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Supernatural Binging

How We Re-watched the Entire Series

By LUCINDA M GUNNINPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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Supernatural Binging
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

We stopped watching Supernatural three, no four, seasons ago.

We're Netflix, Hulu and Amazon watchers, never watching anything week-to-week anymore. And Supernatural had long been a guilty pleasure.

After all, we're horror fans and geeks, so who wouldn't love a pair of monster-hunting brothers that are saving the world once a season?

Jensen Ackles brought just the right asshole with a heart of gold to the show and Mark Sheppard and Mark Pellegrino were the villains you loved to see on screen.

And, truth be told, when we first started watching, there wasn't a lot of good geek television. I credit Buffy and Supernatural for starting the trend to making lightly horror-themed shows palatable to the general public.

But Eric Kripke probably intended it as a five season for a reason. There were other good episodes and even good seasons past season five, but the stories never held together as well as his original vision.

So by about season 11, when it came time to pick the next thing to watch, there were a lot of other things that were competing for our television time. In general, we watch two hours of television five nights a week, so with the explosion of all things geek, it was harder and harder for shows to make it to our screen.

But we had a fair bit of nostalgia for the first few seasons and knew that eventually we wanted to finish up the Supernatural story. Then, we heard that season 15 would be the last one and decided we would wait and watch it all one more time leading up to the final hoorah.

In June, we decided to start over again.

We took one short break for the new season of The Boys, but mostly from June until December, we watched Supernatural.

Jensen and Jared looked so young that first season. Then we remembered that we were a lot younger 15 seasons ago too.

We discovered our memories weren't as complete as we thought. Jeffrey Dean Morgan was physically in a lot fewer episodes than we thought and Jim Beaver as Bobby Singer didn't even show up until the second season.

What? I thought Bobby was always part of the show.

And Carry On My Wayward Son wasn't played until the second season too.

My memories were shattered!

Because we were watching it again, we spent a little more time, marveling at the practical affects for the monsters, noting that they stood up better than 15-year-old CGI would. We picked apart the story lines and were much harsher critics than we were the first time through.

But we still loved it, mostly.

Then there was the season of leviathans and we thought that was pretty bad. And then we noticed that all the non-white cishet males tended to get killed off, usually badly.

When they killed off the prophet, we knew why we had stopped watching. After they fought God's sister, the show really appeared to have jumped the shark.

But we kept watching and did our best to avoid most of the spoilers that came as the final season aired on network television.

We kept rooting for the Wayward Sisters to get their own spinoff, but we should have known that the network wasn't going to approve a show about badass women.

And then we watched the show devolve. It felt like the writers had never watched the show or been briefed on the lore of the universe. They had the same sort of varying power levels we usually see reserved for comic and super heroes.

Sometimes, the Winchester boys were the baddest around and sometimes they got beat up by high school kids. Okay, not really, but it was pretty bad.

Villains we loved died in unsatisfying ways, they didn't call back previous guest stars even when it made sense and then well then there was the final season. It was pretty much disappointing all the way around.

But even with the disappointments, we still own the entire series on DVD and will likely, watch most of it again, skipping the parts we didn't like sometime when there is less good television available.

After all, who doesn't love watching good ol' boys kill monsters to the soundtrack of classic rock?

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About the Creator

LUCINDA M GUNNIN

Lucinda Gunnin is a commercial property manager and author in suburban Philadelphia. She is an avid gamer, sushi addict, and animal advocate. She writes about storage and moving, gaming, gluten-free eating and more. Twitter: @LucindaGunnin

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