The Road So Far
We open in Lawrence, Kansas. 1983.
A mother puts her kids to bed. The father switches the lights off. They head to their own bedroom.
In the nursery, the clock stops ticking. The night-light flickers.
In their bedroom, the mom is awoken by the crackle from the baby monitor. She sighs and heads to the nursery.
At the doorway, she finds a silhouette standing next to the crib.
“John?” she whispers, “Is he hungry?” He shushes her. She softly smiles. Good. He got there first. Stepping softly, she heads towards their bedroom.
On the wall, there is a dancing glimmer. The television. She slows. Walks down the stairs. Turns the corner.
John is asleep on the couch. Oh.
Her smile drops. She rushes up to the nursery.
The man turns around.
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His eyes gleam a sickly yellow.
The room erupts in flames.
Six million people tuned in for this — the pilot episode of Supernatural in 2005 — making it one of the most-watched on CW. It promised fear, horror, mystique, with a backdrop of classic Americana. It reached back to the country’s haunted folklore, its roadside ghosts, and the peculiar poetry of its motels and cornfields. The show followed two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, respectively), driving across America in a 1967 Chevy Impala, carrying out their father’s unfinished battle for revenge while fighting real and inner demons alike. Under the creator Eric Kripke’s wing, the first five seasons deliver on this promise. But after that, we are left with an echo of what was and are forced to chase something that will never be.
The early seasons, especially the first two, have an aesthetic that never gets replicated again in the series — that grungy, dark atmosphere that many early 2000s horror movies and shows such as “X-Men” and “Buffy” embody. It was peeling motel wallpapers, creaking floors, homemade EMF readers, the smell of rain-soaked asphalt. And within every small detail, heart was present; it was in Dean wearing his dad’s leather jacket and his brother’s childhood gift; in the analog hum of research in a library, in flip phones and digital cameras, in bootcut jeans and silver rings. We see the brothers navigate ghosts, vampires, demons and everything in between while dealing with phantoms of their past. But at its core, it was just two brothers on a road trip, eating greasy fast food and fighting over who played the music.
Every episode, the Winchesters come across a different type of entity, stay at a dingy motel, find and defeat the creature, and then drive off to their next mystery town with a million unsaid words between them and emotional constipation that can only exist in early 2000s action protagonists. The Impala is a mobile confession booth, carrying the shadow of their mother’s death and the ghosts of every town they leave behind. They attempt to outrun their grief while simultaneously trying to avenge it as hunters and the hunted. It was futile from the start.
This dilemma is what made Supernatural special. We were given characters that are doomed by the narrative but are unable to see their misfortune. They are cursed by their past and haunted by the ghosts of what their lives could have been: Sam as an aspiring Stanford law student and Dean owning a mechanic shop with a family of his own. Instead, they are trapped in the “family business”, carrying responsibility and emotional scars far too heavy for anyone.
This show lingers like the scent of gunpowder, and the depth of these characters — their broken pasts, their stubborn loyalty, their pipedreams — is what kept audiences coming back for fifteen years.
But as the seasons go on, the show loses this charm and intrigue. Unfinished plot lines, half-baked characters and character arcs that seem like afterthoughts. It was as if the show saw how well it was doing and chased the need to be bigger instead of developing what made it special. The motel rooms still looked the same, but the air had changed. By the time Leviathans ran a food processing company in Season 7 and angels fell from heaven in Season 8, the series had become the ghost of itself. The show traded its dirt-under-the-nails Americana for lore-heavy spectacle, and in doing so, it sacrificed what brought audiences in–the characters.
Supernatural promised horror; it promised vampires and demons and ghosts. It delivered something more than that. It gave us men barely holding themselves together. And the desire to be bigger and richer was its downfall. It started as horror, but in the end, the only thing it’s haunted by is everything it could have been. But that haunting of broken men in a broken story, is why we keep watching. That we can see them grow and hope that they put themselves back together, because they deserve a shred of the life they could have lived. We watch because, at its best, it captures the slow ache of loss, the emotional repression of masculinity, and the quiet tragedy of two men carrying a burden they were never allowed to put down. At its worst, it reads like a game of “what if” that has dragged on for far too long.
The shadows of the early show linger long after it ends. From the haunted folklore and restless spirits to the damp air and worn-down biker boots, you are introduced to this world that looks so similar to ours that at times, when the hallway light flickers or you walk through a cold spot for a second, you wonder whether it is time to take out the salt.
