Reply To: Let’s all talk about – The Winchesters – Teach Your Children Well (S1 E2)
I was unable to get on to comment right after the episode last night…but here I am the next morning! I hope we didn’t lose everyone else by episode two!!!! But YAY PigNaPoke!
This one lost me.
I was not feeling the plant monster. Just…not. It may have been based in folklore, but it felt silly and OVERLY COMPLICATED for Lata to explain for episode two! I am also having a bit of a hard time with John just DECIDING that he’s meant to join these strangers and hunt monsters right back from Vietnam. Like he has some kind of epiphany that this is what he was made for when he ONLY JUST found out about it.
I’ve been thinking about what it is that’s bothering me. I think for me, the kind of TV I love most is when you start with a very small duo and we learn about THEM first…Sam and Dean…Mulder and Scully…we come to care about them and then, over time, they add more people we come to love like Bobby and Jody and Ellen…but I like having time to learn and care about and get invested in that core duo first. Here, it’s a large cast right off the bat and that feels more “Scooby Doo” to me (the van doesn’t help…I LIKE the van, but can’t stop thinking “Scooby Doo”!).
Things I liked in this one included the more human moments between John and Mary while driving. Mary is less robotic (and the cast LOOKS different – older – in just the time that passed since the pilot filming and start of season filming) and more human and I liked her better as an actress in this one as she was given a BIT more to deal with. I also really am charmed by Carlos, but I still want more depth and a bit of darkness and not just funny comments all the time. The Age of Aquarius montage went on a bit long for me. But it also made Mary look a bit more human as she was laughing at Carlos’ dramatic rendition of the song.
But I am having a big problem with the monsters. If you tell me in the first episode “we are fighting a thing that wants to destroy our world” – that just means nothing to me emotionally. A “thing” that we know nothing about except that Mary and John’s fathers may have known something about it and been out to stop it…I don’t know how to explain this because I loved on Supernatural when we got to follow Sam and Dean AS THEY LEARNED about how to combat monsters. That was great. And it seems like they are trying to do that here but it’s falling flat for me; maybe because I don’t have an emotional attachment to the characters with only two episodes? I don’t know. But it was A LOT of explanation from Lata about this plant monster and I just started to tune it out at some point!
The plant monster was not scary to me. Not at all. I was hoping to see the origins of these hunters…how terrifying were vampires (for example) before they knew as much as Sam and Dean knew? I wanted to be truly scared FOR the characters and I’m just not. Mary seems to know so much and the others follow her so I’m getting less of a sense of urgency or having them ever be in true danger. Even the kind of psychological component of this plant monster – using family members and insecurities to get to the characters – did not make me feel much (unlike the times in Supernatural when monsters forced Sam and Dean to tell each other the truth and it was so painful).
The “big bad” in a Gothic monk hood being followed around by a pack of spiders at the end…just NOT doing it for me!!!! I know they want to find a monster we’ve never seen before…but this feels like superhero universe stuff.
This one fell totally flat for me. I was really disappointed.
I did like the insights that Carlos had for Mary; how she was acting and how she hated that within her own family. I started to get the feel that they have a fair amount of history for him to know all that and I really liked that.
Lata is unique…not at all afraid of gore (playing with the jaw on the zombie at that start…by the way…zombies??? COME ON! Way too overdone and never really done on SPN.)
Mary is a little too enthusiastic about all this hunting for someone who wants to get out of it!
PigNaPoke; that’s a GREAT observation…that low end motels back then would look like the 30’s or 50’s!!!!!
Of course, not giving up on it two episodes in, but this one was a miss for me.