There is something deeply nostalgic about returning to the world of Supernatural. Sure, the whole thing lasted 15 seasons and only just ended in 2020, but for me, Supernatural is the show that I watched on repeat in college, back in 2010. While there were definitely some more absurd arcs towards the end of that era of my life, the staples remain the great moments with the Four Horsemen, the interdimensional fights between Angels vs. Demons, lots of horrible Crowley and Bobby interactions, and of course the introduction of the angel who has my eternal affections, Castiel of Thursday.
This being said, I am the perfect audience for Supernatural prequel series The Winchesters: someone who has recently watched the whole series (all 350-ish episodes) and who also has fond memories of watching at least through season seven in college. What I found during the premiere screening at New York Comic Con was that despite a bit of a rocky, lore-heavy start (one that really drew from seasons eight and 12, both of which were exceptionally focused on the Men of Letters), by the end of the episode I had watched a perfectly decent and enjoyable 40 minutes of television.
Will it appeal to people who have never watched an episode of Supernatural? I truly couldn’t tell you; it’s not quite as weird as similar shows like Wynnona Earp and treads pretty genre familiar ground. It also requires a bit more heavy lifting than the pilot of Supernatural did in 2005. While the performances are decent, there’s a lot of awkwardness in the dialogue and the lighting is distinctly yellow in a way that makes it look like the whole show was shot thorugh a sepia filter. The fact that Dean Winchester (Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles) is narrating doesn’t do much to convince me that this is the show that will cross over into a wider audience.
The new series focuses on John Winchester (Drake Rodger) and Mary Campbell (Meg Donnelly), the future parents of Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles), who are the stars of Supernatural. Now, the original series does a lot of work to build up the relationships between Sam and Dean and their parents, which results in a lot of daddy issues and a lot of projection onto an absent mother who miraculously returns at the end of season 11. Don’t ask me how, there’s a very Supernatural answer that will make very little sense if you do.
We’re (re-)introduced to John and Mary in ways that make it very clear that the new series is deeply attached to the movement and structure of the original. John is returning from a stint with the Marines in Vietnam, and is suitably traumatized by the experience. Mary is truly introduced while beating up a demon and performing a very classically Supernatural exorcism spell. When we get to the crux of the episode — Mary’s father went on a hunting trip and hasn’t been home in a few days — anyone who knows Supernatural will recognise that this initial premise is the inciting incident of the first episode of the 2005 pilot. Because Mary’s father, Samuel, is missing, she needs to break into a Men of Letters bunker to determine where he might have gone. John joins her in her search of the hideout and realises his father was a Man of Letters, and that this whole demon thing might be the reason he skipped out on him and his mother years ago.
With a solid base of daddy issues, the show is already rewriting some of the old episodes of Supernatural. There are quite a few episodes of the original show where Sam and/or Dean go back in time and interact with their family, usually dealing with Mary, her impending demon deal, and her hunter upbringing. While the original show established, pretty firmly, that John didn’t become a full-time hunter until after Mary died, The Winchesters plays with a bit of a grey area that posits maybe John and Mary did some hunting together, and they both gave it up in order to have a family.
It’s not quite changing the facts established in the original, but there’s certainly a little bit of a side eye coming from fans, especially when at the NYCC panel the showrunner Robbie Thompson–a longtime Supernatural writer/director–said that they weren’t going to rewrite what the show is doing. As prequels go, there’s certainly a lot of space to explore the Men of Letters, the adventures of John and Mary in the ‘70s, and to right some of the retrospective wrongs of the original show. Thompson said at the panel that by the end of the season it will be very clear that this show is setting itself apart from the original.
If this “wait until the end of the season to judge us” attitude rubs you the wrong way — fair. It’s 13 episodes of monster-of-the-week television, I get it. But it is kind of the Supernatural way to spend the whole season monster hunting in between arc building, and reveal a big twist in the 13th hour. But if the show continues to build and expand on what we saw in the first episode, I suspect it will be a very entertaining season. It nails the tragicomedy vibes of the show, where the most devastatingly emotional lines are the ones often delivered like a joke, and we already have a supporting cast of characters that I personally would go to war for.
The original aspects of The Winchesters are, perhaps unfortunately for the show, much better than the bits of lore and the main characters that have been ported from Supernatural. We meet two new hunters — Latika (Nida Khurshid of Station 19) and Carlos (Jonathan “Jojo” Fleites) — who are immediately very charming, likely because they are not weighed down by the same baggage that John and Mary have to carry with them. Latika, called Lata in the series, is a scardey-cat lorehound who is nevertheless desperate to help her friends. Carlos is a wonderfully fey chaos bisexual who shows up in a hippie van and with an exceptional wardrobe and sense of timing. These two are really quite fun, and while my immediate reaction to John and Mary is more of a “oh what trauma will we retread this time” kind of moment, Lata and Carlos are genuinely delightful characters.
Mary and John are interesting characters, and the show is working overtime to convince us that their story will be interesting despite us knowing the ending. They flirt a little bit, the constantly-angry Mary Campbell using her resting bitch face like plate armour as she slowly warms up to the traumatized puppy dog that is John Winchester.
Ultimately, The Winchesters is a slightly more sophisticated, but still slightly campy, version of Supernatural that isn’t held back by the absurdly expansive levels of lore that Sam and Dean had to deal with by season eight of a show that continued for seven more years. Using all that as a foundation seems to have given The Winchesters permission to explore facets of cyclical, generational trauma and bring real depictions of PTSD to the forefront of their storytelling, dispensing with metaphor as it directly tackles the ways in which parents fuck their kids up in the same ways they have been fucked up.
The Winchesters premiered on October 11, and airs Tuesdays on the CW.
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