Dad's on a Hunting Trip and He Hasn't Been Home in a Few Days

From the beginning, Supernatural looked like X-Files hits the road, the show even got the Scully and Mulder reference out of the way early. So without our tax money at their disposal, the protagonists Sam and Dean had to rely mostly on charm to get the locals to open up about the strange occurrences they saw. The show’s blend of shock and awe baddies with sly wit even landing the show on my Best New Shows of Fall 2005 at number five even though it aired opposite the number one show on that list, My Name Is Earl. In a strange twist of fate, just weeks after Earl moved from Tuesday to Thursday, Supernatural followed.

Supernatural followed the X-Files ethos of freak of the week all along searching for the big bad. The freak of the week tended to be hit or miss, seriously, killer paintings. They did deal with a lot of high profile baddies including Bloody Mary and The Hook-Man lore. Though they should have stayed away from vampires as Buffy taught us, they deserved their own show.

The big bad on the other hand started out cool, but seemed to sputter out at the end. The cool thing about the first episode was the duel attack on Sam’s mom twenty-one years ago as she is set on fire on the ceiling at the beginning and ending with his girlfriend getting the same treatment. Most of the first half of the season was devoted to hunting down their dad and we learn nothing about the demon in question. Even when we are introduced to the big bad’s henchman, in form of a chick, we still don’t learn anything about it or why it was targeting Sam. In fact I still don’t know if we learned anything about it in the finale either.

The biggest problem with the show is how the characters just disappear after they have been uses. Except for daddy and the evil chick, played by Carol Vessey’s sister in a butch haircut, we never saw anyone more than once. Even all of dad’s contacts came and went after one episode, and for a solitary man, he sure had a lot of contacts, old dude, physic black chick, hillbilly dude, corporate guy. Then without warning, they introduced another bad guy who seemed to be more important than the chick, but then died the next episode. The big twist being that both turned out to be the big bad’s kids. Not that we would even care since we barely met him

Almost as bad is how Sam kept on getting new powers throughout the season. First he starts having visions ala Cordelia on Angel. Then more in explicatively out of nowhere he get the power of telekinesis. Um, yeah, okay. The strange part of the latter being they basically abandoned that idea after two episodes and only mentioned it in the finale. Then in finale, which was one of the most boring season finales ever, not only do we not learn anything, we are left with a cliffhanger as the big bad t-bones the family’s car and the last images are of the carnage.

When I first drew up my Fantasy CW Television Schedule, Supernatural made the cut, but after a lackluster ending, I’m not sure if I have a spot on it anymore. If it makes it on the official CW schedule, hopefully it doesn’t take the spot of something more deserving like Veronica Mars or Everwood.

Supernatural 1.x gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.