Right. I can see it’s about time that I weighed in here with my comments on the finale episode of Supernatural. Everyone is entitled to their own views, and I am not saying that anybody is wrong in anything they have said. What I am saying is– Oh come on, people! Did you seriously think that there was any other way series five could finish? Do you even watch the show?
Hundreds of fan fiction writers have already seen this, and in fact have already written variations on a theme of Sam chucking himself into the pit. It was inevitable. If it had happened any other way it would have been lame, it would have been a cop-out, it would have been bloody obvious that it was just an excuse to bring them back for season six.
Why was it inevitable? Because of Sam. Sam is the stuff of legend: Sam is the literary figure, Sam is the doomed hero, Sam Winchester is Talyn (Farscape fans know exactly what I’m saying), the person who has spent all of his TV time fighting a losing battle against what he thinks everyone else wants for him. The thing is, he was never going to beat this, and he was never going to be anything else but destiny’s whipping boy. The only surprise that came with the series finale was the twist that Sam could not control his possessed Lucifer form – not until family came into it. And I’m not even talking about Dean, I’m talking about the Impala. It just surprises me that so many people seem to think there was any other way the finale could have happened. Consider the series three finale. The only way that could have ended was Dean going to Hell – if they had miraculously found a way to get him off his deal, or they have managed to somehow delay or resist the inevitable, I probably would never have watched the show again.
There were problems with the finale, I’m not saying there weren’t. Killing off two characters just to bring them back a moment later is a little bit excessive, even for the Kripke. And that moment where the two characters died: that was the moment you knew a reset button was coming over the hill. That was the moment that Kripke took a step over the line in a Russell T Davies kind away, to try and up the ooh-aah quotient of his last hour. I can’t blame him: it’s his show, it’s his baby, and he slaved over it and protected it for five years. The show has being threatened with cancellation so many times, but it’s still here.
Speaking of Russell T Davies, I am so relieved that the finale didn’t all go crappy all-out hands-down balls-to-the-wall loopy, just to try and somehow make it all sparkly and amazing. The way the episode was written made it very clear that this episode was always going to be the end. The tone of the narration, the archived footage used for the flashbacks, the tying up of a few loose ends (“and for the record, this time next Thursday, Bobby will be hunting a rugaru in Dayton”) – it all added up to The End.
So what do we make of The End? The very last moments of the episode I believe are what upset more people than anything else this series. We see Dean carrying out his promise to Sam – even though Dean never actually promised anything to Sam. But then again, Dean probably considered it the best way to go after all was said and done. Dean is never going to be happy with this new life, and I’ll be surprised if he stays longer than a weekend. There’ll be tears, I have no doubt, but Dean will have to say goodbye to Lisa and Ben and take his own five minutes out to accept what’s happened.
But Sam… Oh yes, Sam. What has happened to Sam?
This is where season six will really decide whether it’s any good at all, or it’s just a pile of pants that people are trying to hang on the washing line of bandwagons. Please please please, let the demons and angels be over.
What worries me is the fact that the streetlamp buzzed out behind Sam’s head as he watched Dean through the window of the house. The light didn’t explode all angel-like, it buzzed out, all demo- like. Either somebody else was standing behind Sam at the time the light went out (and please please please let that be Crowley!) or Sam himself causes the light to go out. This would make some kind of twisted sense, seeing as Sam was supposed to have chugged down three gallons of demon blood before he threw himself in the pit. However, wasn’t it Lucifer who said that Sam knew that his real family was ‘them’? Is Lucifer referring to the body of angels that have been haunting the Winchesters for the last generation or two? But that would be ridiculous – if Sam does turn out to be an angel after all this time I really will be the most disappointed in the show that I have ever been.
What would be interesting is a reverse Stanford manoeuvre – where Dean is either trying to make a life with Lisa and failing miserably or he’s leaving and moving on to try and find a life he can put up with somewhere else, and it is Sam who comes to him, to tell him that he needs to come back to hunting. It would make beautiful symmetry, as Chuck would appreciate.
Oh yes, Chuck. There’s been a lot of speculation as to who Chuck really was – I prefer to believe Chuck was actually a real man and a real prophet, as real as prophets are, anyway. I’d like to believe that he was only impersonated in the last episode – and then only at the end. Somebody was sitting back and having a monumental chuckle at The Boys and what they were getting up to – someone in a very tall-man-watching-ants-scurry-around kind of way. I like to think in the last scene that we see of Chuck, it was either God himself – although that would be the juiciest M. Night Shyamalan moment ever, wouldn’t it? – or one of the other archangels. Whoever it was, they cheated with something Chuck could not have had, giving the location of the face-off. And I believe whoever this person was, sitting at Chuck’s keyboard in a very clean shirt, enjoying his virgin hookers and whiteness, he also brought Sam back. Because Sam and Dean did alright in The Test, Job-style? Or because nothing ever really ends?
For me, the series did go kind of tits-up when we found out that an angel had brought Dean back in season four. That’s when it crossed the line between hunting urban myths and legends and trying to create its own. Some fans have been tired of the angel-demon arc in the later seasons, and I have to say I have been a little too. A few more run-of-the-mill monsters would have been nice – good old-fashioned salt and burns, which they don’t seem to have pulled in the last few series. I really hope, really really hope, that in season six we get back to some normal monster-stabbing rocksalt-burning silver-cutting box-standard monster hunts. I think we, as fans, deserve it, for sticking with the angels and demons plot line for the last two series.
I have enjoyed all five series, don’t get me wrong. But a few less demon plots, a few less angel playground fights, and a Hell of a lot more monster hunts – if you’ll pardon the expression – would have gone down much more easily.
And that’s all the news that’s fit to print. More articles coming soon. We have a new Hellatus before us (with gratuitous re-runs on a millions different channels, not least of the CW), but I’m not taking it without a fight. We have #SPNrewatches via Twitter, we have spoilers to dodge, and we have DVD and BluRay releases in September – supposedly before season six reaches our screens. We can only hope that the new crew on board, this mix of old and new, don’t screw up this last series. Give us the last series to be proud of, people! Get us back to the season one and two fun of salting and burning, and leave the Russell T Davies plot lines to Doctor Who.
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This is a very good post… I really enjoyed reading it and the arguments just add up perfectly. And I agree with you on that “the series did go kind of tits-up when we found out that an angel had brought Dean back in season four” – I have given this some thought since the last post and posting a new post in a bit :)
…..oh my G (who is in hiding right now) I just had a horrible thought! Is that kid that Dean now raises going to be the new Hunter? Like a story a few years in the future? No, that cant be. That would be way too short timeframe… no, forget I even said anything! Bad brain! Bad brain!