Archive of ‘television shows’ category

On the CW making death “the great escape”.

One of the biggest problems that I had with the Supernatural finale is that Dean, at least in their eyes, could not find happiness in life — that he could only find happiness in death, in Heaven, after he had passed away, but not in life. For a character that was passively suicidal for much of the show’s run, whose character arc demonstrated him finally beginning to turn away from that, see the worth that was in life, and want to do something beyond hunting (since there was a job application on his desk in his room), to have killed him off like that sent the worst possible message to fans of the show. And mind, the show is rated TV-14 — this means that minors, and impressionable minors, can watch it if they so desire. And this was the message that was sent to them: who cares about the here and now? Your only happiness, or salvation, is allegedly in death. The CW should not have sent people that message, but they did. And they know that they’ve done it due to all of the negative backlash that the show has gotten in respect to the finale. They absolutely know.

Soon, I will have a fourteen-year-old of my own who can, at least in theory, watch Supernatural after his fourteenth birthday. But for an array of reasons that don’t have as much to do with him being autistic as they may seem at first glance, I will not be letting him watch this show, whether it is with me — assuming that I eventually do a rematch — or on his own. I loved this show until the finale and I am consciously choosing not to share this love with my child out of respect to what the finale tried to make the show.

This actually makes me laugh here. It does.

The remainder of the fifteenth season’s episodes of Supernatural are available on Netflix here in the United States, which I completely expected them to be sooner or later. (But will I watch them? Maybe once, just to say that I watched every single episode of Supernatural, and then I am not going to rewatch it.) But the thing that makes me laugh, you say? The fact that the Spanish dub is not available along with them when it usually is. Someone that I know stated that… this doesn’t ordinarily happen, but everyone’s guess is that the Spanish version of the show is going to be re-dubbed to conform more to the American version even though there are plenty of videos being disseminated around the Internet demonstrating the original dub where Dean Winchester reciprocated Castiel’s love for him. It’s not like you can put all of this back in the box here.

The actor that plays Castiel hasn’t said anything else about this aside from admitting that his initial (more than likely encouraged by the CW, at least as far as a lot of fans suspect) attempt at… quashing this was tone-deaf, and I’m inclined to agree with him. It was. But I’m still annoyed that a show that managed to last fifteen seasons, that broke a world record and is now the longest running sci-fi show ever, managed to go out as poorly as it did and us fans are just expected to sit here, there, wherever we’re sitting and gladly take table scraps. It seems that we’re supposed to be grateful for them, and we’re not. Oh, we are really not…

They should have waited until the pandemic was over to film and complete the series, and they should really have re-thought the last three episodes and the finale. They seriously went out on the poorest possible note.

It took them all of one day to do this.

It took the CW all of one day after that information broke in the manner that it did to have Misha Collins, Castiel’s actor, make a series of Tweets about “how that wasn’t really how the scene was supposed to go down” (Dean Winchester reciprocating Castiel’s love for him), actually having the nerve — and for the record, I blame the CW for this now, not Misha himself — to try and blame “rogue translators” for this when it was, to the best of my knowledge, two languages that this occurred in. It happened in Portuguese and Spanish. I did some more research on the matter beyond what I had already picked up, and translation is more of an art than some people realize. There are quality checks along the way. Dubbing is almost always done in the native language in question so that the characters speak in a language that they will be understood by their intended participants in, and the subtitles reflect this. There would have had to have been a whole lot of “rogue translators” (insert me rolling my eyes here) for this to have actually occurred, let alone made it to television, and not become a big thing in the countries that it aired in other than praise for it ending the decade-long queerbaiting that had been going on in the show with something more substantial.

This has strengthened my resolve not to re-watch any episodes of Supernatural after I watch the ones remaining that I have not watched, and I will not be watching any more of the CW’s shows after this. The hashtag “they silenced you” and “they silenced them” was, at least at the start, primarily about this, but then it came to encapsulate so much more — that Supernatural killed off every LBGT and minority character that came onto the show more quickly than they did… characters who were not. As I’ve stated in previous entries, the hope is in the fandom at this point, and the “Supernatural family”. It’s definitely not in the actual show…

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