It was only a matter of time before I touched this show. This is probably one of those shows that may or may not need an introduction depending on who you ask. I'll be honest, I tapped out of this show around season 6 or 7 and caught a few episodes here and there afterwards. I've been curious how well it plays out given some of the things I've heard so I figured I might as well start from the beginning as a refresher. This isn't going to be too detailed and is going to be more of an overview of how the season went down for me. Note: I don't know how often these posts are gonna come out because in addition to working late, I've been rewatching this show in bursts in-between various korean dramas on netflix. Now, lets take a look at the first season.
The premise synopsis for this is gonna be tricky because the series goes places after the first season that would sort of render that pointless. As you'd probably expect from a show that managed to last 15 seasons, where it starts certainly isn't where it ends up. Anyway, even though I just said all that, here goes: Basically Sam's brother Dean finds him at his college and ropes him in to looking for their father who hasn't come back from a "hunting trip". Sam agrees to help out this one time. The twist? They hunt monsters. They do their thing, kill a ghostie, and Dean drops Sam back off at college only for Sam find his girlfriend pinned to the ceiling before the place catches fire. So Sam goes back to the hunting life to find their dad and whatever the hell did this because its not the first time this has happened to them.
This season is something I like to refer to as "Demonic Scooby-Doo" and I absolutely adore it even though I'm a known wimp when it comes to horror. They use their dad's journal as a way to retrace his footsteps and that leads to said Scooby-Doo-ish shenanigans. I was unable to tear myself away from the screen during pretty much every episode even though I've seen them all before. I think that says a lot about how well this season holds up for me.
My favorite episode out of the entre season is the episode "Hell House". Its a pretty damn good ghost story with a twist. Essentially the brothers investigate a haunted house covered in odd symbols and when their usual tricks don't work on the ghost they start digging into the symbols. Spoiler (for this 15 year-old episode of a tv show): They find out through researching one of the symbols that the ghost in question isn't a ghost...its a Tulpa. A Tulpa is basically an idea given form when so many people focus on it that it suddenly pops into reality. Due to the Tulpa taking the form of an urban legend that two bored teens in town literally made up two weeks prior, it becomes a game of telephone (as urban legends tend to do) and the creature evolves as the tale changes. So its effectively one of the few things they've hunted that they can't actually kill.
I'm a sucker for monster lore so every episode's breakdown of how the monsters do their thing was always pretty interesting. One particularly funny thing of note to me is how the show handles vampire weaknesses. It outright says the classic lore is bullshit and that only two things can harm a vampire: 1. Injecting them with deadman's blood to weaken them and 2. removing the head. That second one makes me laugh every time I remember because barring ghosts and demons (and a few other outliers), pretty much every single thing the brothers hunt can effectively be killed if they remove its head.
Peppered throughout the first season is drama about Sam working out his issues while looking for their father as he goes about returning to the hunting life. If I'm being honest though, that part is pretty much unnecessary. Let me explain: The show's monster of the week episodes are so good that they overshadow the plot related ones. In that sense, them following the notes in their dad's journal in hopes of finding him really just kind of feels like a way to get them into those situations. I don't really have much else to say about this season other than that it is downright fantastic and its no surprise to me why the show took off.
