fireintheimpala:

So, I was pondering this yesterday, after seeing the MTV article: Season 8 didn’t air two years ago–season 8 is still airing. On Netflix. On streaming sites. On bittorrents. Every day (or so) someone new hops on the Supernatural train and rapidly transports themselves to the present. They arrive largely ignorant of local custom and traditions, with only the clothes they packed beforehand and the trinkets they picked up along the way.

Supernatural is one of the first shows to get painted by the sudden shrinking of the temporal world–in fact, perhaps the first major show to straddle both sides of this historical jump. Before this rapid digital transit was created, it was difficult to travel far from your show-time location. Once in Season 10, Season 5 could be at best a hazy memory of smoke and cornfields. And this functioned, for one, as a stabilizing mechanism. Season gaps were like mountain passes or fire doors. Oh sure, some mass of things made it through, but things could be dropped as well. Characters refashioned a smidge, lackluster plot threads dropped… The fine details in human memory could only make it through a few doors after all.

But now nothing is far! Every narrative location is at the tips of our fingers. And thus, too, no contagion can be localized. If you start something powerful, you’re stuck with it. You can’t ignore anything and just hope it goes away, because nothing goes away anymore! …Star Trek DS9 could backtrack on Garak and Bashir enthusiasm in the 90’s, but they’d never get away with it now. Two seasons of minimal Dean and Cas interactions would have dampened viewer emotions a decade ago, but now it has no ameliorative effect at all.

Season 8 is in a perpetual state of generating more and more Destiel fans. As is Season 4. As is Season 5. As is The Man Who Would Be King. And with every passing day, the sights that new fan finds when finally hopping off that final train platform become more impressive. The Destiel fandom is like a thriving Paris, waiting for the traveler who can for the first time in history cross the ocean in a mere two weeks.

I guess what I’m saying is…(to mix my time metaphors…) Supernatural may be slow to respond, only just now letting the Beatles play on Sullivan in the 200th. But while they’re crawling forward, Timothy Leary is already off in his own realm handing out acid to everybody and their mother.