kleenexwoman | (no subject)

drworm pointed out while we were having our weekly viewing party that the show has changed a lot. I was thinking about this at work. It really has. At first I thought it was mainly that it had gone from a joke show to a show with serious storylines, characters, and mythos that happens to have jokes, but that's not necessarily it--a lot of the storylines are still complete parody. I think what's happened is that a lot of the episodes have gotten too busy and too mired down under an increasingly complex plot--I can just about keep on top of it at this point, and I hope it's going to settle down.

The show really is best when it's taking a single ridiculous premise and expanding on it. "Blood of the Father" and "Perchance to Dean" were impressive in their own ways, but "Handsome Ransom" and "Self-Medication" have been my favorite episodes of this season so far, mostly because they do what the show used to do--take an aspect of retro kiddie pulp and make weird fun of it or expand it to its "real-life" consequences. Not saying the show should be limited to that, but I'd like it to be the focus of the show instead of something that's become a sideline.

I'm still annoyed that Hunter's transness was a cover-up, because it would have been exactly as cool if he'd stayed a woman and still been the leader of SPHINX. First/second-season VBros would have had that happen, I think. Although Shore Leave is excellent and I think he may be a new favorite. And I like the concept behind SPHINX--deciding to take a vanquished enemy's stuff and do your own thing with it is funny, clever, and a lot simpler than I was expecting.

I'm kind of wondering if the show is really going to take a different direction, though. It's all about an aesthetic of failure, and that's...not happening as much. Rusty is still a horrible failure and Hatred is amazingly pathetic as his bodyguard, and that's awesome, but SPHINX has so far been pretty competent, and a whole cohort made up of competent people in this universe is kind of a scary idea. And I was going to say that 21 has become weirdly competent, but that's all window dressing--he's still a nerdy, sex-starved failure underneath the new badassery.

And I'm really starting to like Hank and Dean a lot more than I had before. The first few seasons, they were pretty much walking Hardy Boys jokes without even a cursory amount of depth. Now they seem a lot more real, and I like it. I'm actually feeling genuinely sorry for Dean, and, um, Hank is sort of cute. In that teenaged-animated-character way. And I actually want to see what happens to them now.