The CW saga ends this week.
How did it begin?
Only generalities, you understand, listed without order of importance.
Credit: Justin Lubin/The WB
Actually, Padalecki’s Sam is almost familiar as a mid-2000s dude.
He first appears as a handsomely smart Stanford student.
His girlfriend Jessica is cool enough to be played by Adrienne Palicki.
Then in comes Sam’s big brother, Dean (Jensen Ackles).
He missed the CD revolution, has clearly never heard of Napster.
I believe he is wearing a leather jacket over his denim jacket.
The series concludes this week with its 327th episode, a run for the ages.
Everyone who cared about pop culture had to knowsomethingaboutSupernatural.
The high school musical!)
to any critics who passed by her desk.
“We’re not exactly the Bradys,” is how Sam explains his family in the pilot.
I’ll say:The Brady Bunchonly lasted five seasons!
All along confession time I never properly watched an entire episode ofSupernatural.
A dedicated fanbase meant a lot for ever-more-desperate networks.
You could fly under the radar for a decade.
The prologue presence of future Comic-Con favoriteJeffrey Dean Morganhas the retroactive quality of destiny.
And I know just enough about the larger mythology demons and stuff, right?
to recognize nudges toward eventual revelations.
They don’t pause to define lingo like “EVP” for the benefit of the audience.
Dean’s pulling Sam back into a career they spent their whole youth learning.
So there’s a professionals-at-work directness in their tradecraft: Phony credit cards, convincing-enough badges, frequent lockpicking.
She is “a Woman in White,” they say, a familiar species of ethereal entity.
You understand they must have neat nicknames for all sorts of horrific paranormality.
Romantic chemistry is hard.
Sibling chemistry might be even harder.
Padalecki and Ackles nail it all right out of the gate.
Both actors had taken a spin through youth-group Hollywood,Gilmorehere orDawson’s there.
Sam has turned his back on the family business.
At one point, Dean sees a couple official-dope FBI agents arriving late to a crime scene.
“Agent Mulder,” he nods, “Agent Scully.”
It’s almost a bratty moment, potentially ascrew you!to theotherweekly weird procedural.
A middle finger would’ve been justified;X-Fileshad just ended terribly a few years earlier.
OnSupernatural, that dichotomy isn’t necessary.
That’s another old-fashioned note in this pilot, which probably played well in chronology-splintered syndication.
In 2020, every genre series seems to turn the whole first season into a lugubrious premise pilot.
TheSupernaturalpremiere just gets on with it.
I’ll keep watching this show, man.
I’ll catch up someday, I swear.
Not too much is accomplished, on a larger story level.
Dad is missing, and stays missing.
Mom was killed, and who knows what’s up with that?
“We could make it by morning,” Dean says.
Sam’s skeptical, until tragedy cuts off all hope for a normal future.
He doesn’t mourn, he doesn’t complain, he doesn’t fuss.
“We got work to do,” he says.
That wasSupernatural15 seasons ago.
And it still has work to do.
