Supernatural Revisited

Aria Giacomino

Saving people, hunting things, the family business. Oh, how it went so downhill. Supernatural was a show that originally aired on the network TNT in September of 2005, and was then purchased by the CW at the end of the fifth season in 2010. From there the show continued to air until November 19, 2020.  It followed brothers Sam and Dean Winchester and their journey through life while hunting the, well, Supernatural. During the shift from TNT to the CW the script writing went from pretty good to… okay at best. The show suffered from something that I personally like to call the “CW curse”. 

This has been showcased with so many other broadcasts, such as The Vampire Diaries, Riverdale, and more. No matter what content the CW pumps out, the writing for each show gets worse and worse. Supernatural suffered at times for its particularly horrible writing over the years, but it also had some high points during its time on air with the CW. Some storylines were extremely complex and well crafted. Sometimes they even came from years and years of lore buildup, and built beloved characters up and gave them awesome character development, such as Castiel and his sense of humanity. But then again, sometimes the plot did the exact opposite, making an entire season feel completely meaningless and mind-numbingly stupid. The final season, season fifteen struggled with the latter. Not only was the whole season bad, the series finale was the worst part of all of it! The overall epic story came to a rather dull, anticlimactic end, with who would’ve guessed!… All of our main characters completely, 100% dead. 

After being on the air for 15 years you would expect some grand, amazing finale to such a long show. Nope. Nothing. Absolutely nothing of substance whatsoever. Nothing great enough to represent what the show really was at it’s core. It left fans heartbroken, yearning for a more fulfilling ending for something that consumed so much of their lives. Two years later, things haven’t gotten any better. All of the backlash against the series finale seemed to do nothing either. It was just left alone, the poor quality being blamed mainly on the COVID-19 pandemic rather than their foolish choices. 

I’m not expecting much to change within the fandom itself either. It has become increasingly toxic everyday on every single platform. With “The Winchesters” prequel getting launched, and it being even worse than Supernatural itself, it looks like this is going to be a dark up-and-coming year for the still broken hearted fans. We will forever mourn when the show was still satisfactory.