My Thoughts on Supernatural

As I pace through my living room with my phone in my hands, trying to find the perfect way to start this post, I find myself drawing a blank.  Where do I begin to explain what this show has meant to me through the years?  Up until a couple of days ago it was some what absent from my mind, but now, it only feels right to reflect upon everything this show has meant to me.  So I'm going to do what feels right; I'm going to put on an episode while I type this out.  Which episode?  Well, I'll get to that.

To start, this show came out when I was twelve and I was freshly into Grade Right.  I remember that my parents and I were discussing what we would watch during the week.  Every year we would talk about the old shows that were coming back, and the different shows that would be coming out.  My dad brought it up, but how I remember it, I didn't want to watch it.  My memory is hazy, but I remember him telling me it was a show about brothers going around hunting.  It didn't sound interesting to me.

It was something that both of my parents were interested in, so I thought I would check out the first episode.  From the moment the episode started, I was hooked.  I loved the music, I loved the acting and I loved the monsters.  It became a staple in our household and for two years we watched every episode, most of the time on their release night.

By the time season three came around, my mom wasn't as interested any more, but my dad and I were still hooked.  He and I watched that show once a week. Until at least season five was done.  I'm trying hard to put a timeline to everything, but I'm afraid that my memory isn't as good as I thought it was.  From my best guess, sometime around season 5 he and I stopped watching it together all the time.  I would have been seventeen/eighteen around this time, in my final year of high school, and I was spending more and more time with my friend group at the time.  He and I still tried to watch as many episodes as we could together, but it got harder around then.

Also around that time, I started to discover that a couple people I wasn't super close with were also into the show.  Through season six and seven, we began to watch the episodes together, even bringing in more people to do so.  For the season seven premier, we had a little watch party for it.  For a while we tried to watch each episode as a group, and for a while we did just that.  But just like watching it with my dad, we eventually stopped watching it together.  This wasn't for any particular reason; we were in college, had girlfriends and we just didn't have the time to just sit and watch at the same time every week, but we still talked about it.

Around this time too, I began to talk about it with people I worked with.  I became close with people that I didn't think I would be close with.  We had a little group chat where we would talk about the episodes after we all watched them.  But just like previous instances, it slowly stopped happening, although this time it was my fault because at the end of 2014 I quit that job and moved away for another.

This next period of my life was void of Supernatural, well, of new episodes anyways.  I had seasons one thru five on DVD, but the place I was living didn't have cable, so I was without new episodes for a few years, until it came on Netflix.  I didn't start where I left off, but I began watching from the very beginning.  So many memories came flooding back as I rewatched old episodes, and I formed new ones with the new episodes I had watched.  But alas, eventually I caught up and after months of not watching it, Supernatural fell off my radar once again.

It stayed like this for another couple years until November 2019.  I hurt myself in the summer and because of that I had lots of time to watch shows, both old and new.  In November, I saw on a social media that it was the last season, and I knew I needed to watch it.  So once again, I caught up, and once again I forgot about it during the Christmas hiatus.  I didn't think about the show again until a couple days ago, when I saw online that the last episode would be coming out very soon.

I binged through the episodes that I needed to finish and in a couple days I was caught up and was ready to watch the finale.  I will say that I was surprised to see how the season arc was wrapped up in the second last episode, but the way they handled the last episode of the series just made sense.  Of course, I cried, how could I not when I was saying goodbye to characters who meant so much to me?  I know that there will always be days worth of content for me to watch, but knowing that this world is closed and we won't get any new episodes hits in a very different way.

Now, to answer the question of what episode I put on to help me write this; the only obvious answer to me was the season three episode, Mystery Spot.  I have very fond, and very strong memories of watching that episode with everyone I have watched the show with, and it was always a group favourite.  I remember being at parties with friends and belting out Heat of the Moment with my Supernatural group.

Supernatural has inspired many creative ideas of mine through the years.  I always loved the monsters/beings that they were up against and all of the lore behind them.  I'm honestly still having slight difficulty specifying what I loved about the show, because there was just so much.  Sure, there were flaws; I wasn't really a fan of season six or seven, even though they had so much potential.  Also, I will still stand my ground and say that without the last thirty seconds of the season five finale, it would have been a perfect series.

This show was such a huge part of my life, and even though I didn't follow it as religiously as I once did, I still feel that it meant more to me than just a show.  It spanned over half of my life, joining me through almost every key moment in my life.  It also was something that I shared with family and friends, which I can't say about most things.

I know this chapter in our lives is over now, but it isn't at the same time.  We have to carry on through the sadness we feel after the finale and keep watching old episode, I know I will.

Thank you for reading!

- Cody S