Supernatural: Season 03 (2008)

Supernatural: Season 03 (2008)

16 episodes, approx 42 mins each

We've come a long way since Dean the hunter called upon Sam the pre-law student to help him find their missing father.

The simplistic Dean = acceptance / Sam = denial standings that served as a basic foundation for Season 01 have evolved. The brothers are now more complex characters with attributes and emotional responses that give rise to even deeper inner conflicts, an element that's crucial to all good drama, regardless of the genre it's tethered to.

Unfortunately, Season 03 doesn't make best use of that growth. The Writers Guild of America strike (November '07 - February '08) had a direct impact on the show. Series creator Eric Kripke has revealed that the strike caused a number of things to be truncated, changed or pushed back in order to accommodate the problematic schedule. The planned number of episodes also took a hit, reduced from the usual 22 to just 16.

Despite the upset behind the scenes, there's still some good stuff. One of my personal favourite additions is an opportunistic thorn in the brothers' side, a woman who values profit over morality, played by Lauren Cohan. The character makes an occasional reappearance. I'd love to have seen more of her interfering ways, but her story was one of the ones that got truncated.

On the surface Dean is living it up as best he can (for reasons), while an element of fatalism creeps in. It kind of works and kind of doesn't, but the less I say about it the better because it's getting increasingly difficult to avoid spoilers while writing about the series.

The event that ended Season 02 functions as a kind of reset switch for the creature-of-the-week scenario. The arc isn't forgotten, though, and while it doesn't feature quite as much as I'd have liked, an intriguing new big-bad for the guys to battle is introduced. Season 03 also has the fan-favourite story that takes place on Tuesdays (Ep 11); that'll make sense if you watch it.

There are a couple of stories that I suspect were inspired by John Carpenter films, one that's good and one that isn't. The Xmas episode (08) has a noteworthy moment but wasn't very interesting otherwise. Near the end (Ep 13) is the worst episode of the entire series to date - the Ghostfacers are a pathetic addition. I'd like to say that they get tossed aside thereafter, but they don't. I can't recall how many more times they feature, but I know it's more than one.

A couple of characters that played an important role in Season 02 are absent completely; I missed seeing them. And finally, while the finale is dramatic, it does feels a little rushed.