A bit about last week's Supernatural

[sholio]

My reaction to this episode was ... mixed. I thought the fandom parody was hysterically funny, and there were bits throughout that I liked. ("I am the prophet Chuck!") But overall, it was too fourth-wall-breaking and heavy-handed for my tastes, and came off feeling kind of, um, masturbatory on the writers' parts. I'm still trying to work out exactly what it was about the episode that made me so uncomfortable, because it wasn't the references to fandom (though I've seen some people reacting badly to that -- honestly though, if you've been in fandom for any length of time and really have no idea what it looks like from the outside, dude, get some perspective!), but the whole thing with the self-conscious "reminding the audience that this is a TV show" just made me feel ... kind of weird. It doesn't help that a lot of shows have done these kinds of fourth-wall-breaking storylines before (and comics too, as well as like 2/3 of everything Stephen King has written) and often done them quite a bit better -- I thought Stargate's "200" episode was a brilliant use of the trope, for example -- and so it mostly just felt like the writers had run out of ideas and were clutching at straws.

I know a lot of my f'list liked this one, though, and I'm happy for them. :D I think I'll bask in my warm glow from the previous week and contemplate the existence of a Sam-and-Dean-are-office-workers AU, because I really kinda want to write it.

Comments

[ratcreature]

I like it in rare cases. For example I loved Morrison's Animal Man arc. But that is so surreal throughout, and the meta is then explicit with meeting Morrison, whereas in this episode they are sort of stuck half-way. Also the former then of course required brain-twisting contortions to bring Animal Man back as regularly working character and that's with all the inherent wackiness that is at a comic book's disposal. On SPN they don't have that. The meta is part of the previous storyline, and can't be discarded if the mytharc is supposed to work.

[sholio]

*nods* Most of the examples I can think of where I've enjoyed it have either been really over-the-top and silly, or very thoroughly integrated into the structure of the show. Combining the fourth-wall-breaking with serious treatment of the existing SPN mytharc really did not work for me. I don't think that it makes the episode objectively bad, just not to my personal taste.