I think there were ways to understand where Sam was coming from -- if you saw him as a major trauma case. I saw the whole relationship with Amelia as something he fell into because he was hurting so badly, he was in so much pain from losing Dean, and she was hurting form losing Don. So much more could have been done with that. Where you saw him as "not giving a fuck", I saw him as being as unemotional as possible when it came to Dean because he was afraid to feel again, because he didn't want to lose him again, he couln't bear that. So he was protecting himself. I thought he gave too much of a fuck. It was the only way I could reconcile how they were playing Sam's character in the first half of the season -- as someone who was terribly, emotionally withdrawn from his brother.
I almost felt like we were watching Soulless Sam again.
They never went into that, never explained it. And I think that was essential. His emotional disconnection was so unlike Sam, it smacked of someone who was very badly damaged.
The whole problem with Season 8 was timing. They gave way too much time to the Amelia relationship and never gave us any payoff from it. If you spend half a season on something, I expect it to mean something at the end of the season. And really, Amelia didn't mean much in the end. And they had Sam acting wildly out of character but never explained it. And Jeremy Carver, in an interview I read, didn't seem to feel there was a need to.
That's poor plotting of the story arc.
I could see Sam's guilt at the end of the season because that's how Sam _would_ react. And the whole "Benny's a vampire" argument -- well, I pretty much put that down to jealousy. Something like "he's replaced me". I could get that, actually, because it fit with Sam's feelings of being an inadequate brother, which we've seen in previous seasons. The second half of the season resonated much more with me. The first half just seemed poorly done.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
momijizukamori
Re: Connecting to S8 Sam
Date: 2013-06-25 04:41 pm (UTC)I almost felt like we were watching Soulless Sam again.
They never went into that, never explained it. And I think that was essential. His emotional disconnection was so unlike Sam, it smacked of someone who was very badly damaged.
The whole problem with Season 8 was timing. They gave way too much time to the Amelia relationship and never gave us any payoff from it. If you spend half a season on something, I expect it to mean something at the end of the season. And really, Amelia didn't mean much in the end. And they had Sam acting wildly out of character but never explained it. And Jeremy Carver, in an interview I read, didn't seem to feel there was a need to.
That's poor plotting of the story arc.
I could see Sam's guilt at the end of the season because that's how Sam _would_ react. And the whole "Benny's a vampire" argument -- well, I pretty much put that down to jealousy. Something like "he's replaced me". I could get that, actually, because it fit with Sam's feelings of being an inadequate brother, which we've seen in previous seasons. The second half of the season resonated much more with me. The first half just seemed poorly done.