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letterboxd · 3 years

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Spectacular Spectacular!

On the twentieth anniversary of its explosion onto big screens, Ella Kemp high-kicks into the Moulin Rouge! once again, accompanied by screenwriter Craig Pearce and a chorus line of jukebox-musical academics and swoony Letterboxd fans.

“You’re always writing for yourself, for the film you want to see. I like all kinds of different films and I think teenage girls do too.” —Craig Pearce, Moulin Rouge! co-writer

This is a story about love. A love born at the turn of the twentieth century in an iconic Parisian cabaret and brought to life in 2001 on Australia’s most spectacular sound stage. A valentine to excess, greed, fantasy and, above all, to the fundamental Bohemian ideals: truth, beauty, freedom and love. This is the story of Moulin Rouge! and how it still burns bright, two decades on, in the hearts of romantics all over the world.

The film, a fateful love story between penniless writer Christian and dazzling courtesan Satine—played by Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman—premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 9, 2001 and opened in New York and Los Angeles cinemas only weeks later, on May 18. Cast and crew fought hard to get it there: unimaginably, writer-director Baz Luhrmann’s father passed away on the first day of filming, and Kidman’s then-marriage was in turmoil. “There were times of beautiful moments, but there were times where we were like, ‘This is so hard’,” Luhrmann recently told an Australian journalist.

And, though this seems strange to say in a world that has since welcomed Mamma Mia!, Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman, making a movie musical early in the millennium was a high-risk pursuit. Luhrmann again: “‘Musicals will never be popular again’ … I can’t tell you how many times I was told that.”

“It’s part of a cycle,” explains Dr. Eleonora Sammartino, an academic specializing in contemporary American film musicals. “It came after a period in the 1990s where musicals had disappeared from the big screen.” Lisa Duffy, Letterboxd member and Doctor of Hollywood Musicals, agrees: “Films coming out [that year] were a lot more dour, so this was a real gamble.”

Nobody understood this gamble better than the film’s co-writer, Craig Pearce, who has been Luhrmann’s close friend and professional partner since the pair were students together. Moulin Rouge! is the third and final entry in what we now know as their red-curtain trilogy, alongside Strictly Ballroom (1992) and Romeo + Juliet (1996).

“Baz had been thinking about the parallels between the Moulin Rouge and Andy Warhol’s Factory,” Pearce recalls. “Places where artists congregate, where it’s more than a place, it’s a petri dish of creativity. Like The Factory, and Studio 54, the Moulin Rouge was a place where the old and the wealthy pay a lot of money to hang out with the young and the sexy.”

At the end of the twentieth century, however, the Moulin Rouge wasn’t all that great (the original had burnt down in 1915). Pearce recalls: “We went to Paris in 1999 on a research trip and discovered, to our horror, that the Moulin Rouge now is just a hideous tourist trap. So we had to go on this journey to find out how this amazing creativity—artists and dancers and musicians—came out of what now feels like this tawdry girlie show.”

With the location and period locked in, Pearce and Luhrmann worked to find the story’s driving force. “This movie wouldn’t work without the exclamation point,” writes Adelaide. Pearce is the first to admit this: “It’s saying it’s Moulin Rouge, but it’s not that one. What we’re trying to do is heighten truth, but you have to start with that underlying truth,” he explains. “It’s not casting around for ‘what would be a cool idea’ because you never come up with one. It’s never as interesting as the truth. Like, there was an elephant in the garden of the Moulin Rouge. And why does that matter? It matters because there are certain inherent logics in the way human beings operate.”

“It's a musical of recycled parts. It’s a story which, beat for beat, has been told for centuries. It’s a staged show drawn from the lives of the characters themselves… This is a film [that] is bold enough not just to say that all art is about finding your own meanings behind someone else’s ideas, and that all art is just copying and stealing, but that this can be totally valid and authentic. When Nicole Kidman sings ‘Your Song’ to the Duke, she’s stealing from the writer, and Luhrmann is stealing from Elton John. But when Ewan McGregor is singing to Kidman, it’s the most magical moment you could possibly imagine. That’s what makes ‘Moulin Rouge!’ a true masterpiece. Cinema has never been more fake, and cinema has rarely been more real.” —Sam

Moulin Rouge! borrows from all over. There are hints of La Traviata, of Cabaret and of Émile Zola’s Nana. There were Toulouse Lautrec’s paintings (John Leguizamo tremendously embodies the painter in the film), Baudelaire and Verlaine’s literature, Jason and the Argonauts, Homer’s Odyssey, and the revues of the 1920s and ’30s. “Moulin Rouge! really embraces that vaudevillian component,” says Dr. Hannah Robbins, a Broadway and Hollywood musicals specialist.

Craig Pearce and Baz Luhrmann writing in Paris (1998) and New York (2019). / Photos from Luhrmann’s Twitter

“This genre lends itself to repetition and fragmentation,” Sammartino expands. “It’s part of the syntax of the musical and has always been, this idea of borrowing from other sources. This doesn’t take away from the daring postmodern approach Moulin Rouge! is defined by, it’s simply further proof that it’s, well, a very good musical.”

Above all else, the core of Moulin Rouge! is inspired by the myth of Orpheus of Thrace and his doomed love affair with the beautiful Eurydice, whom he followed into Hades after she died. “The show must go on, Satine,” the nightclub’s impresario Harold Zidler grimly tells his star, as their world begins to crumble. “We’re creatures of the underworld. We can’t afford to love.”

It wasn’t the first time Pearce and Luhrmann had looked to ancient mythology. Strictly Ballroom’s mantra, which tells us “a life lived in fear is a life half lived” owes everything to David and Goliath. But with the Orphean myth, the screenwriters were looking to dig deeper, to find something much darker. “The Orphean myth is a romantic tragedy in its essence,” Pearce explains. “David and Goliath is more youthful, and it’s about saying that belief can conquer anything. But as you get older people get sick, they die, and life is about resilience and finding ways to embrace the hard things in life and move forward.”

That might sound antithetical to the all-singing, all-dancing nature of the movie musical, but the genre has been trying to tell devastating stories like Moulin Rouge! for decades. “Hollywood is rarely interested in buying and remaking stories with devastating endings as much as stage musicals are,” Duffy explains. (See: Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera.)

This reluctance can be traced back to the classic era, during which there were rules about the ways a musical could end under the censorship laws of the Production Code. Simply put, they had to have a happy ending. (Which also led to a fair amount of bizarre deus ex machina to guarantee a nice, cheery final act).

But then in the 1960s the Code fades away, and Hollywood starts engaging with violence, sex and explicit trauma on-screen. “We have much more freedom in the contemporary era to have people die explicitly,” Duffy says. “And that’s why we keep returning to Moulin Rouge!: there’s the explicit negotiation of our entry into the fantasy world, and then we’re devastated, and the curtains close and we’re in reality again.”

“It’s one of the great 21st-century films. Baz Luhrmann is only good when figuring out how to make historical periods of excess into contemporary displays of grotesquerie, somehow turning great films (‘French Cancan’) or great literature (‘The Great Gatsby’) into tacky Technicolor vomit that somehow understands the underlying sorrow of the material better than any serious-minded adaptation.” —Jake

The red-curtain trilogy has a distinct set of rules: one, the viewer must know how the film ends from the start; two, the story must be set in a heightened world; and three, it must contain a device that keeps the audience awake at all times, whether that be ballroom dancing, scattershot Shakespearean dialogue, or pop songs.

“Part of the appeal of the artifice is that it gives the audience permission to say, ‘This isn’t real, you’re about to see a fantasy, and that’s okay,’” Duffy says. “The pleasure is the fantasy of it. The whole film is us seeing how Christian is imagining what happened—and the musical is the most extreme genre that allows such imagination.”

The point was never to temper the elaborate, hyper-aware fakeness of it all, but to really commit to it. Says Robbins, “Musicals are ultimately artificial and exclusively constructed. And that’s what Moulin Rouge! achieves and quite a lot of films don’t. It goes, ‘This is where the story is going, this is the energy, this will be played in the soundtrack.’ There’s a deliberate thought process there.”

Luhrmann recently said: “The way we made the movie is the way the movie is.” An under-explored aspect of Moulin Rouge! is how the whole affair, with its ‘Spectacular Spectacular’ musical-within-a-musical device, is an insider’s guide to the mechanics and politics of making ‘big art’. How money can control both the art (the dastardly Duke insisting on “his” ending), and the artists (Satine is never told she is dying, because she is the golden goose upon whose shoulders the success of the company rests; Christian is likewise left in the dark, because he is the scriptwriter who needs to finish writing the show. Both are wrung dry for their talents).

There are shades of Luhrmann in Zigler, the impresario juggling cast, crew, investors and opening dates (Moulin Rouge! was originally slated for December 2000). Christian and friends in playwriting mode are surely Pearce and Luhrmann themselves, searching for the most economical way to say “the hills are vital, intoning the descant”.

And, from the show-within-a-show rehearsals, to the bustle of the backstage, to the gun-chase through the wooden bones of the fly tower, the production details are Catherine Martin to the very last diamante. Nobody does daring bedazzlement quite like ‘CM’, Luhrmann’s fellow producer and life partner. Electricity was the new, exciting thing in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century and this film was lit.

A necklace worn by Satine as a gift from the Duke was made of real diamonds and platinum. Designed by Stefano Canturi, It was the most expensive piece of jewellery ever specifically made for a film, with 1,308 diamonds weighing 134 carats, and worth an estimated one million dollars. Needless to say, Martin won both costume and production design Oscars for the film.

Also among the film’s eight Academy Award nominees: editor Jill Bilcock, about whose singular craft there is a recent documentary. Her breathless, kaleidoscopic cutting (also deployed in Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet) dropped us right on the dance floor; one 65-second sequence contained a boggling 85 cuts. And this is on the back of her superbly judged opening, a scene that repeats itself as she places Christian at both the start of his love story, and its devastating aftermath—heartbroken, unshaven, self-medicating, reaching for the words to begin making sense of his loss.

“I wondered, for the first hour of this, how Baz Luhrmann had managed to balance such in-your-face stylistic audacity while maintaining a genuine feeling of care for the characters and their struggles—is it all down to Ewan McGregor’s wonderfully earnest face, or the way Nicole Kidman’s smouldering-temptress persona is worn down by one of the most charming cinematic uses of Elton John’s ‘Your Song’? But as the ‘Elephant Love Medley’ transformed into David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’, I stopped caring, I just swooned.” —Kat

If electricity was the thing that drove the kids wild in the 1900s, the internet was on everyone’s minds in 2001. We were just figuring out how to juggle tabs and text people. The real magic dust sprinkled throughout Moulin Rouge! is, obviously, the cacophonous soundtrack, which made sense to our collective, fragmented consciousness.

“No other musical of the modern era has so perfectly captured the sense of spinning an iPod wheel every 45 seconds to play something else,” writes Jake of the medley of songs by David Bowie, Fat Boy Slim, Nirvana, Police, Elton John, Rufus Wainwright, Madonna and many others.

Luhrmann and Pearce stopped at nothing to get every single track from every single artist they wanted. The journey took more than two years, and some bodies were left at the side of the road. “You constantly have to kill your darlings,” Pearce sighs. RIP to Rod Stewart’s ‘Tonight’s the Night’, The Rolling Stones’ ‘Under My Thumb’, Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ and Fifth Dimension’s ‘Up, Up and Away’. (Hot air balloons were big in 2001.)

"We wanted the music to be modern, because we didn’t want it to feel like a fusty, crusty world,” says Pearce. “We wanted to find the universal modern parallels that have existed since time immemorial.” But it wasn’t just about finding the most popular songs at the time. “The structure had to be driven by the needs of the story,” the screenwriter explains. “The musicals on film that tend to fail are the ones where the music feels like a film clip. If it’s not serving the emotional needs of the story, you very quickly check out and it becomes boring. With good musical storytelling, it builds and builds to a point where you can’t do anything but express yourself through song.”

Has there ever been a more desperately romantic promise than when Christian starts telling Satine he doesn’t have much to give her, before nailing that one perfect high note to reassure her that his gift is his song? Why, yes: when the mirrored love stories of Christian and Satine, and of the penniless sitar player and the courtesan in ‘Spectacular Spectacular’, meet at their dramatic peak, with ‘Come What May’. (The film’s only original song, it had been submitted for the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack by writers David Baerwald and Kevin Gilbert.)

“Moulin Rouge! was successful because it was using songs from different ages and periods, appealing to different audiences with something they could have a connection to. So it wasn’t just boomers, not just millennial or Gen X,” says Sammartino. “Something like Rock of Ages, for example, was much more narrow in terms of the kind of music you needed to like.”

“This film is a dramatic bitch and I love her.” —Mulaney

‘Moulin Rouge!’ co-writer and director Baz Luhrmann.

There is a pattern to our most emphatic reviews for the film: they come from relatively young people, who mainly identify as women. It’s something critics anticipated back in 2001. The New York Times wrote, in a fairly ambivalent review, that “young audiences, especially girls, will feel as if they had found a movie that was calling them by name”. We don’t have time to fully dig into the antiquated notion that “low art” (the publication’s quippy headline for that review was “An Eyeful, an Earful, Anachronism”) is aimed specifically at women, but surely we have to ask the question twenty years on: does anyone still think this could possibly be true?

“You’re always writing for yourself, for the film you want to see,” says Pearce. “I like all kinds of different films and I think teenage girls do too.” And let’s remember, it was Harry Styles who said of the broad demographic of his fanbase back in 2017: “Teenage girls—they don’t lie. If they like you, they're there. They don’t act ‘too cool’. They like you, and they tell you.”

Robbins: “The rom-com has made the connection between song and emotional display about female pain. The Emma Thompson crying to Joni Mitchell kind of lineage has tempered musicals—people think that’s what Mamma Mia! is: women and mothers and daughters and feelings.” Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a lot of musical-related data suggesting a broader scope. “When I went to see Frozen on Broadway, kids of all genders were wearing Olaf costumes, much more than princess ones. That is not the narrative Disney would like. And when people gender musicals and think of the princesses franchises, they don’t look to the fact that The Lion King and Aladdin were more successful.”

There has been an undeniable effort to reel male audiences in to see 21st-century musicals. On Hugh Jackman’s welcome, flamboyant career pivot (surprising to anyone but Australians), Duffy says: “Casting Wolverine in Les Misérables and The Greatest Showman is very, ‘See, manly men can do it too!’” Let’s not forget that Ewan McGregor had gotten his big break as freewheeling heroin addict Mark Renton in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting just six years prior to playing Christian.

Indeed, says Duffy, “more of my male friends have seen Moulin Rouge! than other musicals. The MTV tone might have been significant, and there was the ‘Lady Marmalade’ music video—the fact you have all these beautiful pop stars writhing around in corsets. And just having David Bowie on the soundtrack is like, ‘Okay, this isn’t just girl music.’ Pop music offers an easier way to move past the stigma of show tunes.”

Crucially, Robbins notes that all of this prejudice, and the effort to tear it down, is speaking to, and about, a very specific—cisgender, heterosexual—subsection of audiences. “I always wonder where the critics think the queer audiences are. I do wonder if there’s a cis-het vibe going on that has even more to do with it, reinforcing that norm rather than actually focusing on young girls as an audience.”

I asked my interviewees whether they thought, twenty years on, that Moulin Rouge! would be better received today—and which parts of our contemporary cinematic and musical fabric owe a debt to Luhrmann’s jukebox wonder. “We’re more receptive but we have specific demands,” says Robbins. “And today’s musicals sink or swim on whether they meet those demands. So The Greatest Showman is the Moulin Rouge! of now. I think people would be lying if they didn’t say that the cinematography in Moulin Rouge! hasn’t affected almost every movie musical that has been made since. We wouldn’t have ‘Rewrite the Stars’ if we didn’t have ‘Sparkling Diamonds’.”

Duffy agrees: “So many things that come after you can draw a line directly to Moulin Rouge!—Pitch Perfect, Rock of Ages, Happy Feet… but most significantly, Glee would not exist without this movie. The jukebox musicals of the 21st century owe everything to Moulin Rouge! and the blueprint it lays down.”

Among the films that premiered at Cannes in 2001—David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher—was another kooky little number: Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson’s animated Shrek. Two jukebox musicals in the same prestige film festival, at a moment when the genre was considered deeply uncool? What a time to be alive!

If the last eighteen months have taught us anything, it’s that we film lovers enjoy nothing more than a comfort rewatch of our favorites. Moulin Rouge! and Shrek (and French Shrek) delivered untold comfort in the pandemic—but they had also soothed us much earlier, in the months following the unspeakable tragedy of the 9/11 attacks.

“For me it was very much a comfort film,” recalls Duffy, who had discovered Moulin Rouge! as a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old, during her first year away from home, studying in New York. “Part of that was rooted in this really traumatic thing that had happened, and all of us wanting to escape into this fantasy world as much as possible.”

Luhrmann said, in his recent Australian interview, “I love to see people united and uplifted and exulted. It’s a privilege to be a part of helping people find that.” As life outside our homes resumes, Moulin Rouge! will very much be part of a return to exultant living. The live musical—interrupted by Covid—opens in Melbourne in August and on the West End and Broadway in the fall.

Pearce last saw the film on a large screen in a derelict warehouse in London, at Secret Cinema’s interactive, carnivalesque spectacular. “I have to say, I was really proud of the film,” the screenwriter says, finally letting himself speak fondly of his accomplishment well over an hour into our conversation.

“I mean, some people liked it back in the day, but you’re never really satisfied with your work. You just tend to see the things that could have been better. But seeing the love for the film was really, really emotional.”

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Craig Pearce is currently producing ‘Pistol’—a biopic miniseries on the Sex Pistols, directed by Danny Boyle—and his next film with Luhrmann is a biopic of Elvis Presley, with Austin Butler playing the king of rock and roll. Additional thanks to Dr. Eleonora Sammartino, Lisa Duffy and Dr. Hannah Robbins.

#moulin rouge #moulin rouge!#baz luhrmann #catherine martin #nicole kidman #ewan mcgregor #children of the revolution #truth beauty freedom love #musical #movie musical #jukebox musical #paris #australian director #letterboxd

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canonicallysoulmates · 4 years

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Hey! You can feel free to ignore this since it is a big ask but. As someone who dropped off the show by s8 and doesn’t really care about following the big plot points, can you recommend to me all the good Sam & Dean episodes that have happened since? (Not just angst or drama even, even just episodes with funny little moments or details?) I am like, solely here for these two being codependent and soulmates and not much else. <3 (Sidenote: thank you for your tagging system!)

Hi! Sorry it’s taken me so long to reply to this; as you yourself said this was a big ask, lots of episodes to go through and remember but hopefully you’re still interested in my answer.

Now the following are not every episode where there’s a brother moment for example the s8 premiere had a great brother hug where the boys reunite, episode 3 of that same season drew parallels between the boys and a couple, if I remember correctly, but those episodes are not included on the list because I didn’t just wanna recommend every single epi that had a brother scene just because it had a brother scene. I took into consideration if it had moments, what they were, enjoyability of the episode and if the moment or moments were big enough to make a bad episode worth recommending, I don’t wanna recommend something to you without thought and have you spend an hour of your life just to see and enjoy a flash in the pan moment you can enjoy just as much or more through gifs and clips.

In complete transparency I will also add that I did this mostly from memory so there is the chance that an episode with good moments slipped through the cracks and for that I apologize.

I don’t know at what point of s8 you stopped watching or if you stopped before the season so I am starting this with s8.

Season 8

Episode 4: Bitten. This epi doesn’t have a ton of moments or even a big one but it does have two students saying Sam and Dean give off workplace-romance vibes, and I’m a sucker for the boys being compared to or thought of as a couple.

Episode 10: Torn and Frayed. Not gonna lie, not the biggest fan of this episode, but it does have the brothers choosing each other over Benny and Amelia so….

Episode 11: LARP and the Real Girl. I said it before in another post that to me this is the turning point of the season for the better, and it has the boys having fun.

Episode 12: As Time Goes By. I wouldn’t call this one a Sam and Dean episode as in SamandDean packed with brother moments but we and the boys get to learn more about their legacy as Winchesters so if that’s something you’re interested in...

Episode 14: Trial and Error. This one has emotional brother moments with Dean wanting Sam to be safe and have a normal life and Sam asking Dean to believe in him, and praising him.

Episode 17: Goodbye Stranger. To be honest, I don’t remember if this epi has other brother moments but I am solely recommending it because this is the one where Dean learns the trials are making Sam sick and at the end there’s a scene where he tells Sam to let him help carry the burden.

Episode 19: Taxi driver. Great epi filled with protective!Dean, he kills Benny to save Sam, a beautiful brother hug.

Episode 20: Pac man fever. They argue like a married couple and Dean’s fear is shown to be losing Sam.

Episode 21: The Great Escapist. Pretty much the whole episode has little moments of Dean taking care of Sam.

Episode 23: Sacrifice. “Don’t you dare think that there is anything past or present that I would put in front of you!” This is the ‘if you watch nothing else from this season’ episode to watch. If you watch nothing else from the s8 sections of recommendations, watch this one, it has one of the best, most emotional Sam and Dean moments in the show’s history.

Season 9

Episode 1: I think I’m Gonna Like It Here. “I made you a promise in that church. You and me, come whatever.” “There ain’t no me if there ain’t no you.” I live for the codependency and for these two going to extremes to save the other including tricking into letting an angel possess the other’s body, and I refuse to apologize for it.

Episode 5: Dog Dean Afternoon. Okay, I’ll admit this one definitely falls more under the fun episode type but it does have Dean being all worried about Sam, clutching to him and threatening to lick his face if he doesn’t wake up.

Episode 7: Bad Boys. We learn more about young!Dean and see him choosing Sam over having a normal life.

Episode 15: #THINMAN. This one is an angsty one and not just because it’s the last time we see the Ghostfacers, this takes place after everything goes to shit in the boys relationship with Sam finding out about Dean’s betrayal and it contains parallels to what Ed and Harry are going through in their relationship, a protective worried Sam over Dean possibly being killed (which let me tell you is delicious to witness after all the angst and Sam acting like he doesn’t care about Dean anymore), and a bittersweet moment of the boys reminiscing about their past.

Episode 16: Blade Runners. This one is being recommended because it has some protective!Dean and because Sam being Dean’s Colette bringing him out of his MOC induced rage.

Episode 23: Do You Believe in Miracles?. The “I’m proud of us” moment, need I say more.

Season 10

Episode 1: Black.

Episode 2: Reinbach.

Episode 3: Soul Survivor. These three episodes are all being recommended for the exact same reason they have demon!Dean, and Sam going crazy trying to save him/find him. Plus, Soul Survivor has demon!Dean following Sam around the bunker.

Episode 4: Paper Moon. It has a flashback showing us just how far Sam was willing to go to get Dean back plus some emotional conversations between the boys.

Episode 5: Fan Fiction. I know people who like this episode. I know people who hate this episode. Personally, I think it has its good parts, it has some brother moments and some nods to wincest.

Episode 12: About A Boy. This one also falls more into the category of fun episode with Dean being turned into a teen, but it also has some good brother moments.

Episode 14: The Executioner’s Song. The fight scene between Dean and Cain was amazing and it has Dean collapsing into Sam’s arms.

Episode 18: Book of the Damned. Love this episode, this epi is probs the best example as to what I enjoyed the most about s10; usually we see Dean being codependent and going to extremes to save Sam but during this season we see the opposite and this episode really highlights that with Sam telling Dean he can’t lose him, telling Charlie he understands hunting is his life but he can’t do it without his brother, going behind Dean’s back and seeking help from Rowena to try and save him.

Episode 19: The Werther Project. More Sam being desperate to save Dean, protective!Dean, and Dean saying he and Sam are stronger together than apart.

Episode 23: Brother’s Keeper. Sam and Dean literally choose each other over the world and Dean kills Death over Sam.

Season 11

Episode 4: Baby. One of the best episodes, just our boys, the open road and all told from Baby’s POV. A must watch in my book.

Episode 8: Just My Imagination. The last flashback episode we ever got - *hits 15.16 with a shovel* like I said last flashback episode we got; it’s fun, has good Sam and Dean moments, we learn more young!Sam, Sam gets some love and praise, the boys wore cozy sweaters, good epi.

Episode 10: The Devil in the Details. It has protective!Dean and Lucifer point out to Sam that he and Dean have chosen each other time and time again because they can’t stand to lose one another. What can I say, I like when the codependency is brought up.

Episode 11: Into the Mystic. Here’s the thing with this episode, I have become sort of embittered towards it due this being the introduction of a character with whom there is an attempted romance in s15 which I heavily dislike but I can’t deny that before that I really did like it, it has some good brother moments and it has Dean telling Sam he forgave him for not looking for him in Purgatory which is major.

Episode 15: Beyond the Mat. Another epi on the fun list, mostly being recommended because it has the boys having fun and that’s something we rarely get to see.

Episode 16: Safe House. Protective!Worried about Dean!Sam!

Episode 17: Red Meat. What can I say about this iconic episode? It's one of the best episodes in the series, absolutely soul crushing, codependency times 1,000. Have tissues with you when you watch it because you will sob your heart out. They turned Sam and Dean into Romeo and Juliet but better.

Episode 20: Don’t Call Me Shurley. Regardless of what a certain showrunner ended up doing to the character I do still love this episode and it has some great Sam and Dean content with Dean preferring to possibly die with Sam, telling him he’d never leave him and the return of the Samulet.

Episode 23: Alpha and Omega. Emotional brother hug, Dean saying he and Sam need each other.

Season 12

Episode 5: The One You’ve Been Waiting For. I’m gonna be honest, I don’t remember much of this episode other than I enjoyed it and that it had some fun moments between the boys.

Episode 9: First Blood. I’m truly only recommending this because it had, Badass!Winchesters.

Episode 10: Lilly Sunder Has Some Regrets. Funny thing about this episode was it was supposed to be all about C but it ended up being enjoyable and filled with little Sam and Dean moments including some protective!Sam.

Episode 11: Regarding Dean. Jensen’s acting in this episode is next level, and it is filled with little brother moments.

Episode 18: The Memory Remains. The only reason I am recommending this one is because it’s the one where the boys carve their initials on the table which was a major moment.

Season 13

Episode 8: The Scorpion and the Frog. Another fun episode that’s filled with little Sam and Dean moments.

Episode 11: Breakdown. For so long I talked about Dean being Sam’s knight in shining armor it’d be wrong for me to not bring up the episode where it happened. Also, Dean tells Sam he’s there for him.

Episode 12: Various and Sundry Villains. It had some fun brother moments.

Season 14

Episode 4: Mint Condition. Fun Hallooween episode with fun, little moments. Absolutely loved this one.

Episode 11: Damaged Goods. This isn’t really a Sam and Dean episode, or at least I don’t consider it one but the ending scene between the brothers where Dean tells Sam he’s the only one that could have changed his mind about throwing himself into the box was beautiful.

Episode 12: Prophet and the Loss. The brother hug to end all brother hugs. Absolutely amazing episode, packed with brother moments including what’s probably the best brother hug, will sing its praises till I die and then I’ll continue singing them in the afterlife.

Episode 13: Lebanon. The 300th episode. It has some moments between the boys as well as some touching scenes of the boys with their dad.

Season 15

Episode 4: Atomic Monsters. Is this partially on the recommended pile because Jensen directed it? Yes but nonetheless it’s a pretty good epi that while not super packed with brother moments does have them. (Also, this is the last season and I’m sad to report we are scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find Sam and Dean content in this dessert.)

Episode 11: The Gamblers. Good brother moments and the boys get called heroes which I love.

Episode 13: Destiny’s Child. The sole reason I am recommending this episode is for AU!Sam and Dean, they are the funnest thing this show has done in a while.

Episode 14: Last Holiday. While this doesn’t really have Sam and Dean moments with the exception of Sam telling Dean he should have called him to let him know he was in trouble, it does have the boys being taken care of and getting to have some fun and that’s something we so rarely get to see that I am including it.

Like I said, this is not a definitive list of every single episode that has Sam and Dean moments there’s episodes like the most recent one, 15.17, that had a beautiful moment between the brothers but I didn’t list the epi here cause I don’t think it’s necessary to watch the whole episode for it when it can be seen and enjoyed just as much by watching it through a clip. Which while I don’t recommend the whole ep I do highly recommend looking up the end and seeing the brother moment; point is, similar to 8.01 or 15.17 there were other episodes that had moments that weren’t included due to seeing the whole epi not being necessary to enjoy the moment.

#i didn't wanna just recommend without thought so this took a long time #and i put a lot of work into it #ask #sam and dean #spn related #emblian

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