A Rambling Diatribe on Supernatural...

This season of Supernatural has been rubbing me the wrong way, and I finally had to get a little bit of my aggression out....

A Rambling Diatribe on Supernatural Season Eight...

"I know.  But I do not approve.  And I am not resigned." Edna St. Vincent Millay

This television season has been very different for me.  Because of my strong desire to write more, I have been trying to get out there and watch some other shows so that I can write on more than just Supernatural.  I had tried Being Human (US) a couple seasons ago, but by the end of the season, I realized I just wasn’t invested in the characters enough to continue with it.  This is a common theme with me.  Usually, because the longest hiatus is the summer hiatus and lasts about three months, I lose interest in the show during that period, and even if I had questions about what was happening, I don’t bother to tune in again.  In this way, hiatus usually kills my love for a show.  The one show that I have been watching habitually for several years now is Supernatural.  I began watching live at the beginning of the fourth season.  That year I also watched the first season of Fringe. I loved Fringe.  I even wrote haikus about it.  The story itself moved me.  But I didn’t love any of the characters.  I wasn’t really invested in their outcome. So even though we had that awesome cliffhanger with the alternative reality in which the twin towers were still in existence, I wasn’t sure I would be there for season two.  I did try.  Fringe moved to Thursday nights for its second season and was therefore in direct competition with Supernatural.  I chose Fringe--well, for two episodes anyway, and then I went back to Supernatural and didn’t move again.

See, they say this thing about Aquarians--they say that we are one of the most faithful signs in the zodiac.  That if we stop being interested, we just leave.  It is said that Aquarians like to mentally autopsy one target at a time. This has been true of my television experience as well.  As a faithful, devoted fan of Supernatural, I have written reviews for seasons, dissecting, finding meaning in the lives of the Brothers Winchester. Supernatural was the only television show I was committed to. The only one that no matter what else was planned,  I was in front of the television to watch the new episode when it was on.

But this year a strange thing happened to me.  I picked up another show. Initially, I was dubious about the show, but because of my devotion to Supernatural, I wanted to give its creator, Eric Kripke, a chance to tell us a new story. As the season went on, I started to care about the new story MORE. More as in more than Supernatural.  

Initially, I wondered if it was that “seven year itch” phenomena.  Did I fall in love with Revolution because it is exciting and new?  Have I grown so familiar with the Winchesters that I was taking them for granted?  Or am I maybe just seeing the Winchesters for the first time--without that idealized haze with which we gloss over the object of our adoration?

Prior to Supernatural, the shows that always moved me were shows with strong female characters.  Growing up I wanted to be Nancy Drew.  I loved Nancy.  To me, she represented everything a strong woman of our age should be.  And she did it before it was considered en vogue to do!  Nancy had these two best friends, Bess and George.  Bess was a real “girlie girl”.  She was slightly overweight so very voluptuous.  She shrieked and ran from spiders and creepy crawlies.  She needed help lifting things, liked pretty dresses...she had pretty blonde hair...She was everything that society said a girl of the 1930s was supposed to be.  George was the tomboy.  Her parents wanted a boy so badly that when she came out a girl they named her George anyway and taught her how to play baseball and do boy things.  She had short brown hair.  She had an athletic build.  She was founded in logic and reason and was the epitome of what girls really weren’t supposed to be in the 1930s.  The point is, Nancy was friends with both of them.  She could relate to both of them.  Nancy was the perfect combination of the two, actually.  Through Nancy, Carolyn Keene (the original and all who followed) showed American girls that it was possible to have it all.  A woman could be as strong as a man.  She could survive in a man’s world, and she could do all of these things without losing that feminine touch.  I always felt that Joss made an almost flawless modern Nancy in Buffy, with any of the additional characteristics of feminine strength represented in Cordelia and Willow.  

Scully was another strong female character in television that I loved.  Scully was intelligent and showed women that we can stand right beside men, fight, and still be women.  Nancy, Buffy, Scully, and women like them have been the role models of my life thus far.

So color me very puzzled about my love for Supernatural.  A show without strong heroines. A show that even seems to go out of its way to lump women into one of three categories: idol (picnic blanket, apple pie and birthday cake “normal” life), villain (Ruby, Lillith, etc.) or victim (Mary, Jessica, Jo, Ellen).

Looking back at the seasons of Supernatural, I see that this idea has always been there, beginning with both Mom and Jess being flambed on the ceiling in the Pilot episode.  I could brush it off though.  John Winchester was a tough ass who didn’t coddle his children or show much love because he was a Marine.  He was a tough soldier, a real man’s man.  He was all blood and guts and rage and he raised his boys in  a similar fashion.  Because of this, we could take the fact that Jess was home baking Sam cookies like a good girlfriend and not asking questions about what Sam was going to be doing. We wouldn’t ask why she never pried into his life because we understood that this “supernatural world” wasn’t a woman’s place.  We could turn our heads away from the fact that Dean treated women like pieces of candy he stole from the corner store even while secretly admitting that if a hot man with no address, an ancient leather jacket and a pickup line as clear as glass came up to us at a bar there is no way we’d go home with him.  I know I’d figure that it wasn’t his first time on this merry go round and that he’d probably leave me either pregnant, with the HIV or both...But we push all that away because they didn’t have a mom and they were raised by a soldier.

When Dean went back in time and found out about Mom, I was so happy with the writers.  So in love with the show!  This was a break in the stereotype!  This was a turn!  MOM was the hunter!  She is the one who knew about all of this horrible, crazy stuff.  She made the ultimate sacrifice to save her fiance.  Yes!  A woman, in the Supernaturalverse was able to save a man.  She did what the rough and tumble Marine couldn’t do.  He was dead.  His brawn, his soldierliness, his manliness...none of it saved him from death.  A cute little blonde did. And she kicked Dean’s ass, too.  This was so glorious.  I loved that it was the Campbell family that hunted.  

This season, with no warning, we were given a new storyline.  We were told that the Winchester men were actually part of a society of watcher-like characters that knew and catalogued and watched the supernatural.  These Men of Letters scoffed at hunters.  They felt they were above hunters. Now we are supposed to believe that John’s father was one of these Men of Letters (or was about to become officially) and that John would have been too if dad had survived. Several elements of this new storyline I find very disconcerting.  The least of these reasons being the writers watching too many episodes of Buffy and Warehouse 13 to come up with this storyline...

There are two elements that just all out disturb me.  The first is that we are eight seasons in and I can’t help but feel that Sam and Dean have been around the block so many times in the eight seasons (the equivalent of ten years with the two time jumps), that I don’t feel we can throw in such big chunks into the equation without looking like a blatant plot manipulation. Yeah guys, I’m sorry, but this looks like you’re just trying to write yourselves out of a corner.

The other very problematic element for me, and the one that I seriously cannot find a way to rectify, is how this new addition has changed the entire Mary and John dynamic, and took away that last bastion of feminine strength that existed in Supernatural. Now, the writers have decided that all of the heroicism within the Supernaturalverse, every last piece, should be in the province of men.  And not only in the province of men, but also in an elite “special” few of those men. The entire Campbell clan has systematically been vilified. Hunters themselves have been condemned.  Sam and Dean are tolerated because they are legacies, and Sam and Dean are proud of that.  But let me back this up and explain...

I have heard fans say that now with this Men of Letters thing the whole need to get Mary and John together makes sense.  I always felt it made sense.  John and Mary were the perfect combination--she was a warrior in the battle against the supernatural.  He was a human soldier. I guess I can say about John what I would say about Han Solo.  What made him so great was the fact that he did it on his own.  I remember when one of my best friends got into the X-Wing series and she was trying to sell them to me with the idea that the star of the X-Wing book series was Coran Horn, who was essentially Han Solo with a light saber.  I said point blank to her that one of the amazing things about Han was the fact that he did it on his own.  “Hokey religions and ancient weapons ain’t no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.” He didn’t want the force.  He didn’t need it.  He used his own guts, brawn, and sardonic wit to get the job done.  And I loved him for it.  One of the great things about John was that he was a fighter. He was the best hunter out there and not because he knew this stuff, but because of his humanity.  How he wasn’t part of that supernatural world and didn’t want to be.  That this man sold his soul and was tormented for the entire time he was down in Hell and did not break is a testiment to the human soul.  It can be tortured to no end, but it will not be destroyed.  That was the strength of John Winchester.  He didn’t need this specialness as well.  Quite frankly, I liked him better without it. John Winchester represented humanity as a whole, raw, enraged, with a sense of purpose and determination.

At many times the Supernatural, the evil, has been seen through the icy hand of women.  We could accept that women were vilified to some extent because the way Sam and Dean grew up essentially created a misogynistic culture.  But there was Mary, and with Mary, when Dean sees her, and sees how kick ass she is, his opinion of his mother, his opinion of the entire situation changes.  His mother wasn’t a victim like he thought.  She was a warrior.  I can’t express enough about how wonderful this was.  It meant that women were fighting the evil too.  We see that the evil wasn’t just in the form of women but women and men and as we all have free will (to some extent or another.  Like Scully once said “I believe we are free to be who we are, good, bad or indifferent. I believe our character determines our fate”).  

I can’t help but feel that this season in one fell swoop, took all of Mary’s power away.  Hunters are scoffed at by the Men of Letters. They are seen as troglodytes.  Now all of Mary’s power and her strength of ancestry, has been taken from her.  Now once again the men of the story (and an elite group of men no less) are the only important focus. Mary has once again become just another one of the women that roasted on the ceilings in the homes of Winchesters.  A plot device instead of an identity.