So recently I have gotten into the television show “Supernatural”. For those who don’t know it, “Supernatural” is one of those shows that came on around the same time as others, focusing on writing and drama of a group or duo. In this case, it focused on the Winchesters, a pair of brothers who were hunting demons, ghosts, and legends of both the older and urban variety. The mix of legends, the travels across America and the various little points about the two are interesting to see. The story behind the two boys, as well as their reasons for doing it and how others look at them, makes the whole thing often worth watching, as does the dialogue. Oh, the dialogue is AWESOME.
So as I tend to, I started from the beginning and worked my way to what was supposed to be the end. The writers had planned on a 5-season show, meaning the natural story arc, character development, and general plot of it all was in season 1 to season 5, and when I started watching it, season 6 was just ending.
I enjoyed the story, though I was a bit saddened by the end, mostly as a writer. I didn’t feel the ending given to Dean would be truthful or even helpful to the character. Dean is a family-oriented person, but at the same time has not been ‘normal’ since he was four…relearning that is hard. From my own experience, going from one type of lifestyle or way of living to another can be depressing and a bit hard to deal with, and so going into something that can easily be depressing or hard to change, right after something that had caused him to effectively commit suicide the last time it happened.
And he’s left alone. With a group of people who don’t know anything about the supernatural, or what he’s gone through, or who he can talk to about what he’s feeling, going through, has gone through, or anything else. In fact, if he did tell anyone, including a psychologist, he might be considered a bit insane, or at least mentally unbalanced.
So I started watching season 6, and was a bit…underwhelmed by it. I felt that the storyline was a bit thrown together, with someone randomly pulling ideas from a dart-board. First: Sam is back! So is Skinner – sorry, Samuel – the grandpa! And they’ve been back for a year, Bobby knew, and somehow they were totally sure that Dean was well-adjusted and not about to be attacked by the numerous evils they’ve fought or those that realize Dean is open and ready to kill, AND he has a family to try and protect!
Ok, you can get a whole series, or even half a series, off Dean dealing with his friend’s idiocy, returning to being a Hunter and trying to not instantly become like his dad, and having to learn more about his mother’s side of the family.
But that gets scrapped pretty soon, and now we learn there’s a war in Heaven, and Heaven is pretty messy right now. Another good story, Castiel and his group working to try and save Heaven and not start the Apocalypse while also having others besides Balthazar as Angels that left and are now hedonistic, or vengeful, or something similar. This would work well as Dean has to deal with his–oh, this isn’t even a secondary story but a reason to have Cas not be around that often…
OH, the Alphas!
You see my problem. There was a great deal of ideas, all of them good, but too many of them shoved into the season to really work. It was a bit messy, with good ideas and bad ones, and the final part just felt like something that should’ve been the focus and instead was pushed to be the huge SURPRISE for the ending.
So if season 6 was a bit of a cluster, season 7 was…also clustered.
The storyline went from both dealing with Sam dealing with hallucinations, Dean dealing with Castiel and all of that, and a new big-bad from before even the Angels. Yet only a few of the story-lines dealt with the new Leviathans, and within about two of them, I knew what they were going to do ultimately. I knew EXACTLY what was going on.
Things didn’t get interesting AGAIN until the last few episodes, and even then, some of it wasn’t all that interesting. It was a basic “last chance stand” story.
So I had problems with the last two seasons. The first five were obviously written to be a group, with the rest feeling like they’d been tacked on and, hopefully, season 8 will be better and bring back our guys instead of the angst-buckets we have now.