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ashkirynNow, there are very few ways in which I believe that I am qualified to look and evaluate critically about Supernatural. And since I'm still recovering from writer's block, and good readers make the best writers, I've decided that my attention on this watch-through of Supernatural will be geared and focused towards the writing and why it garners certain reactions and feels out of me.
So, this isn't really going to be a review, per se, of Supernatural. Yes, obviously I'll be talking about the story and characters and plot and so on and so forth, but this isn't a post for me to simply flail about and keysmash and cry into my pillows on how Dean Winchester breaks my heart. This is me peeling back the veil to look into and behind the visceral reactions, and about locating the source, and thus a discussion of the tropes and elements of story invovled.
Currently, my opinions as they pertain specifically to the writing of the show is that I love this show, and I adore Robbie Thompson, who is a writer who hopped on board in season 7, and has also currently written three episodes of season 8.
But now, I'm going to take many steps back, and start at the beginning. I'm going to be rewatching this episode, and pausing it as I see things that I see fit to write commentary on. Also, forgive me if I start to wax endless praises about the actors, or some such thing. Part of what makes it difficult for me personally to be critical about TV shows is that I'm not always certain on who is to blame for the good and problematic things, as TV shows and movies and the like of visual media have a creative process that pulls multiple artistic things together to make one greater whole.
Also, below the cut, you may find spoilers for all aired episodes of Supernatural. :) And this episode was written by Eric Kripke.
And basically the first thing we see is that we're in "Lawrence, Kansas; 22 years ago", and I remember immediately getting the sense that shit was about to get real. When I first saw this a year ago, I had only heard vague mentions of it before---lots of the fandom, I knew from ffnet, shipped "Wincest", or else Dean's name was paired with "Castiel", and the show's called "Supernatural". But unlike many who looked the show up after drowning in GIFs on Tumblr, I didn't really know anything. I couldn't even point and say, "Oh, that's where that GIF is from", or "Tuesday! I get it now!!", or anything of the like. So, I went in unprepared.
Seeing "Lawrence, Kansas; 22 years ago" was definitely enough for me to start feeling this tension. And it's really a fairly common trope---I may not have known what was coming, but I knew something bad was. It's a tried-and-true story formula: some sort of personal tragedy happens, most commonly in the character's past, to put them onto the Road to Plot; and/or some personal tragedy occurs to make them start walking down said Road. In the case of the Winchesters, we go with the "and" option: a demon breaks into their home, goes into six-month-old Sam's nursery, and the mom, Mary Winchester, interrupts the demon's Mysterious and Evil Doings; and he stabs her, pins her to the ceiling, and burns her alive. John, Dean, and Sam may escape, but this tragedy propels John into the Hunt, dragging his sons along with him. And in the episode, not only does Sam have this personal tragedy That Started It All---he also gets the personal tragedy of his girlfriend meeting the same fate as his mother, on the same date, to force him to accept the call of his, shall we say, destiny.
Anyway, that's later. The point is, you know automatically that nothing good comes of showing the characters' past, especially when they're happy and carefree and adorable and innocent. And it effectively grabs you right in.
*sigh* So let's soak in the last time the Winchester family will ever be truly happy and together, shall we?
Hindsight, of course, often tends to make everything seem all the harsher. A first time viewer may be feeling tense and uncertain, waiting for Bad Things to Go Down, but for re-watchers, this kind of thing produces a special kind of ache. After all, I'm now very familiar with the broken, hard John Winchester, who has never stopped grieving or healed from his wife's death, and with self-sacrificing Dean, who after this night will never be a child again, and will grow up too fast, and that this is everything that Sam cannot ever remember and therefore has never known. And so now, looking back on this scene, with the characters on the cusp of beginning the process of becoming the characters that I do know, before they were anything like that? It's all very sad, and full of bittersweet nostalgia. And maybe that strikes a particularly chord in me, because I've never been fond of change myself. It also emphasizes that you can really never know what each new second, even, will bring. Because maybe tonight, you'll end up dead, or your house on fire.
The next narrative trick is, of course, that we then jump forward 22 years in time to the present day, and we're shown nothing of the intervening years. And so, the audience is still basically clueless on what's going on (you don't even find out until later in season 1 what even happened to Mary, and it takes several more seasons for the whole truth to come out). Depending on the viewer's levels of astuteness and awareness, there are several visual clues: obviously, we're now at Stanford University, we see the picture of John and Mary that was on the nightstand in the past is now on a dresser, etc. But it's a good device, I think, because it adds some mystery. This is, after all, a pilot episode, and designed to entice you into watching more of it. Therefore, you can't expect to be told ~all the things~ right off the bat. But it's a careful balance to be struck, because you have to give enough so that the audience doesn't completely flounder and drown, but hold enough close to your chest to make them desire to spend more time in your world.
Thus, what this episode mostly strives to accomplish, apart from hooking viewer interest, is to establish setting, and also the characters.
First thing we get about Sam? He's whining to his girlfriend, "Do I have to?", and apparently holds a dislike for Halloween, as he doesn't want to dress up in a costume, and he doesn't want to go out. In light of what I know from the ~future~, his diction intrigues me. He says to Jess, "You know how I feel about Halloween." Uh....does she really, Sam Winchester? Because I know that someone is currently being hush-hush and never planning to tell his beloved girlfriend about his shameful, abnormal past, and therefore, I sincerely doubt that she knows that you dislike Halloween because of your old monster-hunting days, and I'm also uncertain if she knows that it's two days until the anniversary of your mother's death.
Our Sammy Winchester is a Liar McLiarson, in other words. It's an interesting way to introduce one of your main characters for the first time, and I kind of approve of it, because it establishes him as the anti-hero that he is right off the bat. I suppose you could also make some interesting commentary about relationships and societal conditioning and taboos here, as well. There's a lot of "should'ves, could'ves, and would'ves" in Sam's relationship to Jess---he should have told her the truth about himself, he could have saved her if only he wasn't an obstinate dumbfuck and taken his dream visions foreseeing her death seriously, etc. It's interesting, because the levels of how honest or open you should be with your romantic partner vary quite a bit from person to person. In theory, they always say that your partner deserves to know everything about you---but I also think that there's some truth in that, shouldn't a person be allowed to retain some of themselves, and keep it to themselves?
This kind of thing is, as always, explored and contrasted with the two Winchester brothers, Sam and Dean. In the case of relationships? Sam was in love with Jess and planning on marrying her, and yet wasn't going to tell her the truth about himself, which may or may not have had a hand in her death. When Dean falls in love with a girl named Cassie? He ends up telling her everything, even after only knowing her for a few weeks, and then she doesn't believe him and rejects him and he gets his heart broken.
Which way is better, then?
To contrast Sam's establishing anti-hero moment, we also get Dean's first entrance. Dean breaks and enters into his brother's apartment after two years of no contact, wrestles around in the dark with Sam, and then states that he was, "Looking for a beer." Oh, and he ogles Sam's girlfriend a bit when she's in her underwear. Yeah, these two are definitely not your typical Heroic Protagonists.
Why, oh why do I love Dean Winchester so much more than I've ever loved Sam? And it's not that I don't love Sam, because I do. But...Dean. Dean Winchester. My love for this character goes beyond what I feel for any other character in this series.
Maybe it's because, in a bizarre way, he's more honest than Sam. I mean, see above examples, re: their first significant love interests. Unlike Sam, who disdains and derides hunting, and wants to be kind of young and stupid about shutting it out of his life completely and trade it in for "normal" and "safe", whereas Dean embraces this part of who he is. Really, for all intents and purposes, the hunting community is basically a minority in the society of the Supernatural 'verse that is generally derided and looked down upon and labelled as "insane" and "crazy"---I personally am a part of a minority, and to have a character like Dean, who basically celebrates his minority status, and refuses to be (outwardly, at least) ashamed of it? That's pretty damn empowering, when you think about it. Dean, not completely, I know---believe me, I know all about his self-esteem and self-loathing and self-sacrificing issues---but he still takes some pride and kind of owns who he is---in his own words, a freak. But still. And while he may have ended up hurt by it, I also respect that Dean Winchester, who Sam looks down upon for being anti-social and not having many meaningful relationships with strangers, shall we say, is the one of the two brothers who, when faced with a serious girlfriend he was in love with, told the truth to her. When it's on his own terms, Dean never tries to deny who and what he is, and I certainly respect that. While with Sam---well, that's one of his biggest fallacies, in my opinion. He apparently didn't learn with what happened to Jessica, because now he essentially did the whole lying and denying routine with Amelia, his love interest in season 8, and I just want to smack him, sometimes, I swear.
In regards to Sam and Dean's conversation about their father and childhood and such, there's a piece of dialogue from Sam that I found....interesting.
Sam: When I was afraid of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45.
Dean: Well, what was he supposed to do?
Sam: I was nine years old. He was supposed to tell me, don't be afraid of the dark.
I've always liked that set of lines, and maybe it's because I've just recently seen "A Very Supernatural Christmas" again, an episode that flashes back to when Sam found out about the "family business", and so now....those above lines are kind of fucked up?
Dude, Sam, you were the one who pushed and pushed your brother into finally telling you the truth about what your father did, and about only a year ago, from the timeline. Basically, everything about this speaks to Sam's propensity and desire for denial and such. Hmm. This is probably why I'm not quite so fond of Sam. He's rather....self-righteous, and sees things the way he wants to see them. He's definitely John's son, essentially. I mean, to be fair, there are nuggets of good points in what Sam says---his dad is obsessed with finding their mom's killer, their mom wouldn't have wanted them to be raised like warriors, and their childhood was definitely screwed up, and therefore so are they, and that he does indeed have the right to go to college. But Sam's approach and delivery definitely leave a lot to be desired, and Dean counters with good points---it's just stupid to be willfully unprepared to face what you know is out there, for the sake of "fitting in", their job is a necessary one that saves lives, and his response to Sam's complaints about their childhood, "What can you do," is actually a quite practical one, because you can't change the past; all you can control is how you move forward and deal with your future.
And then, we get this bit of dialogue, that effectively establishes the brothers and hints at their bond with each other, and is also really rather painful in hindsight:
Dean: I can't do this alone.
Sam: Yes you can.
Dean: Yeah. ...Well, I don't want to.
And then Sam gives in, and asks about what their dad was last hunting.
Why does my heart break so much over these lines? Well, firstly, hello first hint of Dean's abandonment and co-dependency issues, how are y'all doing today? But apart from that bit of heartbreaking, it's just....kind of lovely, to get this tacit acknowledgment that Dean is fully capable of handling this on his own, but that he wants help also isn't necessarily a bad or a weak thing. After all....isn't that what family's supposed to be there for?
(Also, this is a rather monumental moment that I think should be noted: Dean Winchester actually asked for help! :o)
Sam as a character has always been at least a touch self-centered. But here, when his brother, his family needs him---he puts himself aside. There's a quote that I think goes rather perfectly here: "Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person." Given Sam's character arc throughout the show, I find that this is quite poignant and fitting. And it's also a nice reminder of why it is that I do love Sam after all.
Hmm. You know, it's interesting that Sam's first hunt in four years, and our first hunt on the show, deals with a Woman in White who can, "Never go home." Kripke, I see your parallel there. And what happens when Constance Welch, said Woman in White, goes home? She meets up with her two children that she drowned, and they hug her, they're all consumed in a purifying element (water, in their case), and ascend to another plane of existence. Sam, therefore, basically = Constance, wanting to go home, but afraid to, and thus basically slowly killing himself on the inside, as Constance was actually doing to other people, because of his repression, denial, and lying. And then Sam's normal, Jessica, is consumed by the fires (another purifying element) of his old life, and thus triggers him ascending to another level of existence---i.e., hunting the supernatural. Not bad at all, Kripke. Veryyyyyy interesting.
Also, I just had myself a thought---Constance targets people who are unfaithful, men in particular, and this number includes Sam, who refutes this. But really, he could in actuality be unfaithful to many things---himself, most prominently, Jessica, for lying to her about part of his true self, he was technically unfaithful to his family; but personally I'd be betting money on the first two.
Sam is also Constance in that he, like with what she did with her children, drowned and buried the part of himself that he couldn't take anymore---except that, of course, it can never really be gone, and it still continues to haunt him. Dean, I think then, becomes Constance's husband in this parallel, as the trigger for her was Mr. Welch having an affair and essentially choosing someone else over her. Dean's love and loyalties could have been considered to be similarly divided and split between his opposing father and brother---and ultimately, in Sam's perspective, Dean chose to stand with their father, and not him.
I suppose what intrigues and appeals to me about this episode so much is that it did its job very well---it established the setting, and it also established the characters, and did so even better than I had realized until now, what with the parallels between our heroes and their hunt. And that's what I love about re-watching shows like Supernatural so much----there's so much to discover, so much nuance to dig up that's just waiting under the surface. I think there's a good chance that maybe each and every individual hunt stops being purposefully paralled in later seasons, but at least in season 1, the definitive and establishing season, the pattern is set here. Now I suppose I just have to see how well this is followed through on.
And now I've been typing this for several hours, so I think I'm gonna wrap it up now. Overall, very, very well done, Kripke. :)
