9.20 Initial reaction: WTF?
Well, that wasn't a waste of 42 minutes of my life. Because I only spent about 10 minutes watching it. As soon as the Supernatural title card showed up, I decided to fast-forward through every scene that didn't include Sam and/or Dean. So these are the notes I took last night:
Oooh maybe this is Dean in a hoodie killing all the boring monsters?
Oh, a dead girlfriend, THAT'S original!
Lucien Lavinscourt? WTF kind of name is that?
Bonham and Peart! \o/
(Skipping all the Bloodlines crap) This should go quickly
"This one's labelled Susan!"
Kids, back in my day, a "spinoff" meant one or more popular characters were actually spun off, like a little satellite, from their mother show. For example, for those of you old enough to remember, All in the Family begat The Jeffersons, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show gave us Rhoda and Lou Grant. Or if you're not that old, how about how The Simpsons spun off from The Tracey Ullman Show, or The Cleveland Show came from Family Guy. That's a spinoff. A beloved character with their own history and storyline gets a show of their own.
What we saw last night? That wasn't a spinoff. That was someone borrowing (and mangling) canon from one show and creating another, completely different show. And then shoehorning a couple of beloved characters from another show into it. A true Supernatural spinoff would have been if Garth and his new vampire family were given a show, or Jody and Alex.
Anyway. I knew I didn't care about the "spinoff," but what The Powers That Be did last night took me beyond "don't care" and straight into "I resent that this show even exists." Because they wasted an episode of Supernatural (at this point in the season!) on this crap.