Oh, the places my brain goes...

[ramblin_rosie]

... when work has gotten boring in the wee hours...

I've just figured out why, despite my fannish creative output leaning almost entirely to the SPN side lately and not being active in NCIS fandom at all, I'm enjoying NCIS so much more this season.
It's not much of a secret that I'm not thrilled with what Sera Gamble has done with SPN Season 6 to date. It remains to be seen whether half a season of Soulless!Sam is the waste of good story it seems to be now--honestly, it's against the Geneva Convention for True!Sam's return to have taken this long--or whether the second half will reveal plotlines that couldn't have been covered had Sam come back in one piece. It's also not much of a secret that I think the show's theology is lousy and that I watch only because I love Sam, Dean, Bobby, and Cas as characters (the actors aren't bad, either) and am holding out hope for some kind of eucatastrophe; there's a reason most of my fic goes AU, and I know I'm not alone in giving into the impulse to whisk the boys off to the relative safety of Atlantis, where they can be brothers and make friends and fight enemies that die and stay dead when you shoot them enough times.
But I was thinking just now about the major character arcs of NCIS Season 8 to date and how a major theme of the show right now is reconciliation, especially between fathers (and father figures) and their children. "You do what you have to for family," says Mike Franks, and that has echoed through the entire season--not every ep, sure, but many of them, and it's been long established that Team Gibbs is itself a kind of family for all its members. And I think seeing that aspect of NCIS only worsens my opinion of the "trust no one" theme of SPN Season 6. Up to now, even when they've been completely at odds and beating each other senseless, Sam and Dean have still had that agape that binds them together at a soul-deep level. It hurts too much to watch Dean having to live without it while riding herd on a Sam that's not capable of more than storge.
(This is also why I can't get into SGU: there's precious little teamwork and almost no hope that any sense of family will develop. SG-1 is a family. SGA-1 is a family. There isn't even a Destiny-1 to speak of!)
I am holding out hope for the rest of SPN Season 6, now that Sammy's back. But don't expect much canon-compliant fic from me in the forseeable future unless it's from Season 5.


BTW, hoodie_time friends, I do have wish-list fic in progress, but it's on hold for RL stuff at the moment, so I don't know for sure if I'll get it posted by Christmas Day. Sorry.

Comments

[ansostuff.livejournal.com]

SGU has been cancelled and although it's sad in a way that it didn't work out I'm not really surprised. It holds nothing of the things that make a series good like SG-1 and SGA did. They should have learned to stop when it was good.

[ramblin_rosie]

I saw that, and I'm not surprised either. I'll watch the ep with Woolsey and McKay whenever it airs, but beyond that... meh. The castaways can stay on the far side of the universe for all I care.
The other thing the SGU fiasco has confirmed for me is that I will never work for SyFy if I can possibly help it. The show failed on its own merits, I think, but the network also bungled it in a lot of ways.

[auntmo9.livejournal.com]

Ah, you have hit so many nails on the head with this one...I do miss SG-1 and SG-A for that reason, and that is definitely what is largely missing from SPN so far this year, and what is there in NCIS, and has pretty much always been there....and yeah, was never there in SGU

[ramblin_rosie]

Not an original observation, really, but that contrast just hit me this morning--that reconciliation is what we've wanted for SPN, but it seems like Sera belongs to the school of thought that drama requires interpersonal conflict between the heroes. No me gusta.

[kcrenegade.livejournal.com]

I agree. I love the family feel of NCIS and I think that's what draws alot of people to the show. And Tony. lol

But the boys relationship of SPN has really made me miss the earlier days. Sure, in the first couple of seasons they held secrets but the audience always had the sense that despite the secrets, the brothers had each others' sixs. Now, well. Did you see the last episode of SPN? Craziness.

[ramblin_rosie]

Oh, Tony. :D Did you notice, though, that when he told Senior that they needed to talk a few episodes back, one of the first things Senior asked was whether Tony was sick? I think that talking-to he got from Gibbs last season about not even knowing that Tony'd had the plague really got to him.

The *only* reason I watched "Appointment in Samarra" was that I'd read the TV Guide spoilers about the ending and had seen Jim Beaver's tweets that he's also in 6.12; I didn't watch "Caged Heat," and it sounds like I didn't miss much. UGH. Sera's a self-proclaimed Samgirl, but she sure has a strange way of showing it... I would have thought a writer would want to make his/her favorite character look *better*, not worse! (I mean, I'm in the "That's NOT Sam" camp, but *still.* She has to know about the Sam-hate that's out there.) And of course, certain portions of the fandom are eating each other alive over the whole thing. :P
Needs more Gabriel, too, IMO.