xwacky: Dean from Supernatural (spn brothers)
xwacky ([personal profile] xwacky) wrote2010-01-21 02:05 pm

The Boys Are Back

The winter hiatus is over! Supernatural is coming back tonight on CW.  The collective sigh echoed throughout fandom is heard even in Twitterland:  #TheBoysAreBack was reportedly among the top 10 trending topic this morning until it was blocked.  The "funny" thing is I'm so used to long drawn out hiatus from watching Battlestar Galactica, two months of waiting felt like nothing to me these days.

Still, I'm excited.  And I've been thinking about the show and season 5 lately, especially after seeing the Favorite Scene picspam by  [livejournal.com profile] layne67 last night.  In particular, I was pondering over my favorite episode "The End" and the mid season cliffhanger "Abandon All Hopes" (note both episodes are written by Ben Edlund) when a small light bulb went off in my head:

WARNING: 5.04 & 5.10 spoilers alert --  A burning question from 5.04 for me is whether or not the future that Dean saw is real and inevitable?  The parting shot Lucifer!Sam left for Dean was particularly troublesome (He said: Whatever you do, you will always end up... here. No matter what choices you make, whatever details you alter, *we* will always end up... here.).  The "here" Lucifer!Sam was talking about of course was Dean's death resulted from his failed attempt in killing Lucifer with the Colt.

Now fast forward to 5.10.  An important truefax we (as well as the protagonists) learned in this episode is that the Colt cannot harm Lucifer.  With that in mind, that particular slice of "future" in 5.04 where the protagonists plotted to kill Lucifer!Sam with the Colt is no longer valid. Why would these Resistance Fighters plan an assault with a weapon they knew to be useless, right?  So is it true we have it implied in canon that Lucifer!Sam's claim on the future is false?!



ETA:  Is this the Valentine's episode? \o/

[identity profile] anastdean.livejournal.com 2010-01-21 11:34 pm (UTC)(link)
Happy Thursday darling. Enjoy the show.

(Anonymous) 2010-01-22 02:17 am (UTC)(link)
Ooh, good thoughts! I would have to agree that the future can be changed (but then I believe that nothing about the future is set in stone).

I do believe that the pic is from the Valentines episode. The guy in the pic looks like the same guy in another pic I saw from that episode.

mick

[identity profile] i-o-r-h-a-e-l.livejournal.com 2010-01-22 04:11 am (UTC)(link)
About 5.04 and 5.10 I think it's going backward. Because present!Dean saw in 5.04 that future!Dean tried to kill Lucifer with the Colt, present!Dean then tried to find the Colt to kill Lucy in 5.10. But then either present or future!Dean knew yet that the gun couldn't kill Lucy. I think that's what you call paradox in time when you make time travel. You might change the future by seeing what the future is like when you happen to travel to the future. Confusing much? I am confused. :D

[identity profile] layne67.livejournal.com 2010-01-22 05:40 am (UTC)(link)
Aargh! Now I'm confused!!

I'm not much good with time-travel stories. I hate it in Star Trek ( because I found it hard to understand )!

Anyway, could it be said that the happenings in episodes 5 to 10 never happened to future!Dean because present!Dean got back to Sam, but future!Dean never did?

[identity profile] ala-tariel.livejournal.com 2010-01-22 02:53 pm (UTC)(link)
That pic from epi My Bloody Valentine? Not that bloody to me. :D Thanks for the pic!

[identity profile] stilettos81.livejournal.com 2010-01-22 08:14 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, so the geek in me cannot resist the temptation ...

The most famous time-travel paradox is probably the Grandfather Paradox, but I think the scenario described in Robert Heinlein's By His Bootstraps is closer to what transpired in SPN 5.04. In this story, the present and future versions of the protagonist all interact with each other to produce the events, leading him to conclude these events must all exist in a closed temporal loop and are therefore non-causal.

There are many attempts to resolve these paradoxes. The multiverse (parallel universe) depicted in Trek is only one of the hypotheses on how to get around the problem, but I don't think SPN - with God and Devil - will use that particular solution.

There is a hypothesize that says the only possible timelines are those that are entirely self-consistent, i.e., a timeline where a man who travels back in time to kill his own grandpa (before the grandpa met the grandma) has probability of zero. In an important sense, this supports the concept of destiny, and I think it makes some sense for SPN to take this route.

The irony, to me, is that this second theory was proposed by a physicist. Who says one cannot prove the existence of God? ;)

[identity profile] dreams-of-honey.livejournal.com 2010-01-23 11:36 pm (UTC)(link)
Woohoo! I'm so glad to see the show back! It's need seems to long a wait for me, because of Christmas and everything, but it does feel like a long time has passed since I last felt this excited about seeing a new episode. I've missed this feeling.

Oh your theory is interesting. Although SammyLucifer didn't mention anything about the colt, he just said that Dean will always end up in that place trying to kill him. Maybe Dean's managed to change the future. He'd chosen a different path and in doing so he now knows that the colt is useless. This could either be a good thing or a bad thing for the boys.

*covers eyes to spoilery pic* Okay I did catch a glimpse of Castiel, but that was it! ;-)