InsaneJournal

Current mood:

thoughtful

Thoughts on "Bedtime Stories"


As anybody who has known me for long will testify, I love fairy tales. Love-love-love them. Together with Greek mythology, they made up the bulk of my obsessive childhood reading (which I'm sure explains a lot about my warped adult self). And I especially love the older sick-and-twisted versions of the tales, before the Victorians started cleaning them up for kiddie consumption and Disney finished the job.

Which bring me to the one aspect of the episode I found disappointing: after having Sam pay lip service to the existence of the darker versions of the storiies, the show still went and used the familiar modern version. There was nothing in any of the scenarios we saw that you wouldn't find either in the Disney movies or in the childrens' section of your local B&N. Where were Cinderella's stepsisters, cutting off their own toes to fit their feet into the glass slipper? Or getting their eyes pecked out by birds? Where was Sleeping Beauty getting knocked up by the Prince while still asleep? I suppose it says something about those tales that the show that gave us a knife through the eyeball and death by barbecue fork still can't give us the uncensored Brothers Grimm.

Which is a shame, because it would've made the expository conversations between Sam and Dean make a lot more sense, plot and character-wise. I would've had no trouble believing a conversation in which Dean was familiar only with the modern versions of the fairy tales and Sam had to explain the older versions to him (and to the audience). I really didn't believe Sam having to explain the basic concepts of Snow White and Cinderella. Plus, the audience already knows that shit, so what's the point of spending screentime on it anyway? I was willing to put up with expositionary lumps in "Sin City," because they were telling us important new stuff about the mytharc. Fairy tale exposition just doesn't cut it.

That complaint aside, I did enjoy the majority of the episode. It gave us more scenes of Winchester family teamwork than any of the previous episodes this season, with longs of strong and emotional brotherly moments between the boys, and it advanced the lovely demon-politics story arc some more.

This is the second episode we've had opening right in the middle of a SamnDean argument about the Deal (the first being the argument about Ruby at the start of BDaBR). It works really well, because it conveys the idea of these two arguments being part of a much larger ongoing string of arguments without actually having to show them on screen over and over. This is a very different conflict from last year, when Sam spent half a season throwing himself against the blank wall of Dean's silence. This year the boys have pooled most (though not all, which I'm sure will mean trouble) of their information, and the fight is about them disagreeing what to do about the current mess. It's pretty ironic, how often the boys seem at their most brotherly when they fight. Their anger and love and fear for each other really shine through.

It's not just the fighting, thouh. It's Sam's quiet "I can't imagine anything worse" in response to the construction worker's grief at his brothers' death, followed by the wordless close-up of Dean's reaction. It's Dean giving a minute headshake and walking away in silence after Sam asks if Dean wants to be let go. It's Sam pausing to look back at Dean asleep in the motel bed before leaving to confront the Crossroads Demon. There were a whole lot of meaningful silences in this episode. None more meaningful than Sam's tight-lipped silence as he blew away the Demon (and her presumably innocent human host) at the end. He killed her just because she pissed him off, which is a new one for the Winchesters, and came in striking contrast to the scene just a couple of minutes before, where Dean was about to stab the Big Bad Wolf guy with a pair of scissors but stopped on a dime when he realized he was dealing with just an ordinary guy again.

Actually, except for that one woman in "Croatoan," we've never seen Dean kill a human who wasn't in the process violently attacking somebody. Dean may look like the shady, ruthless one on the surface, just as he looks like the rebellious one, but appearances are totally misleading here.

(This is probably the spot where I'm supposed to talk about my take on all the discussion surrounding Dean's "could you be more gay?" line. But sanj has actually said everything I would've said on the suject, so I figure a link is worth a thousand redundant words here. I will just add that to me, the line seemed not only consistent with the way Dean normally talks when he wants to give Sam a hard time, but with scenes like him teaching Ben to beat up the playground bully in TKAA. So much of Dean's day-to-day behavior is the sort of behavior that most kids learn in the schoolyard and then unlearn as they get older and better-socialized. Except that Dean totally skipped the better-socialized part.)

About the conversation between Sam and the Demon, I conclude that sometimes demons lie and sometimes they tell the truth, and sometimes they just don't know what the fuck they're talking about. Demons, it seems to me, don't really get human relationshps, and especially human love in all its messy complexity. They can see and understand all the ugly, fucked-up parts of humanity, but they rest of it just glides over their heads. Because of this, the demons have repeatedly underestimated the Winchesters. Azazel did it when he dismissed Dean as a threat. Meg did it when she tried to turn Sam against Dean in "Scarecrow," and again when she tried to get Dean to kill Sam in BUABS. And now the CRD did it when she actually believed, poor fool, that she was confronting Sam with some sort of hidden truth when she suggested he didn't really want to save his brother. Somebody was definitely protesting too much in that conversation, but it wasn't Sam.

Actually, the only demon who hasn't made this mistake so far is Ruby, which makes me wonder about her all the more.

I wish I had some sort of clever theory about who the CRD's boss is, and why he/she/it wants Dean's soul so badly, but, like Sam, I got nuthin' at the moment. I'm okay with having nuthin', though. I'm willing to wait and see.

I do love the fact that the CRD knew Ruby and didn't like her. It seems that Ruby has enemies in hell, but now she has one fewer than she used to have. Looks like her support of Sam is paying off already.