Meta Monsters
I love NOTHING MORE than when this show decides to run commentary on itself and its fandom. I love it so much that I didn’t liveblog the show and am just going to kind of hum contentedly while I do housework and think of this.
However, it’s worth noting that this episode:
Critiqued the episode (quite fairly) from within the episode, which is one of my favorite tropes of all time. (I always think of the moment in The Sixth Sense where Cole is the hospital telling Dr. Crow that his story isn’t good enough and he needs to add some twists and turns to it to make it better...exactly at the halfway point of the film. GREAT STUFF!!)
Rehabilitated Becky (which, THANK GOD b/c the episode where she kidnaps Sam is just terrible and I never stopped being hurt/offended that the choice between fangirls was Becky or Marie when most of us lead pretty full lives with a lot of other good things in them).
Made the ending that all of us fear, the one with the gravestone that says “Winchester,” into one to be avoided at all costs. That is now literally the dilemma of the rest of the season: will Chuck’s Big Bad Ending come to pass or will the Winchesters be saved? This is great for those of us who don’t want Chuck’s ending.
Did more to develop Chuck into the Big Bad, basically guaranteeing that the miserable fucking ending that he wrote won’t be the real ending of the show even though he’s out here scaring us (Becky) with the prospect of something so painful and unfair.
Established that Chuck CAN do anything he wants (erasing the fans and their spot-on complaints from existence), which means that to avoid the nightmare ending he will have to Learn A Lesson and Change His Mind, which is really much better as a plot arc and piece of character development. (I bet you we’ll see Becky again.)
Showed Dean so deep in denial that he left big gaps where Cas’s name should be at least twice, both times right after mentioning the others--Jack, Mary, Rowena--making him The Big Empty again. In S13 Dean wasn’t mentioning Cas because he was too full of grief. Well...same.
Established that Dean returning to and trying to recapture the Great Winchester Brothers Road Trip where they alone save people and hunt things (just like in the good ole days before...WELL YOU KNOW feelings and shit) is not going to work--not for Sam and not, even if he doesn’t admit it, for Dean. Too much has changed.
Neatly segued into showing that this desire has changed for the fandom too. Even freaking BECKY doesn’t want that, and she used to write Wincest fanfic (before she realized it was massively unhealthy). The promo for next time is giving us another Winchester Classic, complete with their IDs from the second episode and jokes about how little they’ve changed (thank you, Jensen). Know that we are going to see how insufficient it is now. Maybe we will KEEP seeing that until Sam cracks or Cas comes back or something. But Denial Dean is here to stay, trying to recapture his pre-Cas self, until something forces his hand.
SPN writers, I love you and your layered commentary on narrative, canon, character, and fandom.