Tag: Season Premiere

Nineteen More To Go…. Supernatural’s Season 15 Premiere!

Nineteen More To Go…. Supernatural’s Season 15 Premiere!

spnfans

 

The experience of watching Supernatural for this season is going to be very different than the fourteen seasons before. It’s Season 15, the final season of the show I’ve been loving for fourteen years and reviewing for almost as long. I usually write an emotional, bouncing-with-anticipation review of the season premiere after waiting impatiently, my heart in my throat and overflowing with gratitude that I get another twenty plus episodes with my favorite fictional characters. I’ve never watched a season premiere and thought ohgod, we’re one episode closer to the end – until now.

I wanted desperately to just watch the episode and savor every second of it, every moment with the Winchesters and company something to cherish now that I know we won’t have that many more moments with them. I didn’t want to think about how it was the last time I’d sit down to watch a season premiere, or that now we have one hour less with Supernatural than we had the day before. I just wanted to squee, but I couldn’t shake the knowledge that we’ll need to say goodbye soon. One down, nineteen to go. Somebody stop me from counting!

I’m sure my reviews will be a little different this season too. I can’t be cavalier about anything – not about my intense love for the show and the characters, and not about my frustration when any of those 42 precious minutes of an episode are squandered. So expect even more passion than usual (if that’s possible) and a little more rage than usual every now and then. I’ll try to temper it, honest.

‘Back And To The Future’ wasn’t the strongest season starter we’ve had, and there were things that made me grind my teeth or scratch my head, but there were also things I enjoyed. I selfishly – and perhaps unfairly – want every second of the last season to be exactly what I want to see, and I recognize that’s not going to happen. I’ll still likely rail against it anyway.

‘The Road So Far’ had Bob Seger’s ‘The Famous Final Scene’ playing, which is not only melancholy and dramatic (which I thought was fitting) but meta as hell, cueing us into the fact that this season is probably going to be very meta indeed.

And then we got the last title card. Sorry, I couldn’t help the L word. It made me instantly emotional to think we’ll never hold our breath waiting to see what the title card will be and then gasp at how bloody awesome it is.

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Are We Ready, Fandom? Supernatural Season 15 Premieres Tomorrow

Are We Ready, Fandom? Supernatural Season 15 Premieres Tomorrow

spnfans

 

It’s Wednesday, October 9, 2019. It hasn’t been a noteworthy date in the past, but to many of us who are Supernatural fans, it’s feeling like one now. It’s the night before Supernatural’s Season 15 premiere – and the last time I will ever sit here trembling in anticipation of a new season of the Show that changed my life a decade and a half ago. Like most humans, I don’t do all that well with change – and I certainly don’t do well with loss. Supernatural has been incredibly important to me, in countless ways. It brought me some of my closest friends, gave me a community that I cherish, pulled me out of my anxiety-caused reticence to go places and do new things. It inspired me to attempt career moves, world travel, new relationships. It turned me into a writer, because I had so damn much to say about this show and these characters and this fandom that even fear and self doubt couldn’t keep me from saying it.

It’s been a long time that Supernatural and I have been together. It’s a long term relationship, with all the benefits that brings and all the potential losses that carries. I’ve grown used to the rhythm of the seasons, intense weeks of episode after episode when I join other fans in jumping up and down in joyous celebration of what we love and gnashing our teeth over what we hate, followed by intermittent hiatus breaks where we all speculate about what’s going to happen next and read a lot of fanfic. Supernatural is part of the ebb and flow of my life, enriching it in the best of ways. It’s personal, this thing I have with the show – and I don’t mean that in the pathologizing sense of the old scary term “parasocial relationship”. I mean the real one, the validating and inspiring and healthy one that lets me immerse myself for 42 minutes a week in a fictional world with beloved characters who manage to teach me about myself and feel like old friends. There’s research on this folks, I’m not making it up. It’s good for you. And for me.

The past week has seen article after article in all the mainstream media publications that cover all the shows and are well aware that a venerable series is about to end. I remember when no one was writing about Supernatural. When my first phone call to the studio was met with an incredulous “you want to write a book about this show?”  I remember season premieres heralded mostly by fandom, mainstream media unaware of this hidden gem that only we knew was going to be something very special. I was frustrated for a long time that the rest of the world didn’t recognize Supernatural for what it was, or its cast for how amazing they are. Now, as it prepares to tell its last stories, it seems like the whole world finally knows. And I’m so very proud of our Little Show That Could, but each time I read an article I also think, you don’t really know. Not the way we do.

You don’t really know what this show means to us or how much it’s changed our lives. (Unless you’ve read Family Don’t End With Blood, and then maybe you have an idea). You don’t really know how we feel right now, caught between incredible joy and anticipation for tomorrow night and the constant looming knowledge that this is the last time we’ll have this. As always, I’ll have a slice of pie and a glass of wine and a comfy blanket ready as I sit down to watch tomorrow night. As always, I’ll also have a big box of tissues. But this time, I need those tissues tonight too. I’ve needed them all week, every time I read another headline. This time I’m steeling myself for the first of the lasts, desperately not wanting that to be the case. I’m determined to cherish every moment I have left with my favorite show and my favorite characters, but I also know this will be a rough season full of anticipatory grief as well as celebration. Luckily I know I’m not alone – as always, the fandom community who really does get it is there to take the last trip on this wild ride with me, just as it’s always been.

Buckle up, SPNFamily.

See you on the flip side.

— Lynn

You can read how Supernatural really has

changed lives – for the actors and the fans –

in Family Don’t End With Blood – links on

the home page