Supernatural revisited
Episode 1.1 Pilot (The Woman in White)
Beginning my rewatch of Supernatural from the beginning, and honestly, this is still the best pilot episode for any series I have loved.
Pre-show notes
There was a trailer for Supernatural which ran in cinemas. Not all of the footage was from aired episodes but I think a lot of it came from this episode. I remember a shot of Sam in a chair with a ghostly female figure caressing his chest. The tag line was “Scary just got sexy.”
I must have watched that trailer for weeks (I watch a lot of movies) before I twigged it was the show my friends were going crazy for on LiveJournal. By then UK TV was well into the first season and I wanted to watch from the start. Consequently I didn’t get to see the first episode until just after the last episode of the season aired in the US. I was a little late to the party but I was instantly captivated: it had everything I wanted from a TV show: heroic eye candy, some elements of the supernatural, lots of action, and an ongoing mystery to keep my mind engaged.
Episode notes
This is still the best first episode of any long-running series I have seen. We learn everything we need to know about the main characters in the first ten minutes, but despite a bit of clunky dialogue, it’s not an info-dump. Almost every exchange also serves to move the plot along, and the plot is interesting in itself. What I find fascinating is that the pilot still holds up against the rest of the series. A lot of first episodes end up being wildly off in terms of how the series tone and characters evolve, so that when you go back, the first episode seems poor. For example, in The Big Bang Theory first episode, the lead characters visit a sperm bank hoping to make some cash for a donation. It’s so out of character for both of them, even a few episodes later. Supernatural’s leads do change and evolve, but the pilot is never retconned, it’s their starting point.
We meet the Winchesters as a regular family: mother putting the baby to bed, dad talking about tossing a ball around with his son. Mary’s death just moments later is horrifying and immediately sets the tone for the show. The brief scene of John cradling his sons outside the burning house is horrifying, too: his swift transformation from happy, loving father to broken and obsessive hunter is right there. And my love for John Winchester is still strong.
Then we skip a few decades and meet Sam in college. Like the first few moments of the episode, it’s so very normal and happy: Jessica dressing for Halloween; Sam celebrating his LSAT scores and planning for his future, but we can feel the darkness coming. Dean arrives with the news their dad is missing, and persuades Sam to join him in the search. Along the way, we learn how the boys were raised as monster hunters and how Sam’s decision to go to college caused a huge rift between them.
John’s voicemail “explaining” why he has vanished is incomplete, but even what we can decipher (a DVD helps a lot with that!) is very vague. ”Something is starting to happen, I need to find out what’s going on.” followed by a lot of static and ending with “Be very careful, Dean. We’re all in danger.” When we learn more about the “something” that’s starting, and John’s reasons for disappearing, it will be obvious that John’s message calculated to send Dean to find Sam. In the pilot, however, there’s more focus on the EVP message Dean managed to render out of the static:
I can never go home
The Woman In White
It’s true of Sam both at the beginning and the end of the episode. At the beginning, he’s determined not to go back to his family, to what must have been “home” for him once. He’s established a new home for himself, but despite his determination to keep it, it’s not a home where he’s fully comfortable. (Indeed, college is a transient home, by design.) In many ways Sam isn’t as out of “the family business” as he thinks he is. Look at the way he deals with an intruder in his home, and minutes later, how easily he can lay his hands on esoteric weapons when he packs for a road trip with Dean. He’s between worlds, belonging in neither.
At the end of the episode, Sam literally can’t go home. His home with Jessica, his life in Stanford are gone. He throws in with Dean, but it’s not a homecoming for him. It’s a surrender. He has nowhere else to go.
When we meet Constance, the woman in white, I start to feel my age. I’m not sure if this hasn’t aged well, or if my older eyes are seeing it differently. Did I really not see this before? Horny teenager picks up a pretty girl hitch-hiking and the scene immediately turns into a pornographic movie, the close ups on her boobs and legs..ugh. Yes, it’s partly the ghost’s pattern but the camera doesn’t need to objectify her that way. It’s creepy in a bad way.
We are introduced to The Winchester MO: roll into town, pretend to be something they’re not to get close to the subject of their investigation. Talk to the locals, preferably young girls. Eventually dig out what’s happening. Go after the monster of the week with either no plan or a half-assed plan. It’s a wonder they got through one season! But it’s still a lot of fun.
I love that Constance tries to run the boys down with their own car. In the pilot, we don’t yet have the significance of the car, but the moment does a lot to make up for the earlier creep show. That a murderous ghost who targets unfaithful men uses a super-masculine muscle car to run down our heroes is nicely on point.
Which, I guess brings me neatly to the gender politics of Supernatural. The show pre-dates the Me-Too movement but feminism was still a thing back then, particularly in pop culture. It’s ironic that Supernatural resonated so strongly with a female audience, when it’s so traditionally masculine. The all-male heroes in leather and denim, the classic muscle car, the music…oh, gods, the music. It’s music I associate with a particular kind of male behaviour from my high-school days: the kind of boys who make jokes about tampons and pass around pages from Fiesta because Playboy is too classy for them. But that’s just my own experience, not a judgement on the music itself.
It’s the women characters who really disappoint the feminist in me. Mary is a classic woman in refrigerator, as is Jessica. Both will become more rounded characters eventually but in the pilot their sole purpose is to die, motivating the missions of the men. Constance essentially performs a porn fantasy to select her victims and her backstory is problematic at best: a woman scorned who murdered her own children before killing herself (while I recognise the origin of the legend, in real life that’s something men do, not women).
Quote
“Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.”
Dean
Funny story. I can’t drive. Part of my job involves travel between the different cities where my organisation has offices. Since I can’t drive, I usually plan my trips to coordinate with a colleague who will be driving. He generally has a classic rock channel playing as he drives, and since I don’t hate it, I’ve never complained or suggested a different station. On about our seventh trip, it occurred to him to ask me if I minded the music. I said it was fine, and added, “Driver picks the music.” He replied “Shotgun shuts his cakehole” and explained it’s something his wife says. And that’s how I discovered his wife, who I had only met briefly, was a Supernatural fan.
Associations
Mary’s death is reminiscent of Poltergeist: the 1982 Poltergeist (not the awful remake of 2015), is notable for centring the female characters: the mother, Diane Freeling, psychical researcher Dr. Lesh and of course the unforgettable Zelda Rubinstein as psychic Tangina are the ones who most advance the plot, while the men, except father Steven Freeling, are pretty much background characters or comic relief. It’s after the poltergeist has apparently been vanquished that it returns and attacks Diane in her bedroom, dragging her up the wall to the ceiling in a moment that is echoed in Mary’s appearance on the nursery ceiling in Supernatural. Diane was a fiercely protective mother who literally walked into hell to save her daughter. The association tells us something about Mary Winchester, even in the tiny amount of screen time she was given.
Women in white in supernatural horror are usually brides. It’s a popular motif: Daryl Hannah’s Mary Plunkett in High Spirits (1988) and Twilight’s Rosalie (Eclipse, 2010) are the first to mind. But this Woman in White is La Llorona, an entirely different beast.
Supernatural was my introduction to La Llorona, but she has appeared in other pop culture since then. There was an episode of Grimm (2.09 La Llorona) which reimagined the legend as a creature that steals children and drowns them at the confluence of rivers. In 2019 The Conjuring universe added The Curse of La Llorona to its spin-offs (it’s not good), and in the same year there was La Llorona which I haven’t seen.
Final thoughts
Supernatural captured me from the very first episode in 2006. Fifteen years later, the pilot still has the power to grab my attention. Of course, I now know how the mysteries it sets up will play out, but my love for the Winchesters, especially John, is still there.
On to the next!
