First, I completely understand your reaction to Dr. Who. I really like the New Who that started a few years back, but when my husband watches the old ones, I have no patience. It's definitely not everyone's cup of tea. I just gave that as an example of how TPTB treated one of my absolute favorite characters, and my unspoiled reaction to it.
Re: Picking up the story months later instead of immediately following . . . after giving it thought a while back (when I first found out this was the route they were taking), from a storytelling point of view, I tend to agree that this is the better route to take. It avoids the necessity of showing Dean's time in Hell (for the moment, anyway), and it gets the characters back together as quickly as possible, which is the premise of the show to begin with. My initial reluctance comes from a season cliffhanger of Farscape, where they left Our Hero in a horrible, horrible predicament, and at the opening of the following season, he'd already been rescued from that predicament and we were thrown headlong into the next. I felt gypped, because it was so anticlimactic. I don't think this will be a problem with SPN, though, because that's what they're basing the season's story arc on. Rather than explaining things away in a couple sentences of dialogue, they'll use the predicament as the ongoing mystery of the season. I'm totally cool with that.
My biggest concern comes with how the characters will be treated. I've gone through some "character dies/goes to Hell/demon takes his place" type storylines in some of my favorite shows in the past. It's always very tricky territory to navigate satisfactorily. (No, I don't think Dean is coming back as a demon. In fact, if he does, I'll be really disappointed.) I've had many people tell me to trust Kripke, but I'm not sure I do. As Jared said, as long as Kripke is involved in the show, we should all be very nervous. Given some of Kripke's story ideas that have then been re-written for the better by others on the writing team, I . . . I'm just really twitchy about what he's going to do to the Boys. I'm delighted he has people on the team who balance out his desire for gore with decent character development. But I'm also willing to wait and see and hope it unfolds well and he/they do justice to the storyline.
And now I feel like I'm talking in circles and have gotten completely off track of our original topic of conversation. :-)
Gotta run to a meeting. Thanks for the conversation!
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Re: Picking up the story months later instead of immediately following . . . after giving it thought a while back (when I first found out this was the route they were taking), from a storytelling point of view, I tend to agree that this is the better route to take. It avoids the necessity of showing Dean's time in Hell (for the moment, anyway), and it gets the characters back together as quickly as possible, which is the premise of the show to begin with. My initial reluctance comes from a season cliffhanger of Farscape, where they left Our Hero in a horrible, horrible predicament, and at the opening of the following season, he'd already been rescued from that predicament and we were thrown headlong into the next. I felt gypped, because it was so anticlimactic. I don't think this will be a problem with SPN, though, because that's what they're basing the season's story arc on. Rather than explaining things away in a couple sentences of dialogue, they'll use the predicament as the ongoing mystery of the season. I'm totally cool with that.
My biggest concern comes with how the characters will be treated. I've gone through some "character dies/goes to Hell/demon takes his place" type storylines in some of my favorite shows in the past. It's always very tricky territory to navigate satisfactorily. (No, I don't think Dean is coming back as a demon. In fact, if he does, I'll be really disappointed.) I've had many people tell me to trust Kripke, but I'm not sure I do. As Jared said, as long as Kripke is involved in the show, we should all be very nervous. Given some of Kripke's story ideas that have then been re-written for the better by others on the writing team, I . . . I'm just really twitchy about what he's going to do to the Boys. I'm delighted he has people on the team who balance out his desire for gore with decent character development. But I'm also willing to wait and see and hope it unfolds well and he/they do justice to the storyline.
And now I feel like I'm talking in circles and have gotten completely off track of our original topic of conversation. :-)
Gotta run to a meeting. Thanks for the conversation!