heaven and hell

Liz’s Giant Supernatural Skip/Watch List

For better or worse, I am in the apparently somewhat unique situation (???) of having sat through all 300+ (at the time of writing) episodes of Supernatural. I’ve been asked multiple times by multiple people about making skip/watch lists for one section or another, so I decided I might as well take this curse and make something good out of it: I present for your consideration a whole-ass spreadsheet of each and every last good, bad, & fugly Supernatural episode there is.

If you used to watch Supernatural and were thinking about catching back up for old times’ sake, if you heard it got good again while you weren’t looking, if you heard [your favorite character here] came back and wanted to see what the fuck THAT was all about, or even if you’re thinking about jumping in for the first time and you’re overwhelmed by the sheer SIZE of it all, here’s your good news of the day! Better still: each episode comes with a small description, so if you JUST wanted to watch for the Dean/Cas parts or the Mary Winchester parts or whatever, you need only Ctrl+F it and skip through at your convenience. (Unfortunately, this spreadsheet does look/work better if you are able to access it on a computer.) I will keep updating this list for as long as I keep watching Supernatural—which at this point is beginning to look like the rest of my natural life probably.

EDIT NOVEMBER 2020: I’ve been asked a few times if I’m going to complete this list. The answer is yes, but it’s not very high on my priorities list, because in order to do that I’m going to need to rewatch Season 15, which is a rollercoaster ride for many reasons, mainly my not particularly enjoying some of it very much. You can expect an update anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months from now. Sorry.

In the meantime, I have a VERY rough guide on which of the missing episodes I’d personally skip/watch right here. This isn’t very refined or detailed, but hopefully it’ll hold everyone over until I can get around to filling it in properly. Happy watching!

tldr: spn itself is a relic from another era, but it was the blueprint for the way modern fandom functions.

so: the year is 2005. buffy ended 2 years ago and they see a gap for another genre tv show with a cult following (it’s working out ok so far with smallville so why not try that again) so they pick up supernatural. charmed will be ending within a year. they also have gilmore girls so all in all they have a bunch of girly shows and they also see opportunity to target a male audience. GWB is president.

During S1, when they were going through some wardrobe choices, Jensen picked up an amulet from a list of items, because he reasoned that Dean, being a hunter would wear various charms to ward off the Evil. When you think how hunters are also shamans of the spn universe, you’d see how thoughtful this gesture was, how Jensen put so much effort in building Dean as a character, right from the day 1.

This is what writers, storytellers do. They build all these backstories for their characters, they have head-canons and relevant tidbits and interesting insights that define their characters.This is what Jensen was doing. He was visualizing Dean as a person, he was adding layers, details to Dean, he was testing the waters, he was becoming Dean.

The show mainly focuses on Sam and Sam’s arcs. We have had writers who openly favored Sam or Cas or Charlie, who wrote exclusively for those characters. (Sera, Edluand, Robby). We had Jeremy Carver calling Dean “boring” in front of an audience. We had Robert Singer on record describing Dean as “all brawn and mentally deficient”. In light of all these I’d say any popularity Dean achieved is not because of writer’s efforts, it is in spite of their efforts.

So, yes, if Dean is an iconic character today, if Dean still attracts attention and wins hearts, if Dean still remains sympathetic despite all that he went through/all the things he’s done- I think the credit should go to Jensen Ackles.

1k follower make me choose