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ariadnes_stringThese yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
Surround me
SPN 6.07
I enjoyed this episode immensely, from the cavity searches to the alpha!vamp, but I feel I might not have been taking it as seriously as I should have.
This is in direct contrast to last week’s episode (6.06), which I didn’t write about then because I felt like I might have been taking it too seriously.
[Warning for Dean-centricity:] It made me surprisingly sad that Lisa broke up with Dean—not because I didn’t think her reasons for doing it were valid, and not because I wasn’t happy that Lisa and Ben made it out of the Great Grimpen Mire of Winchesterdom alive (so far), but just because I was so sorry to see Dean lose something that seemed to make him happy.
And the episode hammered us over the head with the fact that Dean couldn’t have both Lisa and Sam. It’s a pretty explicit part of SPN canon/fanon that Dean has given up a lot for Sam (not just his life in S3, but also his childhood—lost in devoting himself to a little brother). But I don’t think that the show has ever shown him so reluctant to make that choice before, made it seem like a compulsion, rather than a pleasure.
The way the episode pretty explicitly linked Dean’s “addiction” to Sam to his alcoholism really drove this point home. Both seemed like needs that had long gone past the point of enjoyment—until one was revolted by the very thing one needed….
Okay—I know that’s a little melodramatic, which is why I didn’t bring it up last week. But I did just want to say that 6.06 made me sad….and to point how, in contrast to his heavy drinking last week, Dean didn’t touch a drop this week—onscreen, anyway. Inconsistent writing, probably, but it also seemed significant, somehow.
[Warning for flippancy] On to 6.07: I have to say I’m enjoying soulless!Sam or robo!Sam much more than I’ve enjoyed any flavor of Sam for a long time, with his complete inability to have the proper response to anything, and his weird puppy dog parroting of what he thinks the proposer response should be.
Perhaps a better word for him would be sociopathic?
Which is to say that it all reminds me of the lovely scene in “A Study in Pink” in which Sherlock loudly expresses his disbelief that a murder victim might still have been sad about her daughter’s long-ago death, and then looks around puzzled at the shocked expressions on everyone’s faces.
“Not good?” he says.
But whereas John Watson, with classic British understatement, answers “a bit not good,” Dean Winchester, faced with the same sort of behavior, beats his brother’s face to a pulp, ties him to a chair, then calls in his “wingman” to stick his fist up Sam’s gut. You gotta love America sometimes.
And, omg, I still can’t quite get over that opening scene, which was simultaneously one of the most intense, the kinkiest, and the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen—on television or elsewhere. Kudos to everyone involved for getting through it with straight faces.
Tho’ it also left me asking why being touched by an angel always results in intestinal distress on SPN, from constipation to literal gut-wrenching. It’s kind of amazing that Dean and Cas (and Sam to some degree) can squeeze such quantities of UST from the threat of cramping. (lol, never mind, I think I just answered my own question).
In other news, I absolutely loved the alpha!vamp. That may have been the most elegant scene of exposition I’ve ever seen.
[Warning for geekery, which the alpha’s throwaway line about mothers seemed to call for] Since I’ve always been more of a Milton!girl myself than a Dante!girl myself, I thought I’d give you Milton’s take on Sin, the mother of monsters, telling her father, Satan, about being raped by her son, Death:
I fled, but he pursu'd (though more, it seems,
Inflam'd with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Mee overtook his mother all dismaid,
And in embraces forcible and foule
Ingendring with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Paradise Lost, Book II, ll. 790-802
You don't really need to have read Freud to know that maternity is the scariest thing of all....
Merlin 3.09
Okay, what I mostly felt about this episode was that I missed Gwaine. I wondered what he was up to. I wished we could have had an episode about his adventures this week, instead of another episode about what happens when one of the Pendragons (Uther’s turn again this time) is unconscious….
I think I would have had more to say if the episode hadn’t bored my five-year-old out of his mind, and he hadn’t spent the whole 40+ minutes squirming on my lap and trying to wreak havoc on everything in arms’ reach.
The only parts the boys liked were the parts where Arthur “practiced” on Merlin—because the natural environment of small boys is a world in which rigid pecking orders are enforced with taunting and physical cruelty. They thought the arm punches were hysterical.
And we all agreed we liked the manticore, which bore a remarkable resemblance to a miniature terrier owned by my ex-in-laws, except less scary.
The use of black contacts by Merlin confused me, tho’. I kept thinking that Alice was a demon. Or perhaps that Christian Campbell was controlled by a manticore….
Okay—I’ll come back for H50 Tues. or Wed.
Surround me
SPN 6.07
I enjoyed this episode immensely, from the cavity searches to the alpha!vamp, but I feel I might not have been taking it as seriously as I should have.
This is in direct contrast to last week’s episode (6.06), which I didn’t write about then because I felt like I might have been taking it too seriously.
[Warning for Dean-centricity:] It made me surprisingly sad that Lisa broke up with Dean—not because I didn’t think her reasons for doing it were valid, and not because I wasn’t happy that Lisa and Ben made it out of the Great Grimpen Mire of Winchesterdom alive (so far), but just because I was so sorry to see Dean lose something that seemed to make him happy.
And the episode hammered us over the head with the fact that Dean couldn’t have both Lisa and Sam. It’s a pretty explicit part of SPN canon/fanon that Dean has given up a lot for Sam (not just his life in S3, but also his childhood—lost in devoting himself to a little brother). But I don’t think that the show has ever shown him so reluctant to make that choice before, made it seem like a compulsion, rather than a pleasure.
The way the episode pretty explicitly linked Dean’s “addiction” to Sam to his alcoholism really drove this point home. Both seemed like needs that had long gone past the point of enjoyment—until one was revolted by the very thing one needed….
Okay—I know that’s a little melodramatic, which is why I didn’t bring it up last week. But I did just want to say that 6.06 made me sad….and to point how, in contrast to his heavy drinking last week, Dean didn’t touch a drop this week—onscreen, anyway. Inconsistent writing, probably, but it also seemed significant, somehow.
[Warning for flippancy] On to 6.07: I have to say I’m enjoying soulless!Sam or robo!Sam much more than I’ve enjoyed any flavor of Sam for a long time, with his complete inability to have the proper response to anything, and his weird puppy dog parroting of what he thinks the proposer response should be.
Perhaps a better word for him would be sociopathic?
Which is to say that it all reminds me of the lovely scene in “A Study in Pink” in which Sherlock loudly expresses his disbelief that a murder victim might still have been sad about her daughter’s long-ago death, and then looks around puzzled at the shocked expressions on everyone’s faces.
“Not good?” he says.
But whereas John Watson, with classic British understatement, answers “a bit not good,” Dean Winchester, faced with the same sort of behavior, beats his brother’s face to a pulp, ties him to a chair, then calls in his “wingman” to stick his fist up Sam’s gut. You gotta love America sometimes.
And, omg, I still can’t quite get over that opening scene, which was simultaneously one of the most intense, the kinkiest, and the most ridiculous things I’ve ever seen—on television or elsewhere. Kudos to everyone involved for getting through it with straight faces.
Tho’ it also left me asking why being touched by an angel always results in intestinal distress on SPN, from constipation to literal gut-wrenching. It’s kind of amazing that Dean and Cas (and Sam to some degree) can squeeze such quantities of UST from the threat of cramping. (lol, never mind, I think I just answered my own question).
In other news, I absolutely loved the alpha!vamp. That may have been the most elegant scene of exposition I’ve ever seen.
[Warning for geekery, which the alpha’s throwaway line about mothers seemed to call for] Since I’ve always been more of a Milton!girl myself than a Dante!girl myself, I thought I’d give you Milton’s take on Sin, the mother of monsters, telling her father, Satan, about being raped by her son, Death:
I fled, but he pursu'd (though more, it seems,
Inflam'd with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Mee overtook his mother all dismaid,
And in embraces forcible and foule
Ingendring with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceasless cry
Surround me, as thou sawst, hourly conceiv'd
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howle and gnaw
My Bowels, thir repast; then bursting forth
A fresh with conscious terrours vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Paradise Lost, Book II, ll. 790-802
You don't really need to have read Freud to know that maternity is the scariest thing of all....
Merlin 3.09
Okay, what I mostly felt about this episode was that I missed Gwaine. I wondered what he was up to. I wished we could have had an episode about his adventures this week, instead of another episode about what happens when one of the Pendragons (Uther’s turn again this time) is unconscious….
I think I would have had more to say if the episode hadn’t bored my five-year-old out of his mind, and he hadn’t spent the whole 40+ minutes squirming on my lap and trying to wreak havoc on everything in arms’ reach.
The only parts the boys liked were the parts where Arthur “practiced” on Merlin—because the natural environment of small boys is a world in which rigid pecking orders are enforced with taunting and physical cruelty. They thought the arm punches were hysterical.
And we all agreed we liked the manticore, which bore a remarkable resemblance to a miniature terrier owned by my ex-in-laws, except less scary.
The use of black contacts by Merlin confused me, tho’. I kept thinking that Alice was a demon. Or perhaps that Christian Campbell was controlled by a manticore….
Okay—I’ll come back for H50 Tues. or Wed.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-09 12:53 am (UTC)*snorts* Perhaps because angels always had stick up their asses?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-09 04:24 am (UTC)The whole hand in the gut thing reminded me of Cronenberg's Videodrome--I kept expecting Cas to pull out an old-fashioned VHS tape--