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caffienekitty) wrote2007-11-17 11:56 pm
caffienekitty) wrote2007-11-17 11:56 pm
Entry tags:
SPN Reaction: Delayed Reaction to 3.07
(I appear to be spammy today, sorry, all!)
Episode 3.07 - Fresh Blood.
What I'd been spoiled for prior to watching:
-Title
-Gordon would be in it
What I guessed from that:
-Gordon was out of jail and a) stalking a nest of sloppy vampires, or mimicking vampire attacks, to draw Sam and Dean into a trap or b) would be turned into one himself.
So the answer was B, and it was so much more excellent than I'd thought, which was even more mind-blowing because I thought it'd be entirely awesome. Jensen blew my socks off, Jared blew my socks off, Sterling K. Brown blew my socks off... I am completely sockless. Woo!
Reactions transcribed from notes:
-Bela turning Sam and Dean over to Gordon. Ooo. Oooo! Bitch!! I hate her, but in a way that means I like her as an enemy. I really hope she stays an enemy.
-Gordon is a very straight line thinker. He could have offed her (or knocked her out) and taken her phone, gotten Dean's number and gotten his bag back.
-Bela calling Dean? Made me try to fix it. 'Coz no way Dean told Bela where they were.
-Guy with throat wound. Would probably like some first aid, there, Sam. Or a hanky or something at least.
-Dean with the forearm cutting. Oh, that's really gonna mess up![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kroki_refur's flamenco when she gets to the picspam for this episode.
-The facial expressions Jensen Ackles pulls out for this bit kill me stone dead. Because he's totally got the reckless adrenalin-rush deathwish face on, and it's amazing. And he just sliced his forearm. With a machete. Which he then drops to taunt the out-of-control vampire into attacking him head-on. Yowza. That's badass.
-And at the same time how can something so badass make me flail and go "Aw, Dean?"
-Sam got a flinch! Like Dean in Heart! Sam got a flinch as an off-screen death! Only it really creeped me out for some reason and I wish I could go back and re-watch the scene to figure out why. Maybe because he was sort of forcing himself to watch Dean decapitate the girl to toughen himself up? Something was odd there and I don't know what it was. Arg.
-Gordon and Kubrick are so damned cute together in their psycho-ness and their suits. Were those suits very similar to Sam and Dean's suits, by the way? All I remember is one was brown and one was blue or grey and the ties seemed really familiar.
-"One of them was really tall." Hee!
-"We'd've had to kill you." Guy in hospital bed's face and subsequent reaction and change of tone was perfect! Well done... whoever you are!
-Dean gets thrown into a wall! What day is it? :-D
-Dean running across the tops of cars in a hail of gunfire!!!! O.O DUDE!!! *flails*
-Gordon and Kubrick with the guns in the alley was awesome. It made me think for a bit that my A theory was right, and that maybe Gordon had gone right round the bend and was having some perfectly normal guy unknowingly dose people with vampire blood to make sloppy, obvious and unnested vampires to draw Sam and Dean in, figuring the wandering vamps would be easy enough to hunt down after he'd fried the ginormous fish that is Sammy. But then Dixon jumps him and poof, back to theory B.
-Mattresses against the windows to impede sniper fire, very wise when dealing with a guy who's shot at you with a sniper rifle before. *nods* Though they had them up when they were interrogating Lucy, so maybe more to deaden sound and view? Gotta look odd from the outside, though, up against the window.
-Dean's call to Bela. I applauded. Oh yeah. You better believe it, Bela! You don't mess with the Winchesters! Hee!
-Much as I'm dreading the backstory reveal for Bela, I find it really interesting that she looks about nine years old when Dean's through explaining to her that yes, Gordon's an actual threat, and yes, Dean's pissed and yes, he totally means that death threat.
-Scene of Gordon being turned was awesome!! Totally awesome. Gordon's worst nightmare, and it showed. It had to happen at some point, because of the nature of the character set up with Gordon as a person of absolutes with no middle ground. He had to become what he despised in a way that he would realize, in one way or another, and turning him into a vampire is the clearest way to have that happen for the character, considering his actions already portrayed in the series already make him a kind of monster, but one that he doesn't see as a monster, just as a guy doing what needs to be done. And when turned into a monster he doesn't have an epiphany as the vampire who turned him was probably hoping for, that monsters can also be people doing what they feel they need to do to survive. Faced with a dichotomy of feeling human but being monster, he embraces the monster, and doesn't have any kind of last minute redemption or softening of viewpoint. To the end, he is still a person of absolutes. Excellent, excellent, excellent. I would have hoped for a couple more episodes with Gordon, but this plot development was an excellent choice, and almost literary. Wonderful.
-Wow, pardon the lump of meta there. Heh. Onward!
-Bela, purveyor of powerful occult items using a talking board. I find that amusing. I know it's not the Fisher Price version she's using, but still.
-I love the inside view we get of Gordon's transformation. Lights too bright, noises to loud, tracers on everything... turning into a vampire's a lot like having a migraine. Except for the super-strength, bloodthirst and fangs.
-Speaking of which, did Gordon have baby fangs??? They looked different. If they were, since they've only just sprouted that'd so completely sensible and logical that I want to hug each and every member of the special effects crew for doing that. If that's the case. I may have mis-seen that.
-Sam first down the stairs? That's rare. Also tactically impractical since when coming down behind Sam, Dean's view and arc of fire is more blocked than Sam's would be if he was coming down second. Sheer practicality.
-I'm wondering also if there was a squabble of some kind, even if it was just Sam ducking into the stairwell before Dean could, due to Dean's maneuver with the vampire girl in the warehouse, and Sam being annoyed at Dean's apparent deathwish. Hm. Bears thinking.
-Sterling K. Brown rocks! Gordon's talk with Kubrick was a beautiful thing, and Gordon's got some serious multi-layer stuff going on. Very awesome.
-Dean's a ninja! Hee! Sure Dean. Ninja Batman! :-D
-Sam calling Dean on being terrified, and being all armored up. I love that we get the confirmation outright that Dean's had this massive wall up, defending and deflecting with rough snark and ass-hattery.
-I love that Sam knows Dean. That whole trying to be like Dean since Sam was four thing which all little siblings do to some extent (I know I did and I didn't even live with my older siblings) but spoken outright? Probably one of the only things that would make Dean pay attention and listen. And I love that Dean hears Sam, finally. Jared did awesome on this, as did Jensen. Both of them were fantastic and I wish I could watch the scene again right now. 'Cause damn. *curls up in the memory of that scene and purrs*
-I love that sudden door. That's the way to do a sudden door, when the stakes are high enough to make it a real problem that they're separated, rather than making it a minor inconvenient stroll through a non-threatening funhouse maze. Just saying. *looks meaningfully at "Everybody Loves a Clown"*
-Also just saying the way that door was flexing, it'd have been down in about 2 minutes of concerted effort. Which makes it a very good thing they had other stuff to do than get through the door.
-I predict a great many red vamp vision icons of Sammy getting stalked out of these warehouse scenes.
-Gordon has no shades of grey, does he? (Yeah, yeah, they're shades of red now, har har har.) He's a vampire, so in his mind he must be a monster now, because if he's a vampire and not a monster, that invalidates his whole reason for being who and what he is and doing what he does and killing his sister... So he has to be a monster. He's a... what do you call that 'set that contains x, but not y' things? A Venn diagram? He's one of those things but none of the circles overlap. The circles start to overlap for him here when he's turning into a vampire and it's breaking him. I wanted to see Gordon break a little more before he died, kind of, but that would actually not have been as strong as what the ending of Gordon was. Anyway, have I said it was awesome yet? Awesome. Next!
-Gordon's laugh in the warehouse!! Gordon's laugh in the warehouse!!! OMG I want that as a ringtone! Just for when I feel like messing with people's heads. Lovely shivery awesome laugh.
-As soon as Gordon hung up the phone I knew the girl was getting turned, so her attacking Dean didn't surprise me. There was a moment in there that I hope someone catches on a screencap before Dean becomes aware that she's attacking where she's... I think coming up behind him and there's a shot with her face and those teeth peering over his shoulder all "Hiya!" that was funny as hell to me.
-The New Colt can kill vampires too, not just demons, eh? There goes another fine meta...
-Gordon philosophizing at Sam as he tracks him through the warehouse was great. Tactically though, Gordon needed to pay more attention to the Evil Overlord rules. But it was awesome!
-Yay for obviously crappy walls! Or at least walls that can't stand up to 400 combined pounds of man ramming into them suddenly.
-Dean getting bitten by Gordon. Whoa. That was another thing I need to rewatch. I have no notes except 'Wow' for that.
-There was a work safety sign in the background!! Yay! It's a theme!
-Decapitation of Gordon. By hand, with an improvised concertina wire garrotestaring snarling face to face. Dude, Sammy's frigging hardcore! That's... almost disconcerting. Wonderful as a set up for future episodes, I'm thinking. No spoilers, just a feeling I have. *wriggles in anticipation*
-I wonder if that was a hint that Sam's got a bit of something like Jake's psi-kid super-strength. Spines are tough, plus there's cartilage and sinew and things besides the spinal column of vertebrae and discs. That takes some doing. Or sawing, which ICK! Glad they didn't go there. I want to go back and watch Sam's eyes in that scene verrrry carefully for any hint of change or flare that might indicate... something. Because I'm totally not buying the whole 'all the powers are gone' thing.
-Beer and Autoshop. *flails* The character study that that little scene was? There is not enough flailing in the world to express my joy. That was so very far beyond awesome. Again, almost literary, and perfectly, perfectly done by Jensen and Jared. I'm sure there's a hundred metas on it already. It was an awesome scene to go into hiatus with. And also makes me fear the future even more....
-What was the song playing on the Impala's radio during that?
-Sam with the ratchet. Hee! He's never getting the nut off that way! :-D
In conclusion: *glomphs show*
Episode 3.07 - Fresh Blood.
What I'd been spoiled for prior to watching:
-Title
-Gordon would be in it
What I guessed from that:
-Gordon was out of jail and a) stalking a nest of sloppy vampires, or mimicking vampire attacks, to draw Sam and Dean into a trap or b) would be turned into one himself.
So the answer was B, and it was so much more excellent than I'd thought, which was even more mind-blowing because I thought it'd be entirely awesome. Jensen blew my socks off, Jared blew my socks off, Sterling K. Brown blew my socks off... I am completely sockless. Woo!
Reactions transcribed from notes:
-Bela turning Sam and Dean over to Gordon. Ooo. Oooo! Bitch!! I hate her, but in a way that means I like her as an enemy. I really hope she stays an enemy.
-Gordon is a very straight line thinker. He could have offed her (or knocked her out) and taken her phone, gotten Dean's number and gotten his bag back.
-Bela calling Dean? Made me try to fix it. 'Coz no way Dean told Bela where they were.
-Guy with throat wound. Would probably like some first aid, there, Sam. Or a hanky or something at least.
-Dean with the forearm cutting. Oh, that's really gonna mess up
kroki_refur's flamenco when she gets to the picspam for this episode. -The facial expressions Jensen Ackles pulls out for this bit kill me stone dead. Because he's totally got the reckless adrenalin-rush deathwish face on, and it's amazing. And he just sliced his forearm. With a machete. Which he then drops to taunt the out-of-control vampire into attacking him head-on. Yowza. That's badass.
-And at the same time how can something so badass make me flail and go "Aw, Dean?"
-Sam got a flinch! Like Dean in Heart! Sam got a flinch as an off-screen death! Only it really creeped me out for some reason and I wish I could go back and re-watch the scene to figure out why. Maybe because he was sort of forcing himself to watch Dean decapitate the girl to toughen himself up? Something was odd there and I don't know what it was. Arg.
-Gordon and Kubrick are so damned cute together in their psycho-ness and their suits. Were those suits very similar to Sam and Dean's suits, by the way? All I remember is one was brown and one was blue or grey and the ties seemed really familiar.
-"One of them was really tall." Hee!
-"We'd've had to kill you." Guy in hospital bed's face and subsequent reaction and change of tone was perfect! Well done... whoever you are!
-Dean gets thrown into a wall! What day is it? :-D
-Dean running across the tops of cars in a hail of gunfire!!!! O.O DUDE!!! *flails*
-Gordon and Kubrick with the guns in the alley was awesome. It made me think for a bit that my A theory was right, and that maybe Gordon had gone right round the bend and was having some perfectly normal guy unknowingly dose people with vampire blood to make sloppy, obvious and unnested vampires to draw Sam and Dean in, figuring the wandering vamps would be easy enough to hunt down after he'd fried the ginormous fish that is Sammy. But then Dixon jumps him and poof, back to theory B.
-Mattresses against the windows to impede sniper fire, very wise when dealing with a guy who's shot at you with a sniper rifle before. *nods* Though they had them up when they were interrogating Lucy, so maybe more to deaden sound and view? Gotta look odd from the outside, though, up against the window.
-Dean's call to Bela. I applauded. Oh yeah. You better believe it, Bela! You don't mess with the Winchesters! Hee!
-Much as I'm dreading the backstory reveal for Bela, I find it really interesting that she looks about nine years old when Dean's through explaining to her that yes, Gordon's an actual threat, and yes, Dean's pissed and yes, he totally means that death threat.
-Scene of Gordon being turned was awesome!! Totally awesome. Gordon's worst nightmare, and it showed. It had to happen at some point, because of the nature of the character set up with Gordon as a person of absolutes with no middle ground. He had to become what he despised in a way that he would realize, in one way or another, and turning him into a vampire is the clearest way to have that happen for the character, considering his actions already portrayed in the series already make him a kind of monster, but one that he doesn't see as a monster, just as a guy doing what needs to be done. And when turned into a monster he doesn't have an epiphany as the vampire who turned him was probably hoping for, that monsters can also be people doing what they feel they need to do to survive. Faced with a dichotomy of feeling human but being monster, he embraces the monster, and doesn't have any kind of last minute redemption or softening of viewpoint. To the end, he is still a person of absolutes. Excellent, excellent, excellent. I would have hoped for a couple more episodes with Gordon, but this plot development was an excellent choice, and almost literary. Wonderful.
-Wow, pardon the lump of meta there. Heh. Onward!
-Bela, purveyor of powerful occult items using a talking board. I find that amusing. I know it's not the Fisher Price version she's using, but still.
-I love the inside view we get of Gordon's transformation. Lights too bright, noises to loud, tracers on everything... turning into a vampire's a lot like having a migraine. Except for the super-strength, bloodthirst and fangs.
-Speaking of which, did Gordon have baby fangs??? They looked different. If they were, since they've only just sprouted that'd so completely sensible and logical that I want to hug each and every member of the special effects crew for doing that. If that's the case. I may have mis-seen that.
-Sam first down the stairs? That's rare. Also tactically impractical since when coming down behind Sam, Dean's view and arc of fire is more blocked than Sam's would be if he was coming down second. Sheer practicality.
-I'm wondering also if there was a squabble of some kind, even if it was just Sam ducking into the stairwell before Dean could, due to Dean's maneuver with the vampire girl in the warehouse, and Sam being annoyed at Dean's apparent deathwish. Hm. Bears thinking.
-Sterling K. Brown rocks! Gordon's talk with Kubrick was a beautiful thing, and Gordon's got some serious multi-layer stuff going on. Very awesome.
-Dean's a ninja! Hee! Sure Dean. Ninja Batman! :-D
-Sam calling Dean on being terrified, and being all armored up. I love that we get the confirmation outright that Dean's had this massive wall up, defending and deflecting with rough snark and ass-hattery.
-I love that Sam knows Dean. That whole trying to be like Dean since Sam was four thing which all little siblings do to some extent (I know I did and I didn't even live with my older siblings) but spoken outright? Probably one of the only things that would make Dean pay attention and listen. And I love that Dean hears Sam, finally. Jared did awesome on this, as did Jensen. Both of them were fantastic and I wish I could watch the scene again right now. 'Cause damn. *curls up in the memory of that scene and purrs*
-I love that sudden door. That's the way to do a sudden door, when the stakes are high enough to make it a real problem that they're separated, rather than making it a minor inconvenient stroll through a non-threatening funhouse maze. Just saying. *looks meaningfully at "Everybody Loves a Clown"*
-Also just saying the way that door was flexing, it'd have been down in about 2 minutes of concerted effort. Which makes it a very good thing they had other stuff to do than get through the door.
-I predict a great many red vamp vision icons of Sammy getting stalked out of these warehouse scenes.
-Gordon has no shades of grey, does he? (Yeah, yeah, they're shades of red now, har har har.) He's a vampire, so in his mind he must be a monster now, because if he's a vampire and not a monster, that invalidates his whole reason for being who and what he is and doing what he does and killing his sister... So he has to be a monster. He's a... what do you call that 'set that contains x, but not y' things? A Venn diagram? He's one of those things but none of the circles overlap. The circles start to overlap for him here when he's turning into a vampire and it's breaking him. I wanted to see Gordon break a little more before he died, kind of, but that would actually not have been as strong as what the ending of Gordon was. Anyway, have I said it was awesome yet? Awesome. Next!
-Gordon's laugh in the warehouse!! Gordon's laugh in the warehouse!!! OMG I want that as a ringtone! Just for when I feel like messing with people's heads. Lovely shivery awesome laugh.
-As soon as Gordon hung up the phone I knew the girl was getting turned, so her attacking Dean didn't surprise me. There was a moment in there that I hope someone catches on a screencap before Dean becomes aware that she's attacking where she's... I think coming up behind him and there's a shot with her face and those teeth peering over his shoulder all "Hiya!" that was funny as hell to me.
-The New Colt can kill vampires too, not just demons, eh? There goes another fine meta...
-Gordon philosophizing at Sam as he tracks him through the warehouse was great. Tactically though, Gordon needed to pay more attention to the Evil Overlord rules. But it was awesome!
-Yay for obviously crappy walls! Or at least walls that can't stand up to 400 combined pounds of man ramming into them suddenly.
-Dean getting bitten by Gordon. Whoa. That was another thing I need to rewatch. I have no notes except 'Wow' for that.
-There was a work safety sign in the background!! Yay! It's a theme!
-Decapitation of Gordon. By hand, with an improvised concertina wire garrote
-I wonder if that was a hint that Sam's got a bit of something like Jake's psi-kid super-strength. Spines are tough, plus there's cartilage and sinew and things besides the spinal column of vertebrae and discs. That takes some doing. Or sawing, which ICK! Glad they didn't go there. I want to go back and watch Sam's eyes in that scene verrrry carefully for any hint of change or flare that might indicate... something. Because I'm totally not buying the whole 'all the powers are gone' thing.
-Beer and Autoshop. *flails* The character study that that little scene was? There is not enough flailing in the world to express my joy. That was so very far beyond awesome. Again, almost literary, and perfectly, perfectly done by Jensen and Jared. I'm sure there's a hundred metas on it already. It was an awesome scene to go into hiatus with. And also makes me fear the future even more....
-What was the song playing on the Impala's radio during that?
-Sam with the ratchet. Hee! He's never getting the nut off that way! :-D
In conclusion: *glomphs show*
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DAMN, that was good. And if you look at the poll I set up, about 3/4 of the fandom thinks so, too. SHOW!
And now we can ponder the wonderfulness of all this for a month, until 3.08 rolls around.
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The first thing I'm going to do after re-acquiring this episode is watch it through without the distraction of the imminent demise of my season 3 tape. I'm certain I missed a lot. I want to go back and marathon season three now, but that will have to wait. *twitches*
This was a really awesome episode to go into the hiatus with, because it kind of brings a bit of closure to the Dean being terrified arc and indicating a move forward in that department, and burying the growing and more evident sense of "Something's not quite right with Sammy..." in a solid layer of squozy schmoopy emotionally-satisfying car fixing, so it's on a kind of time-delay fuse. Hee. It's a plot-bomb. :-)
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OMG, THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. That was BUGGING me like you possibly have no idea. However, I am on board now, Sam and Dean are very clever. :)
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WORD.
This easily beats "Bad Day" as the best episode of the season so far. For one thing, we've got the real Dean back - at least mostly. Sam finally broke through. Boo-yah.
And CAR MAINTENANCE! I've been waiting and waiting for car maintenance since Bloodlust. 'Cause hello, 40 year old car is going to get quirky. And teaching Sam - such a beautiful thing to watch. It's been in 10,000 fics (and it's coming up in one of mine) and getting the canon confirmation is just...guh.
There's tons of meta to deal with in this episode. I'm so sporfling now, because it also will make the hiatus pretty much fly. Whee.
The song is "Crazy Circles" by Bad Company.
Oh - and by the way, my parents used to have one of those metal Coleman coolers of doom... I am CERTAIN that the boys got it from the Storage Locker of Neverending Backstory. (I love that they had the drain open too... might as well siphon off the water while they're stopped.
Hee. Oh, BOYZ. Oh, echoes of John in this episode. And OH, DEAN.
And yeah, I'm a little sorry that we're losing Kubrick and the Jesuswagon, because he had the makings of a seriously good arc. But okay. I agree that Gordon's end was tragic in the literary sense - he could not change who he was no matter how the circumstances changed him. Heh. Oh, the meta.
no subject
Yay Sammy!!! :-D
I totally agree on the car maintenance. The old girl probably needs a lot of attention and we don't see much of it. A car engine is an excellent place for characters to discuss things while fiddling with stuff. *nods*
I missed the cooler! Was it metal? My folks had a pink one that rusted to death years ago.
One thing that I think echoes John most, now that I think about it, is the way Dean teaches Sam. He explains what's what, hands him the tools and stands back to let Sam do it. It seems to me to be a very confidence-building way of teaching, to stand back, letting the person know you have confidence they can do it while still being there for reassurance and questions if the person needs it. I can so see John teaching Dean how to fix cars (among other things) the same way. It's a very empowering method of instruction, I think. *is not a teacher*
Kubrick... I got the feeling when Kubrick was introduced he wouldn't be around long, although you are totally right about his arc potential. I think the network may have balked on him, as a religious character that might have been seen as contraversial. No idea though.
*flails at the potential Gordon meta*
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The original Colt was supposed to be able to kill anything, even demons. John tested it on Luther in Dead Man's Blood.
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