Entertainment

The 'Supernatural' Spin-Off Trailer is Here

by Kadeen Griffiths

The closer we get to the premiere of Supernatural: Bloodlines (formerly known as Supernatural: Tribes ), the more excited we have reason to get. The Supernatural episode that will air on Tuesday, April 29 will double as the backdoor pilot for Supernatural: Bloodlines, in which Sam and Dean Winchester roll into Chicago and introduce us to all of the dangling threads that will be explored further in Bloodlines. The first trailer for Supernatural: Bloodlines is technically just a promo for the next episode of Supernatural, but it was still more than enough to whet our appetites.

"So you're saying there are five monster families that run Chicago?" says Dean Winchester in the promo. "What is this? Godfather with fangs?"

Why yes, Dean, it certainly is.

The sneak peek introduces Ennis Ross, played by Lucien Laviscount, who, according to The Hollywood Reporter, loses his fiancée during a crossfire of the monster war and trades his police academy training in to become a hunter after learning the history between the monster families. He seems pretty green in the trailer, since Dean and Sam appear to be treating him like a rookie while he insists that he "knows what he saw", which means that the backdoor pilot is going to show us the event that launches Ennis onto the journey that we'll be following him in when Bloodlines premieres.

As good of a show as Supernatural is, it has always been a complete fail when it came to proper representations of women and people of color. Reoccuring female characters were few and far between and most reoccuring people of color were either bad guys or eventual lambs for slaughter. Bloodlines is their chance to fix all that and they seem to be taking it by casting a person of color as the main character and rounding out the cast with intriguing female characters like Margo Hayden, a shapeshifter attempting to become the new head of Hayden monster family, and Violet Durant, a werewolf with a Romeo and Juliet-esque plot with Margo's brother, David.

The closest Supernatural ever came to having regular females in the main cast was adding Bela Talbot and the demon Ruby in season three and neither girl survived past the end of season four. We'll probably end up watching Ennis lose his fiancée early on in the backdoor pilot, because what is a show like Supernatural without a disposable woman to act as an angst catalyst for the male hero, but the patriarchy wasn't defeated in a day and the promise of complex female characters in the series itself is too strong to ignore. Bloodlines is Supernatural's chance to stop with the racism and misogyny already. If they do, maybe it might even become a mainstream hit.

Watch the trailer below.

Image: The CW