Well, as yet I have not been inundated with Pimp Your Book guest posts. Which is kind of surprising to me. I thought people would be into that. That’s okay, though, because it leaves my Friday open to tell you that Amazon sent me Supernatural Season 6 a couple weeks ago and I’ve managed to watch it all already.
This might be slightly spoilery regarding the series in general.
This picture reminds me that I owe Dylan a new jacket...
I guess I should have titled this: My lack of reactions… Because other than Dean is so pretty… I’m feeling pretty meh about things. I was okay with things at the end of season 5. It seemed like Dean was on the brink of something he’d been wanting throughout the series to that point. And now that the world was safe from apocalypse he could settle down with a woman he couldn’t forget, with a cool kid, instant family, and he could get a rest from the horror. Yeah, I was sad for him that he lost Sam, and that was going to scar. But I thought he could have built a life for himself and I would have been okay with the series ending there.
I was okay with the loss of Sam, by the way. I clearly have my preference. I usually like Sam, but sometimes he gets downright whiny, and I’ll admit that all the mistakes he made due to sibling rivalry and pride that eventually led to the end of season 5, kind of made me feel less tragic about the whole thing.
Going into season 6, you knew they had to mess the life that Dean had finally made for himself. The show is what it is and it’s not like he can do the show, hold down a 9-5, and show up for dinner on time. And I was okay with that. But I expected it to be worth it.
For one thing, season 6 felt like a rehash of previous seasons, only without the awesomeness. It was like all the spark was gone from the writing. Sam’s “issue” through the first part of the season just kind of sucked everything that made him Sam-like out of his character. So he was no longer such a good contrast for Dean. And when his problem was discovered and they set about to fix it, there was really a lack of conflict built into that. Sam had some concerns for his own well-being, but mostly it was an entirely external thing and there was none of the angsting that the show did so well in the past.
The biggest problem I see in this season, though, is that there just aren’t any stakes anymore. Everyone dies a soap opera death. I think Dean actually jokes about that at some point. Like, go ahead and kill me, I’ll just come back. Anyone gets seriously hurt, Castiel just fixes them. If no one can really be hurt or killed, then there’s no sense of danger. No stakes. And that means there’s no tension. And why should I care?
So that’s the lesson I got out of watching season 6. Watch your stakes and beware of creating too-powerful characters and making your fiction life too safe. Even though I had season 1-5 on DVD already, had I watched this season via Netflix first, I might not have bought it at all.
What about you? Did you like season 6?
