Thanks as always for your wisdom! For the anons who talked about if Cas thinks about sex or if he secretly likes parties, I would like to add that thinking about what the characters do off screen is a fun exercise for me. :) Of course I love everything Show presents to us on screen but we know even from Show things happen that we don’t see until there is a passing mention of it like the mixtape gift. So if it’s cool, I’ll say enjoy filling in the gaps with your imagination! :)
OH GOSH that’s nice of you. :)
But yeah, I added it up once. For every year (on average, not counting things like four months in hell or a year in purgatory) of the Winchesters’ lives, we see a little more than 16 hours of it all.
23 episodes x 42 minutes (on average) / 60 minutes = 16.1 hours
What do they do during the other 8,743.9 hours in the year?
(8,767.9 hours in a leap year?)
We hear about some of it (Cas went to Syria, they drove halfway across the country for a case, Dean and Cas watched Tombstone, etc.) but those things being textual, the writers actually want us to wonder what else they’re doing in their spare time.
Sure, we know that Dean works on Baby, sometimes washes all the cars in the garage when he’s bored, and makes mixtapes, and that Sam listens to weird podcasts (and sometimes Ladyheart), and is slowly making his way through the bunker library and digitizing it, and that Cas sometimes goes riverboat gambling and accidentally marries djinn queens (or at least jokes about it).
But doesn’t that only make you wonder when they do their laundry, or go shopping, or how often they pop in to visit Jody or Donna, or how often they keep in touch with Garth, or if they all ever just decide to go out for ice cream just because they can?
The show is kind enough to give us more than 364 days worth of fanfic gaps to fill, you know? We only see about 2/3 of one full day on our screens every year. That leaves an awful lot to our imaginations. :D
Sure, some of it is explained away in episodes (it must’ve taken them nearly two days to drive to Rhode Island in 13.17, and that pawn shop in 13.16 was in Oregon, another nearly two day drive each way to the opposite coast, and they theoretically made that round trip twice in the episode...).
Episodes like Baby showed us a little more of what they do on long road trips, but even that episode reduced three days into 42 minutes.
Heck. These mystery hours are where fanfic is born. :D
I know I’ve written about this before, and yeah, the fact that Cas was trying to RETURN the mixtape made it obvious that we’d missed some significant interaction with Dean where Dean gave it to him in the first place. That is clearly a big one. And obviously casually mentioning that time Dean made Cas watch Tombstone-- not like it was a one-off special occasion thing but the implication that it wasn’t, that maybe watching movies together is something they do regularly, you know? But those are “major reminders” that they still do stuff when we’re not watching. There’s so many more tiny reminders that we just mentally gloss over.
I went looking for an old post where I discussed this before, and in searching for it I found the very long and painfully detailed close read post I did of 13.06. There were A LOT of subtle prods that kept us thinking even about tiny things that happened offscreen:
Dean pronounces the room “awesome,” then immediately suggests “quick shower, steak dinner” and postpones all hunt-related activity until morning. Through the swinging saloon doors to the bedroom, Dean begins hanging up their plastic-wrapped-from-the-cleaners suits. I think that’s the first time we’ve ever seen them with suits in that particular state. Yet another reminder that they do ~normal life stuff~ off screen, like taking their FBI suits to the cleaners. We don’t see it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Dean exclaims from the other room, “Yes! Stirrup hangers!” and heck I’m disappointed we didn’t actually get to see those… But THEEEMES because it happened offscreen, and we’re being invited to take Dean’s word for it. Are these hangers specifically FOR stirrups? Hangers in the shape of stirrups? Or made out of repurposed stirrups? How does that work? We just don’t know, but we have to use our imagination to fill in the blanks here.
And right now I’m watching 12.09. Mary’s just received a call on Dean’s phone, and it’s Alicia. Who’s clearly been keeping in touch with Dean since they met in 12.06, at least enough to feel comfortable calling and asking for help on a hunt. Even Cas’s reminder that Sam and Dean had been missing for six weeks, two days, and ten hours invites us to fill in all the blanks in the montage we watched of that time passing, and Cas’s story about his failed hunt that covered just a few of those missing days... The entire series is like this. It’s only moments like the mixtape that truly prompt us to actively think about what other Big Events we might’ve missed.
This is definitely the most fun way to watch the show for me, because this is good storytelling. It’s inviting viewers to actively imagine the characters as real people who have full lives outside of what we see on tv, even down to the tiniest details.
