Okay, maybe you get ONE chance to have a dramatic falling out. ONE. And then when they repair the relationship, they need to actually sort their shit out and not keep having the exact same dramatic falling out because that shit gets boring and is a sign of lazy writing and—shocker!—lack of character development. Next time they fight, it has to be about something demonstrably different, not just the same issue with a new set of tits (c’mon y’all, this is Supernatural, it’s always a set of tits).
Let’s do a real fast recap. There’s a one episode plot in Season One about the two of them falling out over the question of whether they should follow their father’s orders. Dean spends a good percentage of Season Two taking his guilt over their dad’s death out on Sam, but we’ll give a pass because they explicitly acknowledge it and take steps to resolve the problem. A major plotline develops in Season Two that hunters have started trying to kill Sam, and Dean reliably, consistently has his back. Props. Season Three is kind of a mess (if you have a big visible semi-Apocalypse you should probably deal with it, see Point The Third), but whatever. Pertinently, Dean’s big ongoing concern is that Sam isn’t acting like himself, because he’s being much more ruthless (something Dean has consistently told him to do), while Sam’s ongoing concern is that Dean is being reckless (justified, he has a death sentence on him). Season Four is when things start to break down. Castiel shows up and Dean responds with aggression, Sam gets his rehashed ‘humanity’ plotline with Ruby, there are a lot of really incredibly poor decisions made and a lot of lies told with minimal regard for the trouble that’s gotten them into before (@Sam). There’s a fight that includes Dean calling Sam a monster, which has been canonically identified as the thing Sam is most afraid of, and acting like this whole demon blood thing is a terrible tremendous shock, despite the fact that Dean…knew and totally failed to react in any way except to penalize Sam (for trying to save him! Much like Dean sold his soul for Sam! And got pissy about Sam being pissed off about!). Cue Lucifer. Apocalypse, possession, Horsemen, etc, etc, more Lazy Susan Castiel, infighting about who should say yes to what in order to save whom, whatever.
And then Sam apparently dies in the Cage and Dean…goes off to get a nice white picket fence? Um…this is not consistent with the characterization of a dude who sold his soul to resurrect Sam literally just three years ago. Their falling out has never been intense enough nor consistent enough to justify this. Even if you say that Dean’s honoring his brother’s final wishes by not trying to resurrect Sam or anything, Dean should be drinking himself to death or something similarly dramatic, because all the drama in this show comes from the relationship between the Winchester brothers.
Basically, here’s the problem: the show spends a lot of time and effort on telling you that the Winchesters would die for each other. And while they do use that trope a lot (John dies for Dean, who dies for Sam, who sacrifices his humanity for Dean, who risks his life for Sam, who jumps into the Cage for Dean…), they seem to have forgotten that, generally, you’re only willing to die for people who you actually like. Like, people to whom you are genuinely emotionally attached, not just people who are your family because Blood Is Thicker or whatever bullshit you’re trying to pull there. And by Season Five, I’m just…not convinced the Winchester brothers actually like each other anymore. And that never gets dealt with, they just expect you to believe that the Winchsters love each other because the show says so, and listen, I hate the saying of ‘show, don’t tell’ as much as the next person who’s suffered through a college writing class, but honestly. Supernatural needs to stop telling its viewers that Sam and Dean care about each other and actually…demonstrate that shit on a regular basis.
Example: there’s the incident at some point where someone plants a phone call on (I think) Sam’s phone, apparently from Dean, telling him that he’s a monster and he should go do an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing because the world and Dean would be better off if he was dead. Which Sam then believes and listens to. This seems totally justified based on the relationship they’ve had for the past season. Pro tip, kids. If your major dynamic includes two people who readily and easily believe that the other is literally calling them an inhuman abomination and telling them they should just die, that…that is not a Loving Affectionate and Devoted Familial Relationship. And if you’re pitching it as one, A, you need some therapy, probably urgently, and, B, your audience is only going to stick it out for so long before they give it up as a lost cause.
The point of this whole thing is that you better be ready to put your money where your fucking mouth is, and keep your characterizations consistent with what you’re telling the audience.
ANYWAY.
The ultimate TL;DR here is that Supernatural’s storytelling is approximately as competent as the novel I wrote when I was eleven, which I have hidden in a deep dark hole never to be seen or discussed ever again. Less competent, even, because at least I committed to a single individual plotline and dealt with the fallout of major changes to the universe. And it’s fucking tragic, because this was a show with some real potential buried under all the chaos. If you ever want my full rewrite, please do ask and I will tell you, but this is now over 6K words and on its tenth page, so I’m going to stop now.
Long story short? Supernatural: What The Fuck.