Image courtesy of Everett Collection
Published Jun 3, 2026, 2:36 PM EDT
Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.
Sign in to your ScreenRant account
While Supernatural has plenty of iconic episodes, the show also inevitably released a couple of duds in its time, and its worst episode remains a laughably bad piece of horror TV. Alongside the most iconic sci-fi horror cop show The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The WB’s 15-season hit Supernatural is one of the best blends of police procedural formatting and supernatural story elements in TV history. Starring Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as a pair of mismatched brothers tasked with hunting down supernatural phenomena across America, the show was a reliably fun genre TV mainstay.
As the series continued, Supernatural’s lore and world-building grew increasingly complex, and what started life as a monster-of-the-week horror series eventually became an incredibly ambitious blend of buddy comedy, character drama, fantasy, religious horror, action, and mystery. Despite how successful these later seasons were, many fans still fondly recall the show’s early monster-of-the-week era as a highlight. Like the ‘90s classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural undeniably got a little more serious after the show began developing a multi-season myth arc.
However, nostalgic looks back on the show rarely remember just how brutally bad some of Supernatural’s earliest monster-of-the-week outings actually were. Not only did one of the show’s worst episodes not work at the time, but the outing hasn’t even aged well in hindsight 21 years later. Season 1, episode 8, “Bugs,” arrived early in Supernatural’s run, and, if every season 1 outing had been this weak, the show might have never become the cult sensation it later turned into among fans.
"Bugs" Is Indicative Of Supernatural's Early Season Struggles
The plot of “Bugs” starts out fairly promising, with the discovery of a construction worker’s dead body, complete with an entirely dissolved brain, in a housing development. However, things start to take a turn when Sam and Dean learn that the development is being built on Native American land that was the site of a genocidal massacre, prompting a chief to lay a curse on its future settlers.
While this plot is mercifully nowhere near as poorly handled as Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s worst episode, which awkwardly mocks the Native American genocide itself, the storyline is still a hackneyed, overly familiar one that relies heavily on outdated stereotypes. It doesn’t help that the crux of the episode centers on Sam and Dean fighting off a swarm of bugs throughout a long, arduous night that translates to about four minutes of screen time.
Even Supernatural's Cast Members Hate “Bugs"
“Bugs” doesn’t work for a whole host of reasons, the most compelling being that the titular threats aren’t all that scary onscreen. Hilariously, the production subjected the show’s stars to working with real bees throughout the scenes where they are attacked by a swarm of supernatural bugs, only to then edit in shoddy CGI bugs when these real-life bees didn’t look at all impressive.
The result was that the show’s cast endured real-life stings for an episode that still ended up looking laughably un-scary, and the all-important night-long siege that the episode revolved around was cut down to just a few minutes of actual screen time. While Supernatural was never the darkest or goriest horror show, this episode’s threat was simply too tame for viewers.
Over two decades later, few viewers have mounted a defense of “Bugs” online, although some have noted that the behind-the-scenes chaos of the episode’s production makes re-watching it pretty unintentionally amusing. However, Supernatural’s worst episode is still far from scary, and “Bugs” certainly doesn’t reveal how great the show’s potential eventually proved to. be once the blend of buddy comedy and horror drama ironed out its early kinks and nailed the formula that allowed the series to last for over 14 seasons.
Release Date 2005 - 2020
Showrunner Eric Kripke
Writers Meredith Glynn, Davy Perez, Raelle Tucker, Cathryn Humphris, Brett Matthews, Nancy Won, John Bring, Ben Acker, Daniel Knauf, David Ehrman, James Krieg, Trey Callaway
English (US) ·