It’s been 20 years sinceSupernaturalfirst hit television screens on the now-defunct WB back in September 2005, but fans haven’t let up on their love for the show. Still making waves on streaming, the show continues on as a fan-favorite in an age where spooky procedurals are mostly a thing of the past. But there’s one Season 1 episode that continues to get vast amounts of hate from the Supernatural community, even all these years later. Funny enough, stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki tend to agree with the sentiments themselves — though not for the reasons you might think. That episode? The infamous “Bugs.”
Both ‘Supernatural’ Stars Hated Filming “Bugs” Due to the Literal Bugs Involved
If you ask just about any Supernatural fan what the worst episode of the show is, undoubtedly “Bugs” will be listed as at least one of them. Though not the lowest-rated of the show (that dishonor belongs to “Bloodlines”), nor even the most poorly constructed, this Season 1 episode was the first hour of the show to really underwhelm audiences. After fantastic episodes like the haunted mirror-centric “Bloody Mary” or the gross body-horror that is “Skin,” fans just didn’t think that “Bugs'” little titular antagonists were as frightening as, say, a Wendigo stalking your campsite. When looking back on the show’s 20th anniversary, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles reflected on this infamous episode, and when asked if it was the worst of the show, they seemed to agree with the general fan consensus.
“Yes, I think it was [the worst] , because of what we went through and what it ended up being,” Ackles explained toEntertainment Weekly. “Basically, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.” According to Ackles and Padalecki, the pair were surrounded by somewhere around 70,000 bees for the episode and were being constantly stung during filming. It’s one thing to be in a room with a guy wearing a Hook Man costume or with fake vampire teeth, but it’s another thing entirely to put your actors in the same room as the creatures (or insects, in this case) that they’re supposed to be battling. Padalecki went on to elaborate that things only got worse when they were told by a bee specialist that they had to pretend to swat the bees by simply guiding them across the room rather than actually swatting, which is what the scene called for. “It was the most absurd thing,” Padalecki noted.
Of course, the worst part of the whole experience (you know, aside from getting stung several times by bees) was that the bugs didn’t do the job. “Then they get to post [production] , and the bees didn’t show up on camera,” Ackles added. “So, they had to VIXFX the bees.” In the end, all the pain that Ackles and Padalecki had to experience on set for the sake of authenticity went out the window. Either because of the size of the insects or the camera’s frame rate, the bees failed to make their mark on the actual episode. It’s no wonder that the Supernatural stars look back in horror at “Bugs,” an episode just about anyone would want to forget after that filming experience. Nevertheless, we’re still here talking about it 20 years later…
“Bugs” May Not Be the Worst of ‘Supernatural,’ but It Was Certainly a Major Misfire
Again, “Bugs” has become notorious among Supernatural fans due to its clear use of genre clichés, an uninspired plot, and stakes that never quite added up when compared to taking down otherworldly ghosts and demons. While perhaps not really the worst of the show (it generally looks better than most later season episodes, like “Raising Hell”), the whole project put Ackles and Padalecki through a literal bug-infested hell, which certainly wasn’t worth the effort. Of course, it’s also worth noting that Ackles, Padalecki, and Misha Collins all speak poorly of Supernatural‘s seventh season as well, particularly the strand of episodes where the show was making constant (and childish) jokes about the Leviathan leader Dick Roman (James Patrick Stuart). Over 15 years on the air, it’s no wonder that Supernatural sometimes got things wrong. But, in some ways, all of that can be traced back to that very first failure in “Bugs.”
When pit up against several other Season 1 favorites (of which most episodes from the inaugural season are), “Bugs” stands out as being overly reliant on creeping out the audience rather than truly scaring them. Bugs crawling out through a shower head or bathtub drain don’t quite live up to a possessed scarecrow hunting our heroes through an apple orchard or even a demon-possessed pilot trying to crash a plane full of passengers post-9/11. The stakes simply don’t feel as high, and the whole idea that this subdivision was being built on cursed Native American land feels like something we’ve seen many times on The X-Files before (there are some unfortunate similarities to that show’s worst episode, “Teso Dos Bichos,” which was ironically also directed by the late Kim Manners).
No matter if you feel like “Bugs” really is the worst of Supernatural or simply one of the worst, there’s no mistaking that it was the show’s first real misfire after several great standalone horror stories. It’s easy to look back at Season 1’s impressive catalog of episodes and single out episodes like “Bugs” or “Route 666,” but the truth is, two subpar episodes in the span of a 22-episode season is pretty impressive for any show, let alone one just getting started. As Supernatural turns 20 this year, revisiting the series reminds us of just how good we had it back when the Winchesters were still hunting on air.
Supernatural is available for streaming on Netflix in the U.S.
- Release Date
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2005 – 2020
- Network
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The WB, The CW
- Showrunner
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Eric Kripke
- Directors
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Philip Sgriccia, John F. Showalter, Kim Manners, Thomas J. Wright, Charles Beeson, Guy Norman Bee, Richard Speight Jr., Mike Rohl, John Badham, Steve Boyum, Amyn Kaderali, Jensen Ackles, Tim Andrew, Eduardo Sánchez, Jeannot Szwarc, P.J. Pesce, Nina Lopez-Corrado, James L. Conway, amanda tapping, J. Miller Tobin, Stefan Pleszczynski, John MacCarthy, Jerry Wanek, Ben Edlund
- Writers
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Meredith Glynn, Davy Perez, Raelle Tucker, Cathryn Humphris, Brett Matthews, Nancy Won, John Bring, Ben Acker, Daniel Knauf, David Ehrman, James Krieg, Trey Callaway
