Surfing SF: Supernatural – “The French Mistake”
I got these spoilers for Friday night’s episode of Supernatural from Misha Collins’ Twitter feed…
Supernatural had already established itself as the metafictional champion of genre dramas. After all, there is a long history of science fiction shows commenting on their own fictional nature, ranging from the utter anarchy of Stargate‘s 100th episode (“Wormhole X-Treme!”) where the gang discovers there’s a TV show based on their adventures to the ultra-dark episode of Buffy where the title character wakes up in a mental institution in the “real world”. But no one has done it quite as often as Supernatural, taken it this far, or integrated the craziness this deeply into its own mythology. “The Monster at the End of This Book”, among my favorite episodes of the show, featured major plot developments in the same episode that Sam and Dean get grossed out reading “Wincest” fan fiction online.
“The French Mistake” pushed all of this just about as far as it could be pushed. Balthazar breezes into Bobby’s place, compares current events in the ongoing Angel Civil War to the end of The Godfather, does a quick ritual, and Sam and Dean find themselves in some sort of other universe where they star in a TV show called Supernatural and are named “Jared Padalecki” and “Jensen Ackles”. They run into someone they think is Castiel, but he turns out to be a Tweet-happy actor named Misha Collins. And “Jared” finds himself married to Ruby, or at least the actress who played Ruby, Genevieve Cortese. After a while a bad-guy angel shows up, and things get much weirder, ending in the massacre of much of the cast and crew of Supernatural, including Misha Collins, Eric Kripke, and Robert Singer (“What kind of douchebag names a character after himself?”).
Look, it would be easy to criticize this show, with so many other things going on (really, how much of this angel war is going to take place off-screen? And when is the “Mother of All” going to show up again?), taking time out to do this episode. But they’re so gosh darn good at it that it’s hard to stay mad. Plus, amid all the madcap, the show found a serious side to all this… the “real world” universe seems to have no magic, no heaven, no hell. The fact that the show found that somewhere in its logic is pretty twisted, though it’s made fairly clear this isn’t quite meant to be our reality (after all, if Misha Collins had his throat slit in an alley, I would have heard about it, right?). They even manage to find some real meaning for Sam’s character in the fact that Jared Padalecki and Genevieve Cortese are married in real life. That may be a whole new level of metafiction.
Bits:
-While the show’s actors were playing themselves, strangely the crew members such as Eric Kripke and Bob Singer chose to be played by actors.
-The title, if you were wondering, is a Blazing Saddles reference. Now you know.
-Dean’s displeasure that the show is shot in Vancouver was amusing. Of all the shows supposedly set in America that shoot in Vancouver, Supernatural is probably the one most steeped in Americana (well, except maybe Warehouse 13, which is sort of about Americana). It’s probably a tribute to the technical aspects of the show that you don’t really spend any time thinking about this while watching the series.
-Another way to tell this isn’t quite our reality: I doubt Padalecki & Cortese have overblown Warhol-esque portraits of themselves in their foyer. I wonder if they really do have an Alpaca in the backyard.
-Is Supernatural officially the first TV show to feature it’s own fanzine in an episode of the series?
-Bob Singer’s increasingly exasperated exclamations of “Season Six” were another great running joke.
-“So we’d have to blow off the scene where they sit on the Impala and talk about their feelings.” “Do you want to open the hate mail?”
-Dean: “I feel like this whole place is bad touching me.” And that’s before he finds out Jensen Ackles was on Days of Our Lives.
-“Dean Cain was like that on Lois… and that man was a real actor!”
-Bob Singer: “It appears Jared and Jensen were seen beating an extra to death.” Sera Gamble: “Huh.”
-“He sold Octocobra?”
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