As I told some of my fellow Cinema Studies students last week, I don’t normally recommend watching Supernatural. The reasons are many and varied, but usually boil down to my viewpoint that the show’s themes aren’t terribly original. That’s changed, over the years, but I’m usually quite bored when I watch it, and the usual reason I do watch it is because it comes on right after Smallville.
Every now and then, however, they have a really well written episode, a seriously funny episode, or one that’s fortunate enough to be both. Such an episode was “Clap Your Hands If You Believe” which carried hilarious subtitle of “Fight The Fairies!” (or at least should have), and then there was last week’s episode, “The French Mistake”, the main characters were transported to an alternate reality where they were actors playing their characters. In the soon to be immortalized words of Castle from an episode a few weeks back, “it was too meta…” Jensen Ackles playing Dean Winchester discovering that Dean Winchester was a character being played by the actor Jensen Ackles… The only way to unfuck that is to realize that Ackles was ultimately playing a unsteady version of himself. Nonetheless, it was a funny and well written episode that undoubtedly made a lot of other cinephiles like myself laugh whole heartedly… Assuming I wasn’t the only one that watched it…
So, being in my usual state, I decided to watch tonight to see if they might do anything interesting. Ultimately, it wasn’t the plot that caught my attention, though it was very X-Files-ish, but it was the fact that it actually had two X-Files alumni appearing. “And Then There Were None” starred Mitch Pileggi, known to X-Files fans as Assistant Director Walter Skinner, and Steven Williams, the legendary Mr. X himself! While I always recognize Pileggi, and knew that he’d been playing the role of Samuel Winchester, the primary character’s previously deceased grandfather, Steven Williams has only appeared in 4 episodes according to IMDB, and I didn’t recognize him right off the bat. As the episode went on, his face and voice began to ring some bells, and I looked him up discovering that it was indeed Mr. X.
It took me a full hour after the show went off to make the connection and realize that everything about tonight’s episode was in essence an X-Files tribute. Mr. Kripke, you’re slowly turning me into a fan!