I almost feel a bit bad making this video because when I was 13, 14,
Supernatural used to be my favorite show in the world. And, hey, I still feel a little flash of
nostalgia when "Carry On My Wayward Son" comes on.
Unfortunately, while Supernatural had a decently strong start,
This show is a textbook example of what some people call "seasonal rot", that is, when a show drags on for so long that it,
simply put, starts to suck.
And given that Supernatural, a show that was originally slated to end after five seasons, is now at thirteen seasons and counting,
It's evident that the majority of the issues with this show stem from the fact that the showrunners just won't let it die.
So even though I feel like I'm betraying some younger iteration of myself by admitting this,
*sigh* Supernatural real bad.
Here's why.
During the show's intended five-season run, the goal was to have every season up the stakes with its Big Bad.
This was done pretty effectively. We started in Season One with brothers Sam and Dean facing down a singular, albeit powerful, demon
and intended to end the series with the literal apocalypse, including the Four Horsemen and the actual Devil.
We got this big powerful finale with one of the brothers sacrificing himself to stop the apocalypse and save the world
So when Supernatural was renewed for a sixth season, there was a little bit of confusion. How can you make a Big Bad
that's bigger and badder than Satan without it seeming like it's coming out of nowhere?
Well...as it turns out...you don't.
After Season Five, the show didn't really have anywhere else to go.
This meant that they had two options: either
introducing villains that are kind of underwhelming in comparison to previous seasons
or try to find a scarier Big Bad than they already have.
Supernatural has played around with both. In Season Seven, they introduced the Leviathans who came out of nowhere and were never mentioned before.
They were essentially these ancient monsters who ate humans and their plan was to make all humans mindless and fat for easy devourin'.
Also one of them was a rich businessman.
It seemed like the intention here was to provide satire on corporate America.
Besides the numerous dick jokes, we got references to turducken and other 'Murican things.
It's not the worst idea in the world if executed well
Unfortunately the writers clearly didn't know what to do with these new characters
so we would often go multiple episodes without them showing up or doing anything particularly scary,
despite the fact that they were supposed to be this terrifying, built-up group of villains.
The writers also seemed a little unsure of what they wanted to go for. On one hand they were sometimes trying to make the
Leviathans this sort of comic relief and they did give me my favorite terrible line in the history of the show
LEVIATHAN: Everything is better
with cheese.
On the other, they sometimes wanted them to be this super serious game-changing threat.
It's not that you can't effectively juggle comedy in serious situations. The Joker is funny and a legitimate threat at the same time.
But the way this was executed here made it feel more like the writers
just forgot what the Leviathans were or that they even existed half the time.
This left the threat of the Leviathans feeling almost hollow and made Season 7 feel entirely like filler. On the other hand,
Supernatural seems to have learned from its Leviathan problem
and have been working to make sure that the Big Bads of each season felt like genuine terrifying threats.
Unfortunately, that hasn't been working out great either.
The problem is they've already exhausted most of their established lore in terms of threats.
For the first 5 seasons, they gradually started building up little pieces of a bigger universe
until we ended up with a decently well-painted picture of who the most powerful entities in this world were and why they were so terrifying.
Then finally the main characters faced down these entities and more or less won.
After that, there's not much in the way of established threats for them to fight that wouldn't be a massive downgrade,
so unfortunately, in order to "up the stakes" from here the writers have to keep bringing in bigger,
badder, and more powerful entities for the brothers to fight, even at the cost of good storytelling.
All of a sudden we have Metatron, an even more evil and powerful angel than Satan
with no mentions of how his existence should have factored into what we already know about angels from the first eight seasons.
And then they defeat Satan's more evil cousin, so then what? Well, then
11 seasons into the show, we're told about the Darkness, an evil super scary entity that's older than God.
Great time to bring up that little tidbit.
And then she's defeated so they focus on a secret order that was never alluded to for over eight seasons despite
Sam and Dean's entire paternal ancestry line supposedly being a part of this order.
Turns out, four seasons after that, there's another secret evil version of this order that emerged from a schism
despite having absolutely nothing to suggest that.
Of course, not every villain has to be foreshadowed several seasons before they appear.
You can bring up totally new villains and conflicts. That's fine.
But they should still be consistent with what we know about that universe.
But the writers of Supernatural seem to be continually writing themselves in to corners and having to retcon long-established rules about how their universe works.
Now I'll give them that some of these characters like Metatron are actual biblical figures and not original characters that the showrunners created
but given the fact that they're fairly distinct from their biblical counterparts, they're effectively treated like original characters regardless.
Besides, in the context of the actual TV show, a lot of these reveals still seem to come out of nowhere.
Just to be clear, the problem here isn't
necessarily just that the writers seem to be making the villains, and by extension the plot, up as they go.
The problem is that the stakes have been upped so high so quickly that there's no satisfactory way to top it.
The world has ended time and time again. The brothers have died countless times,
and they watched as repeatedly their friends died and got brought back like it was nothing. At this point,
there's simply nothing you can do to the plot that feels impactful and earned.
It's all been done and any attempts to make the consequences any bigger just come off as cheap.
Let's compare Supernatural to its spiritual predecessor, another show that intended to end in its fifth season with a main character
sacrificing themselves for their sibling, only to be brought back at the beginning of Season 6 when the show was unexpectedly renewed.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
which aired from 1997 to 2003, serves as an inspiration for
Supernatural and even has a few actors in common with the show. While not perfect, the show represents a lot of what
Supernatural should have done with regards to things like consequences and stakes.
Ha! Stakes.
Every season, Buffy kept upping the ante,
but never in a way that felt unearned. All the villains felt like they were sufficiently built up,
and this show's mythos was kept just vague enough that it wasn't implausible that, say,
a god from another dimension could show up and wreak havoc.
Unlike Supernatural,
which showed its hand too quickly, Buffy slowly
built up details about their world, and when Buffy finally did decide to end the show, their apocalyptic
finale didn't feel like it came out of nowhere.
Well, besides that weird all-female group of Watchers or whatever.
But the threat that they gave us, the first evil that's existed since before humans or demons, was foreshadowed since the very first season.
The terrifying, apocalyptic horror felt earned.
Not only that, but they knew that Buffy
sacrificing her life for a second time would simply be redundant,
so this time around they gave us a new uniquely poignant ending for the show.
Buffy didn't simply rehash the same plot a second time,
and that's important. Given that the show ended two years before
Supernatural began, the Supernatural show runners would have done well to learn from both Buffy's successes and its failures.
Unfortunately...
Sam and Dean don't get any real character growth anymore.
No, seriously, sit down and ask yourself
What have Sam and Dean actually learned since, say, Season Six?
How have they meaningfully changed? How have their experiences shaped them?
Well, the answer is they haven't. There are two main types of conflict in Supernatural:
there's the conflicts against paranormal entities, and then there's the grounded interpersonal conflicts.
We've already talked about why the paranormal conflicts aren't working anymore
but at the very least they can introduce in new things, even if these ideas aren't always executed well.
On the other hand, with regards to interpersonal conflicts, there's not really anywhere else they can go with Sam and Dean's relationship.
Virtually every possible conflict that you could have between the two of them has been
completely played out by now. In some ways, this is kind of inevitable given how long the show's been running.
Unfortunately, the writers' response to this is just to rehash the exact same conflicts over and over and over again.
How many times now has Sam lied to Dean or vice-versa for their own good?
How many times have they bottled up their emotions only to fight about it later?
How many times has one of the brothers become addicted to something harmful only to snap out of it in the finale?
These conflicts happen time and time again and these characters never seem to learn anything from them.
Their character growth has completely stagnated and as a result, even though a lot happens to them,
it's not interesting because none of it seems to affect them at all.
The same happens with Castiel's character. The writers had kind of written themselves into a corner.
At the end of Season 5, Castiel was given almost godlike powers. Keep in mind,
this was supposed to be the end of the show and Castiel becoming this powerful was the end of his character arc.
But when they brought the show back, they realized that having an all-powerful character as a teammate wasn't going to make for interesting storytelling.
So when Castiel isn't mysteriously disappearing unmentioned for episodes at a time, he's always being encumbered by something
that's preventing him from using his powers to their full extent.
He's being mind-controlled, or he has amnesia, or he's in Purgatory or he's being controlled by Lucifer.
It's distracting and repetitive and simply draws attention to the fact that the showrunners
don't know what to do with Castiel's character. On top of that, the writers are
still playing the "will they or won't they" game with Dean and Cas, keeping representation-starved fans on a string,
even though the show is never going to deliver and never was intending to.
This, like every other regurgitated plot on the show, is tired.
Unfortunately, the show has simply been running for so long that in terms of personal conflicts,
they've run out of ideas. And even if there are other interesting believable storylines that they could be using for these characters,
simply repeating the same story over and over again seems to be profitable so
why bother changing things up?
BO BURNHAM: *singing* We'll stop beating this dead horse when it stops spitting out mooooney
Numerous elements are introduced into the show only to be completely forgotten, either for several seasons or indefinitely.
Take the Council of Watchers - *cough* sorry, the Men of Letters,
the aforementioned top secret order introduced in season 8 that used to collect information on the supernatural.
You know, fine, sometimes showrunners introduce outlandish revelations and plot twists way later into the game than they should.
I don't love it, but maybe they just had a really cool idea all of a sudden. As long as whatever they add is justified,
you know, it serves the plot well enough to justify bringing it in this late, and it's presented in a way
where its initial absence is kind of believable.
But in this case, it seems like there wasn't much reason at all to give us a big revelation like that,
especially given that it does almost nothing to impact the plot for another four seasons.
The Men of Letters' bunker is a cool filming location for a couple episodes of Season 8 and that's its entire impact on the plot.
Finally, four seasons later, we find out about the second evil Men of Letters order from the UK.
I get set up and payoff,
but it seems more like the writers simply forgot that this organization existed until they were out of ideas again.
And honestly, the Men of Letters storyline was lucky.
It was one of the few setups for something cool in the show that actually
ended up being vaguely relevant later on, even if it was forgotten for four seasons first.
The majority of things they set up simply end up completely ignored, giving us a ridiculously thick bundle of loose ends.
Just a couple examples of elements that were set up and then subsequently completely forgotten, Jacob
Pond's revenge promise, Oz, Adam being tortured for all eternity and never mentioned again, the Antichrist,
Malachi (notably killed off-screen), the Book of the Damned, the spark...
need I go on? With all the already existing loose ends in this show, you'd think they'd do a better job of creating
conflicts that were consistent with the show's established universe.
Sadly, it seems like they just throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks with no regard for things like
plot consistency or creating a universe with clear consistent rules. In fact,
it feels like every season, the show is changing up its established rules.
The thing about any movie or show with fantastic outlandish elements, like 15 different types of demon,
is that there needs to be some kind of consistency with the rules to maintain the viewers suspension of disbelief.
If we know that this kills a demon, this is what power this creature has, this is how the universe works, we're
predisposed to accept this fantasy world, quirks and all.
On the other hand, when you start changing up these
established rules on a whim, it takes the viewer out of the show and makes it seem like you're just pulling these ideas out of nowhere.
I mean, can you imagine if in Buffy's 6th season
they suddenly told you that you can also kill vampires by clipping their nails?
It's hard to get invested in Sam and Dean's struggle to kill an angel if half the time angels have a
completely different set of powers, weaknesses, and abilities than the other half.
So how does Supernatural face this issue time and time again?
For one, angel banishing sigils have been continually used as a plot device on the show and practically every time
they're brought up the showrunners change how those sigils work. Sometimes
they banish every angel in the area. Sometimes the plot demands that they only banish the really bad angels. In
Season 12, Episode 10, Dean is even told not to use a banishing sigil because it'll send
Castiel away too, when other times, like in "Lucifer Rising",
Castiel is magically immune from the effects of the sigils. Or...
Dean gets cursed with a mark that makes him kind of evil in Season 10.
We quickly learn the rules for this kind of curse, like what can/can't cure it
but that all goes out the window when halfway through the season,
we find out that there's a book that's never been mentioned before that can simply
magically cure it at every other spell. This is not only incredibly convenient, but incredibly anticlimactic.
I know this seems like nitpicking, but constantly changing the rules up not only makes the show less believable and harder to follow
but it also makes the stakes feel less real. Part of the tension of a good cliffhanger is wondering how the
characters are going to get out of a terrible situation that they're in.
Knowing that the writers can always Deus Ex Machina in some new rule or solution
really takes the edge off that and makes this show less exciting.
The fact that the show has been running for such a long time and has gone through so many writers and showrunners
means that it's probably unlikely that all of the writers have seen every episode.
There's simply so much lore to wade through that it's almost inevitable that these inconsistencies come up.
However, inevitable or not, it's very emblematic of the fact that this show is in desperate need of a mercy kill.
Absolutely nothing that happens on that show feels final or impactful
which makes it hard to care about anything that happens.
Even the big cliffhangers of previous seasons tend to hold absolutely no weight.
Take Season 7's cliffhanger of Dean and Castiel being stuck in Purgatory together.
It was resolved in the very first episode and we're even given a time skip
to make sure that there are as few lasting consequences as possible.
This is especially true with character deaths. Towards the beginning of the show, when a character died, they were dead.
Their deaths were impactful and it was really emotional knowing that your favorite character wasn't coming back.
Because of that, there was a lot of tension when some of these characters were fighting super powerful enemies
because there was a very good chance that any fight could be it for them.
Nowadays, though, such consequences simply don't exist anymore.
Sam and Dean have died so many times now
that it's incredibly hard to care when one of them is killed or sent to Hell or Purgatory or trapped in another dimension.
They're always brought back and sure, maybe they're kind of wonky in the head for a few episodes
but they're always back to their old selves eventually. There are no real lasting
consequences for anything that happens to them, which really feeds into the lack of character development mentioned earlier.
It's not just the brothers who get this treatment though.
The sad "emotional" scenes we get when side characters die don't really have any meaning either.
Take Bobby Singer, a father figure to Sam and Dean since the show's conception.
Bobby has been through some shit. In Season Five, he gets possessed by a demon and ends up in a wheelchair
supposedly never to walk again. Of course, by the end of the season, his ability to walk is magically restored.
Okay, fine. Then in the Season Five finale Bobby is killed.
Like, five minutes later he's resurrected.
In Season Seven, Bobby is shot and ends up in a coma before dying in a sad emotional moment.
A few episodes later, it turns out he's still around, this time as a ghost.
He starts becoming vengeful so Dean ends up burning his last possession to send his soul away in another sad emotional moment.
I guess this is the end of Bobby's character, right?
Nope! In Season Eight, it turns out that Bobby was actually trapped in Hell, so again, Dean has to go and rescue him.
Bobby continues to make appearances up until Season 11.
Eventually, all the sad emotional moments, with the saying goodbye and the swelling music, start to not mean anything anymore.
We know it's not going to be final.
We know we're going to see these characters again.
And it's hard to feel the impacts of these moments when we all know perfectly well that this stuff is going to be undone.
Even Sam and Dean's mother, the very first death on the show and one of the few that we could really assume to be final, was
brought back for the show's 12th season because of course she was.
If we know that there aren't going to be consequences for any deaths or any actions on the show,
we can't really care about it, because even if it looks like a character is dead,
they can always be brought back, which means that none of the apocalyptic world-ending dangers mean anything.
It doesn't matter who gets hurt, it doesn't matter who dies,
because the show can always, always, always, undo it with a snap of a finger.
Supernatural was never great but it wasn't always the worst.
It started out as a decently entertaining show with some cool characters, some genuinely scary monsters, and a pretty good plotline.
Unfortunately, the show's over-extended lifespan was the death of it.
The show runners started running out of ideas, leading to them rehashing the same conflicts over and over,
changing the rules of their universe on a whim,
and making it hard to give a shit about anything that happens on the show.
Sam and Dean are always saying "what's dead should stay dead".
In the case of Supernatural, now a lifeless husk of its former self, it may be more merciful to salt and burn it.