Confession: I didn’t like the first season of Supernatural. I thought it was too slow, too dark (literally — the show looked like the camera lens was covered in charcoal), and the monster-of-the-week format too cheesy. The plot picked up a bit toward the end of the season, and by the next one, Supernatural found its footing as it expanded and created its own mythology and let the writers have fun with the material. I still suffered through all of that first season, though, mostly because of Jensen Ackles’s eyes but also because of the core relationship between the two brothers, which felt more natural and compelling than some of the other stuff I was watching on TV. From the very beginning, Ackles and Jared Padalecki were so convincing as siblings that I’d have believed you if you told me the actors grew up in the same household.
The two leads in The Winchesters don’t have that same spark, or much of a spark at all. It’s not that one couldn’t be built over time, but what Ackles and Padalecki had together onscreen was something special. I rewatched the Supernatural pilot a few days ago, and the chemistry between the pair is evident from the second we see them together as they fight each other in the dark on the floor of Sam’s college apartment. Their relationship deepened over the course of the show, obviously, but even in its earliest episodes, you could see that these two brothers would die for each other (again … and again … and again … and again). It’s still early in The Winchesters, but now that we’re past the pilot plot dump, it’s somewhat jarring to see the old Supernatural formula at work without a captivating central couple (I said what I said) to keep it going. But we’ll see.
“Teach Your Children Well†is a fairly standard Supernatural-esque monster-of-the-week one-off with a dash of metaplot sprinkled in. The cold open drops us into a hippie commune in Topeka, Kansas, where an unlucky dude named Barry wanders off with his girlfriend and gets attacked by a creature that looks like his dad but has CGI plant arms.
On the other side of the credits, Mary’s Scooby gang is still on the hunt for Samuel Campbell and the magical Acreda-killing thingy when they conveniently come across a news story about Barry’s disappearance. They decide to take on the hunt in hopes of finding Samuel, too — a familiar trope from Supernatural’s first season. John and Mary do the classic Winchester going-undercover-while-harassing-grieving-people act, complete with rockstar aliases and superthin backstories. This leads to both the commune and a surprisingly fun musical sequence set to “Aquarius,†which is thus far the only indication that this show takes place in the 1970s and not in the home-goods section of Urban Outfitters.
The hunter Scoobies split up for some sleuthing and learn the commune serves as an escape for young people who have fraught relationships with their parents, which sure sounds like a running theme! As more hippies disappear, the gang figures out that the creature terrorizing the commune is La Tunda, a Colombian monster who takes the form of its victims’ mothers to lure them in and feed them to her evil plants. In fact, according to the episode’s lore, La Tundra was originally a human woman whose first plant-food victims were her own disappointing children. A simple time-out should have sufficed, but who am I to tell someone else how to parent?
Since this episode is all about overbearing moms and dads, the action is interspersed with some Millie Winchester content back in Lawrence. Millie doesn’t want John to hunt because the supernatural world took his father away, and though that sounds somewhat reasonable, there’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense if you know Henry Winchester’s backstory from the source material. Why do they talk about Henry going missing as if it happened three months ago instead of in 1958? Didn’t Henry tell the boys he was from Normal, Illinois? And how did a prissy nerd who talks like he’s on Downton Abbey end up married to a cool lady who fixes cars? Are we just retconning everybody now? Explain yourself, Robbie Thompson! Anyway, Ada shows up, tells Millie that Henry used to come into her shop back in the day (all the way from Normal??), and hands her the address of the Scooby gang’s motel in Topeka.
This is the lead-up to the least-surprising twist in television history: John finds his mother waiting for him in the motel only to discover she’s really La Tunda in Millie form. After a quick fight, more terrible CGI, and a trip to the magic people-eating-plant garden, the Scoobies dispense with the monster and free the hippies before anybody gets turned into fertilizer. The gang goes back to Lawrence, John makes up with Millie, and everyone bonds over pizza and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, all while a mysterious hooded figure that appears to be friends with spidery monsters does some CGI in the woods. On to the next episode!
“Teach Your Children Well†isn’t necessarily bad, and The Winchesters does carry over some of its promise from the pilot. Nida Khurshid and Jojo Fleites are finding their sea legs as the hunter Scoobies, and Drake Rodger is a surprisingly good John. (Meg Donnelly continues to put in the weakest performance of the main cast, which is disappointing.) Still, for a prequel to work, it needs something to justify its existence. Better Call Saul worked well because it offered a deep dive on a fascinating character who didn’t get quite enough airtime on Breaking Bad. While I’m still on the fence about House of the Dragon, it’s telling a distinct, fully formed story that exists solidly in the world built by its source material.
I’m not sure The Winchesters is doing that just yet. Plot was never Supernatural’s strong point, and that’s starting to feel even more evident without the core relationship between the two brothers to power the series. Part of me thinks this show would be more fun to watch if you haven’t seen the original and aren’t hung up on the canon, but at this point, I’m not sure it’s compelling enough to stand on its own. We can give it a minute.
Family Business
• According to interviews, we won’t get an explanation for the backstory retcon until episode 13, which I guess is a good way to get people to watch a whole season of the show.
• “Americana,†i.e. the brothers’ love theme (yes) from the Supernatural episode “Swan Song,†plays not once, not twice, but THREE times in this installment, which is simply too many times. You gotta use the good stuff sparingly!
• Nothing on Mary’s missing cousin and very little on John’s war trauma this week.
• I get that Ackles has had like ten different voices since 2005, but he’s been away from Dean for too long. The voice-over at the start of the episode only vaguely sounds like him.
• “These purple flowers, I’ve never seen anything like them before. I’ll have to check the lore on this.†Latika is clearly taking on Sam Winchester’s role as resident research nerd.
• One of my favorite things about Supernatural is how quickly it gave up on putting people in monster makeup and made every bad guy exist in human form. (Never forget the “dragon†from season six that was just some dude.) Seems like The Winchesters is going to try more CGI monster stuff, which could go one way or the other.
• The rock-star alias thing was one of the worst bits in Supernatural, and I really, really wish it wasn’t being brought back for this. Not to mention that up until the mid-1970s, Fleetwood Mac was an obscure British blues band; Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham didn’t join until 1974, and Rumours didn’t come out until 1977. Not sure John would have even heard of Mick Fleetwood in 1972.