The New York Times- “Heaven, Hell, Brothers and an Impala”
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(...) Broadly speaking, it revolves around two brothers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester, who lose their mother early in life when a bizarre air current sucks her body up to the ceiling of the family house one night, leaving a bloody, ravaged corpse.
Apparently a faulty HVAC system is not the culprit. Occult forces are at work in Winchester world, and eventually the family patriarch is killed off as well. All of this positions Sam and Dean for a career in hunting down demons, vampires, reckless angels, Lucifer and his various associates.
A predictably messy business, the pursuit of evildoers in both the scriptural and “Twilight” sense requires the brothers to compromise, negotiate and forge unholy alliances. Various acts of soul trading transpire as the show mocks the idea that anyone could ever even aspire to living a life of complete moral purity. On “Supernatural” decent people tend to travel in and out of hell as if it were an Extended Stay America. A trench-coated angel is aloof and dresses as if he were modeling himself after Columbo.
(...) During the series’s first three seasons Dean, who speaks as if he were trying for chief-executive authority by forcing his voice down a few octaves, had been an atheist. (Let’s leave aside the fact that there are far easier avenues of employment for nonbelievers than combating Satan.) But saved by a surly angel during a bout of spiritual ugliness in the fourth season, Dean reconsiders his thinking.
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“Supernatural” was only supposed to last five seasons, but it did so well, its life was extended to chronicle the world after the Winchesters saved it, a feat accomplished in part with the help of a 1967 Chevy Impala. (Add to the list of the show’s subtexts a pro-Detroit theme. After all, it was no Honda that kept the world intact.)
So “Supernatural” is about heaven, hell, faith, revenge and the automotive industry. But at its most basic it is about sibling devotion: no pair of brothers or sisters on television is more closely bound, not even the siblings on “Brothers and Sisters.” Proving their intimacy each week the Winchesters argue as if they were a married couple and seem conceived to correct for the existence of so many only children who must fight their battles solo in fairy tales and other fiction for the young. Single children should watch at their own peril.
In a sense all the brothers have is each other, and in that way the series embodies another defining characteristic of its network: the portrayal of families who configure in unusual patterns, among, say, in the form of friends, vampires, cheerleading squads, children long lost to their mothers, and fathers who reconnect. Again and again CW tells its viewers that parents who are so often depicted as absent or dead or distracted aren’t everything. Perhaps in the end it’s that simple message that has made “Supernatural” such a hit.
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