Supernatural

In honour of the start of its eleventh season, we take a look at one of the longest running modern fantasy series: Supernatural.

The story is simple. There are monsters in the world, Heaven and Hell are real, witches are evil and a handful number of humans take the mantle of hunters, for one reason or another, killing the beasts and saving humanity. In this particular case, we follow the adventures of Sam, played by Jared Padalecki, and Dean, played by Jensen Ackles, Winchester and a changing cast of support characters. After the death of their mother, their father took to investigate what killed her, dragging the boys along into a life of fighting.

The acting is okay and the effects and fight scenes believable.

Supernatural is one of those dark, gritty series where nothing ever goes in the protagonist’s favour and someone always dies. Yet it never felt too heavy because of the humour, satire and very charismatic leads. Or at least it was such in its youth.

Eventually it turned into Gary and Larry Sue wacky adventures and gradual descend into incoherent or inconsistent storytelling. It’s still good. It was okay up until season five. But you can just feel the writers struggling to produce even a shred of creativity and originality at this point.

Overall, Supernatural is decent, check it out, but it has long ceded to alzheimers and is now slowly wobbling around on a tennis ball padded walking aid with the subtle stench of sour pie wafting in the air.

But nevermind that, let’s turn back to when Supernatural was still a toddler and barely released its Pilot episode. Watch out for spoilers on the road ahead.

The episode begins 22 years ago in Kansas. It’s night, and a spooky tree casts a shadow on a small family house. Inside, a woman is putting her sons to bed, and all seems fine until she’s thrown to the ceiling by a supernatural power and then set on fire, along with the house.

Right off the bat, nice build up, nice spooky mood in that opening sequence and solid and swift establishment of the backstory.

We then cut to present day Stanford university where Sammy, one of the boys, is studying. Everything is going well for him, good grades, a promising law school interview, sexy girlfriend, friends and parties, at least until his brother shows up for a visit.

Sammy isn’t happy about seeing his bad/play boy of a brother, but Dean is there on family matters. Their father has gone missing, and he needs Sam to help find him. We also learn that for years their father has been dragging them around, hunting whatever killed their mother and meanwhile slaughtering all kinds of monsters, a life Sam ran away from.

But gingerly, he agrees to help Dean, family first after all, as long as they’re back ‘first thing Monday.’ And then they’re off to California, the place where their dad was working on a serial disappearances case.

We move to location and a man who is talking on the phone with his girlfriend while driving along, until he sees a woman in white drifting about the road. He stops to ask if she’s okay, and she asks him to ‘take her home.’ She then gives him the doe eyes and asks him to go home with her. And so he zooms off into the distance, the girlfriend be damned.

They arrive at destination, a dark abandoned house. The man is understandably perplexed, ‘Who would even live there?’ He turns to ask her the address again, but she’s gone. It’s halloween so naturally he concludes it’s a bad joke. Still, instead of doing the sensible thing and leaving, he enters the house.

Or at least he tries to until a frantic bird sends him scurrying back to his car and driving off. Once he has gained enough distance, he looks in the back mirror, and there she is. He skids to a stop on the bridge, a muffled scream and blood splattered windows. Classic horror.

The next day Sam and Dean come across the crime scene as they enter town. Time for action. Dean grabs a fake badge and heads to ask the cops a few quick question. He learns the man has a girlfriend and moves on to talk to her. She and her friend brief Sam and Dean on the local legend. A girl disappeared hitchhiking, presumed dead. A short look into the library archives provides a slightly different story, a record of a suicide on the bridge where the men are going missing.

They arrive on location and see a woman in white jump off the bridge, just before their car tries to murder them.

After surviving the attack, they check into a hotel, and the receptionist recognizes the card informing them that someone else checked in with similar. The first real hint of their father. But it doesn’t seem like anyone has been around for a while in his room though he did leave them an extensive amount of research on the case.

Before they can confront the husband, find the grave, and burn the body to get rid of the ghost, the local cops catch onto their fake cards and badges. They arrest Dean to question him about his father. After finding an extensive journal on supernatural things the cops suspect the Winchesters are a family of murdering psychopaths.

And while the cops are entertaining Dean, Sammy visits the husband, asking him about their marriage, his wife and her demise.

Meanwhile, Dean steals a paperclip and escapes the police station.

Now they know that they’re dealing with a ‘woman in white,’ a wife who was wronged, killed her children in her insanity, then killed herself, and now haunts unfaithful men. The brothers get a lead on their father too, he left coordinates in his journal.

But no time for that now, out on the road Sammy has a very close encounter with the woman in white. She gets into his car and demands he takes her home. He refuses. She isn’t happy, locking the doors and manipulating the car into driving by itself.

Once again it stops in front of the old house, the woman mumbles that she can never go home and jumps on Sam, determined to make him unfaithful. But before she can rip out his heart, Dean appears to the rescue.

Now freed, Sam takes her home by driving the car into the house. There, the ghosts of her children drag her down into hell.

The ghost is vanquished, the day is saved, and Sammy goes home just in time to prepare for the interview. He enters the apartment, goes to the bedroom, looks up and sees Jess, his girlfiend, pinned to the ceiling the same way his mother was at the start. She bursts into flames and nearly takes him too but Dean drags him away.

And so begin the road trip adventures of Sammy and Dean, as they fight monsters, dramatize about brotherhood and family and spew one liners and clever exchanges.

The atmosphere the series manages to build is still its best quality, alternating between spooky and action packed, dark and sometimes goofy. A definite must watch for lovers of paranormal stories.