Edvard's Supernatural Rewatch & Review: 1x01 Pilot
The show introduces us to our characters in a scene oozing with horror-genre influence. In Lawrence, Kansas, the seemingly happy, normal Winchester family’s life is upended when an unknown evil entity kills and burns Mary Winchester on the ceiling of her newborn’s bedroom. Four-year old Dean flees with his baby brother Sam in his arms while the father tries to save his wife. But it’s too late to save Mary; John (the father) escapes moments before the house exploded in flames. The prologue ends with John, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, holding his sons on the hood of a car and staring miles into the distance as emergency services arrive.
Having seen the pilot plenty of times at this point, the effect is somewhat lost on me due to familiarity. However, granted the show has limitations on its content, being a CW property with an age-rating of 15 in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Denmark and 16 in Finland, the prologue of 1x01 is a suitably chilling opening that sets the scene for the series with aplomb. There is next to no gore, and the events are not graphic, but what we are shown is horrifying enough to give kids nightmares and for adults’ brains to fill in the rest.
Christopher Lennert's musical score for the scene also adds atmosphere and depth. The slow piano line in the background is reminiscent of scores to horror films involving children who died tragically in Victorian orphanages, and evokes something waiting and watching just beyond perception. It's a constant throughout much of the scene, changing to a panicked rush when Mary sees John asleep and realises who is really in Sam's room (oh, does she know!), then calms as John soothes Sam, only to reach another crescendo as Mary is revealed to be gutted on the ceiling.
Supernatural hits the ground running.
That said, using the prologue for exposition is not an original or innovative choice. It's shock and awe, and knowing the hell the children (Dean especially) are going to go through being raised by John makes the scene all the more striking, yet in spite of that, it's information dumping. The story leaps straight from 1982 to 2005, a gap of twenty three years. The characters introduced to us in the prologue are therefore twenty three years different. I'd have much preferred to begin the story in 2005, and for the information about the brothers’ past to be revealed in another manner. We don’t even need to necessarily know the exact details right at the start; knowing that ‘Dad’s gone on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been back in a few days’ tells us enough to get the story going.
I understand this is a show mainly intended for young people, e.g. 15-29 being the main age range. However, although the lower end of that age is still in compulsory education, they're able to follow a narrative without everything being spoon-fed to them. Or are they? Perhaps I give my fellow man too much credit.
My point is that the opening, for all its horror-infused spectacle, is too obvious. I'd have appreciated a slightly more ‘sophisticated’ introduction to the world of Supernatural.
However, though it’s not perfect, it does the job it’s intended to do and more, and what follows shows me why it was critically-acclaimed when first aired. I’m a fan of Buffy, Angel and The X-Files, and the first few episodes of Supernatural are as atmospheric as the best of those shows, hardly surprising given Kim Manners’ presence as co-executive producer. The sense of ever-present yet unseen threat, the two ‘agents’ researching the paranormal, the seeming wealth of monsters and demons the world has to offer is all evocative of genre shows from the 1990s and 2000s.
In spite of inevitable comparisons to Buffy and Angel, Supernatural doesn’t have the same level of sophistication that its peers do. There’s a wealth of philosophical, psychological, mythological and metaphorical matter in Buffy and Angel that lends the shows a kind of richness and depth that Supernatural doesn’t have. Of course a viewer can watch Buffy and Angel and enjoy them simply as a bit of fun, but those who know and are paying attention can discern a lot more.
Supernatural, however, is mostly fun that only occasionally plumbs the depths Buffy and Angel swam in; its story arcs are not based around psychological concepts such as individuation or philosophical experiments such as the panopticon. Neither are its characters built around the ideas of body, spirit, mind and heart, used to reflect and compliment each other as part of one whole. This is not by any means to say that Supernatural is a bad, mindless show: certainly it has metaphors and mythology, but not as finely crafted as Mutant Enemy’s output: Supernatural’s depth is mainly in its characters.
Having said that Supernatural’s characters are not constructed in the same manner as Buffy’s or Angel’s, Sam and Dean still do form a contrasting pair, each one a foil to the other. Sam is the rebellious younger son intent on going his own way. He’s ‛normal’, civilised and safe, and his motivation is centred on himself and his own goals. Dean is the obedient elder son devoted to family. He’s wild and lives outside normal society, yet his motivation is other-centred.
Dean's entry clearly marks him as being part of the ‛otherworld’, he’s the monster prowling around at night, and the introduction of the ‛otherworld’ into Sam's normal life. He is also Sam's call to action. The acting in the following scene is generally strong - I admit my bias as a Dean / Jensen fanboy - which is remarkable for a pilot episode. However, Dean here is not quite the same as the Dean we see a few episodes later; his mask is on, being the son he believes makes him valuable in John's eyes and the brother who can protect Sam whilst hiding the other half of himself that he believes they don't want or find abject. His facade is not 'false', but it is an exaggeration. This Dean is 'cool', very reminiscent to the popular sports players in American teen dramas etc, which is strange to see after watching the real Dean for 14 1/2 years of the show. It’s likely a result of this being the first episode and the actors not having a proper grasp on the characters yet: even the sentence prosody and cadence sounds affected occasionally, something absent in subsequent episodes.
Sam doesn't get much of any interest at the beginning of the episode except display his fighting prowess, which is not the best introduction for the character intended to be the main protagonist and hero of the story. He’s passive, hesitant and reluctant, harder to get behind than Dean breaking into his home at night. It’s not abnormal for protagonists to be reactive and passive at the very beginning, but we want them to switch to being active early on: think Harry Potter fighting to get his hands on his letter from Hogwarts, or Frodo accepting his responsibility in taking the ring out of The Shire. This is not a step Sam takes in this episode, however, nor really at any point for a long time; things happen to him, and he passively goes along with it.
He is highly reluctant to join Dean, in spite of Dean’s clear worry for their dad, and is only set on his quest because his girlfriend was burnt alive on the ceiling. None of this itself is bad, but the fact that Sam chooses to go back to his normal life makes him hard to like. Frodo wanted to stay in The Shire, but accepted he had to leave, and then in Rivendell he realised he was the only one capable of bearing the ring to Mordor, though he wanted nothing more than to go home. That makes him a likeable hero. Sam on the other hand chooses to let somebody else shoulder the responsibility, displaying no admirable traits whatsoever.
His defenders might posit he has trauma associated with his family and is looking after himself, but having watched the entire show it’s clear he was shielded from most of John’s abuse while Dean bore the brunt of it. Sure John and Sam’s relationship seemed frayed, but they seemed positively normal compared to John and Dean’s farce of a bond. Self-care is important, but which of the two brothers is more in need of self-care? It ain’t the one with the poofy fringe.
A small tweak is all it would have taken to make Sam more active and likeable: rather than abandoning his brother who came to him asking for help, he could have agreed to join him as soon as his interview was over. How much different would the story have been if Dean had booked a motel room near Sam’s student accommodation for two nights, and Sam had gone home to talk to Jess about needing to leave with Dean for a while? Quite a lot. He would have made the choice to be in the story before having it forced upon him, giving me at least an opportunity to see behaviour I can get behind.
As it is, the first episode showed us nothing about Sam other than he knows how to use a computer and is quite happy to abandon his brother: there’s no character development and Jess might as well have burnt up on the ceiling right after the opening credits and got the story going immediately.
That aside, Sam doesn’t make a good first impression. He’s a music AND technology snob with an obnoxious fringe. Of course Dean has tapes, he’d have difficulty playing CDs in a car from 1967. And so what if he likes ‛mullet rock’? This is probably supposed to be one of these ‛sibling’ things, but it comes across as douchbaggery to me. Sam gives the impression of a guy who's attended university and therefore thinks he’s on a higher level of consciousness than his bumpkin brother. I apologise to any Sam fans, but things between me and Sam only get worse from here.
To be fair to him, he doesn’t wish anybody ill in this episode, and he does agree, however reluctantly, to join Dean on the hunt.
The scene after Dean breaks into Sam’s home is a disappointing exposition dump - one which Kripke admits to disliking on the commentary track - coming straight after the info dump prologue. I understand something of the like needs to be there, but it’s so painful to watch as an author-in-training with hundreds of hours’ experience reading and editing other people’s novels. If ever you need to give information about characters’ backgrounds, please, for the love of Óðinn’s one remaining eye, do not do it this way.
Dean is very dismissive of Sam’s job interview on Monday, encouraging him to skip it. A first-time viewer might well interpret this as Dean seeing it as completely unimportant. This fits with his general attitude and presentation throughout the episode as the cocky ‛jock’ (I can't think of a British equivalent to that term, and ‛Jock’ in Britain means a Scottish person) with no respect for authority and no regard for education. This, of course, grates against Sam’s supposed academic leanings and ambitions of a successful career in law of some variety.
The intention was likely to introduce conflict between the two and to illustrate the difference in their characters to make them an interesting duo, and it works. However, I'm a very far from being a Supernatural virgin, and knowing Dean as well as I do, I see his reasoning as being based in his surety that Sam will join him in his search for John. After all, he turned up at Sam’s home in the middle of the night (why he broke in rather than knocking on the door I don’t know, but it was probably something the writers thought would be a cool introduction, reckless behaviour though it was) after not speaking for two years, hoping Sam would want to join him.
Dean is very aware Sam doesn’t truly care about him or their family the same way Dean does, but is unable to let go because of all he’s had to suffer and sacrifice for them. He wants Sam to be able to have his own life, but he’s also scared of the abandonment he believes he deserves. His dismissal of the interview is him trying to convince Sam to join him so he doesn’t have to be alone, and Dean trying to get Sam to care.
It’s my job as a reviewer to do more than point out the obvious, but Dean clearly doesn’t believe it possible for Sam to truly leave the life of monster hunting and become a lawyer. Why he believes this isn’t made wholly clear, but it is later revealed that hunters rarely get out of the job alive. Dean doesn’t believe Sam can, nor does he believe Dean can: he believes they’re doomed to die young and bloody.
Also interesting to note is that the boys are very working class(with very American, working class freshly-whitened teeth, I might add...), or perhaps more correctly underclass compared to Sam’s apparently affluent student friends. Does Dean believe that people like them have no place at a university? Probably, but more discussion on that later.
We see Dean’s hope and disappointment towards the end of the episode as he drives Sam back to university. Most of his face is in darkness, concealing him and his thoughts from the viewer, but what is visible makes me very sad. I’ve known this guy since I was 17 (almost 13 years now), and I don’t like it when he’s sad. He wants Sam to have a life of his own, but believes he needs Sam’s presence in his life to give him meaning and purpose. He also realises Sam doesn’t really care about their missing dad, implying the amount of f*cks Sam would give if Dean were to go missing.
If we were supposed to like Sam, having him decide not to look for John was not the way to go about things. I hate John F*cking Winchester as much as the next rational person, but Sam doesn’t know half of the bad stuff John’s done (as is made abundantly clear in his treatment of Dean) and still decides to abandon him for a job interview.
And Dean lets him do it. Bless your sweet little heart, Dean, you self-sacrificing bastard.
Regarding the main plot of the episode – the Monster of the Week – the Woman in White is a sufficiently interesting urban myth to get the show started. While the urban myth and folklore feel of the early years of the show is vastly different than later years, it provides a pleasant gritty, atmospheric, low-budget B-movie vibe that’s distinctive to Supernatural.
That said, some of the characters in the show have to be stupid for the story to work. The man agreeing to take the Woman in White home induces too much disbelief for me to be able to suspend. Mainstream television likes to reduce people to stereotypes, and men are portrayed as being completely guided by their need for many, many orgasms, but what man in possession of his full five senses would regard taking a random sexually-aggressive woman in a frilly dress he met at the side of the road in the dead of night home for the purposes of copulation? Or did he think her a prostitute, perhaps?
And, of course, the man dies. It’s not so apparent in the first episode, but the number of men who die in Supernatural far outstrips the number of women. Apocalypses etc aside, precious few brutal, bloody on-screen deaths in the show’s 15-year run are women. If a woman dies, it’s usually off screen, or instant and relatively painless, and their deaths are usually used to both make the audience feel sad or scared. The men’s deaths are usually just for horror-fodder spectacle, sometimes for laughs, and their deaths are usually much more violent.
The commentary track reveals that Jensen poured freezing water over himself to make sure the mud was the correct consistency. I used to think he was the straight man of the group, but the more I learn about him, the more insane I’m convinced he is.
This episode leaves me with a question I never get an answer to: what exactly was John researching in this town? How does the Woman in White have anything to do with Azazel and his plan?
It also raises some inconsistencies in ghost lore: iron repels ghosts in Supernatural, the molecular construct of iron dissipating ghosts’ incorporeal bodies and iron being an established repellent of fae / Otherworld beings in Celtic myth and folklore. In 2x17, driving into a ghost causes it to disperse for a while, but for some reason Constance manages to avoid being vaporised and ends up in the back seat of the car.
Dean sexualises himself in front of authority figures, starting in this episode. He is almost flirty with the policeman who arrests him, then makes a reference to prison rape with his ‛squeal like a pig’ comment. This can easily be read as a Devil May Care attitude, which is undoubtedly a trait of Dean's, but this could also suggest a darker relationship to figures in authority, or rather figures with authority over Dean. Sexualising himself to get out of trouble... tuck that thought away at the back of your mind, because we’ll return to it.
Earlier I wrote about Supernatural not being as ‛deep’ as its older peers in the genre. That being said, analysis and meta-analyses of the show still reveal a lot beneath the surface which a casual viewer will miss, e.g. Dean's struggle to overcome his childhood abuse and find self-acceptance, Sam's constant guilt, and class in 2000s America.
It's a small thing which took me several rewatches to notice, but all three women who die in this episode wear gowns, linking them together thematically. What exactly this signifies -- if anything -- in not made clear, but gowns bring maternity wear and weddings to mind, and the colour is associated with purity. All of these women died in these gowns. Am I to associate their deaths with a loss of innocence? After all, the Woman in White murdered her own children, Mary's death ruined her children's lives and Jessica's death ruined Sam’s. Perhaps.
On the subject of children, motherhood is a prominent theme in this episode. That being the case, the choice to have Mary and Jess’s stomachs cut open while on the ceiling is a point of interest: it suggests a mark of dominance over the mother specifically, as the womb is located in the stomach area. Are we to interpret this as Jess being pregnant when she died?
Also of interest is the fact that Dean has never gone back to Lawrence, Kansas since Mary's death. The Woman in White says 'I can never go home', just like Dean is unable to go home and face what happened. That the WiW murdered her children possibly suggests some of Dean's own feelings regarding his mother’s death: that it was responsible for everything he had to endure with John. Perhaps.
Speaking of Dean, although Jared Padalecki enjoys top-spot on the billing, Jensen Ackles stole the show and ran with it, and for the past 15 years the writers have been playing catch-up with him. From the very first episode, Dean was the standout character, and after only one episode I have much, much more to say about him than Sam.
Dean exudes large phallus energy. He appears incredibly sure of and secure in himself, lacks respect for authority (probably the result of his dad abusing his authority by abusing Dean), cracks wise and doesn’t shy away from a fight. He loves his Impala, his classic rock and his pie. He’s ferociously protective of his brother and fiercely loyal to his dad (but not for healthy reasons, as will be revealed), but all of this is a cover for the other half of Dean that few people get to see (and that Sam unironically mocks on more than one occasion); he longs to have his mum back, and doesn’t value himself or his own life. He expects to die young and to die bloody, which casts his confidence in a different light; why should he not try to hit on Sam’s girlfriend and joke/flirt with the cops arresting him, when none of it matters anyway?
And the subtext of Dean being bisexual is there right from the get-go. He's inspired by his namesake Dean Moriarty from the novel On the Road, a bisexual man based on a real bisexual man. Some meta-analyses of the first episode perhaps exaggerate its importance, but it’s not not there. If a femme fatale smoking a cigarette is a metaphor for phallic power, what is Dean sucking on a tootsie pop whilst filling his car with petrol a metaphor for? You tell me.
And while you’re at it, convince me Dean is heterosexual. I dare you to try.
As for Sam, he’s Kripke’s self-insert and the putative main protagonist of the show. His story loosely follows the hero’s journey, and several of the plot beats occur within the pilot episode. Dean’s appearance at Sam’s home and taking him to search for their dad is the call to action, or more generally the inciting incident. It’s the event that takes the character out of his normal life and sets him on the path towards reaching his goal.
Other examples of inciting incidents/calls to action are Hagrid telling Harry he’s a wizard, Giles presenting Buffy with the Vampyr book or Gandalf telling Frodo to leave the Shire and take the ring with him. Ultimately, Sam refuses the call and returns to Stanford to resume his normal life.
However, this episode concludes with Sam being locked into the story; the moment Jessica is burnt alive on the ceiling is the moment he can no longer back out of the story, but must cross into the ‘other world’ of monsters, ghosts and demons.
Sam’s story over the course of the show contains other elements of the hero’s journey, such as the quest to defeat the Big Bad, the trials he must overcome internally and externally, woman as the temptress, etc but they don’t occur in a strictly linear pattern. Moreover, there’s a fair few points in the hero’s journey that Sam doesn’t fulfil (if one takes official, canonical ending of the show as the real ending, which I emphatically don’t), such as being the master of both worlds, but more on that in due course.
He’s supposed to be the protagonist, but he hasn’t shown much agency in his own story thus far. Dean's in this story because he's ‘chosen’ to be so, whereas Sam is not yet a proactive character. If the writers wanted us to get behind Sam rather than his ‘sidekick’ brother, they didn't do a good job and Jared has very little to work with.
I’m not ashamed to admit it; I’m 29 and Dean is my hero. He made the show his own, and I only hope there’s an alternate universe somewhere where the writers realised this and gave him the 15 years he deserved, instead of…
Well, instead of repeatedly stabbing him in the back.
As a final note, Dean’s phrase 'shag ass' is hilarious. American English can turn up some real gems on occasion.
