Snarky Supernatural Saturday (S1 E11)

Elderly, friendly couple in a small town? They’re kidnapping and eating people, right?

Or it’s a giant dude.

Oh, just a crucified scarecrow.

You SAW it move, you do not respond with “Please let’s just hurry,” you FUCKING RUN!

THANK YOU.

And then the scarecrow has the tattoo or something, right? There has to be a reason they pointed out the tattoo.

Oh, or she just trips over him. At least they didn’t bother with the useless Previously On, but that makes the lackluster title sequence even less lustery.

A demon killed their mom. A demon named SAM!

I’m treating this as confirmation that their dad is trolling them, by the way.

Oh, don’t play Mourning Olympics, that’s just not cool.

Um, no, being a good son doesn’t require blind obedience.

Dean calling someone a selfish bastard is hilarious.

Great, either one will save the other and they’ll cheesily reconcile by the end of the episode, or I’m going to have to follow two storylines about characters I don’t like instead of just one.

I have no idea who this girl is, but I suspect I’m meant to find her “spunky.” Blech.

Oh look, Dean’s ectometer is going off. Another big Twinkie?

The scarecrow is some sort of patchwork zombie creature, isn’t it?

Yep, it’s got his tattoo.

Wow, a gas station where they fill for you? That’s ancient.

They’ve got an evil protector spirit thing going, huh? Once again I find myself reminded of something vastly better, American Gods in this case.

The sheriff just literally ran him out of town. Hilarious.

Wow, it’s like she’s going through everything Sam is! Almost as if her sole purpose in being in the show is to advance Sam’s story!

And then Dean predictably saves them from the scarecrow, yawn.

Ugh, can you stop saying “pagan god”? It’s a god, it’s evil, can we drop the implication that polytheism=evil?

It’s one of the Vanir?

The appropriation and shallowness of the research here BURNS. I just saw Thor 2 over the weekend, and it managed to be less disrespectful to Norse beliefs than this. That’s pretty pathetic.

All the people standing around with umbrellas are going to start chanting “the greater good” any minute.

Why DOES it have to be her? Couldn’t it be an actress who doesn’t sound completely fake when crying?

“For the common good” is close enough.

YES! SHE SAID “THE GREATER GOOD!”

And then quoted Star Trek. Weird.

As it turns out, the apple pie is TOTALLY worth it.

…and I guess in a sense I was right about the old couple eating the victims.

Blah blah Sam saves him and they reconcile, cheesiness on cue.

You really need to stop mentioning the movies you’re ripping off by name, show.

The introduction of gods and demons to the show makes me think of something I read once regarding Shinto, that the difference between a god and a demon is their relationship to humans. To the people in the mountains for whom the river is a source of water, it is a god; to the people in the plains whose house it just washed away in a flood, it’s a demon.

And then the scarecrow god thing kills its worshippers, as evil gods in these sorts of things tend to do.

And then the scarecrow was a tree, I guess?

No, they just found the First Tree somehow, and it was right by that ladder all along. Okay.

Congratulations, Emily, you’re now being haunted by the ghost of an angry evil god.

On the other hand, you claimed a small amount of agency! Good for you!
 
Oh, for FUCK’S SAKE, Dean, can you not be evil for once.

Is Meg going to turn out to be some kind of monster?

…Or an evil cultist, that works. And by “works” I mean “meh, could have been worse, she could have gone back to her family.”

I find it amusing that the first episode to really feel like it’s part of a serialized show is also the first episode with no Previously On.

Characters so far (characters appearing in this episode are in italics, characters who have not been seen or mentioned in three episodes not included):
-Drunken, absent father (still punking them)
-The living incarnation of anxious masculinity
-Milquetoast who is secretly evil-baby with evil-baby fiery lady-fridging powers he can’t control
-Disposable woman who exists solely to die in a horrible, painful way to create drama for the male characters and further the plot (deceased)
-Other disposable woman who exists solely to die in a horrible, painful way to create drama for the male characters and further the plot (deceased)
-Jenny (owned their house, lost it in the lawsuit the narrative just forgot about)
-Plumber (lost his house, sued Jenny)
-Jenny’s daughter
-Jenny’s son
-Missouri (I miss her already) 
-Murder-suicide cop (deceased)
-Black cop (not dead, in this show’s most shocking twist yet)
-Gavin (dickweasel)
-Kat (yet another generically pretty blonde)
-Ghosts who just want attention
-Evil psychiatrist ghost (he lives in a Silent Hill level, and not one of the good ones)
-Emily, who gets actual agency and to actively make a decision and literally takes her fate out of Dean’s hands! (she needs a fansite)
-Meg, who gets agency too but is evil
-Evil scarecrow (probably not in the family of blood)
-Evil farmers (FOR THE GREATER GOOD)
Disposable women who exist solely to die in horrible, painful ways to create drama for the male characters and/or Lori and further the plot counter: 7
Women who kiss Dean: 2
Missouri counter: 1
Average disposable women who exist solely to die in horrible, painful ways to create drama for the male characters and further the plot per episode: 0.6
Average women who suffer horrible fates no one should have to endure per episode: 0.8
Average Missouri per episode: 0.1 ACCEPTABILITY LEVELS CRITICALLY LOW

Final Rating: 6/10 WOMEN WITH AGENCY! PLOT THAT CROSSES AMERICAN GODS WITH HOT FUZZ! ADD IN MISSOURI OR MAIN CHARACTERS I CARE ABOUT AND THIS COULD HAVE BEEN THE FIRST GENUINELY GOOD EPISODE! 

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So, as I said yesterday, I'm not doing these anymore. I tried to like the show, and I don't think I'm ever going to. And frankly, snark-watching just isn't my thing--this was an interesting experiment, but I don't think the results were particularly great and I didn't enjoy it at all. I have better things to do with those three hours a week--like watching Veronica Mars, which is delightful so far, or working on My Little Po-Mo vol. 2.

So why didn't this show work for me? Well, first of all, the double fridging in the first episode started it off on a sour note. Dean also was immediately immensely unlikeable for me--in that episode he was a swaggering, sexist bully, and while they backtracked on those elements somewhat in the following episode, he was still obsessed with his anxious masculinity in a tiresome way that the narrative didn't particularly seem to want to criticize. Sam, meanwhile, was just boring generic milquetoast--the comparison to Han Solo and Luke Skywalker in one episode was spot-on.

It's pretty clear by episode 11 that the relationship between the brothers is a central element of the show, which is a problem given that I find them unlikable and their relationship uninteresting.

The other thing the show offers is the monster-of-the-week horror plots. Unfortunately, these have also been utterly uninteresting for me. I simply do not find slasher movies frightening or (usually) interesting; fictional blood and gore and violence just aren't frightening to me. The show seems to have no interest in the kinds of horror I find interesting or frightening--the psychological, the surreal, the kind where neither the audience nor the characters are entirely sure what's real. There's been none of that in the show, and no suggestion it will ever happen.

People have assured me that the show gets better. There is some hint that it's doing so. But I simply don't have time to watch hours and hours of something bad in the hopes it will improve; there's too much good stuff out there I haven't watched yet.

So what do I do with Saturday's now? I'm not sure--probably something related to that week's pony episode, at least while those are on the air. Perhaps a liveblog of the episode?