I'm colour-coding these entries, Blue for descriptions of narrative (the storyline of the episode), black for my thoughts on the scenes, or background, red for quotations. Hell yes, I am quoting the guys.
If I've missed anything you think is relevant, please don't hesitate to point it out. Sorry if you have not watched, because I may mention future episodes. I'll try to keep spoilers to a minimum. Because this is one of the projects I'm including in my 100k in 100 days challenge, I will be tallying word counts at the end. That's for my piece of mind more than anything else, feel free to ignore it.
So, on with it! The pilot episode is, surprisingly, called 'Pilot'. This won't happen very much throughout the season, they tend to reference Classic Rock in the titles. This is also one of the rare episodes that doesn't have a 'Road So Far' introduction to both assimilate you into the storyline and highlight the themes of the upcoming episodes. What they do have, however, is backstory.
The first scene is of Mary Winchester putting Sam Winchester to bed. It takes place in 1983, in Lawrence Kansas, when Sam is six months old. Dean, who is four, is hovering around his mother, talking to her about the baby, as his father, John walks in. They seem like a typical, happy family.
As any Supernatural freak will tell you, this little scene sets up so much. Lawrence, Kansas, has so much meaning for Supernatural, like Sioux Falls, South Dakota. If I said the Apocalypse and the Men Of Letters to a Supernatural fan, they'd mention Lawrence. The date is pretty important too, it comes up when Anna has relevance, when we meet Azazel properly … it's so much more important for a Supernatural fan to know what shit was going down when Sam was six months old than it is to know anything much about Dean being an infant. At the beginning, as I'll touch upon later, it's very much Sam who has the relevance, and Dean is almost a background character to Sam.
The happy 2.4 family scene is a farce. Not because of what we're about to see, but because Mary is not who she seems. John is not who he thinks he is. And this is the end of the line for any normalcy that Mary may have been able to give either of her sons. Why? Because, as Dean puts it later on in the episode, 'you can't just quit hunting'. This is another repeating theme - Hunting is for life. You don't get to leave once you start.
The scene cuts away, to later that night. There are flickering lights in Sam's nursery, and Mary is woken by interference and Sam's crying into the baby monitor. She gets up, and stumbles bleary-eyed into the nursery. Someone is already standing over the crib, watching Sam. He half-turns, and shushes Mary when she asks him if Sam is okay, assuming it's John, who wasn't in the bed when she woke. She leaves the room, and notices another light, in the hallway, flickering. She taps it, the light remains on, and then she hears the TV. She walks halfway down the stairs, and sees John, asleep in the armchair in front of the screen. Realising that he can't be in two places at once, she runs back upstairs, scared of who - or what - could be in her son's room.
The genius thing about this scene, is that it comes across as a mother who is just worried that someone has broken in, someone set on murdering her child. But with the hindsight of a Supernatural Nerd, I know there's far more going on in Mary's head. She is not the weak woman she is being portrayed in this scene. I'll hold it back a little for now, but bear in mind - she ran towards the threat. She did not wake John for his assistance. Mary is the one taking action, because that's all that Mary knows.
This is probably already creepy enough, right? We'll keep going.
The scene cuts to John, who's startled awake by his wife's scream. We see him run into the nursery, where Sam is laying, alone in the crib, gurgling to himself. John approaches the crib, trying to soothe Sam, and notices a small dark patch on Sam's pillow. As he touches it, trying to work out what on earth it is, something drips onto his hand, identical to the patch on the pillow. Blood. He looks up, for the source, and there's Mary, pinned to the ceiling and bleeding from the abdomen. As he takes in the sight, fire erupts from behind her, taking over the entire ceiling. Dean stumbles into the room then, woken by all the noises. John takes action, thrusting baby Sam into Dean's arms and telling him to run.
John stumbles back towards the nursery, where the flames are quickly running out of control. Realising he has no way of saving Mary, he runs out to the front yard, where Dean has stopped with Sam. Not breaking stride, John scoops them both up and gets further away from the house, just as the window blows out with the force of the fire. The scene then cuts again, to fire engines crowding the street, as John sits on his old, battered, Chevrolet Impala, holding his sons tight and crying over the loss of his wife.
This is a lot of writing for the first scene, isn't it? But throughout the series, they return to this scene, building meaning and giving relevance to actions. This is pretty freaking important. And that picture would have been baby Sam's last view of his mother. Scary shit.
I must admit, until about season three (ish) I had no idea why Mary would have been killed in this way. When they start going into it, the reasoning seems ridiculous, but eventually it does become clear.
The only thing I really want to pick up on with the above, is the way the Winchester's relate to each other, which is really subtly planted into the scene, but becomes a theme throughout. Mary was acting for her sons, putting them first, above her safety. A typical mother, maybe, but I think that this helped to build Dean's view of the world early on. John put his faith in Dean to protect Sam, but his first and foremost thought was Mary. As it will unfold, John would sell Dean and Sam out in a heartbeat for Mary, every single time. Even at four years, and six months, John thought that Dean and Sam could cope without him. John is, I'm sorry, a bit of a prick.
But Dean and Sam … this sounds crazy when they're so young, but the behaviour you see here will run. Dean will repeatedly act blindly, on the faith of his father's word (WHY?) but like Harry Potter, his heart is like his mother's. He wants to protect, to save. He does it because he cares so fucking much, but he does it in such an apathetic way because he's Daddy's Little Soldier. And Sam - how can I judge a six-month-old, right? - is oblivious to what Dean, and John, and even Mary are trying to achieve. He doesn't see the love and protection that are surrounding him. He is so internal, so unable to properly interact or understand them. Yeah, that's like any typical baby, but even in the final episode of season eight, Dean is having to stand there and tell him that for Dean, Sam comes first. And it still doesn't sink in straight away. Sam is smart, but Sam is ignorant. And yes, you can be both.
After the title credits, we cut to Stanford University, in the modern day (circa 2005 for those who are just experiencing Supernatural for the first time) where a beautiful girl is calling across her apartment to Sam. Sam sticks his head through the door and answers when she demands to know what's taking him so long, and why isn't he dressed up? It's Halloween, and Sam isn't in a costume. He tells her, enigmatically, "You know how I feel about Halloween."
I'm going to guess Sam told her - Jessica - that Halloween was lame. And she took it to mean he was being boring, whereas he was thinking that there are things in life far scarier than kids in bedsheets and toilet paper. In a later episode, we learn that before he was twelve, Sam had run into burning buildings to save people and was already a perfect shot with a rifle. We see him kick the shit out of a kid twice his size. But, for now:
There's a small scene, later that night in a bar, where Jessica is showing off to their friends how smart Sam is, and how high he scored on the LSAT test. She's proud, he's embarrassed, but admits that he's set up for an interview into a law school the following Monday.
Proof, in this one small scene, that Sam's intelligence is unquestionable. In a later series, he even gets to play lawyer, representing Dean against an Egyptian God, Osiris. And what did I say earlier? Sam is trying to live a normal life, he has aspirations and good friends, an amazing girlfriend, a nice apartment. He's a hunter. Try again, Sam.
Later that night, Sam is woken by a crashing sound, noises that sound like someone has broken in. They're being careless about the way they're stumbling around. Sam attacks the intruder, who fights back. Eventually, Sam is pinned to the floor, where he realises exactly who has broken in. Dean beams down at him, says "Easy, tiger" and makes fun of Sam's boring lifestyle and lack of fighting skills. Sam quickly pins Dean to prove a point, and they finally stand up, Sam demanding to know why Dean is there. Jessica stumbles into the room in her pyjamas, where Dean tells her that she's above Sam's league, and he's a big fan of the Smurfs.
Sam tells Dean that he can say in front of Jessica why he's there, and he says their dad hasn't been around for a few days. Sam blows it off, until Dean reiterates that it's a Hunting trip, and their dad hasn't been home for weeks.
Sam reluctantly agrees to go with Dean to help find their father, with Jessica reminding Sam about the interview, and Sam telling her their dad has probably passed out drunk somewhere. The scene then cuts to a stairwell, where Sam is chastising Dean about the way they were brought up and how their father dragged them into the unconventional lifestyle. The conversation includes lines like:
Sam - "When I told Dad I was scared of the thing in my closet, he gave me a .45."
Dean - "Well, what was he supposed to do?"
Sam - "I was nine years old. He was supposed to say 'don't be afraid of the dark'."
Dean - "Don't be afraid of the dark? What are you kidding me? Of course you should be afraid of the dark, you know what's out there."
For those of you who aren't avid fans, I should probably mention that hunting, in this sense, refers to the searching and killing of malignant spirits, chupacabras, werewolves, vampires, shape-shifters, ghouls, poltergeists, sirens and other mythical creatures. But more so than anything else, of demons who have left Hell. Hunters are those people who dedicate their lives to eradicating the things that go bump in the night. As actual hunting (bears, deer, rabbits etc) also comes up within the show, I will capitalise Hunting when referring to their job.
I like this scene. Even though it sounds like neither of them have hit puberty yet because they're so squeaky compared to how they sound in a few episodes time. There's a continuity in personalities from that first scene, but there's more to them now. Dean will say whatever he feels like, even if it's inappropriate at the time (like making references to the cartoon characters splayed across his brother's girlfriend's chest) and especially if the end result is to get in trouble. Whereas you can already see that Sam has conflicting views about the way they were raised and the way he has always viewed himself as a freak, and although he loves his brother, he wishes Dean would think for himself a little bit.
The next scene takes place in Jericho, California. A man in his twenties (isn) is driving along a highway just outside of town. He's on the phone to his girlfriend, reassuring her that he'll be back soon. He spots a woman on the side of the road, hangs up on his girlfriend and offers the woman a ride. She's quiet, she appears to flicker. She asks him to take her home. He agrees, and drives to the address, finding an old, rundown and abandoned house. He laughs, asks her if she's kidding … but she's not in the car anymore. He looks around the house, and only finds bats. As he drives away, she reappears in the backseat, where she waits until he drives onto a bridge to move forward, and avenge her death on him. We see, from the outside, blood splattering in the car.
They don't do this so much now, but this used to be the theme of Supernatural. The relationship between Sam and Dean was in the background, they weren't on a first name basis with angels and the King of Hell, they just had urban legends presented in short scenes for the boys to deconstruct in order to save lives. Jensen Ackles (Dean) called it the 'Monster-A-Week' theme. It's a pretty good construct of the storyline, above, because even though it seems like I gave it a short summary, everything is there that needs to be. They've even had a little fun with it, adding the bats in for a visual interpretation of this guy's feelings, that it's creepy and like something out of a bad horror film.
We rejoin the boys, where Dean is pumping gas and Sam is acquainting himself with the Impala once again. Through their dialogue, we learn that there's little money in Hunting, and both Dean and John run credit card scams and hustle pool to make cash. We also learn that Dean's diet sucks, because he has soda and cake and refers to it as 'breakfast'. Sam flips through the music choices, and berates Dean playfully.
I love the conversation they have as Dean gets in the car. Most Supernatural fans do. I'll deconstruct after pasting the conversation.
Sam - "I swear, man, you gotta update your cassette tape collection."
Dean - "Why?"
Sam - "Well, for one, they're cassette tapes. And two; Black Sabbath, Motorhead, Metallica? It's the greatest hits of mullet rock."
Dean - "Well, house rules Sammy. Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cake hole."
Sam - "You know, Sammy is a chubby twelve-year-old. It's Sam, okay?"
Dean - *putting a tape in and ramping up the music* "Sorry, I can't hear you, the music's too loud!"
I love it - we all love it - because it says so much, again, about the characters without saying much. Dean actually doesn't own anything of his own, this is his dad's car, his dad's music, he's wearing his dad's old clothes. But Dean loves the music, and the car, because they were what he grew up with, and maybe if he listens to his dad's favourites and dresses like him, he'll become someone like his father by osmosis. And when Sam challenges any part of that, he gets sarcastic, or pig-headed, anything to avoid having to analyse his feelings.
And likewise, we can see that by spending time with Dean again, Sam is feeling like time is pulling him back when he only wants to go forward, and Dean calling him Sammy while listening to old music is a little too intense for him. He tries to assert himself as adult, and able to function alone, but it's something Dean can't face.
I know it sounds like a lot to read from a few lines exchanged by the brothers, but these things do come up again and again.
We see Sam ending a phone call, obviously further down the road, and saying that their father hasn't been to the local hospital or the local morgue. As they discuss where their father could be, they see police cars swarming around a car abandoned on an old bridge. Dean pulls up, and rifles through the glove compartment for some fake FBI badges. He starts to ineptly interview the police, with Sam intervening before Dean can be arrested.
This smacks, at first, of Dean having issues with authority. And while it's true that he doesn't trust the police because they can often get in the way of an investigation, his attitude is more based on the officer's ignorance. They don't choose to believe in the supernatural, therefore Dean seems more like a nuisance than help, and it frustrates him. Whereas Sam knows a little more about how to work with people to get the means to the end they want. Later on, they get a better understanding of when Dean should approach someone, and when Sam should. Sam is definitely better at wheedling information out of reluctant adults. Dean does better with kids, and women with loose morals. But for now, Sam steps on Dean's foot mid-conversation, and Dean slaps him around the head in retaliation once their interview with the police is done. Ahh, brotherly love!
Sam and Dean learn that the recently deceased had a girlfriend in the local town. They track her down, and ask her questions, Sam leading the way again. In turn, the girlfriend tells them of a local legend which suits the situation. There was a woman who was murdered along that stretch of road. Sam and Dean are positive it's this ghost which is responsible for the disappearance we witnessed earlier, and others that had been recorded over the years.
This is the first real showing of Sam's puppy-dog eyes. God, those things are killer. We learn a few supernatural things in this section, like when the girl says the missing boyfriend had given her a pentagram to freak her parents out and Dean tells her that actually, pentagrams are a sign of protection from harm. We can also see Sam and Dean's attitude to ghosts etc at this point, because neither look remotely scared or sceptical by the story. They sit forward, intrigued, instead. They attack ghost stories in a way the Mystery gang would be proud of, sifting through information and using local legends and other sources as a way to pin-point their problem. Then they either use previous knowledge to eradicate the problem, or research a way to remove it. They're almost clinical about the things that go bump in the night.
They've been desensitised to horror. Well done, John.
The boys go to a local library, where Dean uses the electronic microfiche system to look for local stories of murdered women. After a few searches with no results, Sam takes over the machine. They fight for a moment, and Dean calls Sam a control freak, while Sam explains in his attempts at searching that ghosts don't always come from murder, sometimes they're malignant from other deaths. He searches for suicide, and returns a promising result straight away.
The story goes that in the 1980's, a woman drowned her children in the bathtub at her home, and then threw herself off the bridge that had been the scene of a crime earlier. Both boys agree that it must be the same distinct bridge.
This again says so much about Sam and Dean. Dean goes by instinct, and trusts his witnesses. So they said murder? We'll search for varying terminologies of murder. But Sam is more logical (though, not as logical as season six, which we will get to) and applies what he knows about ghosts to the storyline. The word murder doesn't fit, but suicide might be more logical.
Night has fallen by the time the boys return to the bridge. They look around the bridge, arguing about their past and their parents, and spot the ghost as she climbs to a certain point on the bridge, and jumps. The boys rush forward to save her, disappointed that they miss her. They hear the Impala rev, and see her lights come on. Sam asks who could be doing that, and Dean holds up his car keys. Realising the car is possessed, they try to run from it, only to jump at the same point the ghost woman had. Dean lands in the mud, but Sam has found a ledge to hold onto.
I'd run too. My favourite bit of this scene is actually after they're back on the bridge together. Dean, coated in mud, shouts to the world at large how much of a bitch the ghost is, and Sam tells Dean he smells like a toilet. Again, neither of them is scared of the ghost itself. Fuck no, they're the Winchesters.
The boys go to a local motel, where Dean presents his latest fake credit card and the receptionist tells Dean that his father booked a room for a month. The boys go into their dad's room, where they find clues as to their father's mentality.
I love this shot, because Dean is willingly looking through research. Don't get used to this. Savour it. Also, I'd do him even with a muddy face.
Sam thinks their father was scared of something, as he had put a ring of salt around his bed, as well as guarding the door and windows with salt lines. Dean notices that he was following the same story they were, so they must be on the same lines, which means they have to be on the right lines. Sam joins Dean at the research wall, and realises that their dad cracked the story. It was a woman in white, and they need to talk to her husband if he was still alive.
Salt is important. Salt is purity, and a good guard against those that seek to harm. See also, iron (but not in this episode). I like how Sam just announces the ghost is a woman in white and Dean takes it, and that's pretty much it. They know what a woman in white is. But the audience does not, necessarily. But the writers don't treat us like idiots, or give the boys crappy dialogue. We'll learn, when someone ignorant of the story needs to hear it. It's awesome.
Dean goes for a shower to wash off the mud, and they have this really brief conversation:
Sam - "Hey Dean, what I said earlier, about Mom and Dad. I'm sorry-"
Dean - *holding out a hand to shut Sam up* "No chick-flick moments."
Sam - "Alright … jerk."
Dean - 'Bitch."
This gets repeated so much. Sam is pretty in touch with his feelings and verbose about them. He's unafraid of them. Whereas Dean hides behind macho bullshit. And the Jerk/Bitch or Bitch/Jerk thing is like a term of endearment between them. It's been the one ray of sunshine in a lot of bad fan fiction. It's the first moment either of these happen, and it happens together … but it's still almost like a reunion to me.
After Dean's shower, he announces that he's going to grab some food while Sam listens to his messages from Jessica. As he leaves the motel, he sees a few police officers loitering and twigs that they're after him. He calls Sam quickly, telling him to get out of the room, and it's too late for Dean to escape. The police then confront him, and he replies in typical Dean Winchester fashion.
Officer - "Sp. Fake U.S. Marshall, fake credit cards. You got anything that's real?'
Dean - " … my boots" *big grin*
See that, Sam? Dean put you first when you were being a whiny bitch about finding your father. FFS.
In the police station, they inform Dean that they think he's a suspect as in the motel room, there was the wall of information about several missing locals and a 'bunch of satanic mumbo jumbo'. Dean points out that the first person missing disappeared when he was a few months old. The policeman says the 'older man' must be an accomplice. They show him a journal out of their evidence lockers, with the name 'Dean' and five digits scrawled over a page. The police want to know what it means.
The scene cuts to Sam knocking on a door, and confronting the deceased woman's widower. He tells the man that the person who had come a few days before was his colleague and he's fact-checking for an article, repeating a lot of the same questions. Sam discovers that John had found out where the woman was buried, and notices something amiss about the ex-husband. He then explains what a woman in white is and we see the widower falter. A woman in white is a woman who, when she discovers her husband has been unfaithful, suffers temporary insanity and murders her children. When she realises what she's done, she feels remorse so painful that she kills herself. She's doubly-cursed.
I love how, even though Sam has been gone from Hunting for years, he automatically has a plausible cover story that can excuse both his and his father's questionings. Sometimes, I re-write stories in my head because of the shocking decisions that characters make, but here? Faultless. We learn through the conversation that the woman drowned her children in the bathtub, and John has already attempted to burn the bones. The story that Sam tells matches what we know so far about the story, and gives the audience information in a really organic way. It's even better than people must realise, because not only is the audience learning this particular local legend, but we're also getting a good insight into her mindset before her death just from his reaction. He was a weak man, which we see manifest when he stutters and cowers, then tries to project some authority by chasing Sam from the property.
Dean is still under interrogation, claiming the digits relate to his high school locker combination, when a call comes through for a local shooting. The police leave the station, and Dean finds a paperclip in his father's journal. When the officers have left, he unlocks his handcuffs, takes the diary, and leaves the station, going to a pay phone and calling Sam. He thanks Sam for the fake-call about the shooting, and we see Sam full of pride for his quick thinking. Sam briefs Dean on what he's found out about the case, and Dean tells Sam that their father has moved on. The digits are a marine tactic that reference a grid pattern. Sam then slams on the brakes of the Impala, having just driven through the woman in white.
She demands that Sam take her home, and Sam tries to rationalise with her, ask her what's keeping her there. He takes her to the ramshackle house, where she tells him she can never go home. He works out she's afraid, and continues trying to talk to her. She climbs on top of him, and Sam tells her that he's not unfaithful, he's the wrong kind of victim. She tells him that everyone's unfaithful, and forces a kiss on him before trying to claw his heart out. Dean appears, and shoots through the window at the ghost. Free of her grip, Sam decides to drive the Impala into the building, dragging the woman in white with them.
Dean runs after Sam, shotgun still in hand, and makes sure he's okay, before a cabinet slams into them, held in place by the woman in white. Before she can hurt them further, there's dripping water, and two children appear at the top of the staircase. The woman in white looks at them, and they flicker down the stairs to hug her. She screams as all three ghosts melt into ectoplasm and disappear.
I love that Sam always wants to talk to the monsters. He is one, so I guess it makes sense? (I won't totally spoil that one for you, don't worry!) and I love that Dean was like 'some ghost bitch is trying to hurt my Sammy? I'm going to shoot her in the fucking face'. So Dean. I also love how neither of them really broke a sweat over fighting a ghost, they just got frustrated when their first solutions didn't work.
They discuss how the children must have drowned at home, and Sam laughs at Dean for trying to shoot a ghost in the face. Dean responds by saying that if his car is damaged in any way, Sam is dead. They start driving away from Jericho, and locate the coordinates that their father gave them. Sam insists that he can't continue looking for John with Dean, he has to go back for his interview. Dean takes him back, where Sam asks Dean to let him know if he finds their father, and Dean tells him, that he thought they made a good team.
Sam walks into his apartment, calling for Jessica. He finds a plate of freshly made cookies on the counter in the kitchen, and starts eating one as he heads to the bedroom, where the shower can be heard running. He lays back on the bed, and feels a drip on his face. Opening his eyes, he sees Jessica … on the ceiling, her abdomen dripping blood from a wound. As he screams, the room erupts into flames and Dean kicks his way into the room. He takes one look at the scene and forces Sam out.
I felt so sorry for Dean, when he said to Sam that they made a good team and Sam basically shot him down. He was reaching out to a brother he clearly missed, but Sam missed the signs, because he could be in law school soon.
There's a reason why Jessica's death matches Mary's, by the way, but that will come out later. I'm surprised Sam didn't get a flashback of his mother at that point. And the one thing I have questioned since seeing this, and seeing all the story playing out - how did Dean know? He had pulled away as Sam walked up. Was it a gut feeling? He burst in seconds after the flames appeared. Dean isn't associated with demons, he's Angel Boy.
We cut to outside the building, where firefighters are grouped around the apartment complex in a parallel to Mary's death. Sam and Dean are by the Impala, and Sam is putting his possessions in, caressing a gun before placing it in the trunk. He looks at Dean and says "We got work to do."
This, again, has so much influence for later. Dean was still a Hunter, he did it for his dad and because if he didn't, innocent people would die. Sam goes back to being a Hunter for revenge. Dean is motivated by love, Sam by hate. As much as they would do anything for each other, they're rarely on the same page, even when they're on the same page. And this is a neat way of stopping Sam's aspirations to be anything but a Hunter. You can't just quit the life, Sam. You fight, or you die.
So, that's the first episode. Hopefully I've done it justice. And hopefully you want more of me being positive in my deconstructions? It's easily done, just put pictures of Dean in front of me ;)
***
Word count - note form: 1620
Overall word count: 5154
Overall minus note word count: 3534
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