Supernatural 6×20

[rusty_halo]

That was an interesting episode. I LOVED the film noir style narration, with our morally ambiguous protagonist detailing his crimes.

But I thought it was flawed in several key ways:

1. It failed to clearly articulate the moral issues at stake. That Raphael was about to re-initiate the apocalypse was a pretty clear argument in favor of doing whatever it takes to stop him, even if it means cleaning up another mess later. The show failed to explain why Sam and Dean think that Cas working with Crowley is so much worse--a generic "deals with the devil are bad" just doesn't cut it, considering that Sam, Dean, and Bobby have all taken that action on various occasions. Presumably we'll learn that Crowley's plans aren't just about hell but will devastate earth, and/or that Cas has done terrible things in pursuit of purgatory (like killing Rachel), but Sam and Dean don't know those things yet, so their adamance seems extreme.

SPN has usually been so good about avoiding simple answers to the ends/means question, but here the proposed solution of "If Cas had only talked to Sam and Dean..." is distressingly simplistic. What if he had, and that delay caused Raphael to raise Lucifer/Michael and destroy earth? Also frustrating is the show's failure to have Cas explain to Dean why he didn't talk to him--quite reasonably, to protect Dean's hard-won happiness. Not that Dean's at fault for retiring, but that fact would cast Castiel's actions is a significantly kinder light.

2. They failed to explain the depth of the relationship between Dean and Castiel. They show us Dean wanting so desperately to believe in Cas, and so angry at being betrayed, but why? Most of their relationship in the past three seasons has consisted of winks to the audience about sexual tension, but the show doesn't have the guts to go the slashy route, so on a literal level Cas is just a "friend" that they go to for exposition and deus ex machinas. This is not the complaint of a bitter slasher*; I honestly think that by substituting winks and ho!yay for real development of the relationship, the show undercut itself. When you strip away the winks, there's no there there.

* Of course my ideal would be that the damn show would go the Torchwood route, stop snickering like a teenage boy, and actually tell the slashy version of the story. This is why I want Russell T. Davies to write EVERYTHING.

And I was disappointed that it took so little for Dean to actually be ready to kill Cas. Half an episode and some moral ambiguity? Compare that to "Born Under a Bad Sign" where Dean won't kill evil!Sam no matter what way more evil stuff he gets up to. For a storyline whose emotional depth depends on the audience investing in the relationship between Dean and Cas, the show is failing to provide a reason for me to care.

OTOH, Misha Collins knocked this episode out of the park, and Jensen Ackles is always a pleasure to watch (though I wish he'd played that final scene with a lot more internal conflict and depth of feeling).

So do we really have to wait two weeks for the finale? Why does the CW hate me??!!

Originally published at rusty-halo.com. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[netweight]

I think your complaint about the way they handled the relationship between Dean and Castiel is a really good point. I really disliked that they defaulted to the "Castiel is like family" explanation because it is kind of complete crap and it really felt like it was lazy writing. Everyone is like family now? They didn't have to go the slashy route if they didn't want to. The relationship has basis in which to be approached and developed - it's predicated in trust and a weird kind of wariness on Dean's part, and devotion/adoration in Castiel's part and all of these would have made for more interesting material to work with than "omg, you're just like a brother". (Castiel = Sam? Since when, Show?)

[rusty_halo]

I can understand Dean saying "like a brother" because it's one of the only frames of reference he has for articulating what Cas means to him (just like he slots Bobby into the "like a father" slot). We know the relationship is a lot different than "brotherly" but Dean's not exactly known for self-awareness. It's more a failure of the show that they didn't explore all the nuances and complexities that are going on between Dean and Cas--the combination of fascination, admiration, fear, contempt, compassion, and of course friendship. There's so much going on there and yet the show is barely cracking the surface, skipping real character moments in favor of cheap ho!yay.

As seems typical with SPN, I put the biggest blame on the seasonal pacing--there's so much interesting material here and yet they cram it into three episodes and so can't give it the depth or focus it deserves, after a season full of filler. *sigh*

Meta recs (in case you hadn't already read them):

i_speak_tongue had an interesting post about Dean as a father or big-brother, mentor-type figure to Castiel.

luminosity also had a really interesting post today--I particularly liked her observation on how Castiel's arc handles the ends vs. means question (though I wish I could see the ep through her eyes because she liked it a lot better than I did!).

[netweight]

I can understand the within-textual rational of the argument for why Dean classified the relationship as brotherly but I kinda utterly disagree with it. When you have that kind of strong, close relationship with a sibling nothing measures up. There's nothing else that will ever compare and that would go for Dean times a million. He just wouldn't feel this way and he wouldn't articulate it this way. I would have been okay with him saying Castiel is like family (not really, but, heh, whatever, *handwave*), because that frame of reference fits with the way Dean conceptualizes the relationships he has with people who are close to him and he cares about - it's that extra "like a *brother*" that feels completely unnatural, and extra-textually it comes across as a total failure of characterization, lazy writing (and, quite honestly, Edlund fanboying Castiel) and the show in general being unwilling or unable to delve into and deepen the relationship.

I agree i_speak_tongue has an interesting point about the show presenting Dean as a father/mentor figure but this is also problematic to me because, though it is an interesting angle, it fails to take into account all that Castiel is. Castiel might be new and like a child at free-will, but this is an old, old being we're talking about here, one that has knowledge and power beyond what we can imagine. The show seems to have forgotten that. This is not a relationship between equals or 'people' in equal footing - this is a relationship between beings that aren't even the same race. This, however, seems to bear no weight in their differing moral approaches. Instead it's all about Castiel being morally underdeveloped (when it could be something akin to Illyria's story, if we imagine Illyria's possible progression in the hands of someone other than Joss).

Yes, it is about the ends vs. the means. But it doesn't bring anything new to the table. Instead it feels like a step-back. I don't really care about the story of the angels fight to become 'real boys' to begin with and the way this new iteration fails to encompass personal sacrifice makes me care even less.

More than pacing, I blame the writers having run out of ideas and not knowing what the fuck they're doing. I'm not surprised but I'm still quite a bit :/ about it.

(Thank you for the recs though - I do not read SPN meta other than what comes across the f-list so I had not read the first one.)

[rusty_halo]

I'm sorry you're so disappointed with this season! (Just as I'm getting into the show, all my friends are falling out of love with it. *sniffle*)

I agree the "like a brother" comparison was lazy writing, although I thought the ep pretty clearly demonstrated that Cas doesn't mean anything near what Sam means to Dean. By the end of the episode, Dean was already talking about killing Cas, whereas we've seen ample evidence that it takes about a thousand times Cas' level of darkness before Dean even allows the thought of killing Sam to enter his head.

Also agreed that the "Castiel is like a child" is trite and diminishes the potential of the story. *sigh*

Ooooh, imagine Illyria and Castiel having adventures together...! *brain goes off to entertaining places*

[netweight]

Well, I'm not wailing and beating at my chest. ;) I pretty much knew the story I was watching was over with the end of season 5 and lowered my expectations accordingly, even if I knew I wouldn't be able to disengage completely and there's low-level annoyance at the direction they chose to take and at the failure to explore the more interesting possibilities of that direction.

The angel storyline could have maybe been interesting if they had gone the Eldritch Abomination route, the Other, the ultimate aliens. They hint at it ("my true form is the size of the Chrysler Building," and "multi-dimensional wavelength of celestial intent" and "I have six heads, one of them is a lion") but it's played for laughs. They could have done it with Robo!Sam too and with Eve. And this could have been explored as part of the reason why Dean is so immediately willing to put Castiel down. Instead it's all about Castiel's angst. (Man, if I wanted "I'm not a real boy, woe it's me" wangst I'd be watching re-runs of Buffy and Angel, you know? Been there, done that.)

A lot of us signed up for the Sam and Dean show, for the tight humanistic focus. This season can be fanwanked to be about what it means to be human, what it means to be a monster, what's the difference - but it's the kind of thing where I have to fanwank *hard* because the season has been all over the place.

It's true that shows evolve - I'm okay with that. I'm not in the angel-hating camp, I'm in the "whatever, I don't care" camp. So that's my reaction upon learning that this season's action plot - for which we've been waiting for 20 episodes, WTF - is about off-screen angel shennanigans. I don't care. The show could have made me care, but they haven't. So I'm stuck in not caring.

There's always Game of Thrones. ;)