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Wow episode 15x03 has me tore up. So I’m gonna get some distance by doing what I do. Also this is crossposted from Tumblr, so some formatting might be kind of wonky because I haven't really posted here before.
This is something I put together about how we’re following a “natural progression” from the folkloristics themes of last season. The show went from Folklore to “Writing” to Postmodern Literary Theory pretty quick. This post, however, got VERY LONG and I don’t want to break it up on Tumblr. So if you want to keep reading, be prepared, this is a big essay that tops out above 2700 words.
Okay, I watched The Rupture twice on Friday for this, so I’m a wreck, but here goes.
First, the usual quick survey of the history of contemprary lit crit… if you’re already familiar with how structuralism progressed to postmodernism and the role that the study of folklore played, you can skip the next paragraph. I touched on it in Folk the Author https://prairiedust.tumblr.com/search/folk+the+author but we weren’t quite there yet. Let me sum up: Folkloristics was made an academic discipline by anthropologists who were interested in tracing human origins, and who saw commonalities that transcended time and space in folk traditions around the world. The quest for the ur-stories continues today. But during that revival in the forties and fifties and sixties, Claude Levi-Strauss (among others but he was the heavy) put forth the proposition that all stories belong to all people, because they all generate from the primal myths of our earliest shared ancestors. This (an element of “structuralism”) led to the first rift in the traditional model of the holy trinity of author-scholar-critic by loosening up modes of comparative analysis. In the realm of literary theory, this meant that works could be read in the context of larger genres or narratives, like myths and tropes, and that one could find universal themes and concerns in even modern literature, and implied to canny theorists that this analysis was thus accessible by anyone. Other thinkers reacted against this but at the same time marched forward into “post-structuralism,” and eventually “deconstructivism.” Deconstructivist Jaques Derrida argued that relying on “universals” for literary criticism would lead to empty criticism, criticism with no benchmark of quality. Deconstructivists like Derrida literally broke down texts bit-by-bit to search for meaning, and explored the way in which text and language makes that meaning. Then Roland Barthes jukes and writes “The Death of the Author” in 1967, wherein he codifies the assertion that an author is irrelevant once their work is out in the real world, for it is the reader who brings meaning to the text. Lots of people liked this idea, that through their experiences readers interact with the author’s words and essentially come to their own conclusions. It synthesized the best of both structuralism and deconstructionism. Well lots of other academics had a collective fit. This would not do at all. You couldn’t allow just any old Tom, Dick, or Harry to interpret a work! And especially not “based on their own experiences”! They could say just any old thing about a text! There must be standards and qualifications they yelled. There was a half-step, where some tried to find a middle ground (read Umberto Echo’s The Role of the Reader for instance) where they tried to say, “But okay, some texts lend themselves to an accessible analysis, we’ll call those ‘open texts’ and some Do Not, we’ll call those ‘closed texts’ and those are still our provenance.” But cats were jumping out of bags everywhere. By the nineties “postmodernism,” as this new movement was called, had taken hold in just about every “soft” academic discipline. Much to the disappointment of people who like to name historical periods, we are still in the postmodern era. (Just so you don’t think I’m romanticizing postmodernism, I am deliberately leaving aside the problems of literary canon, contextualization, colonialism and appropriation, and “moral relativism,” (did I forget anything?) sorry that’s outside our scope, and we’re also only on episode three.)
“The death of the author,” as a concept, over the last couple of decades finally bubbled over into the real world and shaped contemporary fandom. More and more people experience fandom participatively or transformatively– by cosplaying, by making fanvids, by creating fanart, by writing fanfiction, and lately, by tweeting about how the ending of Game of Thrones ruined the series for them. Speaking of that, if we operate on the assumption that readers and authors have a symbiotic relationship in creating meaning from a text, then readers’ experiences of the text might be something that a writer keeps in mind. Audiences seem to be demanding this consideration more and more. On the Archive of Our Own, as an example, that consideration from author for audience takes the form of tagging for content. So, how does the death of the author fit Supernatural season 15? Well, Chuck, the author, has been shot by the Equalizer and isn’t healing, so there’s that. Actually, he gave the gun two names– The Hammurabi, or “the rules,” and The Equalizer, or something that levels the ground between at least two parties, say an author and a reader. Chuck has literally been dealt a blow by the Equalizer, by postmodernism. What about an injury from “the rules”?….
First, let’s look at Chuck’s appearance in 15x02 Raising Hell. Chuck (the creep) sneaks up on Amara (creepily) and starts small talk with her by saying “How about that Game of Thrones ending? Pretty great, huh?” Of course Chuck is a fan of that ending. He has unleashed Hell on his creation because his characters were trying to run away with the plot, somewhat like the GoT showrunners made one of the main characters go insane and burn down a city as a Dramatic Twist rather than resolve seasons of subtext and sometimes outright text in a manner that was at all satisfactory (albeit with less CGI,) and the fans had some opinions. Their experience of that text was suboptimal, but not universally so– as predicted by the reader-brings-meaning model. As far as warnings go, this is a giant klaxon that we shouldn’t trust Dabb et al, right? After all, writers lie.
Mmmm, well, let’s soldier on.
So, Amara, as it turns out, is not in Reno playing keno as Chuck asserted in the season 14 finale, we’re being shown that she’s in Reno getting massages and doing yoga, engaging in self-care and possibly self-improvement, a much different picture than Chuck painted for us in the finale last season. She might have played keno at some point, but she says that she is “running a hot streak” in craps– Chuck told TFW that Amara was playing a simple and notoriously impossible-to-win game, implying that she was frittering away her time, whereas Amara tells us that she’s been playing a very complicated and nuanced game that, if played with enough cunning, can actually be very lucrative; and she’s doing the freaking warrior yoga sequence while debating him in the present. So where is the truth about what Amara has been up to? Does it matter? As subtext, it does, it highlights the slippery nature of language and a writer’s techniques of misdirection and wordplay. BUT it also brilliantly illustrates the old chestnut “Show, don’t tell.” Who do you believe now?
We see in their next scene that Amara is indeed working on her higher self. (She states as much toward the end of the episode: “I’ve become the better me,” she declares.) During her warrior meditation, Amara senses a disturbance and says that Chuck is wounded, that he is not “complete.” There is something missing from his equation, from his worldview. Chuck is damaged, to an unknown extent, he’s trapped in TFW’s universe, and he’s afraid. And finally Amara, his first and ultimate critic, abandons Chuck to be the sole “expert” on his works. “I guess you’ve got what you always wanted.” image Chuck has no critics, no collaborators, no material left, and possibly he’s going to alienate his fans (that last is pure speculation based on the Shaving People trailer.)
Now, let’s talk about the author surrogate in the room.
Again, back to Raising Hell because my meta for the premiere isn’t complete, as usual, but I did have one written for 02.
Remember the precept we were given in last season’s finale: writers lie. We can ask the question, is the converse true? Lying is an act of creation, in a way, much like telling a story. In fact, “telling stories” is a phrase people use that is synonymous with lying.
The scene after the cold open is of Castiel telling Sam that the townsfolk are restless, and that one has even gone missing. Sam alone addresses thecast crowd at the high school and writes lies his pants off. By telling the townsfolk that they are at risk of benzene poisoning, he is trying to create a plot where the characters all remain in the high school. Well, they don’t buy his bill of goods– even the woman that Sam rescued in the last episode has questions, and she’s supposed to be on his side!
Later on, Sam and Cas argue about telling Nan’s family about her death– Cas insists that the family deserves an explanation (his blocking in the Q and A scene paints him as sympathetic to the townsfolk and also perhaps as one of the cast, but that’s for a different post) while Sam-as-author is saying their characters are not ready for that information (Chuck would probably call this “creating dramatic tension.”) They are interrupted by Rowena, and then those negotiations for a new soul-sucker are in turn interrupted by a hunter, who says they have a situation– the characters have gone into the dead zone. They have successfully run away with the plot. We’re never shown whether or not Dave and Sheri recover from their possession, although we’re told that Ketch’s ion gun doesn’t harm the possessed. It feels like a loose end, but we’ll use it as an illustration of an open text. Whether or not Dave and Sheri make it is open to interpretation, because the writers have given us two possible outcomes– the ghosts caused irreparable damage and they died, or Ketch saved them in the nick of time. Shrug emoji.
Francis Tumblety is also a creator, who “writes” a word as his first line, but his creative session went much differently. In a ghostly echo of Sam’s Q and A with the Harlan residents, Tumblety holds a town hall with his fellow spooks. After some initial skepticism from Society Woman in particular, the ghosts decide that by following Tumblety, they will all get out of the dead zone. They make a plot and carry it out together, pun intended. It’s important that Tumblety doesn’t lie, to anyone, and even in the end he stands in solidarity with the ghosts under his leadership. There are lots of contradictions in the first three episodes–Tumblety is a destroyer of life but a creator of plots, Sam and Dean fabricated a plausible lie that perhaps is putting people in even more danger, and most importantly Belphegor looks like Jack but is a demon and sees without eyes.
Lastly and most simply, we find out that not only do Sam and Chuck have identical wounds, they are quantumly entangled. When Chuck hurts, Sam hurts.
I hope that I have done enough to show that Sam has a symbolic role as a quasi-writer in Raising Hell, because it continues into The Rupture.
Rowena is a creator, too. She is going to do a spell she “devised” herself in order to close the Hellmouth. (If that text to Ketch [Ardat] is not a second Whedon reference I’ll eat my hat, because we all know what “jossing” means. Another klaxon call to watch out for nefarious writers?)
“Eyes on the page, I need you off-book for this incantation,” Rowena says to Sam, making the parallel between creating an outcome and the “written word” explicit. And also, isn’t that a contradictory statement? Keep your eyes on the page, but go off book? What she means is that he needs to memorize what she has written in order to cast the spell (to recite his lines), but the imagery I think this conjures is exactly that of writing on a page– there is nothing to be read as you write, or perhaps better put, you can not read ahead because you are creating the story. image
I’m going to break down their scenes more in a later post but – oh my gosh, her line as she struggled with Sam, “I believe in prophecy!” Oh yeah, I felt that. I don’t know what to do with it but I felt it in my bones. thanks berens. This season we’re not chasing subtext to a twist or a cliffhanger, we’re chasing it to an ending. As I said here, trying to make predictions with subtext and metatext in a serial is difficult and should not be done with any serious expectations of payoff, as with every finale the possible ending turns into an “ending” and the story continues. I think we’re being asked very specifically to trust whatever comes next, now that it is in fact drawing to a completion. I feel that the extended metaphor of the writer will continue but that this was an extra-significant waystation along the road. This will be a satisfying ending.
There’s also Belphegor to deal with– were his lies “writing”? What was he trying to bring into the world? Were his lies just put out there to keep Castiel distracted? Also, he was just mean. That’s going to be a completely different post because his biggest and most intimate lies in the end were exclusively for Castiel, and Cas deserves his own space now. But we had a HUGE metaphor of a liar also being a betrayer. What does that say about the Sam and Rowena plot that is building during The Rupture???
Well, we have Sam turning out to be the ONLY one who could kill a beloved character because he is a writer/author. But the relationship between Sam and his actions with Rowena are COMPLETELY different than Chuck’s to TWF2.0. We were warned implicitly in 15x02 by Tumblety and the revelation that he and Rowena had a “liason” during his Ripper days. We were warned explicitly after Raising Hell in the 15x03 preview that Rowena would be in danger. We were textually informed about her death as far back as season 13 with the prophecy that Sam would be the one to perma-kill her. Subtext and text pointed right at this. It is a fulfillment of expectation. At the same time, I hate this idea, because it means Rowena’s death might have been partly to satisfy this particular old writer/new writer subtext. But also, this is the end of her “redemption arc.” She says she doesn’t love the world enough to die for it, but that’s exactly what she did. She said one thing and did the opposite. At least Sam was crying about it. (Also also, she pushed his hand, okay, so he didn’t really kill her, and some threads in her arc still feel unbound, but okay whatever, I can get over this if it lasts.) We’re being told that writers who are collaborative and write the plot for the characters, like Tumblety, haha, (because this is a season about things that look one way but are actually something else entirely) and Rowena exist and can be trusted. Sam was the only one Rowena trusted to finish her final spell. They carried out their destiny together; they engaged in making meaning of her text together. If Sam learns from his lonely tenure as a solo writer against the Harlan residents, versus his collaboration with Rowena, well, that’s just really really exciting. Is this a parallel to the writers’ room? I don’t know. Fourteen seasons of this bedeviled show have taught me that anything can happen.
This theme of Sam as a writer feels sewn up, it feels like if they drop it now it’s still very satisfying, but I know with Chuck being the baddie and with their parallel wounds that Chuck and Sam are not finished. Sam rejected Chuck’s method of “creation” by shooting him, but still had an apprenticeship to fulfill under Rowena. I also think it means that this season it’s “Sam’s turn” in the spotlight. I don’t think I’ve ever written Sam meta in my five years in this fandom so this was interesting. I have other thoughts about Sam so there will be more Sam ramblings to come.
Anyway, all this to say that Sam’s arc is gonna be lit this season. Ha ha ha I crack myslef up I really do. See y’all soon.
This is something I put together about how we’re following a “natural progression” from the folkloristics themes of last season. The show went from Folklore to “Writing” to Postmodern Literary Theory pretty quick. This post, however, got VERY LONG and I don’t want to break it up on Tumblr. So if you want to keep reading, be prepared, this is a big essay that tops out above 2700 words.
Okay, I watched The Rupture twice on Friday for this, so I’m a wreck, but here goes.
First, the usual quick survey of the history of contemprary lit crit… if you’re already familiar with how structuralism progressed to postmodernism and the role that the study of folklore played, you can skip the next paragraph. I touched on it in Folk the Author https://prairiedust.tumblr.com/search/folk+the+author but we weren’t quite there yet. Let me sum up: Folkloristics was made an academic discipline by anthropologists who were interested in tracing human origins, and who saw commonalities that transcended time and space in folk traditions around the world. The quest for the ur-stories continues today. But during that revival in the forties and fifties and sixties, Claude Levi-Strauss (among others but he was the heavy) put forth the proposition that all stories belong to all people, because they all generate from the primal myths of our earliest shared ancestors. This (an element of “structuralism”) led to the first rift in the traditional model of the holy trinity of author-scholar-critic by loosening up modes of comparative analysis. In the realm of literary theory, this meant that works could be read in the context of larger genres or narratives, like myths and tropes, and that one could find universal themes and concerns in even modern literature, and implied to canny theorists that this analysis was thus accessible by anyone. Other thinkers reacted against this but at the same time marched forward into “post-structuralism,” and eventually “deconstructivism.” Deconstructivist Jaques Derrida argued that relying on “universals” for literary criticism would lead to empty criticism, criticism with no benchmark of quality. Deconstructivists like Derrida literally broke down texts bit-by-bit to search for meaning, and explored the way in which text and language makes that meaning. Then Roland Barthes jukes and writes “The Death of the Author” in 1967, wherein he codifies the assertion that an author is irrelevant once their work is out in the real world, for it is the reader who brings meaning to the text. Lots of people liked this idea, that through their experiences readers interact with the author’s words and essentially come to their own conclusions. It synthesized the best of both structuralism and deconstructionism. Well lots of other academics had a collective fit. This would not do at all. You couldn’t allow just any old Tom, Dick, or Harry to interpret a work! And especially not “based on their own experiences”! They could say just any old thing about a text! There must be standards and qualifications they yelled. There was a half-step, where some tried to find a middle ground (read Umberto Echo’s The Role of the Reader for instance) where they tried to say, “But okay, some texts lend themselves to an accessible analysis, we’ll call those ‘open texts’ and some Do Not, we’ll call those ‘closed texts’ and those are still our provenance.” But cats were jumping out of bags everywhere. By the nineties “postmodernism,” as this new movement was called, had taken hold in just about every “soft” academic discipline. Much to the disappointment of people who like to name historical periods, we are still in the postmodern era. (Just so you don’t think I’m romanticizing postmodernism, I am deliberately leaving aside the problems of literary canon, contextualization, colonialism and appropriation, and “moral relativism,” (did I forget anything?) sorry that’s outside our scope, and we’re also only on episode three.)
“The death of the author,” as a concept, over the last couple of decades finally bubbled over into the real world and shaped contemporary fandom. More and more people experience fandom participatively or transformatively– by cosplaying, by making fanvids, by creating fanart, by writing fanfiction, and lately, by tweeting about how the ending of Game of Thrones ruined the series for them. Speaking of that, if we operate on the assumption that readers and authors have a symbiotic relationship in creating meaning from a text, then readers’ experiences of the text might be something that a writer keeps in mind. Audiences seem to be demanding this consideration more and more. On the Archive of Our Own, as an example, that consideration from author for audience takes the form of tagging for content. So, how does the death of the author fit Supernatural season 15? Well, Chuck, the author, has been shot by the Equalizer and isn’t healing, so there’s that. Actually, he gave the gun two names– The Hammurabi, or “the rules,” and The Equalizer, or something that levels the ground between at least two parties, say an author and a reader. Chuck has literally been dealt a blow by the Equalizer, by postmodernism. What about an injury from “the rules”?….
First, let’s look at Chuck’s appearance in 15x02 Raising Hell. Chuck (the creep) sneaks up on Amara (creepily) and starts small talk with her by saying “How about that Game of Thrones ending? Pretty great, huh?” Of course Chuck is a fan of that ending. He has unleashed Hell on his creation because his characters were trying to run away with the plot, somewhat like the GoT showrunners made one of the main characters go insane and burn down a city as a Dramatic Twist rather than resolve seasons of subtext and sometimes outright text in a manner that was at all satisfactory (albeit with less CGI,) and the fans had some opinions. Their experience of that text was suboptimal, but not universally so– as predicted by the reader-brings-meaning model. As far as warnings go, this is a giant klaxon that we shouldn’t trust Dabb et al, right? After all, writers lie.
Mmmm, well, let’s soldier on.
So, Amara, as it turns out, is not in Reno playing keno as Chuck asserted in the season 14 finale, we’re being shown that she’s in Reno getting massages and doing yoga, engaging in self-care and possibly self-improvement, a much different picture than Chuck painted for us in the finale last season. She might have played keno at some point, but she says that she is “running a hot streak” in craps– Chuck told TFW that Amara was playing a simple and notoriously impossible-to-win game, implying that she was frittering away her time, whereas Amara tells us that she’s been playing a very complicated and nuanced game that, if played with enough cunning, can actually be very lucrative; and she’s doing the freaking warrior yoga sequence while debating him in the present. So where is the truth about what Amara has been up to? Does it matter? As subtext, it does, it highlights the slippery nature of language and a writer’s techniques of misdirection and wordplay. BUT it also brilliantly illustrates the old chestnut “Show, don’t tell.” Who do you believe now?
We see in their next scene that Amara is indeed working on her higher self. (She states as much toward the end of the episode: “I’ve become the better me,” she declares.) During her warrior meditation, Amara senses a disturbance and says that Chuck is wounded, that he is not “complete.” There is something missing from his equation, from his worldview. Chuck is damaged, to an unknown extent, he’s trapped in TFW’s universe, and he’s afraid. And finally Amara, his first and ultimate critic, abandons Chuck to be the sole “expert” on his works. “I guess you’ve got what you always wanted.” image Chuck has no critics, no collaborators, no material left, and possibly he’s going to alienate his fans (that last is pure speculation based on the Shaving People trailer.)
Now, let’s talk about the author surrogate in the room.
Again, back to Raising Hell because my meta for the premiere isn’t complete, as usual, but I did have one written for 02.
Remember the precept we were given in last season’s finale: writers lie. We can ask the question, is the converse true? Lying is an act of creation, in a way, much like telling a story. In fact, “telling stories” is a phrase people use that is synonymous with lying.
The scene after the cold open is of Castiel telling Sam that the townsfolk are restless, and that one has even gone missing. Sam alone addresses the
Later on, Sam and Cas argue about telling Nan’s family about her death– Cas insists that the family deserves an explanation (his blocking in the Q and A scene paints him as sympathetic to the townsfolk and also perhaps as one of the cast, but that’s for a different post) while Sam-as-author is saying their characters are not ready for that information (Chuck would probably call this “creating dramatic tension.”) They are interrupted by Rowena, and then those negotiations for a new soul-sucker are in turn interrupted by a hunter, who says they have a situation– the characters have gone into the dead zone. They have successfully run away with the plot. We’re never shown whether or not Dave and Sheri recover from their possession, although we’re told that Ketch’s ion gun doesn’t harm the possessed. It feels like a loose end, but we’ll use it as an illustration of an open text. Whether or not Dave and Sheri make it is open to interpretation, because the writers have given us two possible outcomes– the ghosts caused irreparable damage and they died, or Ketch saved them in the nick of time. Shrug emoji.
Francis Tumblety is also a creator, who “writes” a word as his first line, but his creative session went much differently. In a ghostly echo of Sam’s Q and A with the Harlan residents, Tumblety holds a town hall with his fellow spooks. After some initial skepticism from Society Woman in particular, the ghosts decide that by following Tumblety, they will all get out of the dead zone. They make a plot and carry it out together, pun intended. It’s important that Tumblety doesn’t lie, to anyone, and even in the end he stands in solidarity with the ghosts under his leadership. There are lots of contradictions in the first three episodes–Tumblety is a destroyer of life but a creator of plots, Sam and Dean fabricated a plausible lie that perhaps is putting people in even more danger, and most importantly Belphegor looks like Jack but is a demon and sees without eyes.
Lastly and most simply, we find out that not only do Sam and Chuck have identical wounds, they are quantumly entangled. When Chuck hurts, Sam hurts.
I hope that I have done enough to show that Sam has a symbolic role as a quasi-writer in Raising Hell, because it continues into The Rupture.
Rowena is a creator, too. She is going to do a spell she “devised” herself in order to close the Hellmouth. (If that text to Ketch [Ardat] is not a second Whedon reference I’ll eat my hat, because we all know what “jossing” means. Another klaxon call to watch out for nefarious writers?)
“Eyes on the page, I need you off-book for this incantation,” Rowena says to Sam, making the parallel between creating an outcome and the “written word” explicit. And also, isn’t that a contradictory statement? Keep your eyes on the page, but go off book? What she means is that he needs to memorize what she has written in order to cast the spell (to recite his lines), but the imagery I think this conjures is exactly that of writing on a page– there is nothing to be read as you write, or perhaps better put, you can not read ahead because you are creating the story. image
I’m going to break down their scenes more in a later post but – oh my gosh, her line as she struggled with Sam, “I believe in prophecy!” Oh yeah, I felt that. I don’t know what to do with it but I felt it in my bones. thanks berens. This season we’re not chasing subtext to a twist or a cliffhanger, we’re chasing it to an ending. As I said here, trying to make predictions with subtext and metatext in a serial is difficult and should not be done with any serious expectations of payoff, as with every finale the possible ending turns into an “ending” and the story continues. I think we’re being asked very specifically to trust whatever comes next, now that it is in fact drawing to a completion. I feel that the extended metaphor of the writer will continue but that this was an extra-significant waystation along the road. This will be a satisfying ending.
There’s also Belphegor to deal with– were his lies “writing”? What was he trying to bring into the world? Were his lies just put out there to keep Castiel distracted? Also, he was just mean. That’s going to be a completely different post because his biggest and most intimate lies in the end were exclusively for Castiel, and Cas deserves his own space now. But we had a HUGE metaphor of a liar also being a betrayer. What does that say about the Sam and Rowena plot that is building during The Rupture???
Well, we have Sam turning out to be the ONLY one who could kill a beloved character because he is a writer/author. But the relationship between Sam and his actions with Rowena are COMPLETELY different than Chuck’s to TWF2.0. We were warned implicitly in 15x02 by Tumblety and the revelation that he and Rowena had a “liason” during his Ripper days. We were warned explicitly after Raising Hell in the 15x03 preview that Rowena would be in danger. We were textually informed about her death as far back as season 13 with the prophecy that Sam would be the one to perma-kill her. Subtext and text pointed right at this. It is a fulfillment of expectation. At the same time, I hate this idea, because it means Rowena’s death might have been partly to satisfy this particular old writer/new writer subtext. But also, this is the end of her “redemption arc.” She says she doesn’t love the world enough to die for it, but that’s exactly what she did. She said one thing and did the opposite. At least Sam was crying about it. (Also also, she pushed his hand, okay, so he didn’t really kill her, and some threads in her arc still feel unbound, but okay whatever, I can get over this if it lasts.) We’re being told that writers who are collaborative and write the plot for the characters, like Tumblety, haha, (because this is a season about things that look one way but are actually something else entirely) and Rowena exist and can be trusted. Sam was the only one Rowena trusted to finish her final spell. They carried out their destiny together; they engaged in making meaning of her text together. If Sam learns from his lonely tenure as a solo writer against the Harlan residents, versus his collaboration with Rowena, well, that’s just really really exciting. Is this a parallel to the writers’ room? I don’t know. Fourteen seasons of this bedeviled show have taught me that anything can happen.
This theme of Sam as a writer feels sewn up, it feels like if they drop it now it’s still very satisfying, but I know with Chuck being the baddie and with their parallel wounds that Chuck and Sam are not finished. Sam rejected Chuck’s method of “creation” by shooting him, but still had an apprenticeship to fulfill under Rowena. I also think it means that this season it’s “Sam’s turn” in the spotlight. I don’t think I’ve ever written Sam meta in my five years in this fandom so this was interesting. I have other thoughts about Sam so there will be more Sam ramblings to come.
Anyway, all this to say that Sam’s arc is gonna be lit this season. Ha ha ha I crack myslef up I really do. See y’all soon.
