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watchingspn-blog · 5 years

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spn rewatch | the woman in white (pilot)

Okay so I can safely say I’ve seen the pilot episode at least half a dozen times, if not more. I got season one on DVD for my 14th birthday (which I 100% binged with my BFF at the time to the point where we were beyond exhausted for my actual birthday festivities the next day) and would watch over and over in the days before Netflix. So for me the first couple of seasons are way more familiar to me than the later seasons. Especially since at some point after I started college when I didn’t have as easy access to television and streaming services weren’t quite what they are today I fell off the bandwagon. Pretty much everything I know about the show from mid-season eight onwards comes from gif sets on Tumblr and the occasional Facebook posts. Which brings me to this rewatch/first time viewing.

It’s easily been at least three or four years since I’ve watched the pilot but it’s still so familiar to me which I feel like says a lot for the show. Or just says that I was way too obsessed with this show as a teenager. But anyway, here we go.

First of all, I don’t know about anyone else but I’m honestly a little weirded out by seeing JDM looking younger and not having a beard. Like it’s strange to me and I don’t know how to feel about it and I’m glad this is the only scene where he looks like this. The beard does him wonders in all walks of life and I’m glad it’s a look he’s stuck with in just about everything he’s in these days. (Also you can totally see one of JDM’s tattoos under the sleeve of his t-shirt and it just makes me want to headcanon John with a couple tattoos from his time in the service despite looking so clean cut when they have the flashbacks with Matt Cohen.)

Secondly, I want to know when they came up with the backstory that Mary was a hunter and came from a family of hunters and that she’d been in that life before she settled down with John. Because I feel like if that backstory had been mapped out before the pilot her reactions when she woke up to the baby monitor would be more suspicious. But that could also be me just being too picky. Like it’s totally valid that Mary, just waking up didn’t pick up on the static or the flickering lights. I just want to know if they’d had her history in mind when this started or if that came up later once they’d developed the story and characters more.

Okay, so I don’t have any major attachments to Jess, mainly because we just don’t spend enough time with her. She’s got a whole three (?) scenes where she’s mostly delegated to the supportive girlfriend who’s also over-sexualized. Like they seriously chose to introduce a female character and have all of her outfits be revealing to the point where other characters are commenting on it before killing her. Like I have no issues with female characters wearing whatever the fuck they want, there’s nothing wrong with that. But it wasn’t given any more depth than “here’s this sexual object for our audience to look at” and that’s what bugs me. But I am glad that they showed her being genuinely concerned when Sam is packing like wanting to make sure he’s okay and make sure he’s not doing something reckless for people who’ve actively avoided being in his life over the last few years. She’s incredibly supportive of Sam and it makes me happy that he had that in his life even if I do hate that it was taken away in a horribly gruesome way.

Adrianne Palicki is just ridiculously talented and deserves way more recognition than she’s gotten over the years.

Now, I’m gonna be real. I was a Dean girl from the get go. I loved me a smartass bad boy when I was thirteen and I was head over heels for Jensen Ackles from the first time I saw this show (probably because I’d never seen him anything else before but I already knew Jared as Dean from Gilmore Girls who wasn’t my favorite as a middle schooler). It also probably doesn’t hurt that I saw an episode of season two as my first intro to the show instead of the pilot. Because honestly, watching his first scene as a 26 year old, he doesn’t come off in the best light. Between breaking into Sam’s apartment, their whole tussle in the dark living room, and then him hitting on Jess right in front of Sam, he’s kind of an ass. Which yes, Dean is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination. All of these characters are fucked up, especially after fourteen seasons and counting. But this just doesn’t line up with how Dean is in the rest of season one even, I feel like.

Like Dean telling Jess that she’s way out of Sam’s league is one thing. I expect nothing less from him. But then him just being creepy and ogling her is just uncomfortable to watch now.

Also the lighting budget for the entire first season is just horrendous. It’s like they wanted to show that they were scary and edgy but really it just meant I couldn’t make out what was happening in any scene that didn’t take place in broad daylight.

Okay, on to the spooks. Having a woman in white for the first MOTW (monster of the week) was kind of cool to me because it was something I actually knew about before the show, thanks to reading any and every book on ghosts my school library had to offer. And Sarah Shahi is super gorgeous. Like hot damn. And as cheesy as some of the effects are in the earlier episodes, I actually like the way that she kind of flickers in and out along the side of the road as Troy’s driving up and then the way you don’t actually see her in the passenger seat when it shows her getting in. None of the effects are too crazy over the top (at least not until the very end of the episode when she finally goes home and has that weird as fuck death scene with her creepy kids) and it works.

As a thirteen year old, I thought it was totally believable that Sam and Dean could be US marshals and the local cops were just being jerks. As a twenty-six year old, the idea that those two could pass as any kind of law enforcement other than like maybe a couple of rookie cops is ridiculous. I’m the same age that Dean was at the start of the show and I’ve got people assuming I’m still in high school. I couldn’t get past the crime scene tape for anything. But I guess if you’re confident enough and tall enough, anything’s possible. Also as if they didn’t already look hella conspicuous, they act like a couple of five year olds with all their stomping and smacking, like no wonder the cops were suspicious.

Also can we take a moment to appreciate the awesome mid-2000s goth look Amy and her friend are rocking? Because it’s fantastic and I’m here for it. Also kudos to them for being the only women to make it to the end of the episode alive.

I never really thought about it when I was younger but it’s not surprising that Sam isn’t as gung ho about hunting down the demon that killed Mary like John and Dean are. His memories of Mary are entirely built on stories and pictures and not from anything he actually remembers himself. And like it’s totally valid for him to want to get away from the hunter lifestyle and follow a different path instead of just killing monsters and running credit card scams for the rest of his life.

All I can think about when they break into the room John was renting is that gif of Charlie from Always Sunny with all the papers and strings on the walls.

One of the better aspects of Supernatural, in my opinion, are the actors they get to randomly guest star on the show. And not necessarily big names (although those can be fun) but like the ones that you’ve never seen anywhere else. Because the guy who plays Joseph Welch is fantastic in his one scene on screen. There’s so much emotion there as he’s talking about a clearly sensitive subject and being able to show the grief and also some of the guilt over being unfaithful. It’s a fantastic scene so like major shoutout to Steve Railsback for being awesome.

The whole showdown with Constance’s ghost is kind of like mediocre compared to future fights. Like it’s a pretty quick scene and the effects once they actually get her to the house to face her creepy children are kind of the worst. Like they used their whole special effects budget doing that flickering thing in her first scene and had to settle for this instead. Also like yes they stopped her and she won’t be able to kidnap and kill skeezy men in the future but like I feel kind of bad for Amy and Troy’s family because they’re just left with zero closure whatsoever. Like I never thought about it but there are a lot of people over the years where it’s like yes we stopped the monster but those families never actually know what happened to their loved ones.

Okay, I get that it’s supposed to be a serious, intense scene, and the first time I saw it - yes it was shocking and heartbreaking and terrifying but the effects for Jess’s appearance on the ceiling are just bad. She doesn’t look like a person, she looks like a mannequin. And I’m still annoyed that they brought her in and showed how much her and Sam loved and cared for each other only to kill her horribly at the end of the episode. It’s just frustrating. And honestly this should’ve warned all of us that pretty much no female character is safe on this show. None of them.

The “we’ve got work to do” at the end is still hella iconic. Like there’s a couple of lines that still give me that little excitement I got when I first watched it and that’s one of them. I love it.

BODY COUNT: 3 humans (Mary Winchester, Troy Squire, Jessica Moore), 1 ghost (Constance Welch - do her kids count too? They didn’t really show up until was time for Constance to like melt into the floor all creepy like)

RATING: 7/10 - the effects are kind of garbage and there’s some stuff that hasn’t aged well but I still think this is one of the better pilots I’ve seen as far as getting you hooked into the story and characters.

#supernatural #dean winchester #sam winchester #supernatural rewatch #watchingspn #idk if anyone's going to read this but if you do thank you #and if you want to talk about the show pls hit me up #i'd love to talk with others about it #spnrewatch*

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leighlikesthing · 5 years

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Supernatural season 1 episode 9: Home

I watched the TV special that aired in front of season 10 not too long ago, and the showrunners talk about Faith being the episode that’s the turning point for the show. While it’s certainly the first time a Winchester comes super close to death, and we start talking about reapers and the afterlife, I disagree. I think that Home really does it.

Between Dean finding out about Sam’s prophetic dreams, and the trek back to Lawrence and the boys’ childhood home, I think this is where we see the show’s direction really starts to turn from being monster-of-the-week to being much more.

It’s a really fast-paced episode, and it’s really the first time we see just how much Dean was affected by his mother’s death. Specifically, we get to see an incredibly vulnerable Dean from go. The idea of going back to the home his mother died horrifically in isn’t exactly a walk in the park, and you can tell it’s triggering the shit out of him.

Dean gets so desperate that he call John for help. He’ll put on the brave face for his brother, but he’s not coping with this. Unfortunately, that message will remain unanswered, and John Winchester will remain an incredibly neglectful father for a while.

Sam, for his part if gung-ho. He doesn’t want anybody else to have to die in that house, and he’s itching to fill the time since there’s no trace of their father anywhere.

And you have to understand the differences here. Sam was too young to have any kind of lasting memories of his mother or that night, so everything he’s learning is very new. Sam didn’t know that Dean carried him out the front door that fateful night; that that night didn’t just shape their childhoods, but it shaped their entire brotherly relationship.

As an incredibly cracky, silly fic pointed out, that was the night John Winchester issued the Prime Directive: Take care of your brother.

What we as viewers find out from all this talk of the past is that the boys asked their father multiple times what killed their mother, and if John had theories, he didn’t share.

Can you imagine being that young, and having no outlet for the fear and anger and confusion from that situation? Yeesh. As viewers, it’s easy to understand why the boys are the way they are when we get episodes like these.

It doesn’t take the boys long to figure out that there is something haunting their old home, and go snooping around. They do their best to treat it like any other case, and the trail leads to a psychic named Missouri Mosley.

While she’s sympathetic to Sam and the loss of Jessica, as well as John’s MIA status, she’s not so kind to Dean. In the early days of fandom it was theorized that she snipped at him so much to distract him from his triggered state. If he was focused on being irritated at Missouri, he’d have less time for a PTSD-flavored panic attack.

While that’s not at all how post traumatic stress works in the real world, if this was Missouri’s plan, it worked. And I like the idea that she jerked Dean around for his own good; that she was trying to help him rather than doing it for a laugh, or because she could.

Missouri mentions that their old house has been quiet, but now, there’s some crazy activity going on. Killer sinks. Refrigerators tempting small children to climb in for a juice fix. It’s a whole damn thing. They bring Missouri by to scope the house out, and she surmises that whatever is in the house, it’s not what killed Mary, but it’s not good either.

There’s more than one ghost hanging out. Because the house was such a hotbed of evil, it drew some nasty shit. So they decide to cleanse the house while Jenny, the owner and her kids are out.

They think they’ve gotten rid of the thing, but the poltergeist isn’t quite done yet. Despite the boys’ best efforts, it takes the ghost of Mary Winchester to get rid of it and save their bacon.

And it’s an interesting appearance, if brief. She looks at Dean with such affection, and deep sadness before moving on to Sam and offering him an apology. We won’t find out what that apology is for until season four, but they’ve laid some really important groundwork here.

With that, she looks up, narrows her eyes and tells the poltergeist to get the fuck out of her house.

Upon first watching this episode so many years ago, it seemed like just a mama bear move. But knowing about Mary Winchester what we know now...we can imagine that she had put on her hunter pants and was ready to kick the hell out of that nasty spook. It’s fun to watch this now, with the understanding that Mary was a very, very good hunter, and was fully aware that going after that spirit would cancel herself out.

I wonder how long she’d been haunting their home. I don’t remember how long it was before John packed up the boys and left Lawrence, Kansas forever. Did baby Sammy get a glimpse of his mother as a ghost? Did little Dean hear her voice out of nowhere? Did John feel a hand on his shoulder he couldn’t explain?

We won’t ever know. We’re in the middle of the 14th season of this show. The likelihood that they’ll revisit something from this episode again is slim.

IN the end, the boys say their goodbyes to Missouri, with the knowledge that yeah. Sam’s got some powerful stuff going on in his brain, and they hit the road.

Inside Missouri’s place, John Winchester waits to be scolded for not talking to his children. To his credit, he looks pained at not doing so, and it’s nice that he did actually show up in Lawrence upon Dean’s request. He doesn’t want to talk to the boys until he has some solid answers about what the hell is going on.

So for better or worse, we’ll have to wait for that reunion until a later date.

#Supernatural #SPN #Sam Winchester #Dean Winchester #Missouri Mosely #Mary Winchester #John Winchester #season 1

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