I never thought about it until I sat down and rewatched the episode for this project . . . but this is a really weird episode to open your season with.

Think about it. What do you want a season premiere to do? It should be a good entry point for people who are new to the show, since this is pretty much your best chance to pick up fresh viewers. That means it needs to give a good sense of the flavor of the show, while also not relying too heavily on stuff those hypothetical new viewers don’t know.

From that standpoint, this episode fails resoundingly — in fascinating ways.

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I got interrupted in my re-watch of Supernatural, and then I was traveling, and then I had that whole Kickstarter thing to run and also the copy-edits showed up for Voyage of the Basilisk, so, yeah. The good news is, this isn’t a blog series I’m attempting to do on any kind of organized schedule, which means if I fall off the wagon for three months, hey. 🙂

So! “Salvation” and “Devil’s Trap.” Aka the end of season 1, aka not at all what I think they were priming the audience to expect.

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The last two episodes of S1 basically make a two-parter, even if they aren’t identified that way. “Dead Man’s Blood” isn’t part of that, but given the things which appear in it, it’s very much the staging ground for the season finale. And the elements here aren’t just important for that finale; they reverberate for years afterward.

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I didn’t originally intend to post about this episode, because I remembered it as being a perfectly competent but not especially important bit of the first season. Rewatching it, though, I was struck by the way it performs some quiet-but-vital work on the issues of character and theme.

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“Shadow” is the sixteenth episode of Season 1, and it is the point at which I realized Eric Kripke had learned some valuable lessons from the mistakes of The X-Files.

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For the record, I will talk about things other than Supernatural pretty soon. 🙂 It’s just that I got some way into Season 1 before deciding to make a blog series about this, which means I have a backlog of things to say. And I don’t want to get too far ahead in my watching from where I am in posting.

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I promise I’ll post something other than photos and Supernatural analysis eventually. 😛 My brain’s a little wrung out from revision, so right now I’m just kind of coasting along, recovering.

Also — speaking of a wrung-out brain — ignore what I said last post about discussing “Scarecrow” some more. I managed to get my wires crossed, and mashed “Scarecrow” and “Shadow” together in my head. (They’re both one word starting with S, and they both have Meg, okay? And I don’t have much functioning grey matter at the moment.)

Instead, we will talk about “Faith” and the Dumber Than Dean Award.

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I don’t have enough to say about “Home” to fill a whole post, so I’m just going to make a comment about it here before moving on to “Scarecrow” and the general topic of Supernatural and its female characters.

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As I said before, I won’t be blogging each episode individually. That would be way too much work, not to mention that I don’t have something interesting to say about every. single. ep. But the pilot, being the thing that launches the whole series, does get its own post.

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I’ll start talking about actual episodes and content soon enough, but before that, I’d like to look at the general format of the show. (No spoilers, really, but I’ll put it behind a cut for length anyway.

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So I’m almost done with the revision of the third Memoir, I just turned in my next chapter for L5R, the number of pictures left to edit is down to two digits, and the next ten months are jam-packed full of time-consuming things I intend to do.

Which means it’s a perfect time to start a new giant project!

(Or at least it’s a perfect time for my brain to suggest a new giant project.)

I’ve decided I’m in a mood to re-watch Supernatural. And if I’m going to do that, I might as well blog my way through, because one of my reasons for re-watching it is to take a look at its macro-level narrative structure. Eric Kripke, the showrunner, did a remarkably good job of blending a strongly episodic, Monster of the Week format with a long-term metaplot and thematic development, and I’d like to take a look at how he did it. I won’t be blogging each episode individually, but rather commenting on structural stuff as it comes up during the course of the show.

This will involve spoilers. Lots of them. I’ll put everything behind cuts, but if you already know the show or don’t care about being spoiled, feel free to share your thoughts!

Before I get started on the actual blogging, let me share how I got into this show, and why I find it interesting enough to merit this kind of project.

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