MovieChat Forums > Supernatural (2005) Discussion > Did the creatures/Monsters/Demons/Angels...

Did the creatures/Monsters/Demons/Angels get depowered in later seasons?


I'm rewatching the show for the first time ever & I've noticed that most of the stuff they encountered used to be an actual threat.

I get that over time, they learn new skills & ways to kill things & get more experienced. I genuinely love that they grow as hunters BUT why depower the things they fight? Vampires, Shifters & WereWoves are BARELY a threat anymore. Demons & Angels are a complete joke now

There's actual sense of danger & peril in the first few seasons. Demons were genuinely scary. Forget about any of those beings & creatures I mentioned being a threat for a sec, what happened to their speed & actual super human strength? ESPECIALLY Angels & Demons. They went from characters who could literally snap people in half to characters who'd get slapped around on a regular basis

Wtf? There's so much inconsistencies in power levels in the later seasons.

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Sam and Dean have become stronger hunters, is all I can say. Over time they have become much more skilful and knowledgeable in how to kill the monster that this over powers that original threat. They have so much more resources than they have ever had before. They are much more stronger than they ever have been. They work exceptionally well together as a team. The Bunker has also allowed them to grow, knowing how to kill the monster much quicker, because of their speed in finding ways to kill the monster.

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I'm rewatching it right now (watched the first seasons a while ago) and... yes and no.

Monsters, angels and demons have become a joke, that's true. But I don't think they have been depowered. It's more about they way they're written.

Imagine you're a demon. You're immune to everything EXCEPT some specific blades. And you have Telekinetic powers. What do you do?
- You use your Telekinetic power to make some useless throw and the beginning and you don't use them again, why would you, huh?
- You never use your Telekinetic power to catch those blades. Why would you do that?
- Since the only thing that can kill you is a blade, which is a melee weapon, you get into a fight with your bare hands, because that looks like a great idea. Bringing a gun? why would you? And of course you pay zero attention to those blades which are the only thing that can kill you. It's rolling in the floor? Let it roll, what could possibly happen? Somebody is holding it? You turn your back on him, what could go wrong?

This is just part of a bigger issue in the series: there's a pile of non-sense and deux ex machina. There's no internal logic. At the beginning, Angels were written as some alien psychology. Later on, they look like a rip-off of Vampire RPG clans. You have Malachi (Brujah) vs Bartholomew (Ventrue)... seriously?? There's lot of copy and paste and just because. Not to talk about the post-Bobby safe house which is a clone of The Librarian one.

Still... it's kinda fun. And it has very good episodes once in a while. The average quality in the Urban Fantasy genre ranges from low to... rock bottom, both in series and novels. Only thing in this genre that made me say "wow, that was good" were the three first volumes in Anita Blake (the rest is garbage), and that's not exactly a ton of content. There's a lot of non-sense in this show, yeah, but it's still better than most in the genre.

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Like I said, this is my first rewatch ever. In a way, it's honestly like watching it for the first time. Cause I honestly didn't know I forgotten so much from the first few seasons

Now that you mention the blade, the boys genuinely feel bad when they kill a demon in the first few seasons. Cause they're actually possessing an innocent person & by killing the demon, they kill the person.

So can you remind me, maybe I haven't gotten to that part yet or it doesn't get explained but they honestly just kill a lot of demon possessed humans in later seasons. Like I'm talking left & right. Without even thinking of the person being possessed.

So Uh, what changes? Do you know? Like is it ever explained why the hunters just don't care about 'em anymore? or is that another inconsistency for the shows later seasons. i.e The post season 5 era

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You're right...there is some inconsistency here but basically after awhile they discover that most humans possessed have been rode too hard and don't survive the possession. Demons have a tendency to carry around fatal wounds on their meat suit.

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Good enough explanation. Thanks.

Kinda reminds me of Meg in season 1. Fell outta building & just walked off. Just finished season 1 recently. So good. God, Meg was an amazing antagonist

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Now that you mention the blade, the boys genuinely feel bad when they kill a demon in the first few seasons. Cause they're actually possessing an innocent person & by killing the demon, they kill the person [...] So Uh, what changes? Do you know? Like is it ever explained why the hunters just don't care about 'em anymore? or is that another inconsistency for the shows later seasons. i.e The post season 5 era

I know what you mean. That's another big problem with the series.

Main characters are supposed to be good guys with issues. But then a lot of things conflict with that portrayal. You have them all touchy because somebody wants to kill one of them (sometimes for a very reasonable reason, cough Anna cough), but at the same time they go in a killing spree of innocents hosts without remorse (and some of them could have survived, not all, but some could). That's not being good guys with issues, that's being a couple of psycho-morons.

I don't thing they wrote this way on purpose. It's more like the writers started to pile up things without thinking about how they combine. Lots of family drama. And then some monster of the week pulp. And then a setting that was like a war against heaven and hell. The problem is that you can't just pile up things randomly, because they interact. Piling up lots of drama because somebody wants to kills you or your brother with a supernatural war setting where everybody around dies, that just a weird mix. Soap opera drama doesn't work in war genre, it makes the character look cheap and miserable.

The consequence is that after a couple of seasons, you don't really give a shit about the characters or the general drama. You watch it for the good pulp episodes.

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I think another poster here put it best, there was just no vision in the later seasons. Like Kripke has a vision. A long, overarching story that concluded with the season finale aptly "Swan Song"

Don't get me wrong, the later seasons have produced some phenomenal solo episodes but the season long stories were all over the place. So inconsistent. I genuinely love that Sam & Dean became great Hunters but the show just lost that sense of danger & peril in my opinion. The threats were so tame.

Angels, Demons, Spirits, Vampires & Werewolves just kinda turned into a joke

Also, the soap opera melodrama thing is a CW specialty. That's honestly one of the MAIN reasons I gave up on the Arrowverse shows. Too much melodramas. Felt like Imwas watching a teen soap opera

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Everything got "depowered" in the later seasons, the use of villains, locations, threats, etc.

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Maybe it was down to the same old excuse 'BUDGET' they couldn't afford the special effects that went into the strong story telling. This is all I can think of.

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Probably. I mean, I still enjoyed it for what we could get, but it's still disappointing.

I keep forgetting to post my "theories" list on here.

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It is a budget issue, but not a special effects issue. Instead of hiring good writers to create a new story after season 5. They created a throw away story every season and had no professionalism involved. Basically just milking the franchise for what it was worth and spending pennies for millions because the fan base didn't care.

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Oh, the fanbase cared. S6 and S7 were poor immitations of what followed those first 5 seasons. I didn't care for S8 because of how it treated Sam. But after, the story telling got back on track and produced some amazing episodes. We had some great writers like Bob Berens and Meredith Glynn to name a couple of my favourites. It felt, at times like the old days.

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I agree angels definitely were. In the first angel appearance, Castiel walks through every known ward and ignores every weapon Dean and Bobby can use against him and he does it as if they were throwing glitter at him. As time went on more and more symbols could ward against angels (even though on that first appearance the hunters admit they can't find anything to use as a ward, they were just throwing everything at them), humans could sometimes go toe to toe with them.

I can understand why they did it. Creatures that powerful don't make interesting characters and Castiel, especially, would have been a problem interacting when he should have been able to destroy anything that came against him. But I was still a bit disappointed.

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I think the warding thing can be explained away as they learned new things that can ward off Angels or Castiel taught them. But I still hate how they made Castiel weak af in later seasons.

I think season 5 handled weak Castiel well. He was still badass even though he wasn't at 100%. Like the guy was an Angelic warrior for like thousands of years & they turned him into a punching bag in later seasons.

I genuinely hate how much he got his ass kicked by freaking humans.

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