Supernatural Season Five
Okay so. Just finished watching the finale of Supernatural season 5 and it was… okay…? I guess. I figure I’ll just ramble about the whole season since I haven’t really in awhile, and most of my problems with the episode stem from stuff they’ve been doing all along.
One of the major problems this season is that it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. I mean, there are lots and lots of episodes that are just Sam and Dean running around killing stuff and solving mysteries like in the first and second seasons. It’s very much a monster-of-the-week kind of formula and a lot of those episodes were really well done, and were fairly enjoyable. But at the same time, this isn’t season one or two. They aren’t living in a vacuum anymore. They’ve got a plot they have to deal with that they set up quite brilliantly in the previous season, which makes these monster-of-the-week episodes seem really out of place. The writers usually think to mention that the apocalypse is… y’know… right around the corner, Lucifer is running free, and people are dying, but that’s all the relevance those episodes have.
I actually would not have had a problem with that, except that when it got down to the last few episodes and they had to set up the finale… it felt rushed. This isn’t the first time either. The same thing happened last season, though season four did quite a bit more to get the plot set up and going. It just so happened that it needed one or two more episodes to really give the story the right weight without the finale seeming half-assed and shoddy. Season five on the other hand, had a lot of ties to the plot, but nothing really started happening until like… halfway through the episode. There were a lot of atmosphere episodes, where we got to see what would happen if the Devil won, or we got to see the Devil’s influence pulling them apart and stuff, but there wasn’t anything that hinted at how they were going to kill Lucifer until the Horsemen started showing up.
I just think it could have been amazingly effective if they had introduced several plot points earlier and developed them throughout the season. For instance, the last two Horsemen were shoved into a single episode. And while I liked that episode and thought it was well written and well handled, I still think it kind of trivialized the Horsemen a lot, particularly Pestilence. I’m not sure what else they could have done with Death, so that scene works fantastically, but Pestilence…
Let’s face it, Pestilence got shafted. Famine and War got whole episodes dedicated to finding and beating them. Pestilence got… Castiel bursting in at the last second and cutting his finger off. Lame.
In fact, I think the reveal that the rings were the key to trapping Lucifer again would have been a lot more dramatic and a lot more interesting if the Horsemen had been scattered throughout the season, and if a little more emphasis had been placed on the rings themselves. I’m not saying Dean should have waved them around in front of the camera and gone LOOK RINGS I WONDER IF WE’LL EVER USE THEM, but a reminder ever now and then would have been nice. Maybe they’re on Bobby’s desk in one scene, and then in another episode Dean is looking one over before shoving it into his pocket and taking off when Sam gets done packing his stuff. I’ll admit I had kind of forgotten about the rings when that reveal happened, so it lacked the drama it could have had.
Then of course there was the whole… bringing back Adam. That was just… stupid. I dunno. I didn’t even like the first episode where they introduced and killed him. I thought it was a boring, attention-grabby but unimportant episode when it happened. It’s nice they tried to give relevance to such a boring pointless fact but I really think they should have just not done it in the first place. If they were so itching to get Lucifer and Michael to talk in the finale, why couldn’t they just give Michael at substitute vessel like Lucifer had? It also completely contradicted the entire season with everyone going DEAN’S THE ONE when… all they had to do was resurrect the brother. And wouldn’t the brother be like… an equal opportunity vessel? Why couldn’t Lucifer grab him up too? I was not a fan of this bit of nonsense. It felt like lazy writing so the writers could get the final scene they wanted by suddenly introducing another brother.
Also, Sam’s evolution as a character struck me because it seemed like they were trying to do something really REALLY interesting with him. They had character after character tell him he was angry and nasty and a monster. They even had Sam recognize himself as a monster, and it seemed like they should have spent some time developing that, having Sam deal with how he felt about himself and how he was going to change. That way, in the last couple of episodes, when Bobby mentioned how good a kid he was and when Sam decides to sacrifice himself for the world, it would have felt more like a complete journey. The audience would have gotten to see him struggle through this and, essentially, redeem himself of whatever monster he could have been. The way it is now, I feel like I saw parts of a story that would have made him a far more interesting character to me, which kind of surprises me because I am not a fan of Sam’s.
In fact, a lot of the characters suffered from this, unless of course they were (re)introduced for the sole purpose of dying which is a whole other ball of wax that had me ticked off like you wouldn’t believe. But anyway. Let’s see, besides Sam and Dean’s character arcs to handle, there was Bobby, Castiel, Crowley, Gabriel, Lucifer, Michael and to some extent or other, Zachariah and Chuck. How many of them did we see as more then cameos in a few episodes? Two: Bobby and Gabriel. Guess how many of those arcs I thought were handled well and fully developed? One. Bobby’s.
Which is kind of… surprising, I think. Bobby’s got a decent fanbase (I think), but he’s pretty much just a fat old hick with a viper’s tongue, which when the majority of your watchers are teen/young adult females, doesn’t really make him prime storytelling material. I always kind of thought he’d just be one of those constant things. He’s always the same ol’ Bobby no matter what’s going on, and I was a little bit worried when they made him lose his legs. Change isn’t always good, especially while handling a plot this big.
That said, I thought his story was really well done. The arc seemed at least somewhat realistic, and I like that we got to see exactly how much the Winchesters mean to him. He wouldn’t have held on if not for them and it really does hurt him. I thought his angst was understandable even if, in the sea of angst that was this season, it sometimes felt heavy and overbearing. I can understand trying to tell a unique secondary story for a unique secondary character, but he could still get pretty sad right when he needed to be the voice of reason that smacked Sam and Dean and made them continue on. So… well handled arc, yes. Appropriate at this point in the show, probably not.
So then there’s Gabriel. This. Could. Have. Been. Amazing. I literally squee’d out loud when they revealed the Trickster was an angel. Like… holy shit! A recurring character that’s appeared since the first season (I think, might’ve been the second actually) is going to have a real relevance to this huge climactic battle! FUCK YEAH WHAT A GREAT TWIST.
Except… then it wasn’t. The writers set up this really awesome parallel between Sam and Dean, and Lucifer and Michael and then injected another brother into the mix. This could have been amazing. The way I ended up seeing it, with Gabriel’s introduction, was less Michael & Angels fight for earth and Lucifer & Demons (except not really) fight for earth too, and the humans are just fucked unless Sam and Dean can figure this out, and more like a three-sided fight with Michael for heaven, Lucifer for hell and Gabriel for earth. They could have made this into a truly cosmic battle between brothers, developed the family dynamic between these three superpowers, and just… ugh… it could have been amazing.
But then they decided that they can’t have this battle which should rage at the cosmic fucking level, because then they can’t include their precious Sam and Dean. Really, they could have, they just would have had to have been a little more creative about it, and it would have been so soooooooooooo cool.
Then we’ve got Lucifer who… appeared in… like… what? Three, four episodes? Your MAIN VILLAIN, THE FUCKING DEVIL, only showed up a few times throughout the season. We never saw what he was doing. His character wasn’t developed in the slightest. I mean, you can’t really develop the Devil, really, but you can get his position and his point of view on things a little more established then they were. He almost didn’t seem like a real threat by the finale. The threat is the apocalypse, not the Devil, which should not be how it is. I should be able to really feel that this is his doing. It’s not just something that’s happening, it’s got a source and that source, no matter how innocent he may appear, is truly, undeniably evil. I like that I was sort of able to see his point of view, but at the same time, I should still feel threatened by him, because he is not a good guy.
Michael suffered the same thing except worse. He was just this… little whisper of a threat. It seemed like they were trying to make him into just as much of an antagonist as Lucifer and… I guess they succeeded in that I feel no more threatened by Michael then I do by Lucifer. I just don’t. For big, main antagonists, both of these guys were poorly established and poorly developed, and their stories were just… not handled well in the slightest.
Crowley gets a bit of a pass because his story was actually handled pretty well. The only reason I even think to mention him is because HE WASN’T IN THE SEASON FINALE. They didn’t even have a scene where he showed up to give Bobby his soul back. I know he was with them at the end of the last episode, and he seemed pretty gung ho about going to take down Lucifer and stop the apocalypse, but HE WASN’T THERE. I mean, wtf guys. He could have had a well-rounded if small story arc if they had given him a single scene to explain where the fuck he went and I would have been happy. Instead? Nothing. He just wasn’t there in the last episode for no adequately explained reason.
Chuck and Zachariah suffered from this a lot less if only because they’re pretty minor character. I’ll admit I like Zachariah if only for how smarmy and slimy he is, but once he was killed off heaven didn’t really have a face except for the vague, poorly developed Michael. I really wish they had kept him if only so heaven didn’t end up on the backburner as far as threats went. And then… Chuck. I don’t know. He was pretty funny in the one convention episode and I really really liked him narrating the finale but then he… disappeared at the end…? What? Is… IS CHUCK GOD?! I suspect that scene is just going to… have happened and never get explained, which would suck. Talk about leaving an open ending, Kripke. :|
And now, if you’re keeping track of all the characters I mentioned, you’ll likely notice that Cas has been left out. This is because I had to leave him for the end. I have made no secret about the fact that Cas is my favorite character. He is just really interesting. He was the first nonhuman character who legitimately switched sides for the humans and he was well acted and just… cool to watch develop. So I’m going to be frank and say this:
Season 5 raped Cas’ character. And that is not a term I use lightly.
And I really do feel awful that I have to say it too. His arc suffered from the same thing Gabriel’s did. It could have been amazing, but trying to juggle this huge plot with all these characters meant it was shoved off to the side. Now I think if they had just eliminated his story and kept him constant I would have had less of a problem with this. Where they went wrong, was that he was changing and they didn’t show us any of it.
The character arc that they clearly had planned out for him looked really awesome. They have him becoming more in touch with humanity. They have him losing his faith one step at a time, until it’s literally shattered with the news that God doesn’t care anymore. They have him dive hard for rock bottom, mirroring the him from the five years later ‘verse, and then they bring him back up in the finale. The problem is almost all of this development was off-screen. Scenes were set up where Dean and Cas were hanging out and doing human things, like going to a strip club and the like. Or Cas got into a drinking competition with Ellen. Or he went to look for God. All of those scenes or mini-plots could have done really interesting things with not only his character, but the characters around him as well. Instead, he showed up every few episodes for a few minutes to tell Sam and Dean what he was doing, before disappearing again.
I could understand where all of the changes to his character were coming from, but they never showed me how he got there. Instead his evolution into a cynical, pessimistic, slightly awkward human was just… really jarring and sudden and… not well done.
And then it was all reset in the finale because apparently becoming an angel again means he can be the dissociative, higher-then-thou douche from the very first episode of season four. WHAT? WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL HIS SEASON FIVE DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU NEVER SHOWED US? YOU HAVE SQUANDERED A FANTASTIC CHARACTER WITH YOUR FAIL WRITERS!
So much potential was just… tossed out the window when it really could have been a wonderfully written continuation of all his growth from the previous season. Which should be what a show does with a character, right?
This season also did… the one thing… that I cannot stand in fiction. It started introducing characters just so that they could be killed off again. I just cannot even begin to explain how much it pisses me off when a characters death serves nothing more then to add angst to the mains. I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it and this season had it in droves. UGH…
But alright, I’ve rambled on for long enough about the stuff that wasn’t done as well as I had hoped. The thing is I liked all the plot points and character things that were introduced, I just thought the execution slipped every now and then. Except for Cas, everyone was in character, well acted, and I really really liked the ending. I liked that it didn’t end in a big climactic fight. It ended up just being a little brother’s love for his big brother and all the memories they shared that… defeated the Devil. The Devil and the evil angels too. I just… I like that kind of thing so well done there, guys. I even liked that Dean went and got settled because he promised his little bro before he died. I adore relationships like that. Like Chuck said, Dean wants to die or save Sam, but he won’t, because he promised. And promises to his family mean more then anything else in the world.
I really liked how the Horsemen were characterized too. They all had their specific thing even if Pestilence and Famine were yucky. Especially Famine, hngh, creepy old guy in a wheel chair. )8 Pestilence was particularly fun if only because he was so methodical and he looked so much like he was enjoying what he did.
And Death! FUCK YEAH DEATH. I dunno, I went into that episode going… Death is older then Lucifer and isn’t… evil… so how are you going to handle this? And I really liked how he came out. He’s just some old guy tethered to this little brat having a fit and he wants out. Awesome job, actor man. You made me think he really was Death.
There were probably other things I liked that I can’t think of right now, and this has gone on long enough, so… there you go. My thoughts. It could’ve been way waaaaaay better then it was, and I might change my mind on second watch through if I have a chance to see how everything fits together, but right now… I’m just hoping the next season does a little better job handling its character arcs. Also… I’m curious what it’s gonna be about since… y’know… they took down SATAN this season. So what does that really leave them?
I dunno. Next season needs to get here now.
Tl;dr - Characters were poorly handled, especially Cas, the ending is kind of weird but good, and most of this is me just rambling about how I would have done it, which I’m sure makes me sound like a pretentious bitch. Oh well. That’s how it goes sometimes I suppose.
One of the major problems this season is that it doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. I mean, there are lots and lots of episodes that are just Sam and Dean running around killing stuff and solving mysteries like in the first and second seasons. It’s very much a monster-of-the-week kind of formula and a lot of those episodes were really well done, and were fairly enjoyable. But at the same time, this isn’t season one or two. They aren’t living in a vacuum anymore. They’ve got a plot they have to deal with that they set up quite brilliantly in the previous season, which makes these monster-of-the-week episodes seem really out of place. The writers usually think to mention that the apocalypse is… y’know… right around the corner, Lucifer is running free, and people are dying, but that’s all the relevance those episodes have.
I actually would not have had a problem with that, except that when it got down to the last few episodes and they had to set up the finale… it felt rushed. This isn’t the first time either. The same thing happened last season, though season four did quite a bit more to get the plot set up and going. It just so happened that it needed one or two more episodes to really give the story the right weight without the finale seeming half-assed and shoddy. Season five on the other hand, had a lot of ties to the plot, but nothing really started happening until like… halfway through the episode. There were a lot of atmosphere episodes, where we got to see what would happen if the Devil won, or we got to see the Devil’s influence pulling them apart and stuff, but there wasn’t anything that hinted at how they were going to kill Lucifer until the Horsemen started showing up.
I just think it could have been amazingly effective if they had introduced several plot points earlier and developed them throughout the season. For instance, the last two Horsemen were shoved into a single episode. And while I liked that episode and thought it was well written and well handled, I still think it kind of trivialized the Horsemen a lot, particularly Pestilence. I’m not sure what else they could have done with Death, so that scene works fantastically, but Pestilence…
Let’s face it, Pestilence got shafted. Famine and War got whole episodes dedicated to finding and beating them. Pestilence got… Castiel bursting in at the last second and cutting his finger off. Lame.
In fact, I think the reveal that the rings were the key to trapping Lucifer again would have been a lot more dramatic and a lot more interesting if the Horsemen had been scattered throughout the season, and if a little more emphasis had been placed on the rings themselves. I’m not saying Dean should have waved them around in front of the camera and gone LOOK RINGS I WONDER IF WE’LL EVER USE THEM, but a reminder ever now and then would have been nice. Maybe they’re on Bobby’s desk in one scene, and then in another episode Dean is looking one over before shoving it into his pocket and taking off when Sam gets done packing his stuff. I’ll admit I had kind of forgotten about the rings when that reveal happened, so it lacked the drama it could have had.
Then of course there was the whole… bringing back Adam. That was just… stupid. I dunno. I didn’t even like the first episode where they introduced and killed him. I thought it was a boring, attention-grabby but unimportant episode when it happened. It’s nice they tried to give relevance to such a boring pointless fact but I really think they should have just not done it in the first place. If they were so itching to get Lucifer and Michael to talk in the finale, why couldn’t they just give Michael at substitute vessel like Lucifer had? It also completely contradicted the entire season with everyone going DEAN’S THE ONE when… all they had to do was resurrect the brother. And wouldn’t the brother be like… an equal opportunity vessel? Why couldn’t Lucifer grab him up too? I was not a fan of this bit of nonsense. It felt like lazy writing so the writers could get the final scene they wanted by suddenly introducing another brother.
Also, Sam’s evolution as a character struck me because it seemed like they were trying to do something really REALLY interesting with him. They had character after character tell him he was angry and nasty and a monster. They even had Sam recognize himself as a monster, and it seemed like they should have spent some time developing that, having Sam deal with how he felt about himself and how he was going to change. That way, in the last couple of episodes, when Bobby mentioned how good a kid he was and when Sam decides to sacrifice himself for the world, it would have felt more like a complete journey. The audience would have gotten to see him struggle through this and, essentially, redeem himself of whatever monster he could have been. The way it is now, I feel like I saw parts of a story that would have made him a far more interesting character to me, which kind of surprises me because I am not a fan of Sam’s.
In fact, a lot of the characters suffered from this, unless of course they were (re)introduced for the sole purpose of dying which is a whole other ball of wax that had me ticked off like you wouldn’t believe. But anyway. Let’s see, besides Sam and Dean’s character arcs to handle, there was Bobby, Castiel, Crowley, Gabriel, Lucifer, Michael and to some extent or other, Zachariah and Chuck. How many of them did we see as more then cameos in a few episodes? Two: Bobby and Gabriel. Guess how many of those arcs I thought were handled well and fully developed? One. Bobby’s.
Which is kind of… surprising, I think. Bobby’s got a decent fanbase (I think), but he’s pretty much just a fat old hick with a viper’s tongue, which when the majority of your watchers are teen/young adult females, doesn’t really make him prime storytelling material. I always kind of thought he’d just be one of those constant things. He’s always the same ol’ Bobby no matter what’s going on, and I was a little bit worried when they made him lose his legs. Change isn’t always good, especially while handling a plot this big.
That said, I thought his story was really well done. The arc seemed at least somewhat realistic, and I like that we got to see exactly how much the Winchesters mean to him. He wouldn’t have held on if not for them and it really does hurt him. I thought his angst was understandable even if, in the sea of angst that was this season, it sometimes felt heavy and overbearing. I can understand trying to tell a unique secondary story for a unique secondary character, but he could still get pretty sad right when he needed to be the voice of reason that smacked Sam and Dean and made them continue on. So… well handled arc, yes. Appropriate at this point in the show, probably not.
So then there’s Gabriel. This. Could. Have. Been. Amazing. I literally squee’d out loud when they revealed the Trickster was an angel. Like… holy shit! A recurring character that’s appeared since the first season (I think, might’ve been the second actually) is going to have a real relevance to this huge climactic battle! FUCK YEAH WHAT A GREAT TWIST.
Except… then it wasn’t. The writers set up this really awesome parallel between Sam and Dean, and Lucifer and Michael and then injected another brother into the mix. This could have been amazing. The way I ended up seeing it, with Gabriel’s introduction, was less Michael & Angels fight for earth and Lucifer & Demons (except not really) fight for earth too, and the humans are just fucked unless Sam and Dean can figure this out, and more like a three-sided fight with Michael for heaven, Lucifer for hell and Gabriel for earth. They could have made this into a truly cosmic battle between brothers, developed the family dynamic between these three superpowers, and just… ugh… it could have been amazing.
But then they decided that they can’t have this battle which should rage at the cosmic fucking level, because then they can’t include their precious Sam and Dean. Really, they could have, they just would have had to have been a little more creative about it, and it would have been so soooooooooooo cool.
Then we’ve got Lucifer who… appeared in… like… what? Three, four episodes? Your MAIN VILLAIN, THE FUCKING DEVIL, only showed up a few times throughout the season. We never saw what he was doing. His character wasn’t developed in the slightest. I mean, you can’t really develop the Devil, really, but you can get his position and his point of view on things a little more established then they were. He almost didn’t seem like a real threat by the finale. The threat is the apocalypse, not the Devil, which should not be how it is. I should be able to really feel that this is his doing. It’s not just something that’s happening, it’s got a source and that source, no matter how innocent he may appear, is truly, undeniably evil. I like that I was sort of able to see his point of view, but at the same time, I should still feel threatened by him, because he is not a good guy.
Michael suffered the same thing except worse. He was just this… little whisper of a threat. It seemed like they were trying to make him into just as much of an antagonist as Lucifer and… I guess they succeeded in that I feel no more threatened by Michael then I do by Lucifer. I just don’t. For big, main antagonists, both of these guys were poorly established and poorly developed, and their stories were just… not handled well in the slightest.
Crowley gets a bit of a pass because his story was actually handled pretty well. The only reason I even think to mention him is because HE WASN’T IN THE SEASON FINALE. They didn’t even have a scene where he showed up to give Bobby his soul back. I know he was with them at the end of the last episode, and he seemed pretty gung ho about going to take down Lucifer and stop the apocalypse, but HE WASN’T THERE. I mean, wtf guys. He could have had a well-rounded if small story arc if they had given him a single scene to explain where the fuck he went and I would have been happy. Instead? Nothing. He just wasn’t there in the last episode for no adequately explained reason.
Chuck and Zachariah suffered from this a lot less if only because they’re pretty minor character. I’ll admit I like Zachariah if only for how smarmy and slimy he is, but once he was killed off heaven didn’t really have a face except for the vague, poorly developed Michael. I really wish they had kept him if only so heaven didn’t end up on the backburner as far as threats went. And then… Chuck. I don’t know. He was pretty funny in the one convention episode and I really really liked him narrating the finale but then he… disappeared at the end…? What? Is… IS CHUCK GOD?! I suspect that scene is just going to… have happened and never get explained, which would suck. Talk about leaving an open ending, Kripke. :|
And now, if you’re keeping track of all the characters I mentioned, you’ll likely notice that Cas has been left out. This is because I had to leave him for the end. I have made no secret about the fact that Cas is my favorite character. He is just really interesting. He was the first nonhuman character who legitimately switched sides for the humans and he was well acted and just… cool to watch develop. So I’m going to be frank and say this:
Season 5 raped Cas’ character. And that is not a term I use lightly.
And I really do feel awful that I have to say it too. His arc suffered from the same thing Gabriel’s did. It could have been amazing, but trying to juggle this huge plot with all these characters meant it was shoved off to the side. Now I think if they had just eliminated his story and kept him constant I would have had less of a problem with this. Where they went wrong, was that he was changing and they didn’t show us any of it.
The character arc that they clearly had planned out for him looked really awesome. They have him becoming more in touch with humanity. They have him losing his faith one step at a time, until it’s literally shattered with the news that God doesn’t care anymore. They have him dive hard for rock bottom, mirroring the him from the five years later ‘verse, and then they bring him back up in the finale. The problem is almost all of this development was off-screen. Scenes were set up where Dean and Cas were hanging out and doing human things, like going to a strip club and the like. Or Cas got into a drinking competition with Ellen. Or he went to look for God. All of those scenes or mini-plots could have done really interesting things with not only his character, but the characters around him as well. Instead, he showed up every few episodes for a few minutes to tell Sam and Dean what he was doing, before disappearing again.
I could understand where all of the changes to his character were coming from, but they never showed me how he got there. Instead his evolution into a cynical, pessimistic, slightly awkward human was just… really jarring and sudden and… not well done.
And then it was all reset in the finale because apparently becoming an angel again means he can be the dissociative, higher-then-thou douche from the very first episode of season four. WHAT? WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED TO ALL HIS SEASON FIVE DEVELOPMENT THAT YOU NEVER SHOWED US? YOU HAVE SQUANDERED A FANTASTIC CHARACTER WITH YOUR FAIL WRITERS!
So much potential was just… tossed out the window when it really could have been a wonderfully written continuation of all his growth from the previous season. Which should be what a show does with a character, right?
This season also did… the one thing… that I cannot stand in fiction. It started introducing characters just so that they could be killed off again. I just cannot even begin to explain how much it pisses me off when a characters death serves nothing more then to add angst to the mains. I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it and this season had it in droves. UGH…
But alright, I’ve rambled on for long enough about the stuff that wasn’t done as well as I had hoped. The thing is I liked all the plot points and character things that were introduced, I just thought the execution slipped every now and then. Except for Cas, everyone was in character, well acted, and I really really liked the ending. I liked that it didn’t end in a big climactic fight. It ended up just being a little brother’s love for his big brother and all the memories they shared that… defeated the Devil. The Devil and the evil angels too. I just… I like that kind of thing so well done there, guys. I even liked that Dean went and got settled because he promised his little bro before he died. I adore relationships like that. Like Chuck said, Dean wants to die or save Sam, but he won’t, because he promised. And promises to his family mean more then anything else in the world.
I really liked how the Horsemen were characterized too. They all had their specific thing even if Pestilence and Famine were yucky. Especially Famine, hngh, creepy old guy in a wheel chair. )8 Pestilence was particularly fun if only because he was so methodical and he looked so much like he was enjoying what he did.
And Death! FUCK YEAH DEATH. I dunno, I went into that episode going… Death is older then Lucifer and isn’t… evil… so how are you going to handle this? And I really liked how he came out. He’s just some old guy tethered to this little brat having a fit and he wants out. Awesome job, actor man. You made me think he really was Death.
There were probably other things I liked that I can’t think of right now, and this has gone on long enough, so… there you go. My thoughts. It could’ve been way waaaaaay better then it was, and I might change my mind on second watch through if I have a chance to see how everything fits together, but right now… I’m just hoping the next season does a little better job handling its character arcs. Also… I’m curious what it’s gonna be about since… y’know… they took down SATAN this season. So what does that really leave them?
I dunno. Next season needs to get here now.
Tl;dr - Characters were poorly handled, especially Cas, the ending is kind of weird but good, and most of this is me just rambling about how I would have done it, which I’m sure makes me sound like a pretentious bitch. Oh well. That’s how it goes sometimes I suppose.