all right let's get to it: the SPN finale ep
I have an excessive number of thoughts and feelings, which I'll now proceed to share with you, now that I've sort of processed them. Can someone please come talk with me about these? Because...so many feelings.
I woke up this morning after four hours of sleep with puffy eyes and a crying hangover, which I haven't had because of this show for years. And then I asked myself how I was feeling about the episode, with some distance, and the answer was...hollow. It makes me feel bad to know that the Winchesters are canonically dead. Like, no going back dead. I realize nothing in SPN ever dies, except when it does, apparently, but. I'm sad.
It's unfortunate that I was also pretty on the nose with my prediction of what might happen, but I guess the moral of this story is - when a writer shows you that they don't know how the hell to tell a story, then for the sake of your own sanity, BELIEVE THEM. SPN has been a hot mess for years. Dropped plotlines, stakes raised so high they lose meaning, characters dying pointless deaths, etc. The important thing to remember is that now? Now we own the story. As the show took great pains to explain to us, both textually and metatextually, the author is dead; long live the fan writer.
To that point specifically, the opening minutes of the show were...basically what Becky told Chuck the fans want. It was domestic!Winchesters, right down to the callback of the bros doing laundry. That was pretty funny. *g* That look at them being happy and living normal lives together was only, of course, to set us up for pain, because that's all this show knows how to do. At least the dog didn't die? But I knew the moment Dean hugged that dog, he was a goner. It was a huge tell. Dean doesn't get to be happy. That's practically in his genetic code.
And to THAT point...Dean's been ready to die for years. As far back as season 2. Usually for Sam, but you know, his self-sacrificial tendencies are not always selective. He was willing to die to kill Amara with the soul bomb. He's always been pretty fatalistic about it. Mostly because he lives on borrowed time - he's been brought back, and brought back, and on and on. When it was his time to go, he didn't have much of a problem with it, because now his work is done. The Big Bad is vanquished, Sam is alive and well and grown and capable of going on.
There were so many callbacks in Dean's death scene. I liked the callback to Swan Song, with "I'm not leaving you" and "It's okay Dean", but. My two faves were Sam reaching around to Dean's injured back and finding blood, which echoes Sam's first death in season 2 when Dean reached to the stab wound and realized Sam was dying; and Sam telling Dean "I can't do this alone" and when Dean says he can, answering "well I don't want to" which is a callback to the very first episode when Dean implored Sam to come with him. Now he's imploring Sam to go on alone. When he started to get scared there at the end - when he was begging Sam over and over to reassure him, to tell him it was okay, when Jensen was TEARING UP THE FUCKING ROOM WITH HIS ACTING, those microexpressions, the fear in Dean's eyes, and when Sam had to muster the will to tell him that it was okay, he could go now - that was when I lost my shit, reader. I really, truly did. Ugly crying. Sobbing. Fetal. He was so scared, it was so awful. :(
I've been a Dean girl since the first episode I saw, so this was very hard. Dean saying to Sam that he loved him so much, "my baby brother" - how he's always seen Sam, because that role and love and responsibility defined his entire life. Begging Sam to stay with him, and Sam in turn begging Dean not to leave him. UGH. The forehead touch, I'm weeping. And then Dean dies more or less in Sam's arms, sighs out with one last tear and drops his head on his shoulder like he's going to sleep and I just...didn't function again for a little while. Nope. Nope nope nope. That scene was so, so well done. All Dean ever wanted was for Sam to be happy and live a long life.
(And you can see from the side views of that scene that Jensen Ackles was crying very hard on some takes - not his close coverage, but wow. So many tears.)
But I'm just...Sam couldn't call 911??? REALLY SAM!??! Okay, I'm over it, but...that was really stupid. So stupid. Sigh. I mean yes, he'd be going to prison because of all the beheaded vampires, but. Sigh.
"It's always been you and me." *whimpers*
"I'm gonna be with you, right here. Every day you're out there living, and you're fighting, cause you always keep fighting." *sobs* *sobs more when I realize the callout to AKF*
"I love you so much. My baby brother." FUCKING END ME.
Dean basically told Sam all the things Sam knows, but needed to hear Dean say, so he could carry them with him for the rest of his long life. All the truths about loving him, looking up to him, how smart he is and how proud he was of him, and that was just...amazing. He was laying down wards of love all over Sam's psyche and soul, to protect Sam even after he was gone. So beautifully done.
I did love the fact that Dean lands in Heaven at the Roadhouse. However, I'm 10000000% sure that scene was written to include Castiel. (It was supposed to be a callback to the figurines on Becky's shelf - with Dean and Castiel standing in front of the Roadhouse. Fight me on this, I'm right.) There's a quasi-confirmed post on Tumblr that includes a tweet from one of the writers, re Covid interfering with bringing back 'people'. (Possibly Sam Smith, JDM and Misha Collins were those 'people'. It would have made sense.) It was good to get the info that Castiel IS in Heaven and helping Jack rebuild it correctly (called that one!) so at least he's not suffering in the Empty, and now that Sam has shown up, pretty sure Dean's next port of call is the grumpy self-sacrificial angel. But it's very sad we didn't get to see him. And I feel horribly for all the Destiel fans who wrote such brilliant meta, and connected dots that absolutely WERE there in the text...it's just that the writers are so abysmally stupid and close to their text, they could not find their own dots to connect them. Alas.
(Sidebar: I noticed Dean STILL has a trenchcoat in the trunk. By itself! And I really need all the fic regarding that coat. Like. Is it an old coat??? Why does he have a Castiel coat in there? He gave Cas the one he was carrying back around the 2nd or 3rd time Cas died, right? And Cas went to the Empty in his coat. THIS MADE NO SENSE. But I liked it anyway. I mean, the crumbs are what there is to take, so I'll take them.)
But oh how I do love the fact that Bobby was waiting for Dean, to hand him a beer and tell him Rufus is down the road and his parents are around the bend and Castiel helped arrange Heaven into the Heaven Dean deserves and they've been waiting for him. All the people they've lost were waiting for Dean, in a Heaven without walls, that won't trap Dean into reliving old memories. He gets to "live" anything he can dream or wish for. Loved. That.
Also loved that Dean wanted his car and there she was, and then he turns on the radio and it's...Carry On Wayward Son. Of course. We get the classic version for the start of the journey, and the cover version for the end. (That cover is gorgeous.) And I loved that Dean could FEEL the moment Sam's soul arrived in Heaven. That was...pretty great. The emotion coming off both those men was melting me, it's true.
Did not care at all about Sam's earthly journey. Eileen who? I mean. That is a dangling plot thread that's just annoying as fuck. Instead he got a FACELESS INVISIBLE WIFE and we know nothing about her, not even what she looked like or what happened to her. Of course he had a son, not a daughter. Of course he named his kid Dean. Of course he kept the dog and kept hunting for a while. But I mean...what did he DO with his life, other than become a father??? It's perplexing. And that WIG. Lord! Let us never speak of it again.
That moment where older Sam got into the Impala and just...touched her steering wheel. You could feel how much he missed Dean, and that hurt my soul. How come Dean gets to go to Heaven and Sam has to grow old without Dean?? That makes me mad on Sam's behalf. Yeah he had a kid, whatever, a new generation of hunters, sure okay. But ouch!!! This seems so awful for Sam, who admittedly was the less codependent of the two, but by this point in the story so much of his life is bound up with Dean's that it had to be like separating a couple limbs and half his heart. Not a loss he could really ever recover from. :(
I don't know. 2008 me would have loved this. And a large part of me still does, or at least parts of it. But 2020 me is like WHERE THE FUCK IS CASTIEL. And while I understand on a real-life level why it probably just couldn't be done to bring Misha back...I hate it. A lot. Killing characters is not a substitute for actual plot or story, it's a copout. It's 2020, we should be past this. But no.
And I think overall the execution of this was very clumsy. I get totally now why Ackles hated it. (Called that one too!) He really should have just told them no. He had enough clout to get it squashed. (But once they started down the path, he would have had no control over how that episode was rewritten due to COVID, which exed out Misha.)
In the end, the thing they had worked so hard for - a normal life, free to live and to die on their own terms - is the thing they both achieved. Team Free Will all died free of other influences, and are all reunited in Heaven, and...that is maybe the best ending we ever could have hoped for, for them. It's certainly all they ever wanted. And they got it.
One of the criticisms I've seen is along the lines of "But Dean would never leave Cas in the Empty and Sam would never let Dean just die, have the writers met them!??!' and the answer is, yes! The whole point of season 15 was to demonstrate some growth! They aren't frantic to throw themselves under buses anymore. They've learned. They can go on now. Hard as that is for fans who want the old codependent bros. That doesn't mean they don't love each other. (Two halves of the same soul? Sure, I buy it.) But the old ways of responding to loss had to go.
(Additional sidebar: the death scene had echoes of both Tony's death in Endgame - "You can go now" - and Arthur's in Merlin - "Just stay with me/just hold me" - and I'd like for you all to end me now, because apparently I can't get attached to a character unless they're fucking doomed.)
The writers blew it on Castiel, though. Full stop, no hedging, and it's unfortunate that this is going to leave a lot of bitterness in many fans' hearts.
Bring on the fanfic!!
I woke up this morning after four hours of sleep with puffy eyes and a crying hangover, which I haven't had because of this show for years. And then I asked myself how I was feeling about the episode, with some distance, and the answer was...hollow. It makes me feel bad to know that the Winchesters are canonically dead. Like, no going back dead. I realize nothing in SPN ever dies, except when it does, apparently, but. I'm sad.
It's unfortunate that I was also pretty on the nose with my prediction of what might happen, but I guess the moral of this story is - when a writer shows you that they don't know how the hell to tell a story, then for the sake of your own sanity, BELIEVE THEM. SPN has been a hot mess for years. Dropped plotlines, stakes raised so high they lose meaning, characters dying pointless deaths, etc. The important thing to remember is that now? Now we own the story. As the show took great pains to explain to us, both textually and metatextually, the author is dead; long live the fan writer.
To that point specifically, the opening minutes of the show were...basically what Becky told Chuck the fans want. It was domestic!Winchesters, right down to the callback of the bros doing laundry. That was pretty funny. *g* That look at them being happy and living normal lives together was only, of course, to set us up for pain, because that's all this show knows how to do. At least the dog didn't die? But I knew the moment Dean hugged that dog, he was a goner. It was a huge tell. Dean doesn't get to be happy. That's practically in his genetic code.
And to THAT point...Dean's been ready to die for years. As far back as season 2. Usually for Sam, but you know, his self-sacrificial tendencies are not always selective. He was willing to die to kill Amara with the soul bomb. He's always been pretty fatalistic about it. Mostly because he lives on borrowed time - he's been brought back, and brought back, and on and on. When it was his time to go, he didn't have much of a problem with it, because now his work is done. The Big Bad is vanquished, Sam is alive and well and grown and capable of going on.
There were so many callbacks in Dean's death scene. I liked the callback to Swan Song, with "I'm not leaving you" and "It's okay Dean", but. My two faves were Sam reaching around to Dean's injured back and finding blood, which echoes Sam's first death in season 2 when Dean reached to the stab wound and realized Sam was dying; and Sam telling Dean "I can't do this alone" and when Dean says he can, answering "well I don't want to" which is a callback to the very first episode when Dean implored Sam to come with him. Now he's imploring Sam to go on alone. When he started to get scared there at the end - when he was begging Sam over and over to reassure him, to tell him it was okay, when Jensen was TEARING UP THE FUCKING ROOM WITH HIS ACTING, those microexpressions, the fear in Dean's eyes, and when Sam had to muster the will to tell him that it was okay, he could go now - that was when I lost my shit, reader. I really, truly did. Ugly crying. Sobbing. Fetal. He was so scared, it was so awful. :(
I've been a Dean girl since the first episode I saw, so this was very hard. Dean saying to Sam that he loved him so much, "my baby brother" - how he's always seen Sam, because that role and love and responsibility defined his entire life. Begging Sam to stay with him, and Sam in turn begging Dean not to leave him. UGH. The forehead touch, I'm weeping. And then Dean dies more or less in Sam's arms, sighs out with one last tear and drops his head on his shoulder like he's going to sleep and I just...didn't function again for a little while. Nope. Nope nope nope. That scene was so, so well done. All Dean ever wanted was for Sam to be happy and live a long life.
(And you can see from the side views of that scene that Jensen Ackles was crying very hard on some takes - not his close coverage, but wow. So many tears.)
But I'm just...Sam couldn't call 911??? REALLY SAM!??! Okay, I'm over it, but...that was really stupid. So stupid. Sigh. I mean yes, he'd be going to prison because of all the beheaded vampires, but. Sigh.
"It's always been you and me." *whimpers*
"I'm gonna be with you, right here. Every day you're out there living, and you're fighting, cause you always keep fighting." *sobs* *sobs more when I realize the callout to AKF*
"I love you so much. My baby brother." FUCKING END ME.
Dean basically told Sam all the things Sam knows, but needed to hear Dean say, so he could carry them with him for the rest of his long life. All the truths about loving him, looking up to him, how smart he is and how proud he was of him, and that was just...amazing. He was laying down wards of love all over Sam's psyche and soul, to protect Sam even after he was gone. So beautifully done.
I did love the fact that Dean lands in Heaven at the Roadhouse. However, I'm 10000000% sure that scene was written to include Castiel. (It was supposed to be a callback to the figurines on Becky's shelf - with Dean and Castiel standing in front of the Roadhouse. Fight me on this, I'm right.) There's a quasi-confirmed post on Tumblr that includes a tweet from one of the writers, re Covid interfering with bringing back 'people'. (Possibly Sam Smith, JDM and Misha Collins were those 'people'. It would have made sense.) It was good to get the info that Castiel IS in Heaven and helping Jack rebuild it correctly (called that one!) so at least he's not suffering in the Empty, and now that Sam has shown up, pretty sure Dean's next port of call is the grumpy self-sacrificial angel. But it's very sad we didn't get to see him. And I feel horribly for all the Destiel fans who wrote such brilliant meta, and connected dots that absolutely WERE there in the text...it's just that the writers are so abysmally stupid and close to their text, they could not find their own dots to connect them. Alas.
(Sidebar: I noticed Dean STILL has a trenchcoat in the trunk. By itself! And I really need all the fic regarding that coat. Like. Is it an old coat??? Why does he have a Castiel coat in there? He gave Cas the one he was carrying back around the 2nd or 3rd time Cas died, right? And Cas went to the Empty in his coat. THIS MADE NO SENSE. But I liked it anyway. I mean, the crumbs are what there is to take, so I'll take them.)
But oh how I do love the fact that Bobby was waiting for Dean, to hand him a beer and tell him Rufus is down the road and his parents are around the bend and Castiel helped arrange Heaven into the Heaven Dean deserves and they've been waiting for him. All the people they've lost were waiting for Dean, in a Heaven without walls, that won't trap Dean into reliving old memories. He gets to "live" anything he can dream or wish for. Loved. That.
Also loved that Dean wanted his car and there she was, and then he turns on the radio and it's...Carry On Wayward Son. Of course. We get the classic version for the start of the journey, and the cover version for the end. (That cover is gorgeous.) And I loved that Dean could FEEL the moment Sam's soul arrived in Heaven. That was...pretty great. The emotion coming off both those men was melting me, it's true.
Did not care at all about Sam's earthly journey. Eileen who? I mean. That is a dangling plot thread that's just annoying as fuck. Instead he got a FACELESS INVISIBLE WIFE and we know nothing about her, not even what she looked like or what happened to her. Of course he had a son, not a daughter. Of course he named his kid Dean. Of course he kept the dog and kept hunting for a while. But I mean...what did he DO with his life, other than become a father??? It's perplexing. And that WIG. Lord! Let us never speak of it again.
That moment where older Sam got into the Impala and just...touched her steering wheel. You could feel how much he missed Dean, and that hurt my soul. How come Dean gets to go to Heaven and Sam has to grow old without Dean?? That makes me mad on Sam's behalf. Yeah he had a kid, whatever, a new generation of hunters, sure okay. But ouch!!! This seems so awful for Sam, who admittedly was the less codependent of the two, but by this point in the story so much of his life is bound up with Dean's that it had to be like separating a couple limbs and half his heart. Not a loss he could really ever recover from. :(
I don't know. 2008 me would have loved this. And a large part of me still does, or at least parts of it. But 2020 me is like WHERE THE FUCK IS CASTIEL. And while I understand on a real-life level why it probably just couldn't be done to bring Misha back...I hate it. A lot. Killing characters is not a substitute for actual plot or story, it's a copout. It's 2020, we should be past this. But no.
And I think overall the execution of this was very clumsy. I get totally now why Ackles hated it. (Called that one too!) He really should have just told them no. He had enough clout to get it squashed. (But once they started down the path, he would have had no control over how that episode was rewritten due to COVID, which exed out Misha.)
In the end, the thing they had worked so hard for - a normal life, free to live and to die on their own terms - is the thing they both achieved. Team Free Will all died free of other influences, and are all reunited in Heaven, and...that is maybe the best ending we ever could have hoped for, for them. It's certainly all they ever wanted. And they got it.
One of the criticisms I've seen is along the lines of "But Dean would never leave Cas in the Empty and Sam would never let Dean just die, have the writers met them!??!' and the answer is, yes! The whole point of season 15 was to demonstrate some growth! They aren't frantic to throw themselves under buses anymore. They've learned. They can go on now. Hard as that is for fans who want the old codependent bros. That doesn't mean they don't love each other. (Two halves of the same soul? Sure, I buy it.) But the old ways of responding to loss had to go.
(Additional sidebar: the death scene had echoes of both Tony's death in Endgame - "You can go now" - and Arthur's in Merlin - "Just stay with me/just hold me" - and I'd like for you all to end me now, because apparently I can't get attached to a character unless they're fucking doomed.)
The writers blew it on Castiel, though. Full stop, no hedging, and it's unfortunate that this is going to leave a lot of bitterness in many fans' hearts.
Bring on the fanfic!!