SPN 8.12 As Time Goes By
Jan. 31st, 2013 06:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snick_backupRoommate and I agree: interesting concept, and I thought the acting and so on was fine, but my gosh the dialogue was awful.
Also, this ep is the third in a series of really weird tonal switches - from the itchy awful conflict of 8.09/8.10 to the LARPing lark of 8.11, to this one, all heavy with Family Issues and also big worldbuilding stuff. The progression of the Sam-Dean reconciliation has been not so much rushed as assumed pre-emptively; 8.11 was not, IMO, sufficient transition between "Benny's the only person who's never let me down" in 8.09 to Dean here, reiterating for Henry (and all the audience members who had NEVER EVER SEEN THE SHOW BEFORE) that he'll do anything to save Sam. I mean, not that we can't have deep resentment and brother-saving in the same ep, even, but I need lingering tension, people!
Everything in the last third of this was so ham-handed. Where is the subtlety, show? (Though I will say, Jensen and Jared were tops at working with what they were given, this ep. They pretty much carried it by the power of their faces alone, and I do not just mean in the sense of the pretty distracting me from the badness.)
OTOH, worldbuilding, huh. This was one of those episodes that, I feel, suffered from something I tend to think of as Star Trek syndrome: something goshbangwowhuge is introduced and resolved all in the same ep, never to be referenced again, much less given the half season's worth of development it deserved. 4.19 definitely suffered from that, I would say, to be only marginally saved when Adam popped up again later, and the same here. I would hope that we follow this Men of Letters trail and I bet the box will turn out to be useful, but I assume that we will never, ever see Abadon again. I mean, dude! The purest of the demons, selected by Lucifer himself, given the title Night of Hell (or Knight of Hell? but the other is cooler).
Apparently there are no Women of Letters.
I find it interesting that in a season that's been so careless with canonical details (the guy standing outside Amelia's house in 8.01, Samandriel's wings not appearing after he died, the "Winchester pact" not to look for each other, just for three), this episode is careful to explicitly confirm that line from back in S5 about the John/Mary romance being orchestrated by heaven. I didn't expect that to ever come up again. The fact that we're bothering to remember it now suggests that it will figure into this season's mythology, though I can't imagine how.
And my gosh, John Winchester. It turns out basically every important person in his life knew about the boogey man except him - and yet he still stumbled into hunting almost by accident. Presumably he never knew about Mary, clearly he never knew about his father.
This episode definitely gave me a lot more thinky thoughts than any episode has in a long time. Since 7.21, actually, I think.
In summary: the ham-handedness, the horrible dialogue, the tonal changes, and the Sam and Dean characterization that seems unrelated to anything we have seen in the last, oh, five seasons or so confirms me in my opinion that this season is bad, bad in much broader and more pedestrian ways than it has ever been bad before.
Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. (
DW replies)
Also, this ep is the third in a series of really weird tonal switches - from the itchy awful conflict of 8.09/8.10 to the LARPing lark of 8.11, to this one, all heavy with Family Issues and also big worldbuilding stuff. The progression of the Sam-Dean reconciliation has been not so much rushed as assumed pre-emptively; 8.11 was not, IMO, sufficient transition between "Benny's the only person who's never let me down" in 8.09 to Dean here, reiterating for Henry (and all the audience members who had NEVER EVER SEEN THE SHOW BEFORE) that he'll do anything to save Sam. I mean, not that we can't have deep resentment and brother-saving in the same ep, even, but I need lingering tension, people!
Everything in the last third of this was so ham-handed. Where is the subtlety, show? (Though I will say, Jensen and Jared were tops at working with what they were given, this ep. They pretty much carried it by the power of their faces alone, and I do not just mean in the sense of the pretty distracting me from the badness.)
OTOH, worldbuilding, huh. This was one of those episodes that, I feel, suffered from something I tend to think of as Star Trek syndrome: something goshbangwowhuge is introduced and resolved all in the same ep, never to be referenced again, much less given the half season's worth of development it deserved. 4.19 definitely suffered from that, I would say, to be only marginally saved when Adam popped up again later, and the same here. I would hope that we follow this Men of Letters trail and I bet the box will turn out to be useful, but I assume that we will never, ever see Abadon again. I mean, dude! The purest of the demons, selected by Lucifer himself, given the title Night of Hell (or Knight of Hell? but the other is cooler).
Apparently there are no Women of Letters.
I find it interesting that in a season that's been so careless with canonical details (the guy standing outside Amelia's house in 8.01, Samandriel's wings not appearing after he died, the "Winchester pact" not to look for each other, just for three), this episode is careful to explicitly confirm that line from back in S5 about the John/Mary romance being orchestrated by heaven. I didn't expect that to ever come up again. The fact that we're bothering to remember it now suggests that it will figure into this season's mythology, though I can't imagine how.
And my gosh, John Winchester. It turns out basically every important person in his life knew about the boogey man except him - and yet he still stumbled into hunting almost by accident. Presumably he never knew about Mary, clearly he never knew about his father.
This episode definitely gave me a lot more thinky thoughts than any episode has in a long time. Since 7.21, actually, I think.
In summary: the ham-handedness, the horrible dialogue, the tonal changes, and the Sam and Dean characterization that seems unrelated to anything we have seen in the last, oh, five seasons or so confirms me in my opinion that this season is bad, bad in much broader and more pedestrian ways than it has ever been bad before.
Original entry posted at Dreamwidth. Feel free to reply here or there. (
