#because he and dean don’t fit in with your normal romance plot beats

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Sad Bois’ Story Time

Bonus:

[elizabethrobertajones]

lizzy? what are your 10 top supernatural episodes?

D: what sort of a question is this? Do you know how MANY episodes there are??

Let’s see… Desert Island Discs… What would I take with me?

Plucky Pennywhistle’s Magical Menagerie

On The Head Of A Pin

Monster Movie

The Man Who Would Be King

LARP and the Real Girl

Safe House

Baby

Heaven Can’t Wait

Clap Your Hands If You Believe

Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets

As you can see I am A: Edlund and Robbie trash and B: helplessly sold on the Perfect Monster of the Week concept over any plot episode. 

Can’t tell if my buzz over 12x10 is going to last but it feels like an all time great and I want to roll around in it forever. It also seemed to directly reference at least 2 of the episodes also on this list (like all the clowns) and live up to all my standards of melodrama and characterisation I eat up, and is possibly the most perfect Destiel episode we’ll ever get (it’s like the overtness of 11x18 crossed with the style of an old Edlund or Robbie episode in delivery… Mmm) so… I put it last on the list cautiously because it’s had to usurp yet another Robbie episode to get on there.

The fairy episode is just a weird little favourite of mine, because I was busy procrastinating writing an essay about fairies for university and realised this silly show was still on the air and binge-watched all 6 seasons and somehow or other, the stars perfectly aligned that I crawl from the library after researching folklore and fairies all day, boot up my laptop to get some downtime, and bam, there’s a kid looking dubiously at the cornfields and I’m just like oh shit this show would never do aliens, it’s more fucking fairies. Obviously my kink is being right, so.

9x06 is one of those nuggets of an episode that’s STILL got brilliant mileage for analysing it, and the Dean and Cas stuff is amazing, and… I practically don’t have anything profound to say about it? I just really love watching it and experiencing first hand everything it showed us about Dean and Cas’s relationship.

Baby, Safe House and Meta Fiction I all debated being on here, and any one of them could have been ditched for Lily Sunder. When all’s said and done I love 9x18 with all my heart and it’s what got me into fandom, and I will always be thankful for it, but on the other hand it’s pretty gruelling to watch, I’m 50:50 on if I LIKE Gabriel’s depiction in it or not so half the time I watch it he grates my nerves and half the time I roll around in glee at the ridiculous fan fic version of him… But it’s pretty bleak and better in context, so you can just extract the important speeches from Metatron and hang them on a wall like a trophy but in the end, not necessary to be on this list as a favourite… Which leaves Robbie’s parting gifts of the 2 best-written MotW episodes this show has ever had, just for pure showing off or filming glee. His overall contribution to season 11 was just loving all over the show, but these were the stand-alones and they’re just really really excellent writing and I think can also make you fall back in love with the show when you watch them.

The LARP episode is also Robbie, I know, but I love it again for the fairies (I’m easily bought) and CHARLIE and the fact that the episode’s message was about having fun. It’s a little blob of light in between some dark storylines. It’s a really neat little episode, not exactly transcendent, but again it’s got some great stuff to analyse in it, and it had Charlie making out with a fairy, and… I’m so easily bought, okay. It’s perfect how it is :P 

While 9x18 convinced me Destiel was canon, 6x20 convinced me it existed at all… I have shipped it basically since that episode aired, and watching Cas watching Dean and hurtling into all his bad decisions and slowly unravelling… Ugh, I can watch it over and over and find more reasons to be miserable for Cas every time. I also think you can basically watch 5x22 followed immediately by 6x20 and not actually miss out on anything :P It’s written as a direct answer to it as well as to fixing and explaining everything that happened in season 6 so far. I appreciate the episode a lot for tying the whole story together, and it inspires me to be the sort of writer Edlund is - running screaming at a story and tripping over hundreds of ideas too ridiculous or terrible or implausible to ever fit in the story, before scraping together the horrendous mess you’ve made of it and hopefully by trying to explain it to yourself, also create a masterpiece along the way with some well-applied framing devices to pretend like you meant to do it that way all along :P (9x18 also is bad writing advice for me because it implies you know what you’ve been doing all along, and Robbie sometimes strikes me as the only writer who planned ahead more than maybe the next episode, rather, I suspect he’s planted foreshadowing for season 15 that we still haven’t discovered, and basically this is not my process at all :P)

Monster Movie cracks me up every time. Dracula. On a scooter! HE HAS A COUPON. And Dean and Jamie is possibly my favourite romance subplot in an episode on the whole show. I love them! Jamie is a favourite character of mine, and the episode is completely hilarious, and I’m absolutely fascinated by Dean immediately post-Hell, and this is a good break from all the drama and trauma to see how he would try and cope and be normal, so despite how weird and kooky the episode is, I’m always coming back to it to try and analyse Dean because I just find him so interestingly written there. If/when I get to season 10 in my lengthy rewatch notes, I’m going to have to give myself a gag order on this episode of comparing Dean’s weird coping methods with the nonsense of this episode :P 

Also 4x16 is basically a stage play but happens to be on TV, randomly dumps the formula of the show entirely by forgetting Sam and Dean exist halfway through to focus entirely on Cas, Uriel and Anna having a domestic, and was the first episode that really delved into Cas and began to show the potential of the angels as a seriously powerful force in the story; not that they’d be great for the plot because it seems like they’d have to be involved with the apocalypse one way or another, but it just sells that Cas’s story is worth telling at all. I’m not sure other writers at the time could have sold it quite as effectively and made Cas worth writing about in the same way, but there was a serious risk involved in hospitalising Dean practically at the halfway point, and letting Cas stomp off to deal with it. Please take a moment to stop and think of one very important fact: this was the first episode Edlund wrote with Cas in it :P

It’s not coincidental that my favourite episode on the entire show is ALSO my favourite episode when you ask me to list top 10 Sam episodes. Funny Sam episodes are rare and perfect little gems. Episodes where Sam gets to be what I think of as an ideal, perfect Sam… That list is even weirder than this one because it’s all about when I end up emotionally screaming about Sam and he beats out anyone else on screen for my attention (with my very particular emotional response to what is my favourite version of Sam, which immediately disqualifies all the serious Sam fans’ fave episodes because I don’t like the show getting emo about Sam because it always vaguely embarrasses me and feels like the show’s working too hard with the puppy dog eyes. You know that bit in the The Hobbit where Bilbo spares Gollum because he’s being too wretched and he just can’t kill him? And the movie didn’t play it subtle at all, it had Gollum looking up at the screen doing the eyes from Puss in Boots from Shrek with a perfect man tear running down his pallid face and you really just want to punch Gollum instead of understanding why Bilbo spared him…? When the show gets all saccharine about Sam it just reads like that to me - trying too fucking hard and over-selling something that doesn’t NEED selling in the first place because it’s already sold and like, I don’t know, a favourite armchair or something that’s by now a 12 year old bit of furniture in your house you favour and would never dream of getting rid of and is just always there for you to flop down on when you  need it…) I mean, fair cop, obviously I am a Destiel fan and Dean and Cas occupy like 90% of my waking life. But SAM FUCKING WINCHESTER and episodes where Jared gets to play him FUNNY? It’s like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. This episode is ridiculous, and hilarious, and plays to all the strengths the show and its actors and writers have, and maybe it’s just because it’s in the middle of season 7 where everything is bleak-bleak-bleak-bleak, but it’s… I don’t know. Same feeling as LARP and the Real Girl, but with extra glitter, and Sam Winchester getting his ass handed to him by the most perfectly choreographed clown fight in the history of visual media.