Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SUPERNATURAL – SEASON 10

A year ago or so, on January 14, 2015 precisely, I wrote what follows for Season 9 of this series.

« It is hard to go on with this series without being repetitive. I will not say much about the episodes that are local and small if not limited battles against this or that monster, vampire or werewolf. These episodes are entertaining but they do not make the plot move forward – nor backward either, just sideways.

The main plot is little by little destroying itself into some kind of delirium tremens caused by self-punishing zeal to go on forever ranting and raving about angels and demons, about hell and heaven, and all that directly on earth that becomes slightly crammed if not jammed with extra-realistic beings who want only one thing: destroy each other, destroy one another, recreate heaven for the good angels who will be stronger and defeat the others by destroying them, and reopen hell for all bad demons though some are worse or badder than others and either they have to be destroyed or they have to destroy those who are not badder.

I would say then the novelty can only be in the technical achievement of the director and editor or special effect technician. But that does not make a good series even if the pictures are original and good. We can of course search the series for what has already been seen, exploited and is coming to the worn-out phase, like Wincest for example. Dean and Sam are not like good cheese or good wine, they do not improve with age, they just get older and you cannot teach new tricks to old dogs, or monkeys, or horses. » (http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RV9F7VYN3VZQT/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00FEVZDC0)

Apparently I must not have been the only one to express, word and even utter such a criticism because this tenth season is definitely an improvement. Very few episodes are only one fable within the big picture, with one monster or type of monsters. Even these few chapters though are clearly articulated in the general picture. The well-named warp of the TV fabric is thus not hijacked by but engrossed with the waft of side enigmas that reinforce the main discourse.

And clear enough now we are back on the main line, on the main stake of such a series and this stake is the impossible deadly conflict between the Cain-mark carrier, the elder brother Dean, and the younger brother Sam who should be killed by Dean just like Abel was killed by Cain. If he demonstrates his inability to fulfill his fate, his mission in fact, then the mark of Cain will have to migrate away from his arm, away from him.

And that’s where the series becomes kind of deeply esoteric. This mark is a curse but it originally was a divine key that Lucifer was entrusted by god with keeping safe, unluckily Lucifer got bad and was thrown down and he passed the mark to Cain after his awful crime, or the mark migrated to Cain. That mark was the key that locked the universe in existence before Genesis, the complete darkness covering the whole watery universe, out of the “creation” that is stated as being of course in no way the creation of the universe from nothing but from that very darkness by curbing it down into what we know today as day and night. Check your Genesis for the details.

The question is that in the series the two brothers have different agendas. Dean wants to die but due to the mark he is immortal. Death suggests that he passes the mark to someone else. Dean refuses. Then the deal is for Cain-Dean to assume his nature and kill Abel-Sam. That’s Dean’s agenda. On the other side Sam has a completely different agenda. He realizes he is nothing without his brother, so he has to save him by all means and the means are not exactly kosher. Sorcery, witchcraft with Crowley’s mother, Rowena, the super duper witch who abandoned Crowley when he was a child in Scotland. She is immortal and he is immortal. This witchcraft with a little help from Crowley finding the only person his witchy mother loved tyhree centuries ago in Poland who has to be sacrificed for this very black magic to work. And here this Oscar from Poland has been made immortal by the witchy mother when she loved him and he is in the neighborhood hiding behind the name of the third son of Adam and Eve, Seth, and Crowley is able to trace him and bring him to the sacrificing table: he is in fact his favorite waiter in his favorite bar. Diabolical, isn’t it?

And all goes wrong. Dean is unable to kill Sam but he “kills” the fundamental semblance of an essential force in our human life. The mark though disappears since Oscar-Seth is generously offering his blood, till death ensues, to the witchy mother and it works. She is free, Castiel is of course alive and Crowley is of course alive too and all our immortals are able to be the witnesses of what Dean and Crowley’s mother have liberated that invades the planet and closes the season on a phenomenal fade-out to black. Just wait for the next season or you have already watched the episodes of the 11^th season on TV.

Try to grip closely to the cliff because you may stay hanging there on the rock-face for quite a few months. But the series has now seriously changed from autonomous episodes strung up on a televised string week after week from September to June into a dark rewriting of the brotherly fate of Sam and Dean. It no longer is the war of the two brothers but the fate of the two brothers who can’t live one without the other and yet cannot die or kill each other. This modern rewriting is definitely sad. In the old days it was so simple for one brother to kill another. Now we have become squirmy about it. And in the old days episodes like pearls on a nylon thread were good enough for a series. Now producers and authors borrowed from the miniseries the necessary global architecture that really gives meaning.

This tenth season has seriously improved but will it manage to land properly from that cliffhanger of an ending? One thing is obvious though: Wincest is purely and simply made fun of in one episode from a girlish point of view. We have recaptured what we should never have lost: the deep commitment to superior and tragic human values and we have been liberated from the teenage, nearly prepubescent, virginal and naïve Wincest that irritated so much my assistant because even with a lot of Marshall McLuhan and the idea that the truth or the lie is in the eyes of the beholder, it is slightly difficult now, in their nearly old age or at least pre-middle age, to imagine the two brothers cuddling in their mutual arms for some apocalyptic riding of each other as if they were horses. And yet that was such a pleasant hypothesis to read this series as if it were a terrifying rewriting of Queer As Folk, the American version  of course in Pittsburgh.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU