Post by Beowulf BoltEven aside of the escalation argument, I can also argue that IMO it
was a good idea to firmly ground the show's handling of demons before
adding angels to the mix, and further more why it should be that they
made the angelic host such dicks (you don't want the brothers solving
every problem by merely phoning for some angelic air support).
Obviously, you're not going to have a "Dial-an-Angel" service, the
angels have their own agenda and they're going to do things their own
way, which may even be at odds with what Sam and Dean and the rest of
the hunters are doing, but there's no real reason to have the angels be
such assholes. Even Cas is a prick.
Post by Beowulf BoltI believe I can understand why you are disenchanted by the way the
story has evolved, yet at the same time I am not seeing any radical
changes in tone or mythology over the course of the series. To me this
all flows pretty organically - far, FAR more so than, say, _Lost_.
Lost is garbage anyhow, that's not really saying much.
Post by Beowulf BoltThe *only* aspect of Supernatural that appears to lend credence to
this possibility in my eyes has been the erratic seasonal variation in
Sam's 'gift'. Everything else seems to stick together pretty well to my
mind.
I think it really comes down to a general failure in the way shows are
written. In a lot of shows, ever season they feel like they have to top
themselves, do something bigger, more epic, more grand than they did
before. In Supernatural, they've really gone so grand that they left
the characters upon whom the show is based behind.
I think a great example of this has been the new Doctor Who. Every
year, Russell T. Davies felt he had to go bigger and bolder with his
series finales until, at the end of series 4, you had the Daleks
dragging planets across the universe and threatening to destroy reality.
But where do you go from there? If your only job is to keep topping
yourself, how can you do less? If everything you do is
universe-changing, you have to keep hitting the big reset button and
changing it back so you can keep telling stories.
Granted, this is the last season of Supernatural, but Kripke keeps
talking about another series and honestly, where can he take Sam and
Dean from here that's bigger than the end of the world?
Post by Beowulf BoltSo what you are saying is that both Dean and Sam are grappling with
being manipulated, lied to, and not knowing what is really going on.
How, then, are they NOT sounding boards for the audience? They are in
the same boat as us!
The point of a sounding board character is the one who asks the
questions that otherwise would not get asked so the audience understands
what's going on. The companion character fulfills that role most of the
time in Doctor Who, since I already brought that up. They ask how
things work and the Doctor, in explaining it to the companion, also
explains it to the audience. However, in Supernatural, Sam and Dean are
asking questions, they're just not getting any answers. They stay
ignorant, the audience stays ignorant. That's not a sounding board.
Post by Beowulf BoltNor do I think that having more info on what was going on would
improve matters. How, for example, would last season have been improved
if the audience was explicitly in on Ruby's betrayal from much earlier
in the season? Ditto for the angelic overlords complicity in the
affair?
I think in a lot of ways, it would. Alfred Hitchcock used to use the
example of a bomb under the table. If a bunch of people are sitting
around a table and an unseen bomb goes off, killing everyone, that's a
shock. Boom and you're done. But if you show the audience the bomb,
let them see it counting down, let them understand the potential
ramifications of what they're seeing, that's suspense. The audience
becomes emotionally invested in what's going on and the entire
experience, even if it turns out exactly the same way as before, becomes
much more interesting.
Post by Beowulf BoltFrankly it seems to me that your objections to the show are so
fundamental in nature that I wonder how you ever liked it, save on a
monster-of-the-week basis.
The problem is, it did monster-of-the-week very, very well. When they
were fighting against urban legends and the like, that was a whole lot
more interesting than "we're out to save the world, yay!" They
initially had a very personal stake in their ultimate mission, they were
seeking revenge on the yellow-eyed demon who had killed their mother and
Sam's girlfriend. Revenge is a very easy to understand motivation, but
as time has gone on, they've lost that personal connection to their
goals and have become little more than tools, beyond their control, in
huge plots over which they have no say. It's stopped being a nice
little road trip with two brothers, their car and their arsenal in the
trunk and turned into something where the brothers really don't mean
much overall.