Dead Man's Blood meta

[hope]

Firstly, the Colt. How much am I loving the Colt? Not for its Deus Ex Machina potential (though, I thought Sammy's brain was taking up the whole 'the eagles are coming!' gig?), rather, for the Colt and its backstory. Because Winchester. Like the rifle.. Fancy schmancy backstory and all, because The Colt was made by Mister Colt himself, who was a playa player. Colt. Winchester. I love the heavy-handed allegorical/mythical/prophecy-esque arc the Colt embodies just by being created and existing as it does. (Post script: someone's translated the inscription on the barrel here.)


Secondly, the accents. I've been mulling over them for a while, because as we all know, the Js are Texan and every so often that pops out if they get shouty or somesuch ("UR IN DAINGER!" meheheh), but, hoo boy, Daddy sure is a bit Southern in DMB, inne? I know criticisms of the accents range from "OMG DO ME JDM" to "dudes, keep in character!" but here's the thing - I think that on a meta level, it is in character. Now, I'm no expert on US accents and their localities, but it seems to me that they don't really have an accent that definitively places them within a specific locality (be it 'California' or 'The South'). This could be because of the tendency for a lot of US TV (and, US peeps reading this, feel free to enlighten or explain or correct me if I'm wrong with this stuff) to genericise accents as they tend to genericise the culture (not including shows like VM, which is about Californian culture as much as American; or obvious shows like King of the Hill or Seinfeld). Generally edges are smoothed off actors' accents to end up a kind of soft, unobtrusive mid-western, right?

And this show is no exception - from the characters themselves to their freaks of the week. Yes, occassionally they slipped if they got excited; but in this episode it was different - or rather, it'd come into its own. John's was the strongest, obviously, and the boys slipped into it too, but instead of being the occassional slip-up, it generated not this 'non-accent', but one of multiplicity, with no original - in other words, it reflected their characters pretty damn well, both on a canonical level (they didn't grow up in any one particular place, they travelled around, ostensibly picking up a range of accents) and on a meta level (they don't belong to a particular locality, rather their verbal identity is constructed of a bricolage of a range of localities to invoke one that doesn't actually exist - simulacrum? - except where they've created a space for it outside of the text).

In other words, I've made up my mind and I freaking love it.


Thirdly, Winchester dynamic. Do I really need to say again how much I love the un-subtlety of this show? All the John and Sam interaction had me spasming so much I almost tipped my chair over, because yeah, heavy-handed and full of chick flick moments but in the middle of that - the writers giving you a gentle bitch-slap with their dudes, we're not incompetent writers, we know exactly what we're doing with the "I spent your college money on ammo." Because it harks back to what I was saying about Dean giving Sam an unloaded gun in Asylum, and how I came to terms with the seemingly half-assed fighting techniques, and I'll re-iterate: They are doing it as it is done. Not as it is meant to be done. If they were living the cliche, the conversation about how Sam and John are really alike and how John had once upon a time had a college fund for him would have ended with: "what happened to the fund, dad?" "it's right here, sammy - I keep the bank statements right next to my heart" or some crap like that. Because as much as the Winchesters live mired in cliche (hello, look at the vampires in that episode), they're not slaves to it - they're floating.


Fourthly, and related to Thirdly, somewhat - I am in one constant state of orgasm thanks to the casting of Paddywhack as Sam. I'm choosing to say that at this point because omg Shouty McShoutPants in this episode. Okay, I'm still not being clear... I love the casting of Sam because it also breaks with cliche. Sam is the little brother, the geek, the lets-talk-about-our-problems guy, the one that always needs rescuing, the puppy-dog eyes. You've seen enough TV shows and films to know the type I'm talking about. But physically - Sam doesn't fit that type. Sure, Dean more often than not needs to rescue him from the baddy, but when it comes down to it, usually he doesn't need the brain power to get out of a tight spot. Physically he's pretty damn powerful (and masculine) - like when he opens a can of whoopass in The Benders, or when he steps out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel (...) in Something Wicked, or when he gets all up in Daddy's face in Dead Man's Blood, and holy crap, his shouty voice. Sam is, physically, a force to be reckoned with.

And it's not that there's a disparity between the casting of a beefcake for a personality that entirely lacks machismo; because there they go undermining cliche again. Like they way they dress him as if he has a wealth of self-image issues (which is, frankly, unsurprising considering a wealth of issues in Sam's upbringing and lifestyle etc), and the way Paddywhack performs that, the too-tall person thing (fuck, I so know), and... um... sorry, I went off and read a bunch of porn between this sentence and the last one. What was I saying? Oh, right. Paddywhack. Muscles. The character is made more real by the fact that it breaks the 'rules' of your typical fictional text. It breaks the boundaries put on it by the audience's expectations.


Also, I'm still adjusting to the weird feeling/structure of this episode - it's the same feeling I got after watching Shadow. It was structured the same way, anyway - starts as a usual freak-o-the-week thing, then suddenly Daddy turns up and everything's de-railed. The freak of the week loses priority - it's still present, of course, but it's like John being there jerks them out of the groove for that episode, jerks them up a level to the season-arc instead of episode-arc. They still get the baddies, but getting-the-baddies becomes just something they do instead of something that they're characters in (more blatantly than usual) - and both Shadow and DMB seemed to end too soon, because there wasn't the conflict-resolution conclusion that the f-o-t-w eps have by default. It's strange.


Anyway. God, I've rambled enough.