Okay, for those of you who have not seen Supernatural, it is a dark suspense/horror show about two brothers who hunt monsters after their mother was killed when one of them was a baby. The show opens when the oldest (Dean) is 26 and the younger (Sam) has just passed the test to go to law school so probably about 22. I'll be reviewing the show episode by episode, and I'll try to do as many as I can within a week, but it all depends on time and energy so I doubt I'll be cranking a new one out every day.
Okay, so to get to the meat of my review. I gave this episode an 8 out of 10. It's up pretty high because I think it's a good kicking off episode but I took away for a couple of things which I found distracting. I'll get to that in a minute.
The episode starts with the event that catapulted the boys into the hunting biz in the first place, their mother's murder. The suspense and horror are on point in this scene as she sees a flickering light (one of the horror tropes I think actually works really well without the use of jump scare tactics) then realizes the man standing over her baby in his crib was not her husband. It is well acted when she runs to her baby and the scream is realistic enough to make you startle right along with her husband, who rushes to find his baby in the crib seemingly fine. Then the blood drips from the ceiling (another trope that works well in this scene) and he looks up to find his wife pinned right before she spontaneously combusts along with his house. He frantically removes the boys and then tries to save his wife to no avail. The scene then cuts to the present day as Sam celebrates his test results with his girlfriend and best friend. There was a line in this scene I didn't really like. Sam says "we're not exactly the Brady Bunch" talking about his dysfunctional family and his friend says "Well we're not the Huxtables" which I felt might be a bit of a micro-aggression but I couldn't be sure. Anyway, back to the script. Jess and Sam go home and Sam is attacked by an intruder and they fight. Before long, however, Sam realizes that the intruder is his brother Dean. Sam introduces Dean to Jess and the way Dean eyeballs her in her pajamas is kind of painful to watch, but it sets the mood for what his character is going to be like throughout the show. Dean tells Sam that their father is hunting and hasn't come back for a couple of days, and Sam sends Jess away to discuss the private family matter with his brother.
Here is where they do the exposition, in the form of an argument, on what has gone on in the past 18-20 years or however long it has been (I'm sure it had a caption at the very start but I'm not re-watching just for that). I didn't really like this route to exposition because it felt a little bit forced. People don't really argue like that. If I were to write it, I might go about it a bit different even if I were going to keep it in the dialog, but I feel like a better exposition might have been to have Sam say something about how they were raised and then show a flashback scene of the things he was talking about instead of him going into explicit detail about it. It just felt awkward. Maybe if Sam were telling someone else, but for an inside argument, naw. It doesn't work.
Sam finally agrees to go with Dean to find their missing father and the scene cuts to show the monster at work. The monster this episode is definitely some kind of ghost who preys on men driving along a stretch of highway. She is a good looking woman, dressed all in white, tattered garments, the picture of a damsel in distress. The guy picks her up, she asks him to take her home. He drives her there only to find out it is abandoned some years ago. Something spooks him and he goes to leave but she appears in his back seat as he's driving away. He freaks out and crashes into the guardrail of a bridge. Then it cuts to the outside of the car and you see blood spatter across the windows indicating that the man has met a gruesome fate. The blood spatter without showing the actual massacre is another trope I think works really well to build suspense.
Then the boys show up. They come upon the abandoned car on the bridge surrounded by police cars and Dean pulls out a fake badge from a box in the glove compartment filled with such stuff. They go to have a look and Dean flashes the badge to the detective before asking him some questions. The detective observes "Aren't you a little young to be U.S. Marshals?" to which Dean responds by playing it off as a compliment that he looks younger than his actual age. Dean then says something derogatory to the detective for which Sam not so subtly stomps his foot. Having gotten their information they go to leave just as two FBI agents walk up and Dean makes an x-files reference (he calls them agents Scully and Mulder). They go to research the case on a public computer and find out that a woman jumped off that very bridge and committed suicide.
The boys go to get a hotel room just to find that their father has a room already paid for a full month. When they break into their dad's hotel room, they find out that their father had already solved the case, but are puzzled as to why he has not yet vanquished the monster (a lady in white, which is to say a woman who found out her husband was unfaithful, murdered her own children and then committed suicide). They are about to go dig up info on where the body is buried so they can salt and burn it, when Dean is arrested by the local cops who have by now realized that he is not a U.S. Marshal and that he is using a fake credit card. The cops grill him while Sam goes to talk to the husband of the woman suspected of being the lady in white.
While being questioned by the detective, Dean finds an important clue in their father's journal which the police are using to interrogate him. He then escapes custody by unlocking his handcuffs with a paper clip (a trope which I do not enjoy seeing as I think it is overused and implausible) when the detective has to rush off because they got a 911 call about shots fired. Turns out the call came from Sam which Dean jokingly admonishes him for. Sam is heading out to the burial site to dispose of the lady in white by salting her bones and burning them.
As Sam drives he passes through the ghost who stood in the road to block his car. Then she appears in his back seat and demands that he "take her home" he refuses. She takes control of the car and drives to her house anyway. He tells her she can't hurt him because he's never been unfaithful. She tells him he will be and proceeds to sexually assault him then try to rip out his heart. Just in time, Dean shows up and shoots at the ghost, which chases it away just long enough for Sam to drive the car into the farmhouse. There, the woman picks up a photograph of herself with her two children. Then she starts attacking the boys, but the children are there. They run to her and I can only assume what happens is that they've drug her down to hell because they disappear into a puddle in the floor with a fiery fury.
As they drive away, Dean tells Sam where their father's coordinates are and says if they book it they can be there by the next day. Sam says he has to get back for his Law School interview and Dean agrees to drop him off. The show ends as Sam, having just entered his apartment lays down on his bed. The same blood dripping from the ceiling makes him look up and see his girlfriend Jess trapped just as his mother had been before combusting in the exact same manner. As the firefighters douse the flames, Sam is at the back of his brother's car looking at weapons. Dean approaches and Sam tells him, "We'd better get a move on." an indication that he has changed his mind about going to law school in the wake of this tragedy. This is where the show ends.
Some final notes: I didn't really like the way Sam's character starts off. He comes off as a bit of a snob. Understandably, it is because he wants to get away from his childhood and the way he was raised, but I really like his character later in the show and was disappointed that he came off as a bit of a prick in this one. Dean comes off much better, even if he is that kind of character that just exudes toxic masculinity. I did like the way, even at this early stage, the Impala was treated almost like a character all to itself. This is an important detail as the show progresses and especially going into the 5th season finale, so I thought this was an especially nice touch.
When they read the newspaper article about the woman's suicide it said that she left her two young children in the bathtub unattended for too long and they drowned, then the woman was so distraught that she took her own life. However, seeing the ages of the children when their ghosts showed up to drag their mom to hell, there's no way anyone would buy that story. A child of three or under might drown, but there's no way a child three years older than that would. Not in a bathtub at any rate. I also noticed that the husband while being questioned became aggressive when Sam suggested that the wife had murdered the children, I think this indicates that he knows his wife murdered their kids.
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