Apologies beforehand if this reviews sounds incomplete, disjointed or incoherent. I had a terrible time watching this episode and after I did, I seem to have blocked off most of it from my mind, so things in this article might not be as accurate as they should be.
Hello and welcome to the nearly impossible to write Gripe Review for episode 200. Last week I said I wished someone would pay me for having to watch Paper Moon to write its review. This week I wished I could pay someone to watch the episode for me and give me key notes for the review, because I literally, literally could not watch this episode in its entirety without gagging.
There are no words for how much I despised this week’s show. I will write a review, I will list my gripes, but this by no means can express the depth of despair, second hand embarrassment, and incredulous outrage I felt while forcing myself to get through it. I'm hoping the comments help me because as off Wednesday night (yes I watched it a day late; I was dreading it that much,) I feel almost violated. To make things worse, since last July I cut all ties with the fandom and the multiple forums I was active on, so I don't have a place to go and vent. This is truly the only SPN corner for me to mourn what’s happened to my favorite show.
Before "Fan Fiction”, "Bitten" was the worst episode of the series for me. The crown is now passed to the landmark 200th episode. And how sad that this was a milestone, for it looks like 100 shows past the memorable "Point of No Return," Supernatural has finally hit its rock bottom. It no longer is the iconic TV show it once was, but a chaotic fairground Carver and his writers trash on regular basis and use as a stage to parade their self-indulgent ownership of it by dragging its text, its fans and its legacy though mud.
Gripe #1 - What is this even supposed to be?
Comedy? Parody? A homage to the fandom? A stab at the female fans?
If you make an episode that isn't funny, doesn't have action, or emotion, or a decent plot for that matter, there must be a reason behind it. The more I think about it, the less I find that reason. Why did Carver and his writers decide to make a Supernatural themed musical packed with fandom references? Was it the challenge of it? To see if they could still push the envelope in a post Edlund landscape that has been sadly barren of genius meta? And why an all-female cast for an all-male show? Why not a mixture of girls and boys?
What were Sam and Dean supposed to take away from this?
In Monster at the End of this Book they broke the fourth wall by making Sam and Dean's life into a book series that had a fandom. They poked a bit of fun at that fandom, but mainly the episode centered on Chuck's introduction as the Winchester Gospel's prophet. It was an ingenious idea and to this day, one of my most favourite episodes of the show.
In The Real Ghost Busters we had a Supernatural convention, the fan stuff was still kept light and again, the episode focused more on Chuck's story and the season's main arc.
The French Mistake was a little more meta but even it had roots in the season's mythology. In the end, there was a purpose to Sam and Dean’s journey to the other other world.
This episode, I can’t find a purpose for. It isn’t grounded in the show's mythology, and nothing that happens adds or subtracts anything from the main arc (whatever that is at the moment.) It pretty much plays like a dragged out comedy sketch, with the same joke – which was only hinted at in the aforementioned episodes - stretched across the entire hour. In the end nothing is gained. The only change that happens is that the viewers are thrown out of their suspension of disbelief while the absurdity of the most obsessed subset of their population is slapped in their faces as if to say, “Look, this is you. We find you pathetic.”
Gripe #2 - Who is this awful character supposed to represent?
No offence to the actress. I’m sure she did the best with the material she was given. This character however has no redeeming qualities. She has to be one of the most unconvincing and ridiculous side characters ever to appear on the show. Nothing she says, or does, feels authentic. It's as if she was invented to annoy and insult Sam and Dean with her smartass answers to their justified confusion. She and her co-captain mostly behaved like actors who didn’t want to break character even while interacting with people in real life.
I talked in one of my earlier reviews about clownish behaviors from one-off characters. Marie is a prime example of that. There's no universe in which her over the top attitude makes any sense unless this entire episode is a big prank on Sam and Dean orchestrated by Ashton Kutcher.
Chuck was a metaphor for the Supernatural writers. The cast and crew in The French Mistake carried the names of the actual cast and crew of the show and were supposed to represent them. Who is Marie supposed to represent? Us? Tumblr? IMDB? The fandom in general? Carver? Thompson? The mighty God? Or is she just a random character who happens to talk like she swallowed the entire Supernatural fandom and barfs it every time she opens her mouth?
Gripe #3 - Why does Dean care?
From the moment Dean steps into the auditorium and sees the actors and the set he is bothered by it. I know they did it for the comedic effect: nothing drags more hahas out of the viewers than the always composed Dean getting rattled by a bunch of cosplaying teens. What I don't get is why he was so bothered? This is not a Broadway production that millions of people would watch. He and Sam aren't public figures whose characters would be defamed by a small high school play. As far as these girls and everyone in their audience knows they are fictional characters in a book series. Why does Dean try to correct them, or stop them from reinterpreting the stories? Why isn’t he more like Sam, slightly amused and completely unconcerned?
I would have understood if Dean took offence at the prop depicting his mother’s burning body on the ceiling, or the actor reducing Bobby's entire character to a single catchphrase. But he said nothing to those, yet took the most issue with the play's Sam and Dean standing a little too close together, which was yet another stab at the subtext-loving section of the fandom for God knows what reason.
Gripe #4 - Dropping the 'D' bomb
When last summer at JIB con, Jensen Ackles implied fans of Dean & Castiel's romantic relationship were delusional I thought it was unnecessary censure. Why did he care what people wrote in their fanfiction? Why spoil their fun? Some fans told me it was because he and other cast members were fed up with people bringing it to their attention, because such things belonged in the closed circles of the fandom and, like dirty laundry, should never be aired in front of the people who bring us the show. I accepted that as legitimate. After all, an actor who's played a character for a decade feels close to him, and may not like to be reminded of every interpretation the fans might come up with for that character. He shouldn’t be forced to deal with it.
Fast forward to this episode and because of what was put in the script he had to deal with it, extensively.
So the decree that Destiel is fandom bound and neither Jensen, nor anyone else involved with the show should have to hear about it only applies to the fans. The writers can bring it up, dress it down, put it on screen, and Jensen & Co have to perform it in very nauseating details? They went as far as discussing ship names, the correct way to pronounce it, and lets not forget the cosplay Cas singing a melancholy song to a sleeping cosplay Dean.
In an age when Arrow makes its flagship canon, and Hannibal's creator teases slash fans with suggestive dialogue, it was quite conservative for Supernatural’s cast and crew not to want to touch the concept with a ten foot pole. But as I said, it was their right and fans respected it. What writers did in this episode was to walk all over that respect. It was as if they said, “You shouldn’t talk to the actors about it, but we’ll do it if we want to, idjits!”
Edit (Jensen's spontaneous look at the camera): A few posters are telling me in the comments that the look Jensen gave the camera as Destiel was discussed was unscripted, and it was to show how much he despised shipping. So let me get this straight. Jensen is giving the viewers the stink eye because of something Robbie put in his script? How is that fair? Or even logical?
Gripe #5 - Phrase Goulash
Destiel wasn't the only fandom bomb they dropped in this episode. Idjit, assbutt, baby, Samulet, chick flick moment, and whatever BM was supposed to mean flew left and right past our ears. This episode was chock-full of phrases pulled out of fandom and show lockers and inserted into every piece of dialogue they had room for. It was obviously meant as a “Wink wink, nudge nudge" to the diehard fans. However I don't imagine anyone being amused by the twentieth or thirtieth time it was done, not even the most hard-core fans. They stuffed the entire script with references. After a while it felt tasteless, forced and faked, not to mention peculiar to those casual viewers who knew nothing about half of them. It felt like characters couldn't have a normal conversation before having to pause for a bada-boom-pish Supernatural reference, a habit which made them even more unnatural and unbelievable.
Gripe #6 - Sam shilling (?!)
At one point Marie says to Dean “If Sam and Dean were real, they wouldn’t back down from a fight. Especially my sweet, brave, selfless Sam. There’s nothing he can’t do,” and Dean looks somewhat miffed.
I don’t get what they meant to parody here. We saw Sam obsession with Becky too. Yet in the real world, at least as far as my experience goes, both brothers have large fanbases with neither one overshadowing the other. So where is this Sam shilling (or parody of Sam shilling) come from? Is the criticism aimed at the fans who – in their opinion - unfairly favor one Winchester over the other, or at their own writing, which from the beginning insisted on giving the most plot driving, challenging quests to Sam while relegating Dean's role to that of the supportive older brother?
And isn't it also interesting that, when the script demanded the author self insert herself into her own play, it was in the role of Sam?
Gripe #7 – Show shilling(?!)
When Sam and those kids were trapped in the school basement we finally met the villainess. In the same vein as most Monsters of the Weeks, she started monologuing the moment the camera turned to her, and this part of her speech stood out for me, “Supernatural has everything: Life, death, resurrection, redemption. But above all, family. All set to music you can really tap your toe to. It isn’t some meandering piece of genre dreck. It’s epic.”
Again, are they laughing at themselves or dead serious about this? I only agree with this if they changed the tense from present to past. Supernatural had everything. It wasn’t some meandering piece of genre dreck. It was epic. Putting such a bold statement in an episode as dreckish as this one creates a black hole of irony that sucks everything out of existence except for the pure essence of WTF.
Gripe #7 - Wasting Chuck's appearance on this pile of @#$
And finally, poor Chuck. For 5 seasons the mystery of who he was and why he disappeared was kept safe in the far recesses of Supernatural’s untouched history, causing fans to anticipate a grand entrance for him as God or an equally impressive entity once he eventually returned to the show.
They wasted it on this. I wonder why Chuck cares about a high school musical director with a tendency to misinterpret and reimagine his work. I was almost expecting Chuck's lawyer to step out from behind him and hand her a cease and desist order. Now that would've been a great twist.
Kudos: “That is some of the worst fan fiction that I have ever heard. I mean seriously, where did you find this garbage?”
The only thing I liked in the episode was this line from Marie. After Dean gave her a rundown of seasons 6-10 she called it as she saw it: the worst fanfiction ever made. Can’t say I disagree, especially listening to Dean’s summary and realizing how silly and disjointed the post Kripke years truly were. Marie was not even told the whole story. Dean left out the part when he tricked his brother into accepting an angel into his body, and the part he threw a helpless Castiel out of the bunker. I wonder how she would have reacted to those OOC moments of Carver’s masterpiece.
Some people were disappointed Misha was excluded from this episode. I'm happy he wasn't there. At least his legacy isn't tainted by this train wreck. I don't care how thrilling it might feel to some fans to have their subculture turned inside out on the show. I hear Tumblr was in party mode and I don’t understand why. There's an artful way to break the fourth wall (Monster at the End of This Book, The French Mistake,) then there's driving a bulldozer through it, crashing into the crowd and over them, then putting it in reverse and driving over them again. That's what happened here.
Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments. In fact I beg you to do so because I need as much vent space as I could get and I can’t reply to my own article. Even if you liked the episode and think I'm absolutely wrong, please tell me about it. Maybe you'd be able to change my mind, though judging by how many times I had to stop the show to keep from throwing up in my mouth, I highly doubt that would be possible.
Note: I will not post a Gripe Review for next week’s episode. I will be out of town, and it looks like another awful filler so nothing of great import will be lost.
Tessa
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