In the pilot episode of Supernatural<\/i>, I yell at mostly everything because why are you making that decision? <\/i>If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re intrigued, then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to start Supernatural<\/i>.<\/p>\n
Oh my god, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s happening.<\/i><\/p>\n
So, this intro is going to be a tad larger than usual. BUCKLE IN. THERE\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S A LOT THAT MUST BE SAID BEFORE WE START SUPERNATURAL<\/i>.<\/p>\n
1) PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL ME OR ANYONE ELSE WATCHING THIS SHOW FOR THE FIRST TIME<\/b>. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re new to Mark Watches, I watch shows with as little knowledge as possible of the show beforehand. <\/i>I do<\/i> have a guide as to what constitutes a spoiler<\/a>, but here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an easy way to determine if what you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re about to say is a spoiler: Can that information be gleaned from the actual episodes that I have seen? No? THEN DON\u00e2\u20ac\u2122T TELL ME IT<\/b>. Nothing from future episodes, nothing from interviews and behind-the-scenes, NOTHING AT ALL. Additionally, don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t try to hint at the solution to mysteries and plots by pointing out things I missed or skimmed over from the past. This project works best when I am viciously and sadly unprepared. Trust me. You will thrive off of my pain and terror once I realize what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going on.<\/p>\n 2) You may use rot13.com to cypher all spoilers!<\/b> Spoiler talk is<\/i> allowed on my sites; that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what all the gibberish in the comments is. Feel free to cypher all spoilers for the show, as long as you take care not to spoil other people in the process.<\/p>\n 3) Video commissions to accompany reviews are $25 per episode, can be purchased here<\/a>, and will remain free to download while I am reviewing that season<\/b>. So, once I finish season one of Supernatural<\/i>, all the video commissions will move to my store to be archived, and will cost $0.99 a piece to download. This helps pay for the very high cost of hosting this website and my videos for y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Please consider supporting me, as it helps me pay bills and keep my online universe running.<\/p>\n 4) Please read the Site Rules<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and the FAQ<\/a>.<\/b>\u00c2\u00a0My moderators and I are doing are best to run a safe, inclusive community. We have a strict policy about slurs and bigotry. If you are warned by a moderator, please take the advice they give as a warning and nothing more. It is not a personal judgment on you. We are not trying to control how you speak in your own life; we are merely asking you to be considerate of others while you post in this one community. Repeated offenses or particularly egregious ones will get your comments deleted and may possibly earn you a suspension or a ban. And if you use the Free Speech\/First Amendment argument in any sense, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an automatic ban.<\/p>\n 5) Do not bring fandom drama to my community<\/b>. One of the reasons I put off watching this show for so long was because even I<\/i> was subject to some of the Supernatural<\/i> fandom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bizarre penchant for absurdity. Please, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s discuss the show, respect one another, and have a good time. My moderators and I are not interested in hosting a rehashing of every terrible thing someone else did; let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not go around ripping bandages off wounds and igniting a firestorm of awful.<\/p>\n I really do want to have a good time and find out why<\/i> so many people love this show, so, let me do my thing, and we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll have a party \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcround here, okay? Now, onwards to another thing<\/i>.<\/p>\n What Mark Knows About Supernatural<\/i><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n So, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t often get to do these because lately, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been doing books and shows that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve either never heard of or am totally ignorant of their content. Supernatural<\/i> is an exception, though, as I am about to demonstrate, I really don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know that much about it. But I like being transparent about this so that y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all know going forward what I already know!<\/p>\n And with that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to begin, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Holy shit<\/i>.<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Take your brother outside as fast as you can \u00e2\u20ac\u201c don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t look back. Now, Dean! Go!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what I took away from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pilot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d: Dean Winchester hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t looked back ever since he left that house. Instead, he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s devoted his entire life to hunting, which was loosely defined as going out and killing really creepy things<\/i>.<\/p>\n There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a part of me that was ecstatic to watch this show for one sole reason: I love the horror genre. And I mean that I will go out and watch any<\/i> shitty horror movie in the hopes that even one part of it will hit me where I want it to. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been obsessed with horror since I was a child; I managed to sneak a copy of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark<\/i> into my house after checking it out of the library and forging my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s signature. (If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re reading this Mom, SORRY.) I would wait until after my bedtime, wait until my mother and father were transfixed by 60 Minutes<\/i> or Dateline<\/i> or whatever adult program they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d watch at night, and then I would pull out a flashlight from under my mattress and hide in a fort of blankets, reading. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d read every word of that book, over and over again even the appendices and Alvin Schwartz\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s commentary on how he came up with some of his retellings. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d stare at Stephen Gammell\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s illustrations, horrified and bewildered by the man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s ability to terrify my goddamn soul.<\/p>\n When I was 8, I found a battered copy of It<\/i> in a box in the garage, left behind by my older sister before she moved on to the rest of her life. I devoured it in six days, not understanding many of the sexual references and scenes, but convinced that there was nothing more frightening in the entire universe. I avoided gutters and rain grates for years<\/i>. And a very justifiable phobia of spiders gripped me for nearly a decade. Then, I went back to that box and found The Stand.<\/i> I read that in eight days, stealing time between lessons in third grade to read, using recess to get lost in a book that was drastically too old for me. I went back to the library, but found that the books capped at a sixth grade reading level. So, at home that afternoon, I crouched down on the floor in the living room, turning my head sideways to read the colorful spines of the books on the bottom shelf, the ones I knew were my mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153adult\u00e2\u20ac\u009d books. I saw a complete set of Edgar Allan Poe stories that my mother had ordered from Reader\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Digest sitting there, and I pulled it out, running to my mother with my new prize in hand, begging her if I could read it. She seemed confused at first, but conceded that I could, as long as I finished my homework first.<\/p>\n The Tell-Tale Heart. The Mask of Amontillado. Berenice. The Black Cat. The Fall of the House of Usher. They broke my heart, they gave me nightmares, they disturbed me that sometimes I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d have anxiety attacks, thinking about just how soul-crushing the final twists to these stories were. And I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop<\/i>. I wanted that feeling over and over again. I wanted to shout at people not to go into that dark house at the end of the street. I wanted to feel that oppressive, enveloping horror as I realized the scope of the story. I wanted my heart to flutter in terror at the dread of every new story I read.<\/p>\n I found comfort in Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft (fuck that piece of shit racist asshole, by the way, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t care how much I liked him as a kid), Clive Barker (QUEER HORROR OH MY GOD<\/i>), Stephen King (his short stories are THE BEST EVER for the most part), Richard Matheson, and Shirley Jackson (MY QUEEN YOU WERE SO PERFECT).<\/p>\n It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until I was much older that horror as a film<\/i> genre became my new thing. It was easy to sneak books into my house past my conservative mother. Movies? Nearly impossible. I missed everything<\/i>. (With the exception of The X-Files<\/i> and The Twilight Zone<\/i>, which were totally fine to watch??? I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand my mother sometimes.)\u00c2\u00a0 I spent a lot of time in college asking my friends to get me movies to watch that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d missed out on. However, it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t until the advent of Netflix that my life changed FOREVER. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all.<\/i> I had a 4-disc-at-a-time account, and would go through about 15-20 films PER WEEK for nearly a year. I watched virtually everything across the entire globe during that year, and that meant I saw a lot<\/i> of horrible movies. And some good ones! John Carpenter\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s The Thing<\/i>. Lake Mungo<\/i>. (THAT ENDING GAVE ME NIGHTMARES FOR WEEKS.) Frailty<\/i>. The Vanishing<\/i>. Alien<\/i>. The Descent<\/i>. (THAT MOVIE IS NOT WHAT I THOUGHT IT WAS ABOUT.)\u00c2\u00a0 [REC]<\/i> (Fuck the American remake.) Do Michael Haneke\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s films count as horror? Because they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all so fucking unsettling that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll haunt you for years.<\/p>\n Anyway, we can devote AN ENTIRE THREAD to talking about awesome horror films. I swear this has a point, though! I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m coming into Supernatural<\/i> from someone who adores the genre, despite that it is flawed and a hot mess. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re a horror fan, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found you generally see more bad movies than good ones, but some of the bad ones end up making for a great<\/i> time. About fifteen minutes into \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pilot,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I realized that even if<\/i> this truly is a problematic show as people have said, I am going to have so much fun yelling at bad decisions<\/i>. In this episode alone, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got people picking up badly dressed hitchhikers! We have people going into clearly abandoned houses that look haunted<\/i>. We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve got a brother essentially breaking into his brother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s house in the dark and being shocked that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s met with a fist. Dude what are you fucking doing<\/i>?<\/p>\n He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s being Dean. The pilot does a good job of establishing the dynamic between these two brothers. I got the sense that Dean was a lot more crude and stereotypically masculine than Sam. But I was most intrigued by their ideas of loyalty to their father. I mean, come on, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, you know I love fascinating family dynamics, so as plain and simplistic as some of this dialogue is, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s totally up my alley. NOT SORRY: I WILL DEVELOP FEELING ABOUT RIDICULOUS FAMILY DRAMAS LIKE MY LIFE DEPENDS ON IT. But Sam clearly<\/i> didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want anything to do with the life of a hunter, going so far as to spend years<\/i> away from the rest of his family. Dean, however, hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever considered leaving that life. So how was Sam going to rectify these two opposing forces? He seemed happy at school and happy with Jess. (Holy shit, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Tyra Collette<\/i>. This is too weird!)<\/p>\n AND THUS, THINGS HAPPEN TO PULL SAM AWAY FROM HIS LIFE. That generally includes killing all of the women<\/i>. Seriously, only two women make it out of this pilot alive. Mary, Jess, and Constance are all dead and very, very gone by the end. Which\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 okay! I get that Mary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death is a motivating factor in the Winchester\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dedication to hunting down the demon-thingy that killed her. I get that! Tragic backstory\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 that sort of goes hand-in-hand with a brofest, y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all. But\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 wait. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll get to this at the end.<\/p>\n I come into pilot episodes with the bar set low. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not that pilots are historically terrible; it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just that I always<\/i> want to give a show a few episodes to build interest, to show me what they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re about, and to make their mark. Yet Supernatural<\/i> doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t waste a lot of time to give me the basics: The Winchester brothers hunt evil, scary things in the world, they do it in an Impala, and everyone around them is consumed by bad decision making. The show is properly spooky in atmosphere, and I can already tell that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a potential for the writers to address just about every single urban legend and supernatural entity known to the world. (This show does<\/i> seem to borrow heavily from The X-Files<\/i>, though I appreciated the Mulder\/Scully reference. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mind the borrowing when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s acknowledged!)<\/p>\n So, how is Supernatural<\/i> going to set itself apart from other supernatural-themed shows? Well, I am totally<\/i> into the Winchesters as bickering detectives. What, it took like fifteen minutes for them to start hitting each other and calling one another names? Okay, count me in for that<\/i>. Plus, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t get the sense that show is going to take itself too<\/i> seriously. I loved that Dean was caught for credit card\/identity fraud in the very first episode<\/i>, almost as if the writers were saying, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Yeah, we know this is bullshit. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s make fun of ourselves first.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n For the most part, though, there are some serious attempts at creeping me out. I admit to jumping a few times. But it was dark in my boyfriend\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s apartment! Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t judge me! Constance is appropriately creepy, but she sort of suffers from the same problem that Mary and Jess do: We don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really know anything about her. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s an idea, though ironically, Constance is the most<\/i> developed woman in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pilot,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d despite that she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s merely a seductress murderer. Also, I thought the whole \u00e2\u20ac\u0153woman in white\u00e2\u20ac\u009d legend was based on women who had been betrayed? Not one who had such a specific story as Constance. Well, I suppose the show can also invent their own narratives around legends. Regardless, I think I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d love<\/i> to see Supernatural<\/i> focus on American folk legends because the idea of the Winchesters going to small towns across this country and finding weird shit is completely appealing to me.<\/p>\n Anyway, I wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t call this one of my favorite pilots. It was a hell of a lot of fun to watch, and I get the basic gist of what Supernatural <\/i>is about. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most likely going to be an episodic story, though I was surprised that we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t find John Winchester by the end of the episode! Okay, so it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doing the X-Files<\/i> thing where it combines monster-of-the-week episodes with a season-long arc, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m guessing? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m into that. I certainly haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been pulled in yet, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just started. The only thing that absolutely bothered me was the deliberate fridging of Jess so that Sam would have a reason to go with Dean on his quest to find their father. I seriously haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seen such a blatant use of that trope in years<\/i>! Literally, Jess (and law school, somewhat) was in Sam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s way, so the writers literally kill her. I mean, why did that even happen? What is the demon-thingy that causes this and why is it tormenting Sam? Will y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all still consider me an adult now that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve typed \u00e2\u20ac\u0153demon-thingy\u00e2\u20ac\u009d three times in one review? Look, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what was responsible for Jess and Mary\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s death<\/i>. I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know what to call it! STOP JUDGING ME.<\/p>\n So, that was Supernatural<\/i>. Not awful, but not mind-blowing. Can we just get more of the Winchesters arguing with each other over petty shit? That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the most entertaining thing about this.<\/p>\n The video commission for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pilot\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded right here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n – If you would like to support this website and keep Mark Does Stuff running, I’ve put up a detailed post explaining how you can!<\/a> In the pilot episode of Supernatural, I yell at mostly everything because why are you making that decision? If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re intrigued, then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to start Supernatural.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[590],"tags":[591],"class_list":["post-2960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-supernatural","tag-mark-watches-supernatural"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2960\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
\n– Please check out the MarkDoesStuff.com<\/a>. All Mark Watches videos for past shows\/season are now archived there!
\n– I will be traveling for many events! Check the Tour Dates\/Appearances page<\/a> for up-to-date tour events.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"