You know, I like "Supernatural". I was one of the few people who stuck through the embarrassingly slow and formulaic first episodes of the series back in '04 and really thought it had potential. And it did. It realized that potential some time in Season 2, with Season 3 being a good -albeit short- follow-up.
But soon after, it aired an episode with the title "Jumped the Shark", in Season 4 and the timing was impeccable. The absolute bullshit that was Season 4, with an equally crappy Season 5 squandered all you had worked for and you'd be at the bottom of the barrel, if not for a few things balancing the shit out-- like Castiel, who Misha Collins nailed and the overall larger scale of the battle, which at least made things fun to watch.
But with Eric Kripke's departure from the show, those left behind struggled to come up with interesting material for Season 6 and completely failed to do so. With an overall arc that even the Season 2 demon-hunting would laugh off the stage and with the contrived drama of Sam's soul, only your biggest fans stuck through to the end, even if we were plenty uncomfortable with even admitting it to ourselves.
Don't bother correcting the above statement; never look at numbers, especially those required by a small network like The CW, when you talk creative spark.
Come Season 7, you may as well have started titling all the episodes "Please, can we finally be done with this??" You're not even bothering with structuring the episodes themselves anymore. You just stick to the same tired formula, according to which Supernatural is about arbitrary drama between the brothers, usually focusing on one of the two, with said focus shifting each season and some stupid-ass bad guy that has to be bigger than the one the previous season to make it work.
Of course, when your heroes have already beaten Satan, magic burgers are hard to sell.
The episode that aired last night, called " How to win friends and influence monsters" (S07E10) confirmed something I'd known for a while. "Supernatural" hasn't, in fact, jumped the shark. No, that happened back when the creators acknowledged it (albeit with a tongue-in-cheek approach). By now, the show is so tired of having made jumping the shark a sport of Olympic proportions that it has just spontaneously developed the power of flight and permanently floats over the shark.
In the end of the episode, it's strongly suggested that Bobbie dies. Regardless of whether or not this is actually the case (and whether it will stick), this major dramatic moment happens two seconds before the end, in a cheap cliffhanger, of an episode about burgers that make people eat other people.
This shit bothers me so much, I can't even begin to explain.
So, instead, I'll just mention a few things that somebody should just get through their skulls if they intend to go for a season 8:
1) The Leviathan are boring. Their super-power is to eat people and be hard to kill. And yes, they can be killed, unless the finale of the show includes them repopulating the Earth. More than that, following Season 6 that had to scale things down after the whole BEAT SATAN'S ASS storyline that preceded it, Season 7 has problems even defining the threat the big baddies pose. There seems to be a very forced theme of corporate control, which would be fine if the writers of Supernatural had any sense of subtlety and symbolism, but as it stands now, it's just a snooze-fest that wouldn't even be relevant for a show made in '80s.
Also, their make-up is absolutely ridiculous. It's like the already silly vampire effect they have for this show, only on steroids.
2) Characters don't need to bitch to each other to grow. You don't need to come up with some retarded reason for Sam's soul going AWOL and you don't need to turn Dean into a drunk. Dean's situation is marginally interesting, but the "show- don't tell" rule applies only when you can do so organically in your show. Unfortunately, you can't. So, instead, we have moaning that gets irritating for anyone above the age of 16 and we have fucked up character actions that are just as forced as their dialogue (like that thing with Lisa and Ben toward the end of Season 6, or Dean killing Jewels Staite earlier this season).
3) Stop. Killing. Characters. Not everyone can do shock value. The only one who managed to do that was Whedon and that's because it falls under his view of drama not being allowed to have a happy ending. But he has a pattern and characters leave when they are no longer needed.
Again, last night's episode ended in a cliffhanger so this may be premature, but I don't see how you can get away from Bobbie's hat having a bullet-shaped hole and Bobbie being unconscious in the back of a truck. Not unless you intend to say that the shot missed him, but not his hat and he just passed out from the shock. In which case, fuck you, because as cop-outs go, this is right up there with "it was all a dream". Actually, it's worse; the "dream" thing can even be used well if it's one of those days that the planets align.
Regardless of the situation with Bobbie, however, it just pisses me off that you feel the need to insert these extreme jolts of "realism" and "cynicism" to make a point about how dangerous life is in this show. No, that's giving you way too much credit. Bobbie now, like Staite's character, like Jo and Ellen; they all died for shock value. Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember back in Season 2? When John died and we were robbed of a great character portrayed by a great actor? Yeah, nobody cared much, because it played on the guys' development. Leaving 'home', or what was left of it and growing up.
4) Put some fucking effort in structuring your episodes. There are countless examples of this and especially in those last couple of seasons since Kripke left the show, there are basic structural issues with each and every episode; some more than others. I remember it at least as far back as the Twilight-spoof episode, which was trying so hard to be funny it ended up being embarrassing. Guys, if you can't get me to laugh about Twilight, which I hate with every fiber of my being, you're doing it wrong.
Hell, your "real world" episode last season was so poorly-put together, both from a logical and a structural standpoint, each and every one of the gags fell extremely flat. Cutsie idea to argue that "a world without magic isn't fun" and as a wannabe writer I sympathize, but it's hard to get that across when the magical world has only been portrayed as an awful place where monsters roam for the last SEVEN YEARS.
Latest case in point, last night's episode, where Bobbie gets abducted by the Leviathan and the brothers ponder how to get in and rescue him. Lo and behold, out of nowhere, a cleaning truck with the one and only earthly chemical that hurts the Leviathan just HAPPENS to park right there. Even porn films are more subtle about getting things going.
Also, the photo-shopped pictures of Dick during the excruciating expository sequence looked awful. You can find better photo-shopped material in Deviant Art.
And that's that. Get your shit together, or be done with it. You were never more than my B-list favorite type of show, but I used to have fun at least. Despite all the occasional bullshit that would pop up, I had some fucking fun. Now, the issues are just too obvious. You can't be stretched THAT thin.
But soon after, it aired an episode with the title "Jumped the Shark", in Season 4 and the timing was impeccable. The absolute bullshit that was Season 4, with an equally crappy Season 5 squandered all you had worked for and you'd be at the bottom of the barrel, if not for a few things balancing the shit out-- like Castiel, who Misha Collins nailed and the overall larger scale of the battle, which at least made things fun to watch.
But with Eric Kripke's departure from the show, those left behind struggled to come up with interesting material for Season 6 and completely failed to do so. With an overall arc that even the Season 2 demon-hunting would laugh off the stage and with the contrived drama of Sam's soul, only your biggest fans stuck through to the end, even if we were plenty uncomfortable with even admitting it to ourselves.
Don't bother correcting the above statement; never look at numbers, especially those required by a small network like The CW, when you talk creative spark.
Come Season 7, you may as well have started titling all the episodes "Please, can we finally be done with this??" You're not even bothering with structuring the episodes themselves anymore. You just stick to the same tired formula, according to which Supernatural is about arbitrary drama between the brothers, usually focusing on one of the two, with said focus shifting each season and some stupid-ass bad guy that has to be bigger than the one the previous season to make it work.
Of course, when your heroes have already beaten Satan, magic burgers are hard to sell.
The episode that aired last night, called " How to win friends and influence monsters" (S07E10) confirmed something I'd known for a while. "Supernatural" hasn't, in fact, jumped the shark. No, that happened back when the creators acknowledged it (albeit with a tongue-in-cheek approach). By now, the show is so tired of having made jumping the shark a sport of Olympic proportions that it has just spontaneously developed the power of flight and permanently floats over the shark.
Spoilers -and pretty big ones- from this point on.
In the end of the episode, it's strongly suggested that Bobbie dies. Regardless of whether or not this is actually the case (and whether it will stick), this major dramatic moment happens two seconds before the end, in a cheap cliffhanger, of an episode about burgers that make people eat other people.
This shit bothers me so much, I can't even begin to explain.
So, instead, I'll just mention a few things that somebody should just get through their skulls if they intend to go for a season 8:
1) The Leviathan are boring. Their super-power is to eat people and be hard to kill. And yes, they can be killed, unless the finale of the show includes them repopulating the Earth. More than that, following Season 6 that had to scale things down after the whole BEAT SATAN'S ASS storyline that preceded it, Season 7 has problems even defining the threat the big baddies pose. There seems to be a very forced theme of corporate control, which would be fine if the writers of Supernatural had any sense of subtlety and symbolism, but as it stands now, it's just a snooze-fest that wouldn't even be relevant for a show made in '80s.
Also, their make-up is absolutely ridiculous. It's like the already silly vampire effect they have for this show, only on steroids.
2) Characters don't need to bitch to each other to grow. You don't need to come up with some retarded reason for Sam's soul going AWOL and you don't need to turn Dean into a drunk. Dean's situation is marginally interesting, but the "show- don't tell" rule applies only when you can do so organically in your show. Unfortunately, you can't. So, instead, we have moaning that gets irritating for anyone above the age of 16 and we have fucked up character actions that are just as forced as their dialogue (like that thing with Lisa and Ben toward the end of Season 6, or Dean killing Jewels Staite earlier this season).
3) Stop. Killing. Characters. Not everyone can do shock value. The only one who managed to do that was Whedon and that's because it falls under his view of drama not being allowed to have a happy ending. But he has a pattern and characters leave when they are no longer needed.
Again, last night's episode ended in a cliffhanger so this may be premature, but I don't see how you can get away from Bobbie's hat having a bullet-shaped hole and Bobbie being unconscious in the back of a truck. Not unless you intend to say that the shot missed him, but not his hat and he just passed out from the shock. In which case, fuck you, because as cop-outs go, this is right up there with "it was all a dream". Actually, it's worse; the "dream" thing can even be used well if it's one of those days that the planets align.
Regardless of the situation with Bobbie, however, it just pisses me off that you feel the need to insert these extreme jolts of "realism" and "cynicism" to make a point about how dangerous life is in this show. No, that's giving you way too much credit. Bobbie now, like Staite's character, like Jo and Ellen; they all died for shock value. Nothing more, nothing less.
Remember back in Season 2? When John died and we were robbed of a great character portrayed by a great actor? Yeah, nobody cared much, because it played on the guys' development. Leaving 'home', or what was left of it and growing up.
4) Put some fucking effort in structuring your episodes. There are countless examples of this and especially in those last couple of seasons since Kripke left the show, there are basic structural issues with each and every episode; some more than others. I remember it at least as far back as the Twilight-spoof episode, which was trying so hard to be funny it ended up being embarrassing. Guys, if you can't get me to laugh about Twilight, which I hate with every fiber of my being, you're doing it wrong.
Hell, your "real world" episode last season was so poorly-put together, both from a logical and a structural standpoint, each and every one of the gags fell extremely flat. Cutsie idea to argue that "a world without magic isn't fun" and as a wannabe writer I sympathize, but it's hard to get that across when the magical world has only been portrayed as an awful place where monsters roam for the last SEVEN YEARS.
Latest case in point, last night's episode, where Bobbie gets abducted by the Leviathan and the brothers ponder how to get in and rescue him. Lo and behold, out of nowhere, a cleaning truck with the one and only earthly chemical that hurts the Leviathan just HAPPENS to park right there. Even porn films are more subtle about getting things going.
Also, the photo-shopped pictures of Dick during the excruciating expository sequence looked awful. You can find better photo-shopped material in Deviant Art.
And that's that. Get your shit together, or be done with it. You were never more than my B-list favorite type of show, but I used to have fun at least. Despite all the occasional bullshit that would pop up, I had some fucking fun. Now, the issues are just too obvious. You can't be stretched THAT thin.
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