Supernatural: Carry On (15x20)

Oh my god. Lol. So... did Andrew Dabb forget to read back through his finale script one final time before deciding it was finished? Because like... Dean says "if we don't keep living, all that sacrifice (Cas and Jack) will be for nothing." Cut to a comically short time later, where Dean dies and is just like "time to go, let's not keep fighting, I'm tired lol."

Like WHAT did I just witness. I'm so grateful, in this moment, to a little show called The Magicians, because in April of 2019 they ended their fourth season with such an egregiously terrible decision that I literally couldn't sleep for a week, I was shaking and intermittently sobbing, I had never felt so betrayed and devastated over any piece of media before. After that, I've sort of become numb to bad endings, and this is no exception. This episode was absolutely terrible and I'm just sort of like... meh. I'll ignore it. Whatever.

I do want to forego the usual "pro" and "con" sections in this review, and do a more traditional full-on ramble about my thoughts, because they're kind of convoluted, if I'm gonna be honest.

The first thing I want to say, is that this wasn't the worst finale I've ever seen. Objectively, it was a terrible episode of TV and an insulting wrap-up to a fifteen-year-show. But I have a very specific category for the worst finales ever, and those are the ones that provide endgame states for the characters that are... unfixable in a post-canon but still-canon-compliant world. So, for example, the How I Met Your Mother finale killed off the titular mother and betrayed years of buildup, and that's a real-world sitcom. There's no resurrecting people from that shit. Or like. Game of Thrones being an obvious recent example. The Rise of Skywalker is a good movie example.

This? It's a little different. The endgame state of Sam and Dean and Cas is that they all die and spend eternity in Heaven, where they get to be with all their loved ones. I mean, sure, we don't get to see that, we only get a throwaway line to imply that Cas made it out of Super Turbo Hell The Empty, but that's the endgame state of the characters. And that's more or less what I would have wanted, as like a... years after canon situation. Right? So yeah, this was a bad episode, but if I edit in the shit I wanted to see, none of it contradicts the canon in a way that's not workable. It's a sad world we've come to where this is all I can really grasp at, but there is a perverse sort of comfort in that.

So, should we talk now about how Dean dying is a betrayal of what they said this whole season, and maybe whole show was about? Ha. It's so ridiculous. It's embarrassing. I watched Dean's final moments and I was embarrassed for Jensen. For Dean. For all of us watching.

Just. Watch the end of 15x19 again, okay? Watch it, and hear what they're saying. Yay, we killed God, we killed the author of the story, which means we get to write our own stories, finally. We get to do that. After all this time, we're finally free. And what does freedom look like? It looks like Dean dying on a run of the mill hunt.

We get this little montage of Sam and Dean at the Bunker, you know? They're doing laundry and going on jogs and cuddling with Miracle the dog, and they're brushing their teeth and going on hunts, I guess. And the emotional resonance from that scene was just kind of... ennui? And boredom? And that's what's so terrible and depressing about this ending. It's so empty, because Dean didn't get to do the thing he said he was fighting for. Sure, he was always fighting for Sam, but he should have been able to fight for himself, too, right? He should have been able to fight for a life after the years of programming. He should have gotten to be a rock star or a chef or worked at an animal shelter or become a foster parent or grown old as Sam's brother, as an uncle to his kid. He should have been able to find love, if he wanted that.

Look, I'm not even mad that Dean died in a "mundane" way. It's not like "nooo Dean is too coooool to die in such a laaaame way, he's a bad-ass and he should have gone out in a blaze of glory!" That's actually not what I'm mad about at all. Sam died old in his bed, and Dean should have been able to do that too. This whole season, since finding out that Chuck was the ultimate big bad, was supposed to be about free will, and Dean never got to figure out a way to be happy and find peace. That's fucking dour and stupid.

I kept saying, in the buildup to this finale, that a depressing, grim-dark ending to this show would be a failing of the themes they set up, and, hey, they didn't go grim-dark, because the writers did not think this was grim-dark. They thought it was powerful and emotional and resonant. You can tell they thought that, even though they're... uh... what's the word. Wrong? Yeah. Wrong. You know what I realized while watching this? It was just a lamer, less resonant and appropriate version of Sam's sacrifice at the end of season five.

Right? Because after Sam yeets himself into hell to save the world, Dean just has to keep going, and as Cas says, "you got what you wanted, more of the same." Just... more of the same. And Dean couldn't hack it, he was miserable without Sam, and Sam came back and we got ten more years of the fucking show. And now... what, we just get that in the other direction? Because Sam is the strong one and can soldier on without Dean because his codependency was a little less crippling? Wow, what a great ending for him, I guess. It doesn't work because we've seen Sam without Dean, and he falls apart too. 

And now the show ends with Sam alone. Sure, he gets married to a blur in the background and has a kid, but let me ask you a question, here. Did Sam... want to be a father? I didn't know that was a thing he wanted, that would make him happy, honestly. I had no idea. So this doesn't seem like it works as something even remotely satisfying as an endgame state for him either. It's bleak.

And it's bleaker because there's nobody else in this fucking episode, y'all. The other big theme in all of Supernatural, after "free will" would be "family don't end in blood." And guess what? Apparently it does? Apparently Sam and Dean are each other's whole worlds and nothing else matters? We get... an implied wider world but we don't get to see it. We don't get to see Eileen, Jody, Donna, anybody left alive for Sam. So from the standpoint of characters that we know and give a shit about, Sam loses Cas, Jack, and Dean and lives the rest of his life lonely and sad. Nobody else even comes to Dean's funeral. It's just Sam alone with the dog. Like... that's bleak.

This ending gave the fucking Wincest shippers everything their hearts could desire, for fuck's sake. Like. Why did they cater to that and not follow through on the idea that they had created a family and community beyond each other? You know, this thing called character growth?

To take a brief break from the negativity, I will say something here about Sam and Dean. In the weird hysterical euphoria of the whole Destiel thing a couple weeks ago, I lost sight of something, which is that for me, the draw of this show has always been the relationship between Sam and Dean. I was never a brothers-only person, but it was their fucked up codependent bond that drew me to the show over the years. I loved the idea of Destiel, but I never thought it was going anywhere, so really I loved Castiel, the character, separate from the context of his relationships. Having a big dramatic death scene where Dean says "I love you so much" and there's a forehead touch and Dean saying "it's always been you and me" and confesses that he was scared to get Sam at Stanford because he didn't know how to survive if he didn't have him, and to have Sam say "don't leave me" and then give Dean permission to go... I mean, all of this is catnip, right? All of this is great, like, in isolation, it was such an amazing "broment," as the fandom says. I mean, it made no sense with context, it was utterly insulting in every way, but Jensen and Jared acted their lil' hearts out and I could tell they were really in the moment.

So let's talk about Cas for a second, while I have you here... they never should have done the big gay confession. They just shouldn't have even fucking bothered. I'm telling you, that makes this whole thing worse. It felt completely intentional and weird that Dean never acknowledged the confession, never told Sam, never had a moment where he specifically reckoned with Cas' loss. But that's what I knew would happen. I knew it in my blood and bones, and as the meta started pouring in, I knew people were getting their hopes up for nothing. See, Cas saying "goodbye Dean" and the handprint on the arm... I knew that was their catharsis, that was the writers' and Misha's big goodbye to the character of Castiel. They thought they fucking nailed it. I knew we wouldn't see him again.

Like I said before, I have to be satisfied with an endgame state that doesn't totally suck, right? So, we get this throwaway line from Bobby that Jack fixed Heaven and made it not suck, and that Cas helped. This implies a multitude of things that are... comforting. At least Cas doesn't get that dour, dark, helpless oblivion that I worried he'd get. We can assume Jack plucked him out of the Empty, that he gets to be with his son, and that, if the fic writers so choose, Dean and Cas can have lots of gay sex up in Heaven. I think Misha not being in this finale was frankly a slap in the face to one of the biggest and most important characters the show has ever seen, you know? And I think that they kept him out of it so we could have Schrodinger's Destiel. Because if we'd seen Cas in heaven, and he hadn't confessed his big gay love, Dean could have been like: "hey Cas! Buddy! Good to see you, my friend." But since we did have the love confession, whatever Dean did upon seeing Cas would have to mean something in that context. So instead we didn't get to see him at all.

Which is stupid.

Also stupid is that the big sacrifice was to save Dean's life and then a couple weeks later he gets impaled on a rusty nail and dies anyway. Thanks for making the whole thing feel so utterly pointless and empty. No pun intended. Wow, they did Misha dirty, here, didn't they.

Turning back to Sam's ending, let's just talk about that for a minute. Like I said, I'm happy he got to live a long life and die an old man, what Dean always wanted for him. But nothing about that ending was more poignant because Dean was gone. In fact, it just made it super duper depressing and lame. There was no reason Dean couldn't have gotten a happy life, too. It adds nothing that he died young and unfulfilled. Like, you know how people joke about the end of the Titanic, where you see that Rose's Heaven is reuniting with Jack and everyone else on the ship, and people will say "well, gosh, that's kind of a slap in the face to Rose's family" since she clearly got married and had kids and grandkids? This is literally that! Like, having an ending where a young-again Sam Winchester gets to Heaven, and his whole Heaven, the thing that he needed to find peace after death, was a return to his brother... look, I'm not mad about that, but what the fuck about nameless blurry wife that we couldn't even confirm to be Eileen for some reason? What about everyone else?

And did Sam... keep hunting? Did he go to law school? Maybe there were background details that confirmed what he ended up doing with the rest of his life besides becoming a husband and father, but I didn't see evidence of it because I was too busy rolling my eyes out of my skull at how dumb this all was. So Sam just gets a generic "raking leaves in the yard" ending, like we saw for Dean at the end of season five, with nothing to challenge that. Even though we've seen why life outside of hunting, life without Dean, isn't satisfying for Sam, we're now supposed to accept it as how he spends the rest of his life, without seeing him put the work in to get there?

One thing I realized watching this episode is that it tries to play the middle. Like, with the Cas thing, they didn't want to make his noble gay sacrifice totally meaningless, so they couldn't just pop him back into the story, but they did give us one single throwaway line to reassure fans that he's not still in The Empty. So, people who don't give a shit about Cas can assume he's off being Jack's assistant and doesn't really interact with humans in Heaven. People who do give a shit about one of the show's main characters can assume that he has a home in Dean's little Heaven neighborhood too, and they all get to buddy around for eternity. People who don't like Eileen? Well, Sam married some nobody who we never got to meet. People who liked her? Well, you can't prove that wasn't Eileen, can you? Even Dean driving around in the impala waiting for Sam to die so he could finally be happy with his fucking soulmate or whatever. Time in Heaven is weird, Bobby says. It's metaphorical. You could assume that the driving montage was actually intercut with other moments, with Dean getting to see dear old mom (and dad, I guess, but ugh), and spending time with Bobby, with OG Charlie, with other familiar faces, and new ones as they finally reach their own deaths on Earth and come up to party with the rest of the gang.

Like, in a better show, in a world without Covid, maybe they had plans along these lines, to get more guest characters back and show Dean getting sappy hellos to a bunch of side characters in Heaven. To be quite honest, I would not have been mad about that. If you're going to make Dean die young and never give him the chance to find out who he could have been when the choices were all his own, which is, in case I haven't made that clear, a horrendous and insulting ending for his character... at the very least you could have given us the cheesiness of seeing him hug his friends in Heaven. Jeezus.

I want to hammer in this point one more time before I wrap up: they ended the show by saying that character development didn't matter. They had Dean's dying speech be a meta reference to the pilot episode of the show, they had him saying "it's always been you and me" and then they confirmed that with everything they had. Sam became a father, but did he have a happy life? Seems like he pined away for his dead brother for decades and then died. If the pilot had never happened, if Sam had stayed at Stanford and Dean had gone on hunting by himself, you know what would have happened? Sam would have had a "normal" life and married a woman and had a kid, I guess, and grown old, and Dean would have died fighting some vampires in a barn. This show has been on for fifteen years, and the ending did not honor anything about the journey the characters had been on.

A particularly egregious example is the early scene with the pie festival, where Sam is like "I'm sad about Cas and Jack" and Dean is like "if we don't go on living it won't honor their sacrifice" like... yeah, I get it, bringing people back from the dead time and time again is supposed to be a bad thing that Sam and Dean did for each other because they were selfish. So Sam giving Dean permission to go was supposed to be a growth moment. Sam and Dean accepting that Cas was gone and not even asking Jack to make sure he got sent to a happy eternity instead of oblivion, that's supposed to mean they've learned their lesson. And what a fucking lesson to leave things off on. Jesus, this is grim.

So like. As I try to figure out what to say at the end of this review, I will point out one glimmer of light in the darkness, which is that this finale isn't going to ruin the rewatchability of the show for me. I can still come back and re-watch without feeling like the whole thing is ruined by the ending. It's more than I can say for some other shows.

But honestly, if this was the ending we were going to get? Why the fuck not leave it open-ended? I did not enjoy 15x19 particularly well, but at least that episode left them on the open road, with a wide future ahead of them. Anything might have happened. It's their turn to write the story, right? Chuck is dead, the writer is "dead", the show is over, and now the possibilities are endless. That would have been an anticlimactic ending, for sure. But this ending just turns around and slaps the whole point of that first ending in the face and says "haha bitch you thought". They don't get to write their own stories. We see exactly how those stories end, and it's lame. Leave something to the imagination, yo. Leave it vague how and when they died, what their lives turned into. Show them in Heaven, getting to their peace at last, reuniting with their friends, including Cas. Put in a significant glance between Dean and Cas, and leave it to the internet to go wild about what it could mean. And never answer when fans ask "so what happened, when did they die? Did they keep hunting?" Just leave it vague. If this was the only ending they could come up with, I'd rather be left with questions.

This finale gets a low score from me, because they couldn't even pull on the right heartstrings to make me sentimental...

4/10

But the show as a whole? Well, it was a mess, and it had some seriously high highs and some devastatingly low lows. It's a bummer that the lowest low came in how they tried to wrap up the whole shebang, but like I said, this ending isn't going to ruin the whole fifteen-year run for me. We get to make up what happens next, and we can make Jack's new and improved Heaven our post-canon fix-it haven. I don't think there's ever been a show in my life quite like Supernatural. The fandom is so bonkers. The meta narrative of the show is so convoluted and twisty and goes in so many unexpected directions. I liked watching this show for its own sake, and also as like... an anthropologist trying to discover something about humanity and American values specifically. It wasn't always a pleasant experience, but it was one I know I'll never forget. My heart tells me to give the show as a whole a high score, representing the many, many hours of joy and dread and delight and horror I got over the near decade I've personally been watching. How do you wrap up fifteen years in a score out of ten?

9/10