Supernatural, Season Seven

Alright, well... I have a lot of feelings.

Season Six was absolutely abysmal and pretty much instant proof that the show should've died at Season Five. Nothing about Season Six was worth salvaging, not a single thing. The Mother of All plot was recycled, badly-handled, and half-assed to hell and back, the soulless Sam bit, the only remotely interesting part, was given up halfway through (and it wasn't good enough to carry, since it was derivative enough), and the whole thing with Castiel...

I don't like Castiel. I just don't. I didn't like him in Season Four, Season Five didn't go very far towards making me accept him as "part of the team" because they just didn't try very hard. He got roughly to "friend" and unfortunately, I didn't value him enough to really forgive him much when he went way off the rails into a villain (and yes, he is a villain in Season Six--he's scheming and plotting and sacrificing lives to an agenda left and right, and his whining about how betrayed he is by Sam and Dean doesn't change that he decides to spitefully fuck Sam over on the problem he caused to begin with, that being his soul's traumatic damage).

Season Six was awful, and Season Six Castiel was the worst part of it and made me want to see him dead very much. And, Season Seven immediately granted my wish.

Castiel spends most of the season dead and I wish I could say it was the entire season. Because I attribute the lack of his character to a notable upswing in the effort of Singer's and Gamble's writing.

Mind, Season Seven isn't really good. It's just not as awful as Season Six by a long shot. The A-plot is the Leviathans, and the B-plot is Hallucifer, and both of these have the makings of good ideas. The Leviathans are, ostensibly, the oldest creatures in existence and some of the most powerful and evil, to the extent that even God feared them and sealed them away. This eldritch description does not really match up with their presentation in-show, which is basically shapeshifters that eat people and are really smug. But then again, that actually works to Season Seven's benefit. For most of Season Seven, and for the first time in a long time, there's very little mention whatsoever of demons and angels, gods and archangels and antichrists...things that were extraordinarily powerful and were really, really clogging up the plot. The Leviathans are still basically unkillable and stronger than everything else, but they're very scaled-down and this works in the plot's favor. They also have a coherent plan which, unlike Eve's shady and overly simple goals or Crowley's and Castiel's dumb scheming about who gets the soul lottery jackpot to solve a war with Raphael we never see, the Leviathan plot is laced throughout the entire season successfully and the details come together well.

The B-plot is even better, as it revolves around Hallucifer (or, as I like to call him, Hallucinatin' Satan). And, while it is an extremely derivative plot, being basically another rendition of "what's wrong with Sam's head this time" after his Azazel powers, his demon blood addiction, and his soulless-ness, but it is by far the best one despite being the latest. Mark Pellegrino sells Lucifer fantastically just as he always has, and the concept of a hallucinatory ghost only Sam can see and be affected by is remarkably SCP-like and Magnus-esque. I'm only disappointed that, in the end, he actually did turn out to be just a hallucination and did not figure into the larger plot. The sleep deprivation angle is especially wince-worthy as pretty much everyone can imagine how awful that feels, giving it a realistic bite.

Where it all goes wrong is, naturally, with Castiel. Who is back. Again. Goddamn it.

Okay, let's just establish something. If you have a character who is an unsympathetic bastard, the audience is going to hate them the way you seemingly intend them to. And if you have that character 1) come back from death, 2) get amnesia and forget their wrongdoing, 3) get beaten up, and 4) get called out on their wrongdoing (by an antagonist who is thus not to be taken as rational or valid in their distaste for this character), you still have an unsympathetic bastard. This is what a lot of people think writing a redemption arc is. In reality, all of these extremely familiar tropes are nothing but cheat codes to avoid killing or at least benching a character you should've washed your hands of. It fails, every single time. I will still hate that character, and today, that character is Castiel.

I don't forgive him. He's a bastard, and at this point he's edging into creator's pet territory because he's been resurrected without good reason a total of three times now. More to the point, if any other character had spitefully torn down a protective wall in Sam's head and exposed him to what torture in a dimensional cage with the two strongest and angriest beings in the universe feels like all over again, Dean Winchester would not fucking sleep until that character's grey matter was splattered all over the walls, preferably with a hefty dose of karmic torment first. But Castiel gets a pass because he's sorry, I guess.

And Season Seven starts nosediving because not only do they bring back Castiel and expect me not to hate him, they have the nerve to do what they did to Bobby.

Bobby dies at the hands of Dick Roman, local king Leviathan, but comes back as a ghost because Sam and Dean kept his flask. And this works! This is good! It keeps Bobby around to continue helping the protagonists and giving them guidance, while giving him a range of abilities that they don't have while not being as overpowered as an angel and thus not clogging up the plot.

So, naturally, the minute Sam and Dean realize, they start fretting about how he's going to go off the deep end and they can't possibly make this work.

I actually have a plot something like this in a fic I'm working on, no spoilers, but I'd just like to say that this is bullshit. This is, in fact, what Singer and Gamble wanted to do with Castiel (and failed at because he's a dick) in Season Six: have a character the heroes are supposed to trust and rely on be subjected to mistrust and misery until it finally makes him go over the edge because the characters don't realize how much that's backfiring. It works with Bobby, in that he's a damn capable hunter and denied his reaper just so he could help out his boys, and they respond to it by treating him like a ticking time bomb that's going to go off via ghostly descent into vengeful madness. This part is not helped by the fact that Bobby validates these fears, but it's rushed, so it just looks like he's randomly becoming a much worse person for no reason. No mention is made of the fact that by now, Dean at least should know that constantly over-cautioning for and vocally mistrusting your closest allies because you think they're dangerous doesn't help anything and in fact makes it worse, because this has driven a wedge between him and Sam multiple times!

And when Bobby does finally go, it's a) done without any tears or hugs that Bobby's character damn well deserved), b) done for good and permanently, meaning I have one less thing to look forward to in future seasons, and c) done while giving Castiel the knockoff resurrect-and-redeem. We traded Castiel, a character I hated, for Bobby, a character I loved, when the only sensible thing would've been to do the exact inverse.

So despite being monumentally better than Season Six, and generally more enjoyable than Seasons Four or Five, Season Seven still tanks and disappoints and I really wish I were watching a better show.