How do we carry on?
Okay, so I've been doing a metric poop ton of thinking about SPN's finale. Which is why I was up at 5:30 a.m. writing about it, and I'm not sure how much sense this will actually make. Pity me later.
But first off, gosh, I hope everyone found something they liked about it. Me? I found a lot I absolutely ended up loving about it, but I had to creep into that. Probably because the shock of it being done done had to sink in, first.
I was actually looking forward to the series ending, but not in a cruel way. It was simply time. Jared's analogy of a beloved old dog that needed to be gently ushered across the Rainbow Bridge was not inaccurate. And lawd, fandom has gotten nigh impossible to navigate without copious filters in place.
So yeah, it was time. 15 years is a helluva run, a record-breaking one, in fact. There is sadness, but also pride. And I'm not kidding when I say “fandom is the friends we made along the way” and I hope I keep those friends, if it's meant to happen. Annnnywho, the finale …
There's two broad, rambling points I want to explore about it: what actually happened in the episode, and how fandom at large has been responding. It's all about expectations.
My fandom buds had already been collecting leaks and spoilers and putting together dropped hints, so we were pretty sure we had a few plot points sealed: Dean would die first, and Sam would go on to live his life and die of old age. But after that? We had no safe bets. These two outcomes were honestly the ones I'd been fearing since the end of the show was announced. Wow, did I not want Dean going out the Big Damned Hero, and Sam sliding into mundane domestication, with a boring law career, 2.5 kids, a dog, wife, and apple pie life. I wanted the ol' blaze of glory ending for both boys.
Then 15x18 aired and Cas made his “homosexual declaration of love” (Misha's words, not mine). I was gobsmacked. They. Went. There. If I'd been nervous about the way they were going to wrap the series before? I was absolutely shook in that moment. Now, I had to be resigned to the eventuality that it would be Cas in the mix there somewhere too. Because certainly, they wouldn't leave Cas with that sticky, uncomfortable trope of Bury Your Gays. Bob Berens wrote 15x18, and he is in fact queer, so the predictions from the Destiel side of fandom began feeling all too possible. They'd been asserting for years that the “healthiest” ending would be one where Dean would shed his repression and admit his romantic love for Cas, Sam would wind up with (insert female love interest of the moment here), and the Winchesters' “toxic codependency” would be broken. Happily ever after, after all! Romance wins! (I feel obligated to note that the only characters in the series who thought of Sam and Dean as toxically codependent have been the antagonists. Discuss.)
Well.
As it turned out, I should've kept trusting the way Jensen had been playing Dean for all these years: not canonically into guys. I shouldn't have let fandom noise tie me up into knots. There was hero worship and deep friendships and a bit of hedonism, but when Dean Winchester tells you he doesn't swing that way? And it's reiterated by the guy who plays him? And the writers and powers-that-be behind the show tell us it's not a story about romance? No amount of dancing with lamps or whatever other perceived circumstantial evidence will change that. I learned a new word this week: “apophenia”, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Yeah, this.
I'm absolutely not saying you can't head-canon Dean however you want. Write the character however he works for you. This is no smear on that, in the least. That's the glory of fanworks!
But this does lead to an unfortunate (though potentially interesting) dilemma, if we accept that Cas was, indeed, falling in love with Dean throughout the course of the show: what about the hinky shit Cas did to Sam? I'm especially side-eyeing 'Beat the Devil', the episode where the guys entered an abandoned mine that was rumored to house a nest of feral vampires. Sam got jumped, his throat torn out, and dragged off down a passageway. Dean, rarin' to follow, was stopped by Cas, who-after cursory examination-assured him Sam was gone. Dean barely had time to process this before he was coaxed to carry on, to save the innocent bystanders. Now, I look back at that and see Cas in a different light. (This episode was also written by Berens, btw. Hmmm.)
All those things Cas did to Sam that were rather dire … pulling him out of Hell soulless, bringing down the wall in Sam's mind that had been put there so he wouldn't remember Hell and go insane, to name a couple biggies … I now view with a stern side-eye. Of course there were also times Cas could've done away with Sam and he didn't, because maybe Cas weighed the worth of offing Sam vs. how destroyed Dean would be? I'm not 100% convinced Berens was playing the long-game, slow, unrequited burn, but it does pose some juicy questions!
It also threw my expectations for the finale way up in the air. Then 15x19 aired, and I chose to try to make peace with stuff, for my own emotional sanity. If the show had ended after 15x19 (Jack is the new hands-off God, Cas died a hero, life goes on) I would've been perfectly content, but we had one final episode, and anything could happen. If rumors were true and Dean died first, hung out with Cas in Heaven until Sam died of old age and joined them, becoming the third wheel/shipper side-character Destiel fandom seemed so fond of? So be it. People have disappointed me before, and they'll disappoint me again. (I'm looking at you, American politics.) It hasn't been easy being a Sam fan, sloshing around in the fandom oceans of Destiel, where the juggernaut ship routinely marginalizes one of the co-leads into little more than a rowboat, tethered to its side (if not sunk altogether). But I was ready.
I sat down with a bottle of wine and my 19-year-old son, who's an occasional watcher, to actually enjoy the last episode. I never expected to be so thoroughly wrecked in such a perfect way. We both cried our fool eyes out. It was glorious. And even though the rumors pretty much bore out, it was so masterfully done, I was LIVING.
Later I discovered that a lot of the dialogue and Easter eggs were added by J2 (verified by Jared during a StageIt panel 11/22), but regardless, this finale was the culmination of a legitimate Hero's Journey in the mythology sense (not to be confused by the debatable SPN episode of the same name, lol!). This lightbulb moment was pointed out by juliasets, and she's spot on. The Hero's Journey is defined as a “common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.”
Sam and Dean had to wrap back around to their beginnings again, after defeating God-return to the prophecies they'd written for themselves-to finish their story.
How many times had Dean noted that hunters don't live long lives? He always thought he'd die young and leave a good looking corpse, go down swinging. Which, of course, he's done multiple times, but there was something evolved about this particular death. For almost his entire life, Dean defined himself by two things: his expertise as a hunter, and his success at keeping Sam alive. He knew his strengths were, well, his strength, his destructive capabilities, his fisticuffs, his quick wit. But he saw himself as a grunt, Daddy's blunt instrument. This was probably a combination of John's A+ parenting and Dean's incongruously low self-esteem, but it served to humanize the character and soften his cocky, devil-may-care exterior. The interior nature of Dean Winchester was far more tragic.
During the three or so episodes leading up to the finale, I noticed other characters notably praising Dean. For his protectiveness, his bravery, his ability to show and inspire love. They were telling Dean things he so desperately needed to hear, punctuating that he was a worthwhile person, all on his own. He wasn't just the job, or the older brother. He was Dean. And I think he really internalized those observations, after all these years. He'd grown into himself. We see a lighter Dean in the finale than we have in a great many episodes. Until, well, YOU KNOW.
And Sam. The boy with the demon blood who only ever wanted to be normal. Clean. Safe. Sam tried time after time to extricate himself from a life of daily danger and uncertainty, only to return again and again. And why?
Dean.
I feel like Sam had finally come to terms with his world being the hunting world, because Dean would never leave hunting. Dean was starting to make noises about it, but nah. Pipe dreams. As long as people needed saving, they'd be hunting things. Sam left behind the idealistic aspirations of childhood, and listened to his heart. And it was okay, because those desires made him what he was, brought him along on his path. He struggled through addiction, possession(s) mental illness, a century of infernal abuse, and came out the other side whole. Sam weighed the risks and rewards with his big brain, and made his decision. It wasn't perfect, it was hardly happily-ever-after, it was messy, but it was his willful choices and it resulted in good. This is what we do, as adults. We find joy in a life, well lived. Even if it isn't a happy little fairy tale.
And here's where Sam returns to his beginning. Dean dies in that barn, shocked and rueful with the irony of the circumstances, but he makes Sam promise he'll always keep fighting (sob!) and assures Sam that he can and will go on. Sam's strong enough, even if in that moment, Sam doesn't think so. We think we're sad about Dean's death? Oh, just wait until you see his baby brother, dealing with the fallout. It's such bone-deep grief. But Sam honors Dean's wishes. He takes his misery and loneliness and funnels it into simply getting by until one day, he snags a case and decides to never return to the bunker. He walks away from hunting, but carries on as a civilian. Has a son. Periodically visits Baby in the garage, and misses Dean all over again. But Sam keeps putting one foot in front of the other and fulfills a lifetime of carrying on, and repairs the broken experience of his own family into a long and peaceful life.
Meanwhile, in Heaven, Dean has one last lesson to learn. Instead of immediately surrounding himself with friends and family who've passed on, he gets in his celestial version of Baby and just … drives. One of the things he used to fear-being alone-is that last hurdle. And he drives by himself until at long last, Earth time catches up with Heaven time, and there on a beautiful bridge in the middle of nowhere, he finally stops and reunites with Sam.
It was tonally perfect. COVID did the finale a favor, imho. But maybe if they'd been able to include a cast of a zillion, some pretty vocal parts of fandom who hated the “Wincest” ending would've been somewhat placated.
Yeah, they're calling it Wincest, and I'm like … y'all do know that means sex, right? And what Sam and Dean have on the show is absolutely love, but why the hell does a huge swath of fandom seem to think that Eros is the end game for every relationship? The thing that SPN did so damned well was explore this deep bond between these two brothers. This has always been its bread and butter. Not many shows risk sidelining romance. (Remember: SPN is still a horror series, not a Hallmark Channel Xmas movie.) SPN dared to say “Sam and Dean? They are two halves of one whole.” Even the general audience was fascinated. The show never indicated anything else was more important than the Winchesters, and I'm sorry some fans fabricated a scenario where their personal subtext overrode the text. I've been really bummed out by the many horrible comments and reviews and insults targeted at the cast and crew, because Destiel only got half-canonized. I wish they'd have stopped playing themselves. I wish certain fandom “reporters” and BNFs had stopped chasing clout and been more honest in what was canon and what wasn't. But here we are and I guess we'll just wait until they exhaust their fury or get distracted by the next topical, shiny thing. I hope next time, they latch onto a show with the actual rep they're looking for.
There were soooo many other delightful and ridiculously moving and neat little hidden nuggets in this, our finale, but I've run on enough and this is already tl;dr, so I'll leave it here. I'm relieved it's done. I'll miss this stupid show. I'll adore it forever, and I'll especially adore the people I've met through it. We'll always have fandom, my babies...
But first off, gosh, I hope everyone found something they liked about it. Me? I found a lot I absolutely ended up loving about it, but I had to creep into that. Probably because the shock of it being done done had to sink in, first.
I was actually looking forward to the series ending, but not in a cruel way. It was simply time. Jared's analogy of a beloved old dog that needed to be gently ushered across the Rainbow Bridge was not inaccurate. And lawd, fandom has gotten nigh impossible to navigate without copious filters in place.
So yeah, it was time. 15 years is a helluva run, a record-breaking one, in fact. There is sadness, but also pride. And I'm not kidding when I say “fandom is the friends we made along the way” and I hope I keep those friends, if it's meant to happen. Annnnywho, the finale …
There's two broad, rambling points I want to explore about it: what actually happened in the episode, and how fandom at large has been responding. It's all about expectations.
My fandom buds had already been collecting leaks and spoilers and putting together dropped hints, so we were pretty sure we had a few plot points sealed: Dean would die first, and Sam would go on to live his life and die of old age. But after that? We had no safe bets. These two outcomes were honestly the ones I'd been fearing since the end of the show was announced. Wow, did I not want Dean going out the Big Damned Hero, and Sam sliding into mundane domestication, with a boring law career, 2.5 kids, a dog, wife, and apple pie life. I wanted the ol' blaze of glory ending for both boys.
Then 15x18 aired and Cas made his “homosexual declaration of love” (Misha's words, not mine). I was gobsmacked. They. Went. There. If I'd been nervous about the way they were going to wrap the series before? I was absolutely shook in that moment. Now, I had to be resigned to the eventuality that it would be Cas in the mix there somewhere too. Because certainly, they wouldn't leave Cas with that sticky, uncomfortable trope of Bury Your Gays. Bob Berens wrote 15x18, and he is in fact queer, so the predictions from the Destiel side of fandom began feeling all too possible. They'd been asserting for years that the “healthiest” ending would be one where Dean would shed his repression and admit his romantic love for Cas, Sam would wind up with (insert female love interest of the moment here), and the Winchesters' “toxic codependency” would be broken. Happily ever after, after all! Romance wins! (I feel obligated to note that the only characters in the series who thought of Sam and Dean as toxically codependent have been the antagonists. Discuss.)
Well.
As it turned out, I should've kept trusting the way Jensen had been playing Dean for all these years: not canonically into guys. I shouldn't have let fandom noise tie me up into knots. There was hero worship and deep friendships and a bit of hedonism, but when Dean Winchester tells you he doesn't swing that way? And it's reiterated by the guy who plays him? And the writers and powers-that-be behind the show tell us it's not a story about romance? No amount of dancing with lamps or whatever other perceived circumstantial evidence will change that. I learned a new word this week: “apophenia”, the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things. Yeah, this.
I'm absolutely not saying you can't head-canon Dean however you want. Write the character however he works for you. This is no smear on that, in the least. That's the glory of fanworks!
But this does lead to an unfortunate (though potentially interesting) dilemma, if we accept that Cas was, indeed, falling in love with Dean throughout the course of the show: what about the hinky shit Cas did to Sam? I'm especially side-eyeing 'Beat the Devil', the episode where the guys entered an abandoned mine that was rumored to house a nest of feral vampires. Sam got jumped, his throat torn out, and dragged off down a passageway. Dean, rarin' to follow, was stopped by Cas, who-after cursory examination-assured him Sam was gone. Dean barely had time to process this before he was coaxed to carry on, to save the innocent bystanders. Now, I look back at that and see Cas in a different light. (This episode was also written by Berens, btw. Hmmm.)
All those things Cas did to Sam that were rather dire … pulling him out of Hell soulless, bringing down the wall in Sam's mind that had been put there so he wouldn't remember Hell and go insane, to name a couple biggies … I now view with a stern side-eye. Of course there were also times Cas could've done away with Sam and he didn't, because maybe Cas weighed the worth of offing Sam vs. how destroyed Dean would be? I'm not 100% convinced Berens was playing the long-game, slow, unrequited burn, but it does pose some juicy questions!
It also threw my expectations for the finale way up in the air. Then 15x19 aired, and I chose to try to make peace with stuff, for my own emotional sanity. If the show had ended after 15x19 (Jack is the new hands-off God, Cas died a hero, life goes on) I would've been perfectly content, but we had one final episode, and anything could happen. If rumors were true and Dean died first, hung out with Cas in Heaven until Sam died of old age and joined them, becoming the third wheel/shipper side-character Destiel fandom seemed so fond of? So be it. People have disappointed me before, and they'll disappoint me again. (I'm looking at you, American politics.) It hasn't been easy being a Sam fan, sloshing around in the fandom oceans of Destiel, where the juggernaut ship routinely marginalizes one of the co-leads into little more than a rowboat, tethered to its side (if not sunk altogether). But I was ready.
I sat down with a bottle of wine and my 19-year-old son, who's an occasional watcher, to actually enjoy the last episode. I never expected to be so thoroughly wrecked in such a perfect way. We both cried our fool eyes out. It was glorious. And even though the rumors pretty much bore out, it was so masterfully done, I was LIVING.
Later I discovered that a lot of the dialogue and Easter eggs were added by J2 (verified by Jared during a StageIt panel 11/22), but regardless, this finale was the culmination of a legitimate Hero's Journey in the mythology sense (not to be confused by the debatable SPN episode of the same name, lol!). This lightbulb moment was pointed out by juliasets, and she's spot on. The Hero's Journey is defined as a “common template of stories that involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed.”
Sam and Dean had to wrap back around to their beginnings again, after defeating God-return to the prophecies they'd written for themselves-to finish their story.
How many times had Dean noted that hunters don't live long lives? He always thought he'd die young and leave a good looking corpse, go down swinging. Which, of course, he's done multiple times, but there was something evolved about this particular death. For almost his entire life, Dean defined himself by two things: his expertise as a hunter, and his success at keeping Sam alive. He knew his strengths were, well, his strength, his destructive capabilities, his fisticuffs, his quick wit. But he saw himself as a grunt, Daddy's blunt instrument. This was probably a combination of John's A+ parenting and Dean's incongruously low self-esteem, but it served to humanize the character and soften his cocky, devil-may-care exterior. The interior nature of Dean Winchester was far more tragic.
During the three or so episodes leading up to the finale, I noticed other characters notably praising Dean. For his protectiveness, his bravery, his ability to show and inspire love. They were telling Dean things he so desperately needed to hear, punctuating that he was a worthwhile person, all on his own. He wasn't just the job, or the older brother. He was Dean. And I think he really internalized those observations, after all these years. He'd grown into himself. We see a lighter Dean in the finale than we have in a great many episodes. Until, well, YOU KNOW.
And Sam. The boy with the demon blood who only ever wanted to be normal. Clean. Safe. Sam tried time after time to extricate himself from a life of daily danger and uncertainty, only to return again and again. And why?
Dean.
I feel like Sam had finally come to terms with his world being the hunting world, because Dean would never leave hunting. Dean was starting to make noises about it, but nah. Pipe dreams. As long as people needed saving, they'd be hunting things. Sam left behind the idealistic aspirations of childhood, and listened to his heart. And it was okay, because those desires made him what he was, brought him along on his path. He struggled through addiction, possession(s) mental illness, a century of infernal abuse, and came out the other side whole. Sam weighed the risks and rewards with his big brain, and made his decision. It wasn't perfect, it was hardly happily-ever-after, it was messy, but it was his willful choices and it resulted in good. This is what we do, as adults. We find joy in a life, well lived. Even if it isn't a happy little fairy tale.
And here's where Sam returns to his beginning. Dean dies in that barn, shocked and rueful with the irony of the circumstances, but he makes Sam promise he'll always keep fighting (sob!) and assures Sam that he can and will go on. Sam's strong enough, even if in that moment, Sam doesn't think so. We think we're sad about Dean's death? Oh, just wait until you see his baby brother, dealing with the fallout. It's such bone-deep grief. But Sam honors Dean's wishes. He takes his misery and loneliness and funnels it into simply getting by until one day, he snags a case and decides to never return to the bunker. He walks away from hunting, but carries on as a civilian. Has a son. Periodically visits Baby in the garage, and misses Dean all over again. But Sam keeps putting one foot in front of the other and fulfills a lifetime of carrying on, and repairs the broken experience of his own family into a long and peaceful life.
Meanwhile, in Heaven, Dean has one last lesson to learn. Instead of immediately surrounding himself with friends and family who've passed on, he gets in his celestial version of Baby and just … drives. One of the things he used to fear-being alone-is that last hurdle. And he drives by himself until at long last, Earth time catches up with Heaven time, and there on a beautiful bridge in the middle of nowhere, he finally stops and reunites with Sam.
It was tonally perfect. COVID did the finale a favor, imho. But maybe if they'd been able to include a cast of a zillion, some pretty vocal parts of fandom who hated the “Wincest” ending would've been somewhat placated.
Yeah, they're calling it Wincest, and I'm like … y'all do know that means sex, right? And what Sam and Dean have on the show is absolutely love, but why the hell does a huge swath of fandom seem to think that Eros is the end game for every relationship? The thing that SPN did so damned well was explore this deep bond between these two brothers. This has always been its bread and butter. Not many shows risk sidelining romance. (Remember: SPN is still a horror series, not a Hallmark Channel Xmas movie.) SPN dared to say “Sam and Dean? They are two halves of one whole.” Even the general audience was fascinated. The show never indicated anything else was more important than the Winchesters, and I'm sorry some fans fabricated a scenario where their personal subtext overrode the text. I've been really bummed out by the many horrible comments and reviews and insults targeted at the cast and crew, because Destiel only got half-canonized. I wish they'd have stopped playing themselves. I wish certain fandom “reporters” and BNFs had stopped chasing clout and been more honest in what was canon and what wasn't. But here we are and I guess we'll just wait until they exhaust their fury or get distracted by the next topical, shiny thing. I hope next time, they latch onto a show with the actual rep they're looking for.
There were soooo many other delightful and ridiculously moving and neat little hidden nuggets in this, our finale, but I've run on enough and this is already tl;dr, so I'll leave it here. I'm relieved it's done. I'll miss this stupid show. I'll adore it forever, and I'll especially adore the people I've met through it. We'll always have fandom, my babies...