Supernatural: The Complete Fifth Season
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Actor: Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Misha CollinsBrand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; Portuguese (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Box set, Color, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 924 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2010-09-07
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Product features:
- Condition: New
- Format: DVD
- AC-3; Box set; Color; Dubbed; DVD; Subtitled; Widescreen; NTSC
DVD Reviews of Supernatural: The Complete Fifth Season
DVD Review: A Show without It's Heart ~ That's what Season 5 was!
Summary: 1 Stars
Supernatural started Season 4 with 3.96 million viewers. Towards the end of the season this dropped to well under three million, and Season 5 bottomed out at 2.28. It's not hard to see what went wrong: the show simply ran too long without its heart, the sometimes strained, sometimes difficult, but always strong relationship between brothers Sam and Dean Winchester. That was what drove the first three seasons, what made Supernatural successful.
It's extended absence was what caused Eric Kripke's carefully-constructed mytharc to fail miserably, turning what could have been one of Supernatural's finest moments into its biggest disaster.
The sad thing? It didn't have to happen.
Season 4: A Brilliant Beginning, a Failed Ending
We loved the beginning of Season 4. Dean back from the dead (and that Winchester hug we'd been waiting for); a mythology that was set to give him a fascinating storyline; a brilliant, unique perspective on angels that owed a lot to Misha Collins' portrayal of Castiel. It should have been the best season ever.
But here's the thing: just because you've suddenly stumbled upon a new plotline that you like and that your audience likes, you can't abandon all the old story arcs that people have been following for three years.
In the middle of Season 4, with the writers deciding to pretend that Sam Winchester and his destiny storyline had magically resolved themselves offscreen so that they could give more time to Castiel and a pointless parade of mythological extras, the trouble began.
Kripke & Co didn't just fail the character they created. In pushing one half of the Winchester hunting team to the background and ignoring the need to conclude a storyline that was almost four seasons in the making, they failed fans. And the fans, outraged and tired of waiting for a resolution that was clearly never coming, stopped watching. The highs Supernatural hit when Season 4 started never came back.
Season 5: Sam Winchester, the Fall Guy
Season 4 marked a difficult year for the Winchester brothers. Each of them was played; angels and demons alike took advantage of them; each of them wound up breaking one of the seals holding Lucifer's cage and contributed, however unwittingly, to his release.
The writers, being the balanced people that they are, had more sense than to scapegoat one person for what was so clearly a disaster with a hundred causes. Sure, the boys had issues - who wouldn't? - but they'd both been deceived and lied to, and once they realized that both Ruby and Castiel had been manipulating them, they got their act together, stopped laying blame and settled their differences. You know, like adults. The angel and the demon got their comeuppance, and once Dean discovered that Castiel had helped Sam get to Lilith, he was seriously pissed. Like "You do that to my brother and I'll kill you" pissed.
Oh, sorry, we forgot. That's the kind of thing that could have happened in Season 2, back when they actually tried to give us some closure on plots (while Season 5's priority seems to have been finding ways to put Castiel in Sam's place in the passenger seat of the Impala). What actually happened was that Castiel's betrayal was unknown to Dean and forgotten, or at least overlooked, by Kripke (although we really don't see how it can be so difficult to remember the basic plot points of a story you wrote), while we kept getting reminders of Ruby's villainy and Sam's inherent darkness.
And thus what could have been the show's saving grace simply plunged it to lower depths, with falling ratings and irreparable damage done to the characters of Sam and Dean.
How Low Can You Go?
The stage for the crucifixion of Sam Winchester was set well before Season 5 opened, during Comic Con 2009 when Kripke and Gamble told us he'd be seeking redemption in the upcoming season, and before that when Kripke commented in a TV Guide article that Sam alone broke the world through his selfishness and pride.
Really, Kripke?
Let's backtrack a bit. Before Sam was born, his mother - yes, his mother - made a deal that led to Sam being fed demon blood when he was six months old. Then she was burnt alive above his crib - not, we might add, by Sam. In the very first episode of Season 1, his girlfriend Jessica, the girl he hoped to marry, was murdered in the same way - still not by Sam, although he was subjected to the somewhat traumatic experience of seeing her burning on the ceiling.
Sam then had to leave his college, his friends, his life behind and go hunting with his brother. Along the way he learnt that the demon that had taken his mother had plans for him, his father was killed (not by Sam), he started having visions of people dying, and practically every single person he met who had the same powers he did turned evil. He learnt that his father had told Dean that Sam might have to be put down (and that Dean had been hiding that from him, had lied to him about their father's last words). He was possessed by a demon who forced him to do terrible things. When he let himself get close to a girl after months of mourning Jess, she turned out to be a werewolf.
Then, because he was too humane to kill a downed opponent, he was stabbed in the back. He died, and woke up to discover that his brother had sold his soul for him. He swore to save him, but, after months of trying, he had to watch hellhounds rip Dean apart in front of his eyes.
We're not experts, but we're guessing that this would be enough to turn anyone into a psychotic serial killer.
Sam, however, just kept trying to do the right thing. He listened to Ruby because he thought she would help him save Dean. He used his powers against the angels' wishes because they let him exorcise demons without killing the innocent people they possessed, and to save the world and save his brother. He killed Lilith because he thought killing her would prevent the Apocalypse.
We hate to bring this up again, but - selfishness? We've gone through the laundry list of Sam's unfortunate decisions, and we've failed to find even one that he has made from motives of personal gain. You can call Sam an idiot (although even that wouldn't stick, because Dean and Bobby believed that they had to kill Lilith, too - it was just that Sam got to her first), but you can't call him selfish. Or evil.
When First You Practice to Deceive
Since we've been fairly unrestrained in our comments on loose ends left dangling for the angels' sake, let's take a moment to list them.
First, the angels were secretly plotting to bring on the Apocalypse. All of them - including Castiel - did anything that it took to keep up their deception and advance their plans, including sending Sam and Dean on wild goose chases to protect seals that the angels wanted to see broken, frequently and unrepentantly causing casualties and collateral damage. Castiel also deliberately let Sam out of the panic room and sent Anna back to Heaven to give him a clear path to Lilith. And then there was the altered phone call.
We'd like to pause here for a moment to think about every point in the past two seasons when someone (often Dean) has blamed Sam for just about everything bad that happened since the day he was born. That could take a while.
Now we'd like to think about how often in the past two seasons anyone other than Sam, Lucifer and the non-Castiel angels has been blamed for anything at all. That will take no time at all, because it never happened.
Not only did Kripke and his team ignore all guilt except Sam Winchester's, they portrayed Dean as the omniscient saviour to Sam's benighted traitor to the point where it stopped making any kind of logical sense.
Sam trusts Ruby despite the fact that she's a demon. We would say that this shows broadmindedness, lack of prejudice, and faith in others, all admirable qualities. Still... if you want to call it evil, writers, and turn Sam's ethics and independent spirit into a flaw, we'll go with that. But you at least have to stay within the rules that you made up. If it's unforgiveable for Sam to trust Ruby, even with the extenuating circumstance that he thought she could save his brother, how exactly do you justify Dean trusting Crowley based on a feeling?
But let's say we're willing to overlook that. Let's assume for a second that Dean's got psychic abilities that let him look into the mind of a demon and know its intentions (and let's also assume that in his case it's not evil or freakish). That still leaves us with the fact that there were sixty-six seals on Lucifer's cage and Sam broke one.
So did Dean.
That's an inconvenient fact Kripke and his team seem to have forgotten: we're not denying that Sam made a mistake or that he needs to make up for it. But let's be clear about what mistake he made: he broke one seal, just like Dean did, except that Sam was then blamed for opening Lucifer's cage and everything bad that went with it, while Dean became a true servant of God.
We like Dean, we really do, but this is ridiculous. Sam did not break all sixty-six seals himself, and while ignorant and trigger-happy hunters might overlook the difference between breaking the last seal and breaking all the seals, you'd think that Messengers of God (and the people who wrote the story) would know better. Especially Messengers of God who altered phone calls, unlocked doors, and removed other Messengers of God in order to give Sam a clear path to Lilith.
And, although we desperately want to give Kripke the benefit of the doubt, because everyone leaves loose ends hanging, we really can't. There's a time when "loose ends" translates into "impossibly botched and retconned story", and when they encompass the plot of half a season is that time.
Sam Is a Character Too!
Dean went to Hell. Dean went to Hell and was tortured for thirty years, which broke his soul. Then he tortured other people for ten years, which broke his soul even more. He came back to a little brother he couldn't recognize and a world that was falling apart. Sam lied to him about his dying wishes, ran off with Ruby, broke the seal, and Dean had to help clean up the disaster that he and his brother had unknowingly helped to start.
We get it, Kripke. His life sucked.
But, as we may have mentioned a time or two, so did Sam's. Yes, he made a couple of bad decisions, but they were practically forced on him by circumstances that were way beyond his control. He was practically condemned by the very act of being born, and then Heaven and Hell set out to break him in every way they could, so that when the time came he'd do what they wanted.
We've always been shown, in detail, the heartbreaking reasons for Dean's unwise choices. Made a deal with the crossroads demon? It was because he loved his brother that much. Broke the first seal? It was because the demons tortured him so much and the thought of it still torments him. Dean is humanized, and we all understand why he did what he did, and there isn't a single one of those decisions that we haven't forgiven him for.
But Supernatural has consistently denied Sam the same privilege. In some ways he's had a harder time than Dean, afflicted by a curse because of a deal that was made years before he was born, doing his best to work with that and put his power to good use but having every attempt backfire. We're lucky to have had Jared Padalecki, who took on the challenge, conveyed a range of emotions and showed us the depth of Sam's pain with lines that were frequently just variants of, "I'm sorry, Dean." But just imagine how much more he could have done with a well-rounded and well-written part in Season 5.
Accountability for Angels
We know we've said this already, but we'd really like to say it again. Castiel and his friends upstairs orchestrated the Apocalypse. Sam would never have been able to kill Lilith without Castiel's help.
The fact that he jumped ship and joined Team Free Will doesn't make him any less accountable for his actions. If anything, he should be more accountable, because he knew what he was doing all along. When Sam and Dean were trying desperately to prevent seals 2 to 65 from being broken, Cas and his buddies stood idly by and let it happen.
So, yes, we get that Sam picked Ruby and it was awful of him and Dean was hurt because he decided that Sam was choosing a demon over him (instead of giving Sam the benefit of the doubt and believing that he was trying to save the world and Dean). We could make a couple of snarky comments involving the word "Gordon", but we really don't want to stoop to that.
It should be pointed out, however, that whatever mistakes he might have made, at least Sam was not secretly planning to bring on Armageddon.
Desperate Writing
With Sam and Dean still having serious issues in Season 5 (and, really, writers, was dragging brother-versus-brother out for another season the most original idea you could come up with?), the writers were forced to work around the heart of the show instead of drawing from it. Dealing only with conflict and negativity, the show ran into a dead end, drawing from what it already had. The writers even resorted to killing off characters just to find something to write about.
Ellen and Jo, both characters with a lot of promise but who never had much screen time, were killed just when they were beginning to shine. The boys were killed and brought back again. We have to ask at this point: is killing Sam and/or Dean the writers' stock method of resolving a plotline that's run away from them? Because it's getting kind of old. When Sam died on his knees in the mud at Cold Oaks, we were in tears right along with Dean. By the time Dark Side of the Moon rolled around, we just rolled our eyes and wondered who would bring the boys back this time. All Kripke has achieved by overusing the kill-the-boys-to-solve-the-problem approach is to make death mean less in the scheme of things.
We won't go into the writers' treatment of Sam again, but we will say that it's just wrong to trash characters just to find something to write about. It didn't work with Sam - it didn't change our opinion of him, it annoyed the hell out of us, and it made Dean look like a jerk.
And it didn't work with John. The boys had already come to a mutual understanding that although their father wasn't perfect, he did the best he could. We agreed with them, because it's been pretty clear every time Jeffrey Dean Morgan has featured that for all his faults, John Winchester loves his boys. John was at peace. His sons were at peace. Sam even gave the younger John a speech on loving and forgiving his Dad because he was doing the best he could.
So what, precisely, did the show gain by trampling on John Winchester's character to the point where Jeffrey Dean Morgan wouldn't even consider returning?
Karma
Just in case we've managed to get the wrong idea across, we'll say it outright: we do not hate Dean. We spent four seasons loving Dean and everything about him. So to get us to say Dean was a jerk in Season 5... Kripke's had to work very hard to make that happen.
The show's attempt to lay all blame at Sam's door backfired on Dean, and it wasn't because of some silly vessel-related concerns. Sam and Dean are so much more than vessels for archangels, and to suggest that their worth should be measured by how agreeable they are to being taken over is to do them a serious disservice.
There are a lot of wonderful qualities that the boys share. They're brave. They help people with no thought of reward. They put their lives on the line for total strangers. And they love each other, absolutely, unconditionally, more than anything else in the world.
We're not sure which part of that translates into Dean letting Sam take all the blame for every bad thing that's happened since the day he was born. We don't know how the most loving, concerned big brother in the universe could give Sam merry hell bordering on physical abuse for using his powers, but could react to Jesse's stronger, darker and scarier abilities with, "Kid, you're awesome!" We have no idea how the things that could have turned Season 5 into Supernatural's highest-rated season ever turned into the endless Dean Winchester pity party that had more than one longtime fan quitting the show.
What we do know is that Sam turned into little more than a prop, accepting everyone's criticism and abuse, apologizing for every crime laid at his door whether or not he actually committed it, but it was Dean who came off looking bad.
When Dean promised Death that he would let Sam jump into the cage, we weren't upset. It was a hard decision, probably harder for Dean than for anybody else. We understood. What infuriated us was that Dean never bothered to tell Sam about that. He told Bobby, and they had a long discussion about deals, Sam, and darkness, and we're willing to believe that until then Dean didn't tell Sam because he didn't want his brother to feel obligated to do it.
But once Dean had accepted that it was Sam's decision, once Sam had made that decision, why didn't Dean tell him then? We wish we could think it was because he was hoping Sam would change his mind at the last minute, but Season 5 precedent has been that Dean doesn't trust Sam to be able to do the right thing.
And we hate that. Like we said, we spent four seasons loving Dean. We hated the fact that Season 5 made us have to work so hard not to dislike him. Sam, at least, wasn't pointing fingers, was accepting responsibility and stepping up to do what he could. It made him look like a man who was taking the high road.
Epilogue
Having said all this... We loved Swan Song. We loved the fact that Dean accepted Sam's decision and supported him although he disagreed. We loved the fact that Dean had faith in Sam and said so. We loved the fact that at the very end, it was Dean's presence and support that helped Sam defeat Lucifer. The season finale of Supernatural belonged to both Sam and Dean, which is exactly the way it should be.
So, despite everything, we've left Season 5 with the hope that things are going to get better. It's going to be difficult: it's a rare and extraordinary show that manages to get itself back on track after falling off the grid and seeing dropping ratings for so long. But in its very first season, Supernatural proved that it had the potential to be a rare and extraordinary show. We hope that Season 6 is going to see that potential fulfilled.
Description of Supernatural: The Complete Fifth Season
Twenty-six years ago, Sam and Dean Winchester lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. Subsequently, their father raised them to be soldiers. He taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America ... and he taught them how to kill it. This haunting series follows the Winchester brothers as they crisscross the lonely and mysterious back roads of the country in their '67 Chevy Impala, hunting down every evil supernatural force they encounter along the way. At the end of the fourth season, Sam unwittingly broke the final seal ? that held Lucifer captive in Hell. Now, Lucifer is free, the Apocalypse is here and angels prepare for a spectacular final battle. Against a landscape of celestial violence, natural disasters and a rising human death toll, Sam and Dean, with the help of fallen angel Castiel, must find a way to achieve the impossible: Kill the Devil.Bestsellers in DVD
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