Now that we’ve had a week to digest Supernatural‘s season 7 finale (they’re where?!), we can begin to reflect on the story so far and speculate about where season 8 will take Sam and Dean.
I don’t post enough columns about Supernatural, really – it all gets lost among the Buffy fangirling and the Community soap boxing. And sometimes I think, well, what is there really left to say after seven seasons of Sam and Dean savin’ ppl n huntin’ things, family business style? It’s great and all, but surely it… gets old?
Of course that’s blatant self-illusion in an “ahh but I just really want to talk about fairytales and dragons” kind of way. The reason it’s hard to write about Supernatural is because under the surface, it’s just such a layered, good quality show, and there is so much going on both visually and textually.
While I count myself among the people who zoned out a little in season 6, after the departure of Eric Kripke and technically after the story was supposed to end, season 7 has brought a lot of the enjoyment back for me as I got used to the new format. After the first five seasons building up and up towards a massive climax, we’d reached the crescendo in season 5, and for a while it felt like there was nowhere to go but down. But since the show hasn’t really gone down in scope, it’s just kind of flatlined on a level of intertwining apocalyptic doom and family feuding. If the show was a graph, we’d call it horizontal in slope. Or… something, I don’t speak Maths.
Because of this, I understand why some people aren’t as big fans of the show as they used to be. In some ways it is a much different story now than it was. The End came and went, but the brothers are still here, struggling on down an increasingly depressing road.
And I’m not gonna lie, as much as I enjoyed season 7, I was beginning to feel a growing anxiousness about the future of the show: while I still loved it, what the hell was Jeremy Carver gonna do in season 8 now that there’s no lovable sidekicks left to kill, no frontiers left to be explored? I was devastated by the loss of Castiel, furious about the death of Bobby. Sam and Dean are the core of the show, but everyone else were like the juicy apple bits around that core. And when all the edible stuff is gone, there’s no sense in keeping the core just lying around.
Plus, Dick Roman just never struck me as an impressive villain. I didn’t think the Leviathan seemed particularly fearsome following the threat of the Biblical Apocalypse and Lucifer himself, and Dick literally had nothing going for him except his pun-tastic name (which, I have to admit, worked every time). The standalone plots were generally throwaway and episodic, with some themes introduced and done away with too quickly (like Dean’s daughter).
On the other hand, some episodes were undoubtedly extraordinary. As much as I hated the fact that the writers felt the need to kill off Bobby, I loved his exit episode “Death’s Door.” Jo’s return in “Defending Your Life” served as a great callback to earlier seasons, and provided some excellent character exploration for Dean. “Time After Time” was the season’s token genre episode, this time very successfully tackling film noir. And of course “Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie” has to be on any list of the season’s best episodes. Finally, though not everyone enjoyed it, I thought “The Girl With the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo” was probably the best utilisation of a guest star all season.
Speaking of guest stars: in my opinion, the scope of talent the show attracted this year was one of the most outstanding things about the season as a whole. We started with Charisma Carpenter and James Marsters’ mini Buffy reunion, and the season continued to impress with its line-up of other Whedon alums (Jewel Staite and Felicia Day) and genre actors, like The Vampire Diaries‘ Sara Canning, The X-Files‘ Nicholas Lea and Veronica Mars‘ Jason Dohring, along with veteran actors Kevin R. McNally and D.J. Qualls. Then there was the (way too brief) return of Alona Tal as Jo, and my own personal favourite: Once Upon a Time‘s Meghan Ory reunited with Jensen Ackles, and no one even noticed because I’m like one of the 10 people left who still cares about Dark Angel. But aside from all these great one-off appearances, did any of the characters actually bring anything lasting to the story? Not really. And this just added to my feeling that the show was kind of treading water.
But then the season finale rolled around, and now we know where the story is gonna go. Because wham! Castiel is back, which raises the stakes (after all, Sam and Dean won’t die permanently until the series finale, so them being in mortal peril is hardly hair-raising at this point), and it turned out that the writers had one frontier left for Dean to explore: Purgatory.
But that’s not what excites me most about season 8. What excites me is the fact that finally, we’ve got a Sam/Dean separation that feels like it matters. Not that either brother being stuck in Hell didn’t matter, but that was different, because we didn’t see them fight to return. So far, the story has been from the perspective of the brother stuck on Earth trying to cope without the other, and any voluntary separation has always felt forced to me. But this time we’ve got two storylines set up: Dean and Cas in Purgatory fighting to get out, and Sam “well and truly alone” on the other side, presumably fighting for the same thing. They won’t just be ambling around lost until their other half returns – they’ll have something to fight for.
I also can’t wait to see Dean and Castiel’s journey through Purgatory. It opens up so many doors, and I hope they’re stuck there for at least half the season. Supernatural will finally feel fresh again, taking its time to develop Sam and Dean in new ways, apart, before bringing them back together. It’s breaking the status quo, but in a wonderfully familiar way that reminds me of the days before God and Angels and what have you. The seventh season of Supernatural left me feeling very optimistic about the future of the show, leading us from what sometimes felt like gimmicks and stalling to a truly deep, original storyline.
What did you think of season 7? Share your views and predictions on season 8 in the comments!
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