Supernatural: Season 2 (DVD)

OK, so I'm happy that finally there is something we female fans of supernatural series TV can perv on on a weekly basis (guys, you have: Charmed, Buffy, Ghost Whisperer, Medium, Hex, and so on), but the WB's Supernatural has yet to spark my interest. I eagerly tuned in to the first episode when it debuted and disinterestedly changed the channel about halfway through. I tried again a time or two, then gave up. I never watched anything from its sophomore season, and quite frankly was only vaguely aware that it had even been picked up again.

When the Season Two DVD showed up on my desk, I figured I'd give the series another shot — after all, stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki are mighty good-looking, and there's monsters and stuff.

The first episode deals with the aftermath of the death of the Winchester Brothers' demon-hunting dad (in the first season, he was just missing and his sons were out looking for him and solving supernatural crimes along the way), and it's pretty heavy and humorless. The second show, "Everyone Loves A Clown", is clearly inspired by Stephen King's It, and that's fine: It works. Writer John Shiban was clearly having fun with the carnival carnage, and the tried and true story moves right along.

Judging from the episode titles in Season Two, somebody is a big Led Zeppelin fan (yay!), so as I have time I will watch beyond the first two entries — but for now, having just uno and dos completed for this review, I have to say the show is too serious for its premise and the Winchester brothers are too angst-ridden to enjoy staying with hour after hour.

Season two of Supernatural has some good guest stars — The Exorcist's Linda Blair ("Usual Suspects"), Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer ("Roadkill"), and Saw II's Emmanuelle Vaugier ("Heart") to name a few.

Episodes:

1. In My Time of Dying

2. Everyone Loves a Clown

3. Bloodlust

4. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things

5. Simon Said

6. No Exit

7. The Usual Suspects

8. Crossroads Blues

9. Croatoan

10. Hunted

11. Playthings

12. Night Shifter

13. Houses of the Holy

14. Born Under a Bad Sign

15. Tall Tales

16. Road Kill

17. Heart

18. Hollywood Babylon

19. Folsom Prison Blues

20. What Is and Never Should Be (I Dream of Genie)

21. All Hell Breaks Loose: Part I

22. All Hell Breaks Loose: Part II

DVD Features:

Audio Commentary

Deleted Scenes

Featurette:1) The Episode From Hell: The Making of All Hell Breaks Loose Part II 2) The Devil's Road Map - urban legends featurettes, factoids, and more pertaining to each episode of the series 3)

Gag Reel

Jared's Original Screen Test

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Also on DVD…

Bones: Season 2

To Unravel A Murder, You Have To Strip It To The Bone.

Like a hipper, yet less music-driven Cold Case, Fox's weekly series Bones teams Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz as crime-solvers (she a forensic anthropologist, he an agent of the FBI) who identifying the long-dead bodies of missing persons by their bone structure and personality profiles.

Like all good TV male/female crime-solving teams, Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan and Special Agent Seeley Booth have a passion simmering just under the surface, and the actors do have an actual chemistry. Season Two keeps the snappy writing style and complex cases, but adds a little more dimension to the characters (which is fine, as long as it doesn't wade into the murky, soapy waters that Without A Trace did with their adultery, divorce, and drug addiction storylines).

One of the best episodes is "The Blonde in the Game", which concentrates on a serial killer — now in prison on death row, thanks to Bones — who feeds the duo info from his cell as they scour the woods to connect clues which don't quite add up. For one thing, a blonde's body found in a shallow grave has the right number of skeletal remains, but they don't all have the same DNA. The race is on when it's discovered that the next victim might still be alive.

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