By Wes Unruh
I hated Supernatural when it started out. Well, not hated.. I'd wander out of the room, though... at least until the first appearance of the Trickster in "tall tales" during Season 2.. After a while, however, I started studying what Eric Kripke was doing in the subtext - the larger themes began to emerge - and what has unfolded is an elegant and entertaining conundrum, at the heart of it a question - is this world of ours devoid of gods and magic?
Sure, that's high-minded and melodramatic. Melodrama is fun. It establishes an ironic detachment between audience and stage where identity seepage can occur, few could be so daft as to allow that seepage to possess them so fully that they act out in violent, irrational ways, though there is always someone willing to believe, and map, the worst possible scenario onto their surroundings, and take up the mantle of hunter in a deeply misguided way (see nunez, brea - two real-world cases which would not have been out of place during Season 5 of Supernatural).
Last night's episode, 'the french mistake' (clearly a reference to Blazing Saddles) firmly planted Supernatural into a twilight space where fans, narratives, and producers can freely decontextualize all elements of the show into personal discursive narratives. Seriously... @MishaCollins (and the rest of the writing and production team) accomplished a nice cross-world paradigm shift in how identity actors public self can seep through narrative space. Utilizing himself as caricature, he timed his first tweet in the show with an east coast live tweet on twitter, and his second tweet in the show to the west coast airing. Breaking the frame in a way that they hinted at in Season 5 - this episode went all the way over into what Misha ultimately called "a parallel universe devoid of magic."
If you haven't seen this episode, you should. Of course, you'll need to watch every episode since Season 3 started for it to make any sense... and you'll come back and thank me once you've finished.
I actually disliked the episode a lot. Collins' metatweeting was a nice touch, sure - but the whole thing struck me as self-indulgent wank. (Oddly the bit which really annoyed me was when a cursory Google search let the Winchesters decide our world is devoid of magic... are they really looking at the same internet as, say, this site lives on?)
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