robbie thompson proves that we’re not asking for much when we ask for:
no dead women
no sexualized violence
no gross fetishization of women of color
cas
dialogue that reflects more than a decade of development
it’s not hard to do these things, and the audience responds so well! this ep wasn’t just excellent writing. it was written with an awareness of what makes fans feel good and validated and like their feelings matter, all without jeopardizing the story or discounting the brothers. it’s that simple.
I threw myself into online dating with a vengeance. I drank my weight in Jameson. I read but ignored every message in my inbox. I cut off all my hair. I liked but didn’t reblog a thousand posts. I read the entirety of Down to Agincourt and joined the twitter book club for that fic. We all spent a lot of time crying about the words “I contain multitudes” for no discernable reason.
I was angry.
Not because Charlie died. Lord knows everyone on this show kicks the bucket eventually. We all saw it coming from the previous Robbie Thompson episode that hammered in the fact that the dead never truly leave us. I was pissed with the way it was handled, and that led to several stunning moments of clarity. The ensuing maelstrom of wank, including the DePaul conference, A14 and Jibcon, led me to several realizations that euthanized my interest in castle-in-the-sky speculation and analysis.
I’ll get to that, but first let’s talk about the finale.
I was muttering, “Just kill Sam, just kill Sam, KILL HIM DEAN,” throughout the entire finale, because the stuff Dean said about how evil their codependent behavior was is fundamentally true. To acknowledge it is to acknowledge that it’s a problem, and instead of moving FORWARD into a resolution (Dean kills Sam, moves to Pluto), they took a step back.
Obviously Dean can’t kill Sam and move to Pluto to contemplate his fucked up life, but there was a genuinely interesting cliffhanger hiding in that dialogue that would have kept my hiatus fires burning until Sam came back from the dead and Dean came back from Pluto.
I got angry when the Mark of Cain backstory about being the finger in the dyke came to light, because WHERE WAS THAT SENSE OF DREAD URGENCY ALL SEASON? As soon as Death launched into Project Exposition, an alternate season ten flashed before my eyes. One where they discovered this bit of lore at the midseason finale and had to grapple with the consequences and connotations. It was a glorious season ten, where The Darkness (*trying to keep a straight face*) was properly set up as The Worst Thing Ever and they came up with several ways to get around it that ultimately led to dead ends. So when it was released, we’d feel the full weight of the consequences.
In my alternate season ten, Rowena tracks down the codex and the Book of the Damned on her own and the brothers try to STOP her from forcibly removing the Mark of Cain, as a marker of how far they’ve come from sacrificing the world for each other.
Crowley’s humanity then becomes a key part of the season development. Will he help his mother or the Winchesters? Castiel’s involvement becomes part of his own many-seasons-long character development of, “No, I will not kill one person to save thousands, I don’t get to play god.”
The finale wasn’t even over yet and I’d already plotted a better-paced and ultimately more fascinating season ten than the one that was presented to us. I had plenty of time, since it was so deeply boring.
And if a cocktail waitress turned liquor store clerk whose life is in shambles and doesn’t have two pennies to rub together can, quietly in fifteen minutes while paying attention the screen, come up with a better story than the one I’ve been told?
Fuck this story, I don’t need it.
Jeremy Carver, lord bless and keep the No Homo Intern, is not in charge of this show. Or rather, if he is, he’s clearly just collecting a paycheck at this point. A showrunner who cared about keeping Supernatural alive wouldn’t have let Charlie die, or let Dean literally kill Death to fuel the codependency fires. He would have seen the grains of potential in this story and demanded them to be played out.
As it stands, it looks like he threw darts at a board and said, “Eh, formless darkness from space? Good enough, let’s throw that in last-minute.”
I spent months curating and speculating on the narrative threads that they left hanging. There were so many good storylines that had basis in fact and a good deal of subtext hinting towards, and they chose to leave them all hanging in favor of, “Look how BIG this problem is! Again!” in a way that wasn’t foreshadowed at all.
And to throw that in on top of Charlie’s ultimately-pointless death? I mean, come on, Supernatural. I’ve excused my problematic fave because of delicious subtext that I STILL think is eventually coming to light for too long. Let’s talk about Charlie. Or rather, let’s sum up.
Robbie Thompson pitched tons of alternative ideas to killing Charlie, he fought for her, and regardless of Carver’s reluctance (I’ve heard that he didn’t like it either and Singer was the big push for it), Carver is the SHOWRUNNER. If he’d wanted Charlie alive hard enough to fight for it, Charlie would be alive.
They threw the responsibility onto Buckner and Ross-Leming, the worst writing team on the show. Obviously Thompson refused outright (her death episode is the only Charlie episode not written by Thompson), so instead of handing it off to Berens or Dabb or hell, even Glass, they let Buck Off and Gross-Leming kill her the same way they killed Kevin.
Egregiously, disgustingly, and with a plot so chock-full of holes you could drive the fridge that houses most Supernatural females through it.
I wanted a swan song on par with Bobby Singer, or the last-minute-ditch-effort glory of John Winchester, or the respectful and ultimately glorifying send-up for Gadreel.
What I got was season one bullshit. Reality check: season one was ten years ago. TV was a different place in 2005, and so was Supernatural. Some people clearly never moved forward, and it showed in the clumsy way they handled Charlie’s demise.
How could the man who brought us so many amazing episodes before he became showrunner let this happen? How could the driving force behind the glory that was season eight let this happen? Easy answer: Jeremy Carver is collecting a paycheck. I still see the brushstrokes of the glorious story he wanted to tell, but he no longer has the fight in him to tell that story.
Singer is still stuck in season four, and his wife is on the writing staff. Singer thinks that as long as Sam and Dean keep choosing each other, and LITERALLY damn the world, people will keep tuning in. Eugenie Ross-Leming thinks racist trucks are a good plot device. Imagine their family dinners for a minute. I have, and it’s the only thing that’s brought me to snickering, horrendous joy in the past month.
If I was hired to revamp Supernatural, I’d fire half the writing staff. Most of the problems in seasons nine and ten are due to the CLEARLY divergent ideas of the long-timers (Klein, Buckner and Ross-Leming, Singer) and the “Let’s keep telling this story because it’s a good one” writers (Robbie Thompson, Robert Berens, Andrew Dabb on his good days).
I can’t continue to yo-yo between the glory of the Destiel Burger Date (Dabb) and the horror of Dean checking out co-eds more than ten years his junior (Charmelo-Snyder). I can’t keep letting an entire writers’ room worth of stupid decisions slide because the decisions of four of them are wonderful.
I haven’t even delved into Destiel yet, because I wanted to make those points first so that I could say this as shortly and sweetly as possible.
Destiel clearly has the support of the “Let’s bring Supernatural forward” writers. I bet it still has Carver’s support, in that deep dark place where he gives a shit. But I will no longer tune in to see Berens and Thompson fight Klein and Buckner/Ross-Leming on this issue indefinitely.
For Supernatural, I have stopped saying, “I care,” and started saying, “Why should I care?”
For Destiel, I have officially exchanged, “This story has potential and is amazing in the subtextual plane already,” for, “Pics or it didn’t happen.”
This hiatus will be spent working on handing the NHI reins over to Thompson and/or Berens so that we can keep the fandom fandom alive. I am writing Carver out of his own fanfic because he doesn’t deserve it anymore. I have no time for speculation on what may happen in season eleven because at this point, I don’t give one entire fuck about what Sam and Dean Winchester do to fuck up the world this time.
They have the first two episodes of season eleven to convince me to stick around.
Okay, this brought the tears to my eyes. Charlie was Robbie’s baby. He created her, and until tonight he was the only one who wrote her. I don’t know what went down in the writers room that led to this decision. I don’t know if Robbie got any say in it. All I know is that either way, I know Robbie is devastated by this character death just as much as we are.
Send your love Robbie’s way, guys. I think he needs it just as much as we do right now.
