Supernatural (2005 -2020)

SPOILERS BELOW

I started watching Supernatural when it first came out and enjoyed it immediately. As the show continued to improve exponentially through the first five seasons, I grew to love it. Immediately after the creator, Eric Kripke, stepped down as showrunner once his 5-season plan had come to a satisfying close, however, the show took an immediate dip and got progressively worse. I watched it until around season 8 or 9, before having to give up on it. I later heard reports that around season 12 or so it had picked up again, and finally this year it got a planned ending with season 15 (despite COVID hitting when they had two episodes left to shoot, causing a long delay and presumably some compromises). So I've decided to do a re-watch, and post some brief thoughts per season on here, updating as I go.

Seasons 1 - 5: I've watched these probably 3 or 4 times now, and they're still great. Okay, so the first season has its share of anonymous episodes, but it never dips below solid. Overall, these seasons manage an impressive and successful mix of humour, horror, action and emo drama. It intertwines the MOTW episodes with the arc plot in clever ways and is always trying new things. And it may steal from a few places (Preacher, American Gods etc) but its lore, especially regarding demons and angels, is really cool. It even manages a satisfying ending!

Season 6: This season is, of course, faced with a satisfying ending that it has to move on from. Unfortunately, it doesn't do a great job - instead of building up slowly, within the first half of the first episode, Sam is back from the dead, as is Samuel, and Dean is out hunting with them again. There's also a whole family of hunters introduced, along with the whole 'alpha hunting' plotline. It's too much, too fast. Meanwhile, Lisa and Ben - Dean's happy ending - are perfunctorily swept aside and eventually are, in essence, retconned from the show (they have their memories wiped and Dean and Sam decide to never mention them again under penalty of nose-breaking). Where it should have taken its time to rebuild, and embraced the trickier remnants of S5, S6 does the opposite. It's not helped by the fact that a lot of the episodes are rather dull. There are a handful of standouts (though some of those feel a little derivative of previous seasons' hits), but the arc plot is leant on too heavily most of the time. Even that arc plot, while holding some interesting ideas, is rushed. Whereas Azazel wasn't even properly introduced until a little way into S2, here we've got civil war in Heaven, Eve, Crowley as King Of Hell, soulless Sam, Samuel, the alphas, and Purgatory, all jostling for position and being rushed through on the way to something else. Adding Eve/monsters/Purgatory as a counterpart to Lucifer/demons/Hell and God/angels+humans/Heaven is a really clever idea to tie all the random monsters into the overall lore and introduce a new big player, but it's rushed. Heavenly civil war and Castiel's god complex is another cool idea, but it's mostly done offscreen with Cas popping once an episode to say 'it's really bad up there you guys!' which is very unimaginative and unsatisfying. Not awful, but a very bumpy journey back towards the status quo.

Season 7: The episodes are, I think, a little more satisfying as individual pieces here than in S6, but again it wastes some good ideas, and feels repetitive. The Evil-God-Castiel cliffhanger is binned within half an episode and then Cas is sidelined for most of the season, the leviathan are just another type of human-possessor with some big weaknesses, and it's a cool idea to have Bobby show us ghost lore from the other side but it doesn't actually add anything to the story at all. Plus as always we've got Sam with some addiction type problem, Dean burying his anger, and Dean getting sent to an afterlife (which, judging from the standard pattern, he'll be back from in episode 1 of the next season). The overarching issue is that the show has lost some energy - not only are ideas getting mishandled and repeated, but a lot of the fun has gone. No more Impala, rock music, prank wars, silly disguises, high-concept episodes. Not bad just, like a hunter, grimly carrying on with a fake smile because that's the job.

Season 8: More of the same grim serialised trudge, though this season doesn't even come up with its own ideas to waste. The big mistake they make is to go the usual 'here's what they were doing the past year' flashback route - Purgatory isn't interesting in 2 minute low-budget chunks, and Sam's year of dogsitting is even worse. The 'Sam wants to leave, Dean has been through some shit' arcs are stale too. There are some tantalising steps further into the the 'ethically grey monsters' realm with the Benny stuff - this show is so close to being the Game Of Thrones of horror, where each species has its own shit to deal with and they all interact in interesting ways - but it's not quite there yet. Later on it re-runs the 'Sam is trying to achieve something huge and it's breaking him down' and the 'evil Castiel' plots. There is the occasional good episode but mostly it all feels very rigid - as well as the repetition, everyone's stuck in place. Sam and Dean are in the Men Of Letters bunker (which is another potentially cool slow-burn idea that instead got rushed through), Kevin is on the boat, Crowley is in Hell, and Castiel is an occasional guest. Demons and angels are now easy to kill, torture, etc. The tablet macguffins are just another version of the 'passage in an old book' that they've been finding since S1E1. Everything has become rote.
Watch-through note: I believe this is where I gave up the first time through. And I don't think I heard murmurings of it getting good again until S11 - I can only hope it picks up before that!

Season 9: more of the same. Some fun change-ups of the status quo - Crowley getting emotions and joining the Scooby gang, Garth becoming a werewolf - alleviate the drudge but they don't last for long. Having Sam and Dean decide to adopt a cold, professional relationship is a dreadful choice, even worse than the regular 'they've got secrets, one of them has a supernatural grimdark addiction' beats (which are also still here!). And we finally get an on-camera angelic civil war but it's painfully unimaginative.

Season 10: This season feels like the show spinning its tires, getting near to some good stuff but not committing to it. Instead of dealing with the Demon-Dean cliffhanger and the current Dean/Sam angst head on, it gets wiped away in 2 episodes, but then slowly built up again through the season. Likewise, Crowley's human side is kept in a holding pattern in a dreadful Dark Shadows-level sub-plot about his mum. (What they should have done is make Dean the season villain and have him hang with Crowley, and meanwhile team Sam up with Cas.). There are some good ideas (musical theatre, Cas' daughter, Charlie's return) but they get fumbled one way or another - they're missing the finesse in execution of the first 5 seasons. They do at least make a purposeful, welcome return to low-angst MOTW episodes - it's good to see goofy age-change spells and possessed power cords again - but these are still drowned out by an increasingly messy, nonsensical, dull arc plot.

Season 11: A high number of legit S1-5 quality great episodes (e.g. Baby and What We Imagine) compensate for a lot of sins. The arc plot starts off dull and messy (lots of laborious side-switching etc, and it still drowns out a lot of other stuff) but it gets a lot better as it goes along - the return of Chuck, Lucifer, and Metatron, Misha Collins' superb Mark Pellegrino impression, and the concept of the Darkness (if not the dull 'sexy sociopathic lady in a small dress' embodiment) are all executed really well - and Sam & Dean have some positive changes, laying some of them down as explicit new rules that could have come straight from a frustrated fan blog like this one - no supernatural addiction or ailment, less fighting, fewer secrets, more effort into saving innocents, promising to accept each other's death for realsies. They even remember to use licensed music effectively! Now if only they could either bin or fix Crowley's mum...

Season 12: A return to the serviceable but aimless style of S10. Almost completely serialised now, yet barely doing anything with most of its threads - Mary, Crowley and Lucifer are all dull, and while the British MoL change things up a bit they're incredibly cheesy. The finale is a complete mess and totally wastes Castiel and Crowley's deaths (end as you mean to go on in the latter's case, I guess - I don't think Crowley has really had much to do at least since the end of S6 if ever). Plus the score has changed to some weird dance-rock thing that sounds like it's from 2002. Oh well, at least they killed Rowena.

Season 13: Predictably enough, Rowena's back. Thankfully she's less annoying this time round, but it's symptomatic of a growing problem with the show. Deciding they've run out of ideas for one-off episodes and pretty much going all in on serialisation is potentially a solid move (though it loses a big part of the show's charm and character), but not when they make classic comic-book mistakes like character deaths losing all impact and being reversed with weak or zero explanation, continuity errors about things like power levels (e.g. Lucifer inexplicably gets his grace back), and Shepard Tone character arcs where someone will seem to be constantly going dark or getting depressed but never actually get there. And worst, the serialised plots are just dull - when I've come to write up these last two seasons I've struggled to remember what their arcs actually were. I guess the main one here is the alternate universe, which has potential but is massively underused until right at the end. They should have had the guts to set the entire season here - it would have made it memorable, provided them with new monsters and alternate versions of existing ones to do MOTWs with, let them play more with returning guest stars. To be blunt, they could have stolen all Fringe's best moves. (There's also Jack, who is likeable enough, but doesn't amount to much other than a half-hearted gesture towards the old 'battle for influence over a powerful young man's soul' set-up.) This one also, rather than building to a satisfying crescendo, goes through a bunch of fake endings before finishing with the most laughable wire-work fight I've ever seen and then showing another evil Dean in one of those stupid flat caps they seem so fond of with a look to camera, eye flash, freeze frame and fake zoom in. Along with the awful recent change in musical score, it all feels like a YouTube parody video.
Embarrassingly, the best episode is Wayward Sisters, the failed backdoor pilot. The combo of female secondary characters feels fresh, it's got some new monsters with nice make-up design, and it finally gives us a giant monster! (I know it's tough on a budget, but the endless line of monsters that are just humans with a couple of facial appliances has been worn thin since they called some nightclub bouncer types with glowing eyes 'dragons' and made leviathans human-sized rather than, y'know, leviathan.)

Season 14: People die, they come back, they die again, blah blah blah. Plotlines are abruptly thrown away or forgotten, actors are brought back for the sake of it (Pellegrino) or wasted (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Ineffectual.

Season 15: Chuck's flip to full-on villain may have been a bit sudden, but it certainly clears out the cobwebs in a similar way to how his return did in S11. And while the 'writer's room as big bad' conceit can sometimes get a little too Brechtian for this show, and is occasionally mishandled (the 'Sam and Dean lose their plot armour' episode is mostly funny and clever but occasionally loses track of its own ideas and of course the score treats it like a Looney Tunes episode. (I finally looked into this and apparently the show has had the same two composers throughout, so I have no idea why it has become so inconsistent in the final few seasons.) A good example is the Radio Shed scene - an overt riff on The Matrix Reloaded's Architect scene, with Chuck in front of a bunch of monitors talking about alternate Winchesters and about how this incarnation is 'the one'. On the one hand, it's a funny, ballsy choice, it's well executed and it cheekily promises the opposite of the Architect scene - Chuck declares his intention to simplify the continuity by clearing out all the alternate realities, failed spin-offs etc, a tantalising concept for many a stalwart Supernatural viewer. On the other hand, it fails to show why this Sam & Dean are any more special than the others; this combined with the lusty post-modernism creates that Brechtian distancing effect, making the same mistake as the Architect scene by leading the audience to care less about the characters and the outcome.
Generally, though, while still falling prey to the same serialised storytelling traps as most post-5 seasons, 15 at least has some palpable energy, some invention - you can feel the writers having fun.
Watch-through note: I'm currently at episode 13. Thanks to selfish people on the internet, I've gathered that Castiel gets killed or similar towards the end. This apparently has upset people because he's coded queer, specifically with Dean, so it's a case of Bury Your Gays (as well as general queerbaiting because they never come out).  Halfway through the final season, I feel confident in saying this is complete nonsense. Castiel is asexual for the majority of the show, and when he does have sex it's exclusively with women. Dean is clearly straight, and no, a girl getting him to wear her underwear once and him liking it does not make him gay. The two barely have a friendship through the show, never mind romantic or sexual energy. Dean's motto is 'no chick-flick moments' and Castiel has muted emotions to say the least - even when they openly acknowledge each other as brothers or family it's still to little or no fanfare and frankly not even that convincing. There's only been one scene in the entire series where their dynamic has felt like anything other than that of a badly-trained dog trying to please its owner, halfway through the final season where they're in Purgatory trying to get the blossom. It's not enough to justify a queer reading of the relationship, and it's certainly not enough to justify spoiling the show for me because you want to cry that the writers didn't legitimise your bullshit shipping. All too often, shipping is just another avenue for toxic fan entitlement, attacking creators and each other because reality doesn't match the fantasies in their heads.

Aaaand finished. The second half of the season wasn't as good as the first half, the Chuck ending was a little weak (this may have been to do with COVID-19 - if so, I feel like they should have waited another six months rather than have one of their most important episodes be small numbers of people talking while socially distanced on big sets) though I liked his fate. The finale episode was excellent. Self-indulgent and soppy as hell, but that's the Supernatural way and it was absolutely the right decision to dedicate an entire episode to a coda, rather than having a big face off ten minutes before the end then rushing to wrap up. Honestly, I'll still be sticking to my S1-5 recommendation in the future, but maybe with the addendum that the curious could try out 11 and 15 too.