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So I have been pondering, as you do when you fall out of love, and in retrospect, the writing has indeed been on the wall since Home (though I truly didn’t want to believe it at the time, and things were still open enough then that they could have planned/found a way to incorporate both boys in The Grand Scheme – if they had wanted to), but at that time The Grand Scheme was only a tiny scribble in the corner and was fairly easily fanwanked or ignored because Sam and Dean - and their struggles within this world - still came first and it was gripping and moving and engrossing.
Then came Season 2… Dean’s character still struggled and it was poignant and heartbreaking, but Sam seemed to be distracted and drawn to something far grander than just the simple loss of the only parent (Dean’s expanded role in his life notwithstanding, he was not Sam’s parent) he’d ever known and with whom he’d had a passionate and tumultuous relationship, because there were Psychic Kids and Demons on the prowl. Oooh shiny!! Only not to me. But I still had several terrific family/brother/saving people, hunting things type of eps so I could ignore or fast-forward through the occasional foray into Sam’s Grand Demon Destiny and be happy.
Now we have Season 3… and while there have been some fantastic scenes, and ideas and performances, I have basically lost all interest in anything that’s going on because even when they do an ep that is more of a standalone, it seems like the demons are still looming over everything. And while I guess that’s the intent and I’m supposed to be afraid for the boys and engrossed in the mystery… in actual fact, I just don’t care. At all.
I don’t care about Sam’s Demon Destiny or Dean’s Deal, and while I probably would have had a bit more interest in these things if the overall mystery had been shown to be a Winchester thing, rather than a Sam thing, it’s the Grand Destiny part that leaves me coldest. I thought they had a chance to get the show back to what I enjoyed most when they killed the Yellow Eyed Demon because that did give them a plausible way for making Sam basically ‘normal’ again, but if Psychic Sam is back… that’s out the window too.
And Kripke should absolutely tell whatever story he wants to tell, but probably the biggest thing I take issue with about how he’s chosen to tell this story – Sam’s story – is that to tell this well, he never should have made Dean Sam’s brother, and he never should have given Dean the same level of emotional involvement from the beginning as Sam had. Because as the story seems to be positioned now, he really can’t tell this story about Sam, the Psychic Boy Demon King without leaving Dean behind or at least putting him to the side, but he can’t really leave Dean behind because he has as much emotional investment and as much history in everything that’s happened as Sam does.
3 are fully loaded | fill an empty chamber