Winchesters Review – “The Tears of a Clown”

Just to let everybody know, there are only about 3 pictures of the clowns from The Winchesters episode 1.12 in the video. So don’t be afraid to hit play……

Even though I really wanted to include shots of clown Mary and John.

Final Score:

I remarked before that these episodes could also be graded by how “captionable” they are in WFB’s weekly “Caption This!” game.

Well hands down, bar none, this episode has absolutely won the award for the most captionable episode of The Winchesters. A definite plus for this episode was how visually interesting it was. Full 5 shells to the set designers and decorators for this episode.

Once upon a time, I advised that the first rule for any writer is to just write. Set aside any concerns or worries that slow you down and just pour out your thoughts onto the page. Above all, no matter what, don’t stop until you are done. Even if you have to use a complete cliché to get through a scene, do it.

AFTER you have gotten over that first hump and actually have something on the page, that is when you go back and start looking where to polish. That’s when you ask yourself, “how can I make this cliché more interesting?” After the scene is written, that’s when you go back and ask, “what would the character do that makes this different?”

This is what seems to me to be the biggest dividing line between The Winchesters and the Supernatural mothership. The Winchesters rarely tries going beyond the cliché level. They set things up but then never seem to ask, “Ok now how would this be different from normal because of the characters we have?” By contrast, what made Supernatural so special and watchable is exactly that. So often they would have the cliché, but now Sam and Dean (and Castiel and Bobby and Crowley and…) are involved. Tune in to see how it twists and becomes different! Again I want to recommend comparing the poker game in this episode to the one in “The Curious Case of Dean Winchester.” It is not one of the greatest episodes of season 5 by a long shot, but they still made it entertaining and fascinating by transforming the cliché through our characters. Conversely, in “The Tears of a Clown” would much about the scene have changed if we replaced Ada with… anybody? (say Willow from Buffy?) At a glance, only the most minor of adjustments like a few props maybe. Ada has been one of the more interesting characters we’ve had in this show. This was a chance for the writers to really do something unique with her, to transform the cliché, just like the mothership always did.

But we’ll talk a lot more about that when the season/series review is posted.

Thanks as always for the screencaps, courtesy of Raloria@livejournal.