SUPERNATURAL “Roadkill.” The CW Television Network; 15 March 2007 (Season 2, episode 16. Jared Padalecki (Sam Winchester), Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester). Guest star: Tricia Helfer. Series creator: Eric Kripke. Teleplay: Raelle Tucker.

   This series seems to have sneaked up on a lot of people, having just finished its 14th season in April of this year. That’ a lot of monsters, ghosts and other supernatural beings for Sam and Dean Winchester to have chased down and eliminated from the Earth.

   Although there have been several overall story arcs, none of which I’m really familiar with, “Roadkill” is a standalone episode, which was fine with me, this being the first one I’ve watched since perhaps the first one or two of the series.

   It begins with Molly McNamara and her husband driving all but lost on an isolated highway and bickering at each other abut it when unable to avoid a figure in the road, they crash down a ditch and into a tree. When Molly wakes up, her husband is no longer in the car, and worse, he seems to have completely disappeared.

   Luckily Sam and Dean are driving on the same road and come to her rescue. They are looking into stories that stretch of the road is haunted, and that the “man” Molly saw on the road may be looking for revenge for his death several years earlier.

   Supernatural apparitions on the highway at night — a spooky premise for a ghost story if ever there was one, and this one’s no exception. There’s also a nice twist or two before Sam and Dean’s job is finally done, after pondering the question for which the two brothers have no answer: where do their adversaries go after they’ve been released from their terrestrial bonds?

   Of the two brothers, Dean is the more hardnosed one, while Sam shows an occasional more sentimental side. There’s a good rapport between the two actors, as there’d have to have been from the beginning for the series to have lasted as long as it has. I kind of think of them as Frank and Joe Hardy some ten years later, after discovering where and what their father Fenton Hardy was doing on all those trips out of Bayport when they were younger.