9.23 reaction

[ash48]

I had a huge reaction post written out but decided it was far too negative and started to make me cry so I decided not to post it.

I will say that I didn't mind watching the episode (made all the better because I had zebra363 with me) but in all honesty it left me feeling pretty much nothing. Empty. Blank. Perhaps a bit annoyed, frustrated and sad.

I love these characters too much to see them wasted like this. To have them at odds all season just so we can have "near" apology scenes and confessions of "I lied". :(

For a whole season to mean absolutely nothing. To have gone absolutely no where. *sobs* (and not the good *sobs* - only S8 and S9 have reduced me to tears over loss of the show I fell in love with).

I need more time to process. I'm sure I will shake these blues away and find something salvageable here.

Though I'm thinking until Carver leaves I'll never see the Sam and Dean I grew to love.

I'd say they've already created their spin off. We watched it this season.

(PS: please, if you loved it and want to squee please feel free. I need to know it's worth hanging on to. I need to know that this is just all part of a plan to build this show back to something we recognise. I need to know that they didn't make Sam say important stuff only to have it completely and utterly ignored for a reason. I need to know that this hasn't just become the worst, predictable, most boring, fan servicing pile of... )

Comments

[de-nugis.livejournal.com]

Maybe they just couldn't get Tahmoh for another season. But quite apart from coming to find Gadreel's arc effective and interesting, I did enjoy having Tahmoh around being easy on the eyes. And I was just feeling a glimmer of Cas/Gadreel shippiness (and I so much prefer the tendency to hang angel storylines around Cas when it deals with his relationships with individual angels -- Uriel, Anna, Balthazar, the beginnings of something with Gadreel -- than when it's all about leadership arcs and heaven en masse), and then boom.

ETA: though I will say, as someone who usually despises redemptive deaths and had no use for, say, Gabriel's (maybe) exit, Gadreel's ending did work for me, it was genuinely moving. So I'm annoyed that they did it, but it's one thing for which I'm not annoyed with how they did it.

EyetagainTA: I think maybe it worked for me because so much of Gadreel's concern was quite openly reputational, about how he'd be remembered, and a redemptive death is, in a non-pejorative sense, really great for propaganda. So it would have been nice to see a longterm change arc in him, but the shortcut was actually a journey to its own perfectly sense-making end, not a detour from a different kind of arc.

I will stop editing now.

[ash48.livejournal.com]

I also liked Gadreel's ending. It was a much better way from going out than could have been. Also, Gadreel had one of the strongest story arcs of the season. It actually made a lot of sense to me.

And I keep wondering if Sam and Deans' arcs are feeling unsatisfying because they aren't finished yet? Maybe Carver really is in the middle of his 3 year story line and he's still working through their overall issues. I'm not sure if I want to hope that hard.

Cas had a more satisfying storyline also. I wasn't particularly invested in it, but from beginning to end it had a nice curve.