Bergamot

Actually, young John in "The Song Remains the Same" has much less of a reaction to learning that the supernatural exists than John does in this show. That John says incredulously, "Monsters? Monsters are real?", but then immediately moves on to demand how long Mary has been fighting them. He is stunned and upset, not from learning that monsters are real, but because he has just learned that his wife has kept secret from him a whole big part of who she really is. He is very hurt and angry in "The Song Remains" that she has lied to him, a factor that obviously does not apply in this case. A few minutes later he is insisting that Dean show him how to draw the angel sigil with his own blood in order to protect them all. Dean starts to explain to him what the sigil means, and John cuts him off: "I don't care what it means. Where does it go?" He adds angrily, "You all might have treated me like a fool, but I am not useless. I can draw a damn sigil!" So his reaction is less, "How can supernatural things be real, and what does that mean?" and more, "How do we fight them? Show me!" It is a very practical and hardheaded way of reacting, also showing his determination to not be left out of the fight, and in that sense his reaction in the Pilot fits pretty well with what we have already seen.

You could open an All Episodes Talk thread if you wanted, couldn't you? And a Production People topic to talk about writers, directors, producers and so on. I think that's allowed, isn't it?

Aside from the symbolism, it didn't look very attractive on her. Plus she looked kind of uncomfortable in it. But I think maybe that was on purpose. Mary is a tiny, dainty girl (she looks so petite next to the other actors!) but I guess she would prefer practical clothes that work for hunting rather than frilly, dainty outfits. I like that they are having fun with the clothing from that era: Latika's bell-bottom trousers in the zombie warehouse, Carlos' paisley shirt in the motel room, John's fringed leather vest and love beads at the commune. Also loving the music! I don't know, I kind of like that she is not conventionally pretty in a bland, ordinary way. She has an interesting, angular face.

The point is that John didn’t know why his father disappeared. He didn’t know that Henry had time-traveled to the future and then been killed. All he knew throughout his entire childhood was that Henry had abandoned him without a word. It would be natural for a little child to secretly wonder if it was because of something he had done, if he had disappointed his father in some way. And Fake Millie brings out this hidden fear of John’s: “I know it’s painful, knowing you were the reason he left.” Now, of course, after having been given the mysterious letter with the key to the Men of Letters headquarters, he knows that his father’s disappearance had something to do with his work with the MOL (“It’s a dangerous world out there, and our family has fought that danger for centuries.”) But this hasn’t brought John peace of mind, because now that he is hunting with Mary, hearing how she was raised since she was a child to do this, he has started to wonder why Henry didn’t train him the way that Samuel trained Mary to follow their family tradition. And again, Fake Millie reveals his hidden fear: “If he really wanted you to follow in his footsteps, he would have stayed, trained you to be a part of the Men of Letters like he was, but he didn’t.” So deep inside John is still the 4 year old who didn’t understand why his father had abandoned him, and feared that he did something wrong to make it happen. Maybe, he thinks, his father knew that he would be a failure at hunting things and saving people, and that’s why he left him behind. In “As Time Goes By”, after they meet Henry, Dean reminds Sam that Henry’s disappearance affected John his whole life. He angrily says that John hated his father for leaving him. And it’s impossible not to be reminded of another 4 year old who lost his parent and whose life changed overnight and who didn’t understand why, and think how it affected him his whole life as well.

Yes, exactly! I don't think even the smartest angels are very good at understanding human emotions and relationships. But I'm sure that John and Mary, with their strong personalities and complicated histories, were especially challenging!

I have always kind of taken that Cupid's statement, "They couldn't stand each other at first" with a grain of salt. For one thing, Cupid was portrayed as very silly, naive, and over-sensitive: he started crying if someone spoke harshly to him. So maybe a Cupid (or any angel, really) would not be the best judge of the intricacies of a human relationship, where two people could fight and be angry at each other, but still love each other. I can see this happening. For all Cupid's rhapsodizing in My Bloody Valentine about love and about the "perfect couple" being the endpoint, all the angels really cared about was making sure that Dean and Sam were born. These were the orders they received as far as John and Mary were concerned -- as Castiel says about another couple in that episode, "They were intended to mate". I can see John and Mary complicating things and giving the angels a hard time in their attempts to carry out these orders.

Yes, that was in Fresh Blood, in Season 3, and Dean is using himself as bait, "chum in the water", as he puts it -- "I smell good, don't I?... Come on, free lunch!" I never thought about it, but you all are right! Cutting your palm to get some blood is not a good idea! Unless, I don't know, the extra pain and suffering it causes is somehow part of the spell, or something like that. But probably the writers just think it looks more dramatic. I liked the scene where John cuts the piece of silver out of his arm to use against the loup-garou. Except afterward I couldn't help wondering why he hadn't had it removed before. Was leaving the silver shard in his arm some kind of twisted way for him to keep alive the memory of his dead friend? Not a very healthy thing to do, but I like the idea of John being twisted and haunted by his war experiences. I hope that the repercussions of his time as a soldier comes up again.

Yes, that would be a shame. I think Carlos could be an interesting character; I liked the actor's line-readings and I want to learn more about Carlos and Latika as well. Hopefully we will have an opportunity to do this in the next few episodes. I have to admit that just hearing Dean's voice put a huge, helpless grin on my face; I could not stop smiling! 😍 I miss Dean. Yes that didn't bother me too much. As you point out, on Supernatural there always were lots of different power levels for demons, from the small-fry on up to the knights of hell. In the first episode where Dean and Sam encountered a demon, "Phantom Traveler", Dean manages to subdue the demon on the plane with nothing but holy water, duct tape, and his fists as Sam reads the exorcism. (Angels were another matter; for me it was sad to see how degraded they became on Supernatural as the seasons went on. Castiel went from a celestial being who burned people's eyes out and terrified demons so much that they fled from his presence, to someone who in a later season had to get in a fist fight with humans to take them down. But of course that is not relevant to TW at this point.)

Considering that we have just seen the show’s pilot, for me it is too soon to already decide that they haven’t. At least in this particular area. The way in which they are already MILES ahead, in my opinion, is that they have acknowledged that things have been changed, that they have promised that there will be an explanation for it, and that they have said that they will not erase what has already happened on the original show. Whether someone likes or can accept their explanation, of course, is up to each individual to decide. Everyone has different lines that cannot be crossed.

The part with the menu made me laugh, not just because John obediently reads it off (he is probably thinking, "Okay, I guess this is no crazier than anything else that has happened today!") but mainly because of the way he recites it, with such total energy and enthusiasm. 😄 Like, if you need a menu read out loud to a demon, John will get it done! I really liked the moment where Carlos tells John, "The only thing worse than how it starts for a hunter is how it ends." Not so much because it helps define Carlos as a character, but because of what it says about what it means to be a hunter. The original conception of what made someone a hunter in Supernatural is that they were ordinary people whose lives had been shattered by an encounter with supernatural evil. And who then, maybe from a need for revenge, or maybe from a desire, as Dean expressed it, to keep what happened to them from happening to other families, devoted their lives to fighting that evil. Hunters were damaged people, forever isolated from normal society even as they risked themselves to preserve it, only able to connect with each other. Unfortunately (in my opinion), Supernatural moved away from this original conception as the show went on. Increasingly, hunters were no longer ordinary people whose lives were changed by tragedy; more and more they were people with a special destiny. They were people who belonged to a special mystical organization, or people who could trace their special hunter heritage back to the Mayflower. To me, this weakened the strength of the original foundation of the show, and I am hoping that with The Winchesters we could get back more to this concept. That's why I like the idea that Carlos is a hunter not because it is his special chosen destiny, but because a ghoul killed his family. And so now, he hunts the kinds of things that killed them.

Latika reminded me of Willow -- but as you say, that's not a bad thing for me. She is intelligent, good at puzzles, a little timid, and apparently has trouble making friends, maybe because of shyness. Also I like that she is a librarian. I love libraries! In the early years of Supernatural, Dean and Sam would go to a library to do research on their own, and I preferred that to later when they would call Bobby (or later Rowena) to be provided with the answers. I really liked when Latika, who is obviously nervous herself, says to John, "It is okay to be a little nervous". And he is so kind and gentle with her, telling her that he is nervous too and that they can be nervous together. It was a nice character moment for the two of them, and I liked the big brother/little sister vibe between the two of them.

Yes, I was glad to see this! The show deserves its own forum. I like the name of this topic! I am full of Anticipation for the Winchesters! 😊

I'm not a mod, but it talks here about how you can request a new forum in this forum. You just need to submit a show synopsis and 3 suggested topic titles. One of them must be a "Small Talk" topic. Maybe also a "Spoilers and Speculation" topic and a "The Winchesters in the Media" topic?

@MAK commented in the SuperNormal thread: When Dean was DemonDean, it seemed to me that he did grow his hair longer. It was brushed straight back and kind of poufy on top. Sometimes he would rake his fingers through it to push it back, and it would look all unruly and sexy! While he was living with Lisa and Ben, I think Dean also let his hair grow out a little, but since he was the civilized, suburban dad version of Dean, he wore it combed neatly to one side. I would have liked to have seen it a bit longer, because it suited him as someone who at that time was out of the hunting life. He just looked softer, like in that scene in "Exile on Main Street" where we see him checking the front door before going to bed and he is padding comfortably around the house in just a tee shirt, sweatpants, and cozy white socks. As for Purgatory, I seem to remember someone from the production side of the show saying that while Dean was there, he didn’t need to eat or drink. So I just assumed that his body was in some kind of stasis in Purgatory, and that his hair and beard did not grow. He just got very dirty and blood-stained, and his hair remained the same length but looked stiff with dirt. Otherwise that would have been a good opportunity to have his hair and beard grow out all wild and crazy, maybe like Soldier Boy when he was first set free!

I think this is a interesting subject! But maybe I should take my comment to the Dean Winchester thread. 😊

We are all Dean experts, and they knew that they couldn't beat us unless they cheated! 😄

I bet it was the same one that I got wrong! Definitely a trick question. That makes me feel better about missing it. 😊 Yeah, that's the one that I missed! I guess the explanation is what @tessathereaper mentions above. It was kind of fun to read the quotes, because it showed how the characters have things in common -- because some quotes I can imagine the other one also saying it. Yet at the same time it showed how completely different they are -- because even though I can imagine the other one perhaps saying it, it would be coming from a completely different place in that character's personality and illustrate the gulf between them. Two very interesting characters!

Just for fun, here is a little online quiz: "Who said it -- Dean Winchester or Soldier Boy?" I actually got one wrong, and I thought I was familiar with every word Dean Winchester ever spoke! 😊

That would be closer to what I thought it would be. But basically, I think that the show should never have tried to portray so concretely and specifically what Heaven is like, because they were bound to fall short. (And in this case it was just one of the many ways in which the finale fell short and ultimately failed for me.) It’s like what happened with Hell on the show. The first time we saw it was at the end of “No Rest for the Wicked”, with Dean suspended in an infinite dark and empty space with chains and meat hooks. But then one of the writers said that this was not actually Hell, it was just the “waiting room” for Hell, and that what came next for Dean would be infinitely worse. And I was glad to hear that, because I didn’t think that the show had a big enough budget and writers with enough imagination to succeed at actually portraying Hell on the screen. As Alastair said when Dean was torturing him, reality on earth was just too concrete for it to work. Unfortunately they couldn’t leave it alone, and kept trying to show us Hell, and every time they did it on the show it became less convincing and less impressive. By the time they got to their last visit to Hell (I can’t remember, was it when they visited Rowena in Hell?), it just looked stupid and tacky and kind of pathetic to me. And of course they did the same thing with Heaven. The way they portrayed Heaven (and angels as well) became less and less impressive and interesting every time they tried to show it. If they wanted to show Dean and Sam going to Heaven in the end – which btw I DID NOT WANT as the ending of the show – but if they just HAD to do that, then they should have left what it was going to be like up to our imaginations, beyond maybe just giving a few hints. For me, Heaven should be something so extraordinary, something so beyond our earthly existence, that it becomes ineffable, beyond our ability to describe or even imagine. It would have worked better, in my opinion, if they had gone back to the idea of the “waiting room”, but this time for Heaven. Just don’t try to show us or tell us exactly what Heaven is like! Instead, the pretty scenery where you could enjoy driving around, which for some reason looked a lot like British Columbia, was just the entry room to Heaven, and when you were ready (which for Dean I guess would be when Sam showed up) you could move on to the real thing. And then just end it there.

This is a very good comparison, and I think that Carroll O’Connor is an excellent example of an actor who could inhabit a totally different character and bring him to life in this way. As an aside, I am also reminded of a story that I read about Carroll O’Connor in a book that I have, which talks about another quality which he had as an actor. He had such a compelling screen presence that he always drew your attention whenever he was in a scene. Back in the sixties he had a guest role as a quirky villain on the show “The Wild Wild West”, and Robert Conrad, who played the handsome and heroic lead character, commented on this. I feel like Jensen as an actor has this same kind of screen presence, and draws your attention in this way. Like Robert Conrad said, I don't know how he does it, but he steals the scene when he is on screen!

Is that one young man Arnold's son? I've never seen him before, but he's kind of annoying. Actually I thought that most of them were kind of annoying. Of course that doesn't necessarily mean that the characters they will play will also be annoying, but this video did not make me want to watch the show, no matter how much they confidently assure me that I will love it.

Yeah, me too! I'm sure that they are not going to be on his Christmas card list! 😊 You're right, Kripke did hint that there is a reason that Soldier Boy is still alive, and said that we would see him again. And it makes sense that if the government had someone so powerful in their possession, there is going to be the desire to use that power. They made sure that at the end they were ready to take him into captivity, with the gas mask and the chamber to keep him in. Yes, it might not be what the government has in mind, but that doesn't mean it wouldn't happen if they tried to use him for their own purposes. It is interesting that Vought, which has been working since the beginning to infiltrate Supes into the military, now may be looking to move them into positions of power in the political sphere. For all we know, their endgame may be to reach the point where basically Vought IS the government. I wonder if Victoria is working on her own, or if Edgar is still there behind the scenes?

Well, if the policy were to put down anyone whose trauma made them dangerous to others, you would need to do the same to everyone on the Boys team. Starting with Butcher, who would have been perfectly okay with the death of everyone in the Vought building if it meant he could get his revenge on Homelander -- if only Ryan had not been there. As a treatment for PTSD, though, it certainly is a way to avoid all those messy, time-consuming efforts to use therapy and medication to help those suffering from it! Now that the CIA has Soldier Boy back in their custody, though, I have to think they are going to see Soldier Boy's blasts as a weapon that they need to learn how to use, rather than a problem to take care of because it causes danger to civilians. I think it would be stupid for them to allow Soldier Boy to wake up in order to do this, but I also totally believe that the government would be stupid enough to try something like this.

I'm surprised that Soldier Boy did not make the connection. He was absolutely convinced that Black Noir, at least, would never have gone along with the plan unless it was approved by Vought (and he was right.) But in his desire for revenge against those who betrayed him, Soldier Boy focused only on his team. Maybe at first he just never believed that Vought would work with the Soviets? But after finding out that they were going to replace him, the connection between Vought and what happened to him was obvious; yet it still never seemed to occur to him to want to go after Stan Edgar. Or maybe he was so cynical about Vought that he expected them to do stuff like this, and just figured it was nothing personal. Unlike what his team chose to do, which was definitely personal.