Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Supernatural

• Supernatural: In All Hell Breaks Loose, John manages to stroll out of hell, saves Dean from getting shot by Azazel, give his boys an 'I'm proud of you' look, and goes up to heaven in a cheap white light. Nice, if slightly cheesy, right? Wrong. Dean's going to be in hell for a shorter time than he was and suffer PTSD when he gets out; there's no way he should be fine. Sam just gets a stiff nod (which doesn't exactly make up for him being sent for coffee in My Time Of Dying). The boys don't have much to be proud of. Dean gets to commit suicide, Sam's killed a human in cold blood, and Bobby and Ellen got to close the gate while they were pinned to a grave and a tree. They've made clear that John's a terrible father who has messed them up horrifically badly. So you can be forgiven for either feeling completely frustrated or having a bitter taste in your mouth. (This might have been intentional; you can never tell with this show.)
• When it comes to John, there tends to be a lot of (maybe intentional, seeing how they think he's a psychopath) wallbangers. Like Long Distance Caller, for example: Dean had a beautiful revelation that John was an arsehole, and now he's back to "I made that deal 'cos you told me to look after Sam and I'm sorry, please don't be mad at me"; and Sam is completely disbelieving anything his father (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) says. Oh John, why are you still fucking up their lives so much?
• Dream a Little Dream of Me. The villain became a psychotic killer because he couldn't dream.
  • REM sleep holds the psyche together, and the villain had an abusive father. This is not a stretch. If anything's off, it's the fact that he has long-term memory.
    • There are conditions that prevent REM sleep, and the people with them function reasonably normally. It's just that the majority of people need to dream.
• Season 3 in general, Bella in particular.
  • Er....how?
    • Massive case of YMMV there.
• After the Wallbangers in Season 3, Season 4 bounced back by producing some of the show's best episodes - until the 10th episode. "Heaven And Hell" had several Series Continuity Errors within the same episode, most notably the idea that angels can't feel or show emotion, despite a large amount of emoting by the actors. Then they decided to include a contrived plotline with "fallen angel" Anna , complete with a schmaltzy Titanic homage. Some are of the opinion that if not for the Tear Jerker Downer Ending, the episode would have been a complete waste. There is plenty of snark to be had, but nothing does it justice like the TWoP recap.
• The "pep talk" at the end of "It's A Terrible Life", where the angel tells Dean to stop whining about his life because he has a cool car and can sleep with hot women. Say what, writers? If you feel like that, then why put so much effort into breaking the cutie in the first place?
  • It was meant to get Dean to stop all his Wangsting; his Wangsting is a common complaint against the show. The angel in question lists Dean's many legitimate problems but concludes, 'you have good stuff too, so there's no need to mope all the goddamn time.' He did come down a little hard on the fellow, all the same.
  • Now that we know more about Zachariah, that speech gets really chilling.
    • But it makes "I will stab you in the face" all the more satisfying.
  • That speech isn't "Dean is an emo crybaby," it's "Zachariah is a douche with wings"!
• When Anna goes back in time to kill Sam and Dean's parents... shouldn't both she and Castiel have known that such a plan was doomed from the start, since Castiel deliberately sent Dean back to a place where he would screw things up if time could be changed?
• The time travel episodes are pretty pointless, in general, especially after they establish that you can't change the past. Also, it makes no sense that the de-powered season five Cas ( who can't even heal people) is able to transport three people back in time.
  • My headcanon is that healing isn't just something you can do if you have enough power, but something you can only do if you're connected to Heaven. Taken like that, it actually makes perfect sense. And they needed a second time travel episode so they could wipe Mary's memory of the first one.
• There are a number of episodes which rely so heavily on idiot plots that they are painful to watch. "Weekend at Bobby's" strikes me as the absolute worst, since doesn't just involve Dean doing something stupid ( which is to be expected), but also Bobby, who has common sense. And in the episode "Swap Meat", how could it have taken Dean so long to realise that Sam had switched bodies with a high-schooler?
  • Possibly justified as to Dean's obsessive inability to recognize when something goes wrong with Sam. What did Bobby do that was so stupid, though? He was quite intelligent, if a bit stressed his soul was on the chopping block.
• Why didn't the angels fix Angela's eye-sight, after Cas accidentally blinded her? It just seems like really bad PR, especially considering that, at that time, the angels were trying to prove to the brothers that they were the good guys.
  • Dicks with wings, remember.
• Dean kills Amy in the "The Girl Next Door", a perfectly harmless kitsune on the grounds of 'she'll kill again'. Nevermind that she only killed to cure her son's illness-and even then, she targeted drug dealers and thieves, leaving innocent people alone.
  • No, what makes this a Wall Banger is that he leaves the kid alive. This was the absolute worst decision he could have made. The kid got sick from eating dead brains, which meant he'd probably get sick again before he finished growing up, which means the mom would probably go on another killing spree. Minimal casualties, but some casualties. If he'd killed them both, there would be no more murders, period. But now that the kid is alive, and has no more access to dead brains? How is he supposed to live without killing? Nice Job Breaking It, Hero.
  • Where did you come to THAT conclusion? Amy and the kid were able to injest dead brain matter *which would be dead anyway in killing* without trouble before. Dean killed her because of Fantastic Racism and nothing more.
    • There's a huge difference between fresh dead matter and possibly-rotting dead matter. Just like you wouldn't want to eat spoiled meat, and kids or people with compromised immune systems are more likely to get sick if they do, just one time when the brain matter wasn't fresh enough could endanger the kid.
• Castiel needs Dean, Sam and Bobby out of the way so he can break into Purgatory. We've seen on many, many occasions that he can teleport people great distances, or render them instantly unconscious with a touch. So to ensure they don't derail his plans he... breaks the wall in Sam's mind, assuming this will be enough to keep the three of them occupied (not-a-spoiler: it isn't.)
  • Presumably, Cas figured that such things as temporarily knocking them out and teleporting them would be ineffective. He also needed leverage to hold over them, as he said when he was finished, he'd fix Sam.
    • Also presumably, since Dean single-mindedly focuses on Sam when Sam's in trouble and Castiel knows this better than anyone, he thought that was the surest way to keep Dean occupied. Those other methods just leave an angry group putting everything into finding and stopping him. And/or he really felt like hurting them.
• Dean spends the last few episodes of season six berating Cas for working with Crowley, on the grounds that Castiel should have come to Sam and Dean for help. However, once Castiel absorbs the souls in Purgatory and becomes a God, the first thing Dean does is work with Crowley to get the binding spell for Death. So...it's okay for Dean to work with demons, but not Cas?
  • It is not logically inconsistent to have higher expectations re: ethical behavior from an angel than you would from a human being. Also, Dean's objection is not that Castiel went to Crowley at all, but that he went to Crowley first.

---

Back to Wall Banger

Back to Supernatural