From MadCap's Couch - "Supernatural: Pilot"

Just in case you mistook it for Lawrence, Kansas in the year 3000....

There are many myths and legends that have permeated the folklore of various cultures since the beginning of time. It's where were get some of the best stories that are most often told around campfires in hopes of frightening the children. But none of those things could ever be real, could they? Enter Eric Kripke and his show that, in 2005, came on the air...and sadly, as of 2015 - ten years later - hasn't gone off the air, but we'll get to the disappointments when we get to them.  For now, however, we can focus on the good. And for the most part, I can tell you, Season 1 of Supernatural is pretty damn golden.

The simple story of two brothers connecting over their missing father and sticking a boot up the ass of any monstrous son of a bitch dumb enough to rear their ugly head in the meantime. Pretty damn simple and yet fantastic and something that was actually well spaced over five seasons...and then dragged out long, long after the concept had completely run out of steam.

But again, disappointments are for later. For now, we have some good.

We begin in Lawrence, Kansas, twenty two years ago, at the home of the Winchesters. Mary (Samantha Smith) is taking her older son Dean to put his little brother Sammy to be when in enters father John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Indeed, it seems to be the idyllic picture of domestic bliss for the pair and their sons...but not so if the creepy music and flickering of electronics are to be believed. Mary gets woken up by crying from the baby monitor...but there's a strange interference. Going to the door of Sam's nursery, a shadowy figure shushes her and - thinking it's John - she leaves, taking notice of a flickering light as she heads downstairs.

...finding John sleeping on the couch! The music swells as she bolts back up the stairs to Sam's nursery, cutting away just before her agonized scream breaks the deafening silence of the night. John, being somewhat like but not completely the badass he will become, snaps awake and immediately bolts up the stairs to find...the nursery empty save for Sam in his crib. Comforting his infant son, John notices a drop of blood fall into the crib, and looks up to see his wife pinned to the ceiling. her body exploding in flames as John screams his protests and takes Sam out. Handing him to Dean, he orders him to take Sam and run outside.

The young boy does so, stopping only to look back right before John rushes out to pull them both out of harm's way while the windows explode from the flame. With a fade across, the emergency response teams are on the scene, and we end on a shot of the Winchester men huddled together on the hood of what will become a very, very familiar car before the series' end.

Immediately, we've been drawn into this world with fantastic elements and have been given what will be the motivation for the three main characters in this Season...or, rather, two of them, but I'll get to that.

"Hellooooooooooooooo, Nurse!"

After the title sequence, we are introduced to little Sammy all grown up (Jared Padalecki). In the present of 2005, he's a student at Stanford University with a potential free ride to law school next year (having gotten 174 on his LSAT). He's even picked up a sexy girlfriend named Jessica who shows off her Hello Nurse cosplay for Halloween. Indeed, it's all sweet and picturesque and any of my readers who have actually seen a horror movie will know what happens by the end. Not to mention people who have actually seen the show.

Needless to say, we need someone to keep this from turning into a romantic comedy so, in the middle of the night, enters the grown up Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) in the middle of the night, breaking into Sam and Jess's apartment and being the snarky asshole we'll all come to know and love. The pair square off before Sam realizes who he is, Dean chiding him for being out of practice. The commotion brings Jess into the mix as well, getting introduced to Dean for the very first time. After Sam refuses to be pulled away, Dean tells Sam that their father's been on a "hunting trip", and he hasn't been back in a few days.

His stern expression falls almost immediately, Sam asks Jess if she will excuse them for a moment.

Outside, Dean and Sam get into a discussion about what happened in the twenty-two year gap between their house being burned and the present of 2005. John became determined to hunt down the thing that had killed Mary, and thus he (and eventually Dean and Sam) became a hunter. As Sam puts it, he and Dean were "raised like warriors". Sam, however, got sick of the whole crusade and left to go to college, John saying that if he were going to leave, he better not come back. Dean, however, wants Sam's help now to find him.

[Insert Fangirls Here]

Eventually, Sam is convinced to at least hear the details, John having been investigating disappearances along the same five mile stretch of road over the last two decades. Three weeks later, however, Dean hasn't heard anything from him...until he received a voicemail from him the previous day, telling Dean that they're all in danger. Sam notes it has EVP or "electronic voice phenomenon" on it, and Dean flips the record over to play the hidden message behind John's words - a woman saying she can never go home.

Sam agrees, but only if he gets back first thing next Monday, though Dean chides him for living the domestic, he doesn't say no. We get a shot seen where Sam gives Jess a cover story before he takes off with his brother.

We cut away to a man riding down the highway at night when his radio starts to pick up interference. He finds this strange. More strange, in fact, than a deathly pale woman in white standing at the side of the road that seems to flicker in and out of vision every so often. He stops, asking her if she's having car trouble...and she tells him to take her home, so he tells her to get in. He tries to make small talk and ogles her breasts, whereupon she begins seducing him...and he takes it, heading down the road to her "home".

They pull up to a dilapidated and boarded up shell of a house, where he finally begins questioning things...and the woman's voice becomes clear as the source of the EVP from John's message when tells him she can never go home. Thinking it's a Halloween prank, he turns to ask her where she lives...only to find that she's gone! He gets out, failing to notice the mark of the handprint she made on his windshield slowly moving away as though an invisible hand has moved. He makes the horror movie fatal mistake of calling out to the darkness and creeping around looking for danger. After a jump scare crow, however, he's convinced to flee in his car.

Be advised! Hitchhikers may be vengeful ghosts trying to kill you!

He drives like mad back down the highway, not aware of the Woman in White in his backseat until its too late. He pulls onto a disused bridge and we get a shot from the outside of the vehicle as blood splatters against the fogged up windows, obscuring out vision from the goings on inside. From the screams and the blood splatter though, it's pretty obvious to everyone.

...they're making cookies, right?

...

The next day, we get a short scene of Sam and Dean in Dean's sweet ride - the Impala - as Sam chides Dean over his use of scammed credit cards and his collection of cassette tapes. Dean, of course, asserts his dominance over the music choice by blaring some AC/DC before they roll on down the road. As they approach Jericho, California  (the end of the trail they have of John), Sam gets off the phone having learned that nobody in the local hospital or morgue matches John's description, so there's a good chance he's still alive. They also roll across the murder scene from the previous night and Dean takes to the use of fake IDs to pose as U.S. Marshals to the cops.

Dean gets fresh with them a bit, but they do manage to get the information that they don't know what's going on, just a reaffirming that all the victims were men and were all along this one stretch of road. The boys bicker afterward, Sam not approving of Dean's lack of tact...just in time for them to meet with two people from the FBI and the Sheriff, adding to the already suspicious cops's suspicions about the pair.

Heading into town, they find a woman named Amy putting up missing posters for Troy - the victim from the previous night and her boyfriend. Sam and Dean pose as "uncles" to get more information. From Amy and a friend of hers, they suss out some of the local stories about a woman who was murdered decades ago, and now her spirit hitchhikes and anyone who picks her up disappears forever. With no further leads, the boys hit the internet. Dean coming up with bupkis until Sam takes over and decides to look for suicides, rather than murders, which brings up Constance Welch - a woman who apparently jumped off the very bridge the murder took place on just after she drowned her two children.

Sammy does the research, Dean does the killing...sometimes even in that order.

Back on the bridge, Sam and Dean have a little heart to heart, Sam insisting that he needs to get back to his life, though Dean tells him he needs to live up to who he really is.  Sam, of course, retorts that he doesn't have a responsibility to any of them...and even if they kill the thing that killed their mother, she isn't coming back...for which Dean puts him angrily up against one of the bridge supports for and tells him not to talk about their mother that way.

Just one of many, many acts of brotherly love that Supernatural will give us!

Before they can continue on that trek that makes the fangirls swoon, however, they're interrupted by Constance recreating her dive of the bridge just before she makes the Impala turn on all by itself and charge the brothers. While Sam avoids just by stepping outside of the railing, Dean takes the full dive off and lands in the muddied water, coming out smelling like a toilet, as Sam so eloquently puts it. Of course, Dean's more worried about his beloved Impala.

Later on in the morning, they return to town and get a motel room, the desk clerk reading Dean's fake credit card and revealing that John's alias bought up a room for an entire month. Breaking in, they find the place in disarray, papers scattered about and many more taped to the walls, as well as defensive measures such as salt and cat's eye shells. From his A Beautiful Mind spread, Sam figures out what John did - Constance Welch is a Woman in White.

Because, even as a Woman in White she is a ghost, they resolve to dig her up and bury her...though John had not figured out where she was buried, so they decide to follow the lead to her still-living husband, Joseph. Sam also tries to apologize for early, but Dean tells him "no chick flick moments", leading into the first "jerk" "bitch" exchange of the series.

"HACK THE PLANET! HACK THE PLANET!"

A bit later, Sam tries to put in a call to Jessica as Dean heads out to get some food...only to be intercepted by the police, who have apparently caught on to the fake...well, everything. Before he's arrested, however, Dean manages to call Sam and arrest him, allowing Sam to escape just in the nick of time. Even in the interrogation, Dean is flippant and screws with the Sheriff...until the Sheriff pulls out a well-worn, leather notebook...whereupon Dean immediate changes his tone. The Sheriff also reveals a page that has only "Dean 35-111" in John's handwriting, which is apparently of interest to the Sheriff, who demands to know what it means.

In the meantime, Sam heads out to meet Joseph Welch and questions him about his late wife. Joseph tells that he buried Constance on a plot by their home, but could not stay there himself in the home where his children died. When Sam brings up the legends of a Woman in White, however, Joseph angrily denies any implications that he was ever unfaithful to his wife and angrily tells Sam to get the hell off his property.

Back at the station, Dean's once more regained his belligerent attitude, screwing with the cops until he gets handcuff to his chair pending them answering a 9-1-1 call about shots fired somewhere off. Unfortunately, they were dumb enough to leave him with a paperclip (because, as CinemaSins has often pointed out, you can open any lock in movies and television as long as you have something straight and metal), so Dean rolls his Open Lock skill and gets high enough to break loose and escape.

He shortly after calls Sam, jokingly chiding him for putting in the fake 9-1-1 call and tells Sam about the notebook - their father's journal, which John never goes anywhere without. He also reveals the meaning of the numbers - coordinates for wherever he's going next, something John learned in the Marines. Before there can be more of this revelation, however, Sam is accosted by Constance Welch...who demands to be taken home. Sam refuses, and from there...things get frightening as the Impala once more becomes animated and drives to the former Welch residence.

From her words, however, Sam works out that she's scared to go home...and she tries to seduce him, despite the fact he's never been unfaithful. But as Constance tries to suck Sam's face off (not literally) and dig her nails into his heart (somewhat literally), Dean comes along and sacrifices the window of his beloved car to nail her with a bunch of salt rounds. Sam, striking inspiration, drives right into the front of the Welch House.

"THE QUICKENING! IT OVERPOWERS ME!!!!"

Seeing a picture of herself and her two children, Constance grows enraged and it seems the boys are in for a world of hurt...until the ghosts of her two children arrive and force her to come to grips with the truth of things and she gets disintegrated, leaving only water. Apparently, Sam's hunch was correct - he found her weak spot. Of course, Dean is once more concerned about the car...nobody, after all, wrecks the car.

Later, Sam has worked out the coordinates John left to Black Water Ridge, Colorado. Though Dean wants to haul ass, Sam reminds him that he has that interview on Monday that he can't miss. This time, Dean doesn't give him grief and agrees to take him home. Upon their return to Sam and Jess's apartment, Dean notes that they made a hell of a team before he drives off. Entering, Sam calls out for Jess, heading in to find the bathroom door slightly cracked and the shower running. He flops back onto their bed, eyes closed, as he relaxes back into his average mundane...wait, was that a drop of blood on his forehead?

Ohhhh, what a feeling...when you're burning on the ceiling...

Yes, like his father before him, Sam looks up to see his beloved pinned to the ceiling, her face frozen in terror before she bursts into flames. Dean returns just in the nick of time, once more pulling Sam out of the inferno as he did on that night twenty-two years ago. Once more, earlier similar to that night, emergency response teams are on the scene with a fade across to it. However, unlike that night, there is not a final, stoic scene of the Winchesters huddled on the hood of the Impala.

Instead, Dean walks over to Sam at the secret weapons compartment in the trunk (disturbingly very open to where cops might see it), where Sam is loading and prepping a gun before throwing it in, claiming they have work to do.

I will say this is still as great an introduction to the show as it was ten years ago. Through the character of Sam, the audience has a natural surrogate. Sam has been out of hunting for at least a few years now, and so his relearning of concepts can give the audience a clear window into the world and provide exposition in a far less clunky manner...most of the time, anyway. Hence, it makes more sense when Sam and Dean discuss new creatures whenever they're incorporated into the series' mythology.

Immediately, it's clear that Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki have good onscreen chemistry. Honestly, if I didn't know any better, I'd say these two had been brothers all their lives and it really does show in their performances. This does carry throughout most of the show, thankfully. To give credit where it's due, even in a bad episode, their acting (usually) can at least make a bad episode tolerable. Though it will be a while off, I will go ahead and give a spoiler warning that this does not remotely apply to Season 7.

At all.

No, I mean it.

But as I've said before, we'll get to the disappointments when we get to them.  For now, we can just enjoy the good.  And much good there is in "Pilot". Come back next week when the show continues into one of my favorite episodes of the entire series - "Wendigo".

Supernatural and all related materials are the property of CW and Warner Brothers.
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