Gods and Monsters


What’s your favorite current TV show? I don’t mean the one you think is the best, necessarily, but the one you can just let go and enjoy most, whether that feeling comes from pulse-pounding action, total investment in the characters, or laugh-out-loud comedy — or all three.

Jensen Ackles as Dean and Jared Padelecki as Sam against nightmarish background, Sam's hand reaching out to viewer with severe foreshortening

Mine’s Supernatural.

You might’ve been expecting me to say Lost. I think that the acting on Lost is underrated, find the premise and plot intricacies often brilliant, and believe that even if it doesn’t end well it will probably stand the test of time as both an example of what can be achieved in the realm of television narrative and in terms of multimedia or, perhaps, metamedia exposure. But although I can still be thrilled as a given episode unfolds, I have Lost on the brain too much, and the imminence of the finale gives me agita.

With its gripping scripts, great performances, and gorgeous cinematography, Breaking Bad may be the most accomplished show on television, but it’s almost too bleak to refer to as a show one “likes”. Sure, I’m totally into it, but I can only watch it when there’s something light to unwind with for dessert (not even then, right now; I’ve lost AMC to the digital-cable tier).

Supernatural is delightful, diverting storytelling. It debuted in 2005, airs at 9 p.m. Thursdays on CW stations, and broadcast its 101st episode last week.

From third to fifth grade, having read many of the classics in Ms. Kerscher’s room, I was plowing through every book on Greek mythology I could find thanks to a curiosity kickstarted by comics. In middle school, I’d quickly get into Narnia, Prydain, and other fantasy series, as well as science fiction. Before that, I exhausted my elementary school’s small mythology section and then moved on down the stacks: After the Greco-Roman volumes — the D’Aulaires, Bulfinch, Robert Graves — came Norse and Egyptian (also familiar via comics but less so), then young-reader anthologies with such names as Gaelic Ghosts that retold spooky folk tales from around the world. Slavic vampires and Irish faerie tricksters and wronged spirits from the heartland of America — it’s these stories, especially those native to the good ol’ USA, that brothers Sam & Dean Winchester have explored for nearly five seasons of Supernatural.

The series has its own considerable mythology, rooted in Judeo-Christian lore but incorporating other world religions and legends — with, of course, interpretations and inventions specific to the show. And in what was intended to, but now won’t, be its final season it has certain wholly coincidental similarities to Lost. I’ll touch upon those in another post, maybe, but the latest Supernatural prompted me to finally stop writing about the show and start publishing.

While it began as a ghost- and demon-oriented cousin of The X-Files and its predecessor Kolchak the Night Stalker, albeit with less investigation and more outright monster-hunting, Supernatural has slowly edged closer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer territory with the revelation of the Winchester boys’ “chosen” status and the show’s shift from done-in-one “creature of the week” episodes to the grand battle between the forces of Heaven and Hell — yet it’s not quite as serialized as Buffy was at the end, nor, I hope, too wrapped up in its continuity to accommodate new viewers. Even amidst the literal Apocalypse, we’ve seen relatively stand-alone episodes this season that, frankly, seem rather hard to swallow despite the fact that the brothers, separately and together, have endured periods of eschatological apathy.

I was late to the game on Supernatural, but all that meant was that I got to gorge myself on the first two seasons via DVD — relishing the commentary from creator Eric Kripke and other special features so much that I’ve rented later discs just for the bonus material. The downside of such feasting is the famine that comes after one is caught up and has to wait a week or more between new episodes; I could extend the famine until the next DVD release in favor of feasting again (as I have to do with, say, HBO series; I’m still waiting for the next batch of True Blood), but the third season was pivotal and the thrill ride since then has been too powerful a lure. As soon as you have time in your television schedule, I heartily recommend the all-you-can-eat Supernatural buffet. In the meanwhile, however, if you don’t mind jumping into an epic storyline as it barrels towards the climax and you do enjoy seeing figures from ancient mythology or allusions to Paradise Lost represented in contemporary popular fiction, then last week’s episode is a nifty little treat.

“Hammer of the Gods” finds the Winchester boys at Elysian Fields, a far nicer layover than their usual roadside motels, to which it turns out they’ve been lured by a conclave of interdenominational deities. Offended and endangered by the destruction being wrought on Earth based on the Christian Book of Revelation, the Hindu goddess Kali and Norse god Baldur are presiding over a summit of celestials that runs the gamut from Mercury to Odin to Ganesha to Baron Samedi — sorry, Lost fans, no Taweret, but Lucifer’s current human host is a very familiar face. You need to know that Sam and Dean are resisting their supposedly destined roles as vessels for Lucifer and the archangel Michael in those beings’ final battle, and that a persistent thorn in the brothers’ side was recently revealed to be the archangel Gabriel, although the other avatars believe him to be Loki.

Funny, serious, rewarding knowledge of theology, mythology, and popular culture, Supernatural is grade-A entertainment. My only real complaint is the blood and gore, but then it is make-believe. If not, we’re all in trouble.



Related: Norse Code Myth and Fingerprints Woman on the Verge

11 comments:

  1. Awesome bloggin' about an awesome episode of an awesome show, Blambino. Me, I watch it on TV and again on DVD. So glad it's not ending yet, but how it continues will be quite a trick.

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  2. Blambino!

    Love it :D



    vw: Meatear!

    Yes! Once in awhile you get a really great one. Is it an ear growing out of your steak*? Is it an ear made out of meat? It is a sick ear that some poor old person has? I'm sorry, Mr.Brovnwinkle, you've got end stage MeatEar.

    *It is OK to eat the steak so long as you finish it quickly before the ear has time fully form. Fully form and respond to your slaughter with pathetic (and disgusting) twitches.

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  3. Love it :D

    She has actually called me Blambino in person.

    Meatear!

    That one could give Spam a run for its money. Annnnd I'm now counting the seconds 'til you refer to me as "Pork Shoulder and Blam"... ;'^{

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  4. My buddies Falen and Palindrome are constantly trying to get me to watch Supernatural (I just have SO MANY SHOWS right now). Consider your voice added to the chorus.

    My favorite show right now probably is Lost (at least, it's the show I look forward to watching the most).

    After that, it's probably Castle (which isn't nearly as deep or as captivating as Lost but is a heck of a lot of fun) or either of two new, phenomenal sitcoms, Modern Family and Community, depending on the night of the week.

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  5. "Pork Shoulder and Blam"

    That's weird. Is that a Pennsylvania thing, pork shoulder and ham, or just a Blam thing.

    I bet it's just you, my little Blam Chop.

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  6. Spam, the infamous canned Hormel meat product, is made of pork shoulder and ham. Now scrapple, that's a Pennsylvania thing. Judging by iced coffee's arrival in Canada last year, scrapple will get there in a few years and Spam will show up circa 2075.

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  7. Oh, Supernatural just rocks, Teebster. You'll love it when you finally get to hop aboard.

    I know what's it's like to have too many shows, believe me; I'm almost thankful for essentially no longer getting any non-broadcast stations thanks to Comcast's uniquely obnoxious combination of greed, apathy, and incompetence. Since that situation includes not having a DVR or On Demand, it's very easy for me to fall behind on awesome stuff due to at most being able to watch one thing and tape another on the VCR, crossing my fingers that my Internet connection will hold up enough to watch something online when necessary. 30 Rock has once again fallen victim to the logjam in the 9 p.m. hour Thursdays that includes Fringe, Supernatural, and CSI. Similarly, I haven't seen Community since it debuted and while I really enjoyed the first dozen or so episodes of Modern Family, I haven't watched it in ages. The priority when it comes to staying on top of shows is not to lose track of the serialized ones, until I fall too far behind and then they get dropped completely until I can catch them in repeats or more likely via Netflix.

    My short list of absolute favorites definitely includes Castle for its pure old-school televisionary goodness. I'm really enamored of Fringe, too, although it borders on giving me the same too-much-thought troubles that keep Lost from being pure enjoyment. Also up there is Glee, which despite its problems has some laugh-out-loud moments and those infectious musical numbers.

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  8. Ditto on Glee. I enjoy that one as well, despite some of its flaws (as much as I love the musical numbers, I also wouldn't mind a few of them to be slightly less-produced; lets just hear the characters singing every once in awhile). It really is a hilarious show, and well, I'm a sucker for the musical numbers as well.

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  9. as much as I love the musical numbers, I also wouldn't mind a few of them to be slightly less-produced; lets just hear the characters singing every once in awhile

    Yes! I've pretty much reconciled myself with the wildly fluctuating tones of the show (bawdy farce, earnest drama, outsize fantasy) and learned to just enjoy it, sometimes for its very contradictions. The overly slick recording even when the performers are simply hanging out in the rehearsal room really chafes at me, though.

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  10. Yeah, I'm fine with the big, overly produced numbers at the end (call 'em dress rehearsals) and the extended fantasy sequence musical numbers (like Artie's 'Dancing with Myself') but it would be nice to see them in rehearsal just singing, without every song turning into a huge production.

    I understand a lot of it has to do with rights and stuff (the more produced the song is, the easier it is, legally, for them to put it on a CD) but I'd think they'd be able to sneak a few quiet songs in there from time to time.

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  11. I might be a teensy bit late on this one, but:

    I would be willing to bet a considerable amount of money that the writer(s) of the episode Hammer of the Gods have read and re-read and re-read American Gods by Neil Gaiman. And taken some serious notes.

    Which of course is something that should be done by everyone who is into gods of various pantheons meeting in quiet motels.

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