SPN Season 7

[oselle]

I've decided not to avoid spoilers as scrupulously as I have in the past so I clicked on the latest from Mike Ausiello's TV Line and I cringed -- then laughed -- then cringed again:

"We had everyone on the writing staff watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” executive producer Sera Gamble tells TVLine. “[Executive producer] Bob [Singer], [series creator] Eric [Kripke] and I were really hungry to capture some of that cowboy, outlaw spirit for Sam and Dean [next season].”

This season, Sera promised us "noir" and gave us...whatever that was. For next season she's promising a Western theme chock-full of "cowboy, outlaw spirit." I wonder what we'll actually wind up with? I also wonder what movie Gamble made everyone watch to get ideas for the incoherent, unfocused, totally-not-noir season that just ended.

I'm going to tell you exactly what happened here. Sera Gamble dug the costumes in the "Frontierland" episode as much as we did, only she took it a step further and decided that all of next season's theme would be "cowboy." For God's sake, can't this woman just get it out of her system by writing fanfic like the rest of us do...oh wait, she does, only her fanfic IS THE GODDAMN SHOW.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I can't even imagine where the Butch & Sundance thing will come out. It totally is just playing dress up with cowboy outfits. I don't even get how they're supposed to suddenly become outlaws. They did that plotline earlier when Hendrickson was after Dean. Is she going to create an angel/demon posse?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

It totally is just playing dress up with cowboy outfits.

That's exactly what it is. People liked that episode because they liked the costumes and now Gamble thinks she can score with an "outlaw" theme for the whole season. I swear, I'm gonna smack the shit out of the first person I see saying "I can't wait to see where she goes with this!"

Is she going to create an angel/demon posse?

I don't know, but supposedly the boys will be up against something "unlike anything they’ve ever fought." Whatever.

[twirlycurls.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, I just can't WAIT to see where she goes with this!!

(Don't you worry, I'm currently smacking the shit out of myself.)

(And seriously, what an awful idea. Frontierland was okay, but only in comparison to the unrelenting awfulness that was the rest of the season. Only someone who thought she'd get an entire season out of "Sam's soul is missing" would decide to write an entire season of Sam and Dean as cowboys or whatever silliness this is going to mean.)

[coronasunrise.livejournal.com]

I should laugh, but I'm crying because it's too true.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Is it just me or does Gamble always sound like a babbling idiot in these interviews? I just have this vision of her forcing everyone to sit down and watch Butch Cassidy while she fantasizes about Jared in a cowboy hat.

[coronasunrise.livejournal.com]

I'm glad someone else said it. I haven't had the nerve or the patience to deal with the “you're just sexist” crap that comes from criticizing Sera Gamble

Kripke sounds like a fanboy, true. Sera Gamble was an actress, and now a show runner / writer. She should be able to present her ideas without sounding like idiot. She sounds like a seventh grader trying to sound deep while giving a presentation in front of class.

[twirlycurls.livejournal.com]

So true. I get second-hand embarrassment listening to her.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

She reminds me of painful client meetings I've been in, where my imbecile of a publisher will start babbling his usual line of incoherent shit while the client sits there with a WTF look on his face and I just quietly shrivel up in embarrassment.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I'm constantly amazed by how witless she sounds in these interviews. Just a lot of "this will be totally awesome!" self-promotion, and not a single thoughtful or intelligent comment, ever. Believe me, I would LOVE to praise a woman in her position, but every time she opens her mouth the only word that comes to mind is "bimbo." I'm starting to think she must have been related to someone to get to where she is in the first place.

[coronasunrise.livejournal.com]

Gamble did come to Supernatural with the superior Raelle Tucker who left to be a producer of True Blood. I'm still not sure how she got the showrunner gig. Maybe Edlund didn't want it, so she got it by default.

That is not quite fair, I did like "Jus in Bello" a whole lot. Not to fill you journal with wank. Sera Gamble seems to have fallen apart as a writer when she fell in love with Sam as a character. We have already discussed how “I Know What You Did Last Summer” did no one any favors. When she writes Dean by himself it isn’t bad, as soon as she touches Sam it like she goes into fangirl mode and writes fanfic.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Sera's written a few good episodes, but her stinkers tend to be the sort of epic bombs that really take the show off the rails -- "Last Summer" is a perfect example. I honestly have never felt that she has a good handle on Dean as a character and she tends to write him as a second fiddle -- whereas writers like Jeremy Carver do an excellent job of giving equal time and understanding to both of them.

My first encounter with Sera Gamble's "insights" into the show were back before the beginning of Season 3, when I heard her talking about how impossible it was to introduce female characters into the show because the fans were so "overprotective" of Sam and Dean. I hardly knew anything about the show back then, or who Gamble was, but even then the comment struck me as a thinly-veiled euphemism for "jealous" and "catty" that was meant to belittle and dismiss viewers who didn't wholeheartedly embrace these characters. Later in Season 3 I recall her delighting in Bela because she "poked fun" at the Winchesters and "took them down a peg" and I wondered why on earth a show's producer would get such a kick out of making her own main characters look like fools.

She can turn out a good episode now and then but overall, I think she's a weak, unfocused and often careless writer who frequently displays an unearned vanity over her own abilities. I've worked with, and for, so many people like that. I've watched them "fail upwards" because their only real talent is for self-promotion, and the higher they go, the harder everyone else has to work to make up for their inadequacy.

[emeraldus.livejournal.com]

I'd like to know who's the posse in this "plot line". Castiel as the new God sending his followers after the boys? I am very slightly interested in the idea but considering this last season, I'm sure the execution will be nowhere near as good as the idea MIGHT seem to be.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Supposedly, Misha Collins is "off contract" for next season, which I guess would mean we won't be seeing that much of him. So I guess he's not going to be heading up the posse. Why on earth "God" would want to hunt down the Winchesters anyway is beyond me. At this point I don't know why anyone would be hunting down the Winchesters. ghyste put forth the idea that it might be a resurrected Adam hunting them down, but Adam has so much cause to be righteously pissed off at them that I'd wind up rooting for him instead of for Sam and Dean...and the whole "outlaw" thing doesn't work if you want them to get caught.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Probably just means Dean and Sam will jump off a cliff at the end of the season. That's usually what the Butch and Sundance are code for.

Not that I would complain about seeing Dean in that duster again. Or the serape that he was so adorably proud of. *smish*

Didn't Sera write X-Files fan fic back in the day? I thought I remember reading that somewhere.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Didn't that movie end with a freeze-frame of the two of them engaged in an apparently hopeless shoot-out? I swear, if they end the series that way...I have no words for how angry that will make me.

Didn't Sera write X-Files fan fic back in the day?

Beats me, but I'd love to know if it sucked as much as her Supernatural fanfic.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

You're right. I think they jump off a cliff earlier in the movie. Or maybe I'm thinking of Thelma and Louise. Either way they end up dead, which sucks in SPN because Heaven also sucks.

I'd love to know if it sucked as much as her Supernatural fanfic.

LOL! I bet is was M/S "erotica."

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I think the cliff-jump is earlier in the movie and they survive that because they jump into a river. I don't know. This was one of those movies that always seemed to be on TV when I was a kid and yet I could never get into it. What I mostly remember (as everyone else does) is that "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" bike-riding scene with Katharine Ross. For my sixth birthday I got a music box that played that song.

LOL! I bet is was M/S "erotica."

How many different, disjointed plots do you think she tried to cram into it?

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Yeah I saw the movie on TV when I was kid too but I barely remember it. But now I'm having visions of Dean riding a bike with Cas sitting on the crossbar, his trenchcoat flapping the breeze.

How many different, disjointed plots do you think she tried to cram into it? I'm betting she hit all the major fanfic cliches and retconned her WIP from one chapter to the next.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I guarantee that SOMEONE will ride a bike this season because you know...that would so totally capture the Butch Cassidy outlaw spirit. Frankly I'm still trying to suss out any traces of "noir" in Season Six.

I now think that finding verifiable Sera Gamble X-Files fanfic could be my own personal Grail Quest if I weren't so goddamn lazy.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Heh! I wish I could remember where I saw it mentioned that she used to write fanfic. Damn! It was actually years ago.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Considering how they've mocked fanfic writing on the show, I'm sure it isn't anything that Gamble would own up to nowadays.

[i-o-r-h-a-e-l.livejournal.com]

Can we have at least good fanfics?

*iz despaired*

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, really. There wasn't one thing I saw this season that would have passed muster in even the lamest fanfic.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

There was Cas loving Dean very, very much (and vice versa) which made me pretty happy. ;)

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking they got most of that from fanfic and not the other way around.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

True. Are you Ben Edlund?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Pfft, I wish!

[mulder200.livejournal.com]

Besides, didn't they do the whole outlaw thing in Season 2 or 3? I mean the cowboy thing was fun but it wasn't THAT great.

To be honest, I wish they do something really interesting like exposing the supernatural to the public at large but after the last two seasons, I don't know if I can have faith in the writers to do it justice.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I'm still lamenting that they didn't take Edlund's apocalypse and run with it for Season 6. Seriously they could have pulled another two or three seasons out of that premise, and worked in all sorts of new elements. I'll admit that they might have lost some viewers because the show would have morphed into something different, but they probably would have picked up a few too, not to mention getting great buzz for doing something genuinely risky and edgy.

[ghyste.livejournal.com]

Frankly I’m pretty much disregarding anything Sera Gamble says about S7 because everything she said about the overall tone of s6 was nonsense. It was supposed to be noir, but the only vaguely noirish part was the quickly abandoned idea that Dean was going to have to play detective. As for it seeing the end of the Angels v Demons conflict and going back to a S1 feel, well…

Should she be telling the truth this time, it feels like just a reworking of the Hendricksen plot from S2/3 - which admittedly also ended up going nowhere when Hendricksen was sacrificed to the altar of Ruby, but was at least entertaining while it did it. As for a Butch and Sundance ending, while I would prefer the show to end with the brothers moving forward together I would far prefer that they died together rather than getting some sort of hastily thrown together soap opera ending complete with the appearance of the tedious Braedens.

As far as Big Bads are concerned, as I’ve said elsewhere I’d be more interested in it being Adam than either an off-stage uberpowerful Castiel or another dull as ditchwater Mother of All type. Of course, that preference relies on the writers dealing intelligently with the situation and having the characters acknowledge their role in creating what Adam has become. Going by the way that this sort of thing has been handled in the past I have no great confidence they would. If I’m being realistic I suspect that if they do bring back Adam we will find that he’s just a pawn for someone else.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I guess you could say there was a noirish element to Castiel's backroom deals, but that came so late in the season and was so obviously thrown together at the last minute that there's no way you could say that it set the tone for the whole year. At any rate, I think we can all agree that Gamble's prattling about a "noirish feel" for the season was a lot of hot air.

As this will no doubt also be hot air -- although what makes me cringe is wondering exactly what Gamble thinks a "cowboy, outlaw spirit" is and how her interpretation will make its way on screen. Reading up on the movie, and now recollecting the bits and pieces of it that I've seen, it seemed to take a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, comedic approach to the Western genre -- and you know I'm not a fan of making the Winchesters look bumbling or silly. Lamentably, Gamble has admitted that she does enjoy "poking fun" at them, so I'll bet that if anything Butch-and-Sundancey makes it into Season 7, it will be this.

I would far prefer that they died together

Fine, but given the show's talent for plagiarism, I'd rather they didn't end with a freeze frame on a hail of bullets. That was no doubt considered real fresh and edgy back in 1969, but I'd prefer an actual ending.

Of course, that preference relies on the writers dealing intelligently with the situation and having the characters acknowledge their role in creating what Adam has become.

LOL...at least admit to me that you know this will never happen!! Admit it!

Gamble's "very definite maybe" about Adam is also making me sweat...especially in light of this new "outlaw" nonsense. A key element of the "outlaw" genre as represented by movies like Butch Cassidy is that you have to be on the outlaws' side. You can't be rooting for the law. Everyone really liked Hendrickson, but no one wanted to see him lock up the Winchesters for good because we knew Hendrickson was wrong to be pursuing them. In Adam's case, I'd be 100% on Adam's side. I'd be rooting for the Winchesters to get caught. And torn limb from limb and thrown into the fiery depths -- even Dean, whom I've been crazy about for years. That's how bad what they did to Adam was. And that's why that development will not work for me.

we will find that he’s just a pawn for someone else.

Yes, or the show will find a way to foist Adam's abandonment onto someone other than the Winchesters. Since Misha Collins has been taken "off contract" for next year, they might very well make it all Castiel's fault. I can easily see them scribbling a retcon that Castiel wiped everyone's memory of Adam, which is why no one ever thought about the poor bastard all year (actually, he did receive a brief, passing mention once, but I'm sure the writers will expect us to wipe our own memories of that scene).

[ghyste.livejournal.com]

LOL...at least admit to me that you know this will never happen!! Admit it!

I did – in the very next sentence :D

If we take S4/5 Sam as a template then the Winchesters will express guilt for something that no-one blames them for and everything else will be ignored. Anyone remarking critically on this will be told that they’re harshing everyone’s squee and clearly just want a whole season of Sam and Dean wallowing in guilt with nothing else happening. The Mod at TWoP will respond by banning anyone who criticises the characters based on their previous, and unresolved, actions or lack thereof.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

The Mod at TWoP will respond by banning anyone who criticises the characters based on their previous, and unresolved, actions or lack thereof.

Well, of course, because you can only talk about the episode in the episode thread! THE EPISODE DAMNIT! Not anything that might have ever come before the episode or might be set in motion because of the episode or anything that relates to the episode at all if it did not actually occur in those exact 40 minutes. JUST the EPISODE!!!

[andromakhe001.livejournal.com]

How was what "they" did to Adam so awful bad? They didn't get him involved in this - the angels did, and Adam listened to them. The "real Adam" was dead long before Dean and Sam even knew he existed--and it was no remotely their fault he died. They didn't "re-birth" him from Heaven, that was Michael, or Zachariah for Michael. They didn't purposely allow him to get stuck in the green room, as I recall Dean even asked Adam if he was alright before he went to help Sam, Adam said he was which is why Dean left him. Adam was "victimized" for the same reason Dean and Sam were - because of his parentage. Dean and Sam weren't chosen to be "it" because they were hunters, they are basically hunters because they were chosen.

After they ended up in the pit, Dean only had the option of one brother to save, per Death, of course he'd save Sam because Sam jumped into the pit to save the world whereas Adam agreed to be Michael's vessel basically so he could see his mom again in Memorex land.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the whole plan in Swine Song was absolutely stupid. Sam's plan actually failed(say yes, trick Lucifer, gain control of Lucifer right away, jump into the pit--which is not what happened:) and the only reason they succeeded in the end was because of a bunch of "unplanned" stuff. Frankly I don't see how it was really much different from Dean's earlier idea to say yes to Michael "with conditions", except that Sam suggested it so naturally Bobby and Castiel were all like "Wow that's a brilliant idea!!".

But whereas Adam was doing it for purely personal reasons and really didn't give a damn about what happened to the rest of the world - at least the basic idea of the Swine Song plan was to save the world.

But again, I certainly do not want to see Adam next year. Hopefully Jake what's his name will be very busy and have no time for it.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Yeah I'm with you. I have no interest in seeing Adam again. I was convinced that he had been sent back to Heaven when Michael said he wasn't home. Why Sera needed to retcon that is beyond me. I guess it was just something else she decided to throw at the wall to see if it would stick. I would be perfectly happy if they re-retconned this plot point with Sam, who now remembers Hell, saying "Stop trying to steal my thunder Dean. I was alone in the cage with Michael and Luci. Adam wasn't ever there. I'm the only one who has ever suffered so much. More than anyone in the history of history." *sniffles*

[oselle.livejournal.com]

I would be perfectly happy if they re-retconned this plot point with Sam, who now remembers Hell, saying "Stop trying to steal my thunder Dean. I was alone in the cage with Michael and Luci.

I'd be fine with this too. The re-resurrection of Adam is fraught with so much potential stupid that I have no desire to see it happen...but I would like the issue to at least be addressed and resolved with some finality, instead of just totally ignored.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Yes since they reopened that can of worms, they need to reference it somehow. At this point, I think they're just terrified to close out any storyline because the show could last for another 10 years so they want to be able to bring anything back at the drop of a hat. Of course, they manage to retroactively screw even semi-decent storylines and episode the way they did when they brought Adam back to be Michael. *eyeroll*

[oselle.livejournal.com]

the show could last for another 10 years

Good lord, can you imagine? I think Jensen will have a nervous breakdown if he's still playing Dean in his forties but I, of course, will still be watching.

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

I dunno. He seems pretty comfortable where he is. But he did confirm at the last con that they are not signed up for season 8, even if he said he would be happy to continue. Then again, what else is he going to say to a bunch of fangirls who paid ridiculous amounts of money to drink coffee with him. Do they actually serve coffee at those coffee lounge things?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Comfortable now, but you really think he'd want to play Dean for another 10 years? Hell, in 10 years there probably won't even be network TV anymore.

Do they actually serve coffee at those coffee lounge things?

LOL, if they do it's probably ten bucks a cup considering how they charge extra for everything at those cons. Pretty soon they'll be selling things like "Glimpse of Jensen" and "A Smile From Danneel."

[mangokulfi.livejournal.com]

Comfortable now, but you really think he'd want to play Dean for another 10 years?

Honestly I'm baffled as to why he would even consider sticking around for an eighth season, especially after this year. He has said that he loves the crew and 99% of his time is spent with them, but still, how wonderful could they possibly be?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd assume that Jensen is wealthy enough that he'd never have to work again if he didn't want to, but even so, I guess he'd rather be a working actor than a "between projects" one. SPN isn't an ensemble show, so he knows that as long as it's on, he's got a job. One that not only must be paying him very well by now, but that also offers the opportunity to make a lot of extra money on the convention circuit. I once heard that headliners like Jared and Jensen rake in about $100,000 for every one of those cons. Can you imagine? They do five or so a year and that's half a million dollars -- it would take me nearly TEN YEARS to earn that much! Ten years of drudgery vs. five weekends of adoring crowds telling you how awesome you are. Sigh. I sure lost the genetic lottery.

[oselle.livejournal.com]

How was what "they" did to Adam so awful bad?

I should clarify that I'm not referring to anything that happened in Season 5 -- I'm really talking about what the writers did to Adam in Season 6, which was basically ignoring him the entire year and so, making it look like everyone had either forgotten or didn't give a shit that he was still locked up in "the worst part of hell" with Lucifer and Michael.

This is a pretty tough pill to swallow when we've been told for years that family is the most important thing in the world to the Winchesters, or at least, to Dean. Adam may not have grown up with them, but he was still their brother and I considered it an enormous oversight that all year, no one expressed any concern about his fate. What makes things worse is that everyone's lack of interest in Adam this year proved beyond a doubt that Zachariah was 100% correct when he told Adam that the Winchesters only cared about each other and that he was nothing to them.

As for Adam's behavior last year, well, I can't call the poor guy selfish when he was torn out of heaven and then promised -- by an angel nonetheless -- that everything would be okay if he just said yes to Michael. The Winchesters tried to stop him, but he had absolutely no reason to trust them at that point. Of course he wanted to get back to heaven -- but he hardly deserves eternal damnation for that.

And now, given that he's been left to rot in the cage for more than a year (thanks to the writers laziness, of course) I wouldn't blame the guy for coming back righteously pissed off at his so-called family for abandoning him...just as Zachariah said they would.

[tazical.livejournal.com]

I guess you could say there was a noirish element to Castiel's backroom deals, but that came so late in the season and was so obviously thrown together at the last minute that there's no way you could say that it set the tone for the whole year.

I said that exact same thing in nearly the exact same words to someone else about ten minutes ago. Just because they used moody lighting doesn't make it noir, and I'm not convinced Sera fully understands the difference when she's chirping all these interview soundbytes at us. The Castiel plot classifies as noir, with all the secrets and the betrayal and the corruption of the hero character, but I'm not convinced that they originally intended it to be the main plot of the latter half of the season.

I'd have been genuinely curious to be a fly on the writers' room wall this last year. I bet a lot of stuff happened behind the scenes which resulted in all these dead-ended plots and the sudden betrayal arc. As much as I've lost a lot of faith in the writers since season 5, I still can't believe that they planned all this randomness in advance and not one of them said 'Um...?'

[oselle.livejournal.com]

Just because they used moody lighting doesn't make it noir, and I'm not convinced Sera fully understands the difference when she's chirping all these interview soundbytes at us.

ROFL -- now I'm imagining that she will insist that all of Season 7 be shot in sepia tone to capture the "cowboy, outlaw spirit." Oh and "chirping soundbytes" is a pretty perfect description of how her interviews strike me.

I'm not convinced that they originally intended it to be the main plot of the latter half of the season.

Oh, I'm certain it wasn't. Castiel's war in heaven barely received more than a passing mention throughout the season and then all of a sudden it was the big deal when everything else fell apart. It became the central plot because it was the last one standing.

I think that Gamble had intended to set up a noirish plot in which Sam was involved in something shady and Dean was more or less playing the guy who gets unwittingly pulled deeper and deeper into it. To compare it to a classic piece of noir fiction (The Maltese Falcon), Dean would have been Sam Spade (The Outsider) and Sam would have been Brigid O'Shaughnessy (The Grifter). Crowley was Gutman (The Operator). Castiel might have been Joel Cairo (The Other Grifter), but he was actually so irrelevant to all this that I don't know what his role would have been. At any rate, it doesn't matter because none of this ever played out.

As much as I've lost a lot of faith in the writers since season 5, I still can't believe that they planned all this randomness in advance and not one of them said 'Um...?'

I have very often wondered what goes on in that writer's room. I can't believe that we can sit here and spot the giant flaws in these stories and they can't. I don't know if they just don't take the show that seriously, or if they just don't see any point in speaking up. I can imagine that Gamble, in particular, would be a difficult person to work with, and in that case it's often a lot easier to just put up and shut up if you want to keep your job.

[kinkthatwinked.livejournal.com]

Well, so much for the fledgling hope that season 7 might be a slight improvement – and just when a certain power-tripping angel finally re-sparks my attention, too.

I’ve been hovering around your journal entries since reading ‘Lazarus Came Forth’ and ‘In Country’ back-to-back. I think the phrase ‘hit with both barrels’ adequately describes how I felt after that marathon read; the gap between what SPN is and what it could have been left me reeling.

Of course I already knew the show’s quality was going downhill, and minus a few glowing exceptions like ‘WIAWSNB’ and ‘Mystery Spot,’ nothing they’ve cranked out for the last five years has really fulfilled the first season’s potential, IMO. But I never fully got just how many opportunities for fresh, risky storytelling have been wasted there.

Now I’m downloading the pilot episode of Mad Men, because if you say it’s a good show then that’s enough for me.

I’d like to go on reading your insights to the show without lurking. May I friend you?

[oselle.livejournal.com]

the gap between what SPN is and what it could have been left me reeling.

I think we all understand that you have freedom to do things in fanfic -- or any prose -- that you can't do on television. And I don't just mean things like violence or sex or foul language. There are limitations of budget and time and resources that don't exist when you're just writing a story. But you don't need a big budget, a cast of thousands, or cutting-edge SFX to tell a good story. You just need imagination and commitment, which relatively speaking, hardly cost a thing.

Mad Men is extraordinary, but for something in the horror genre, you must check out The Walking Dead, which is a perfect example of how this sort of story can be told without its tongue in cheek.

Oh, and of course you can friend me :) Thanks for reading my fics, too!