Watching the Dawson tortures Reid episode of
Criminal Minds right now. The couple times I've seen it I can't help but be reminded of two other bits of pop culture ephemera:
Frailty and
Supernatural.
The first time I saw
Frailty, my initial thoughts were "Okay, Paxton's stranger than I thought and, yes, Powers Boothe remains as Powers Boothe-y as ever." However, what's more salient to this conversation is the thought I had after that. Y'see, first time I saw
Frailty was, oh, I think about two seasons into
Supernatural and I couldn't help but read this film as resembling almost an alternate universe version of the SPN storyline. Mother dead, two young boys raised by their dad, dad takes 'em out killing demons. Except, of course, the main tension in
Frailty is caused by the older son's disbelief and the question of his father's sanity, making it an inverse of SPN in which not only is Dean unwaveringly loyal to his father but the question of
sanity never arises (after all, the SPN universe relies of it's reality of the supernatural).
Watch some heavy John & Dean & Sam angst episodes back-to-back with
Frailty and it will really hit you how very different the boys' lives could have been.
Which brings me to my point. Sitting here, watching this
Criminal Minds a part of me began to think about how for all I love SPN and will continue to love it there is still a small part of me that would like to see something a little more psychological. Some part of me that would have liked to see SPN's set up but instead as an HBO series in which supernatural beings do not exist and in which Sam and Dean are children and are attempting to cope/figure out what to do now that their dad's gone plum loco. Just thought it might be interesting, is all.