Supernatural will always mean a ton to me. It’s the show that got me to start watching prime-time television as it aired instead of just after the fact. This show might actually be the biggest reason the protagonists in my own series defaulted to being siblings instead of some other dynamic.
And for fifteen seasons, the show laid down an astonishingly solid track record, steadily expanding the worldbuilding and lore, answering cosmic questions while opening bigger mysteries, presenting a long, long chain of exemplary ‘therefore, not and-then’ for-want-of-a-nail storytelling. (Then at the end, they found the nail. Fans will get that and boo me.)
…But there were a couple particularly low points. And when Supernatural did pretty much anything, it swung for the fences, lesser moments included.
If you’re a fan, you’ve already guessed with both absolute certainty and accuracy one of the things I’m going to talk about. I’m getting there. But first, we’ve got to look at Season 12.
Coming off the smoking hot intensity of the latter half of Season 10 and the epic, cosmic revelations of Season 11, expectations were high. And speaking just for myself, the disappointment was so great that it took me a long time to properly contextualize it.
Back in 2017, I actually wrote a prospective piece about the British Men Of Letters arc for the Looking Glass, and it went unpublished because it would have been the first time I took a dive into Supernatural on this site and given how much the show means to me, I didn’t want to just do a takedown of what was at the time the most recent arc. It wasn’t really productive or helpful. I say all this because even though this is mostly going to be a critique, and one where I do not pull my punches, I don’t want you to think I’m coming at this as some insufferable disaffected cynic who’s just here to pick and poke and find fault. If you’ve read some other pieces on this site, you know I’m the farthest thing from that. So now that the show has taken its final bows, I think we can dissect what went on as more of a teachable moment.
I: The British Inversion
When Season 8 introduced the lore around the Men of Letters, it changed the game. This idea that hunting monsters wasn’t just the domain of backwoods roughnecks hustling pool and living on pub grub, but used to be an entire secret society keeping the gate from all manner of things that go bump in the night, until the entire American chapter was wiped out in the fifties by Abbadon, a relentless Knight of Hell – it was awesome. It exploded the worldbuilding outward in so many ways.
Season 12, with the idea of international Men of Letters chapters still operating into the 21st century, with all the advanced gear and tactics that would entail, had the opportunity to explode the worldbuilding outward even farther still.
Instead, what landed was what I think is, without a single doubt, the worst arc in Supernatural history.
I’ve talked before about the dissonance that happens when a creator doesn’t realize what they actually have or what kind of story they’re really telling, so they end up taking certain elements for granted. I think that’s what happened here. There was a lot that the British Men of Letters arc had going for it, to an extent. The best parts of the arc are in the ideas, how the BMoL use all this high-tech gadgetry to quell monster-related problems. It has the seeds of a really nice arc: “these guys are super good at killing monsters but they also keep pushing the Renegade interrupt.”
The push-and-pull dynamic – that the American hunters may be rough and tumble, but they’ve got heart, whereas the British Men of Letters are objectively leagues better at actually exterminating monsters, but they also abide by a code that’s pretty ruthless and heartless – would have been enough to sustain dramatic tension in the arc as the two types of monster-killer run up parallel to each other in the hunt for the Nephilim that Lucifer is about to unleash upon the world.
For example, The Raid lays it out for us just how effective the BMoL are and the ripple effect this has on the world; there’s a scene that goes into detail how while American hunters treat, say, vampire packs as individual threats to be snuffed out one at a time, the BMoL treat them more like terror cells with internal connections to one another, and by using these MI-6-type tactics, they manage to almost completely exterminate the vampiric presence from a huge swath of the United States practically overnight. Or how Mick mentions that Britain hasn’t seen a werewolf attack since the 1920s because of the BMoL’s thorough methods.
You can’t just shove worldbuilding like that back in the box; in light of what was to come, I do think they did too good a job of playing up the efficacy of the BMoL.
Just while I’m on the point, fast forward to when the brothers are rallying the hunters against the BMoL, because it really lays bare the crazy dissonance going on with where the writing in this arc railroads us to; in Sam’s speech he says, “The British Men of Letters, they came here cuz they thought they could do our job better than we could.” My brother in Chuck! It was painstakingly laid out for us that they are leagues better at killing monsters, and that’s not me reading into things, that is me just watching the story! “They hooked us with their flashy gear and their tech, most of you had the good sense to turn them down, I didn’t.” This part has this weird luddite energy, like that flashy gear hasn’t been demonstrated as being better at doing everything hunters are doing whenever it was put on screen. The speech goes on to paint the whole conflict as this great struggle to do what’s right against a force that only wants to control and kill, but what all this really feels like is the narrative being forced to fight tooth and nail against its own worldbuilding, against adopting the consequences of the things that same narrative just introduced this very season. Of demanding that we shove all the interesting parts of the worldbuilding back in the box while closing our eyes, hands over our ears and shouting ‘lalalala I can’t hear you’. The weird vibe of this speech is trying to get us to cheer for the idea of the hunters sticking with knocking off one vamp nest at a time with machetes while innocent bodies pile up, instead of using radar and satellites and shit to enact vampicide across multiple states at once. Because the hunters have heart, see, just ignore how many people become vamp chow in the meantime. What utter idiocy.
(If I can digress for a moment, Season 7’s Leviathan arc is overall quality, but it does have this one moment where the writing does something similar in terms of introducing something that should send shockwaves through the entire story forever going forward, and just…doesn’t. That would be the episode Slash Fiction, where two Leviathans mimic the brothers and go on a countrywide spree of mass shootings that would make the record books even in the bullet-drenched hellscape that is America a decade after the episode dropped. At the end of the episode, those Leviathans are disposed of and a sheriff falsifies some records to say the brothers died. They have the brothers ditching the Impala for most of that season and living on the lam because of this, but then it just…mostly isn’t mentioned again. But really, this spate of mass killings was so horrific in-universe that their mugs would be etched into society’s collective consciousness like any of the worst mass shooters, so realistically that would have destroyed the series’ ability to operate normally, going from town to town in plain sight and imitating FBI agents – anything short of a Doctor Strange-caliber worldwide memory spell would have had them more akin to Walter White with his fugitive beard in the snowy cabin. Maybe they actually should have done some kind of magic mind-wipe. But the show chose to mostly sweep this under the rug going forward for the sake of maintaining the classic M.O. Anyway, back to the Brits.)
To my eyes, The British Invasion is the episode in which the BMoL arc goes from tumultuous-but-salvageable, to careening completely off the rails past the point of no return. Re-watching Season 12 recently, I was very pleased to find just how many great episodes there really are in 12 – the problems of 12 are not on account of bad writers, remember, but of great writers acting a damn fool on one specific plot point – but I remembered correctly that The British Invasion marked the start of the episodes that cast a pall over the rest of the season.
Why? Because every interesting thing that could come from the new lore and expand the worldbuilding for new and interesting storytelling within the Supernatural framework – an increased prevalence of high-tech hunting tools, every nation’s Men Of Letters chapter having different methodologies and types of magitech and collaborating when necessary, and on and on and on – everything gets thrown in the trash, replaced by this: all the foreigners are evil, save for the designated good one, who is murdered by his own to drive home how evil the rest of them are, and they now intend to mass-slaughter every last American hunter.
What.
What.
There’s diving off the slippery slope and then there’s going from magitech MI-6 to Order 66 without any sort of believable cause-and-effect that would get us there beyond the episodes jangling keys in front of our face and telling us that this is how it has to be. (Hello again, top-down storytelling.)
Look, I’m not going to die on the hill of defending British culture (sans Iron Maiden and Doctor Who) but let’s be real, this is some yikesy, gross shit no matter which foreign nationality is being tarred as walking stereotypes who are all evil. Oh, did I not mention the stereotyping? It’s all tea-and-crumpets this, jolly-o that, their organization essentially created by stapling together pastiches of other media, the young recruits being trained at Not-Hogwarts and the BMoL playing up that they are essentially James Bond’s MI-6 At Home, complete with their own Not-Judi Dench being the Wario to M’s Mario. If they’d done more with it than this, this all could have been fine, but paired with all the other stuff…
To put it another way, by the end of the arc, the Brits are being written like how North Korean propaganda films write Americans. How did nobody at any stage of production notice how bad of a look this was? How the heck do you accidentally make something this openly xenophobic? And given how many unbridled swipes they’ve casually taken at MAGA on the show, it does feel like the arc turning out like this actually was somehow unintended. What.
Or to put it another-another way, to make crystal clear what’s happening here, imagine how horrific a look this would have been if the exact same cocktail of stereotypes and maliciousness had been applied to a non-white nationality: imagine if it had been the Mexican Men of Letters, who all wore sombreros and sarapis and looked like they hadn’t showered in a spell, whom the American protagonists insistently referred to as the ‘burrito banditos’ or ‘quesadouchebags’. Imagine if it had been the Japanese Men of Letters, who talked endlessly about honour and the way of bushido while acting like ninjas or samurai or overstressed businessmen all at once while the heroes continually referred to them as ‘sushi goobers’ or whatever. Imagine if it had been an African Men of Letters chapter. I will not elaborate. And, again, imagine all these theoretical organizations are psychopathically evil save for The Designated Good One and the only ones standing in their way are a bunch of backwoods Americans. How do you accidentally do this.
And, to quote Bobby Singer, if they were gonna be stupid they could have at least been smart about it; a thematically powerful way to do an arc like this, that paints the Brits in the same light (also just to prove I hate this arc for the right reasons and I’m not just irrationally defending British stuff), could have somehow invoked thematic mirrors to the British Empire’s history of oppression and pilfering other cultures, a practice which continues to this day with precious artifacts belonging to other nations being cloistered away in stuffy British museums (like, let’s say the brothers need a powerful Macguffin to kill the monster of the week but Ketch is like “No, we scooped that up years ago and it’s part of our private collection in the London chapterhouse”) – instead the arc ultimately descends into a very basic, surface-level “foreigners are evil stereotypes, backwoods rednecks unite to stop them” arc that just has an ugly energy to it.
And it’s not like the long arc, structurally, is even unsalvageable; it dovetails with the Lucifer/Nephilim plotline in a well-paced manner (okay, it was kind of lame to have Lucifer spend 2/5ths of the season sitting in Crowley’s back room after the game-changing S-tier trifecta of Rock Never Dies, LOTUS and First Blood, but notwithstanding), and it does have all those niggling little cool things about it that shouldn’t have been so little and which it’s very eager to throw away – it all just has an air of ugliness to it that didn’t exist prior to Season 12 and which clears up as soon as Season 13 hits the ground running (well, the clean break really begins with 12’s admittedly fantastic season finale, All Along The Watchtower, since the BMovement of an arc by-and-large resolves in the penultimate episode Who We Are).
And being completely fair, even after the BMoL arc sets itself on fire and takes a screaming run down wallbanger lane, there are good ideas here, executed well in isolation – the concept of someone familiar with the bunker’s internal mechanisms sabotaging it and leaving the brothers without supplies and dwindling oxygen makes a great peril setpiece, and the scene of Dean trying to get through to a brainwashed Mary is acted stunningly and deserved to be part of a better arc.
And when I say I hate this arc, beyond the vile nationalist air it has, it’s because they took such great worldbuilding potential, and they – this is pure narrative theory terminology – took it in a sucky direction and made sure that it ruined the awesome idea of international Men Of Letters chapters because they didn’t do anything with that after this season. They do retain literal motherfucker Ketch after this season, but what he gets is really just more of a single character arc going forward rather than a salvaging of the broader concepts and ideas that were built up and summarily kicked down. I do like Ketch’s role going forward, incidentally; it rescues the character from being forever tied at the hip to a bad arc, gives him more nuance than said arc would allow, and has shades of Negan’s slow-burn redemption in The Walking Dead (maybe I’ll get around to talking about that one of these days).
If I may, let’s think about the possibilities we could have unlocked if they hadn’t tanked their own arc in the worst way: the remaining three seasons could have had, for example, aid coming in from the other global Men of Letters chapterhouses, or even, say, some sort of portal fast-travel between chapterhouses like the magical sanctums in the MCU. So the brothers could jump through into the Morocco chapterhouse to help fight a djinn in north Africa, or we cold-open with the brothers in Tokyo hunting a kitsune – Supernatural made multiversal portal traversal one of the main plot thrusts starting with All Along The Watchtower, so these ideas are not too far-fetched in the slightest. (Incidentally, where the BMoL arc fails to take advantage of the ways in which it could have expanded the worldbuilding, they did well and fully take advantage of the multiversal expansions of the show’s final leg.)
Given that the production crew made British Columbia stand in for literally the entire United States, I’m not buying that they couldn’t have made those sorts of scenes work. Mick’s offhand remark that the brothers’ key opens the door to every chapterhouse in the world just screams Chekhov’s Gun but nothing comes of it.
Or how about the tech and strategies? Given that the BMoL arc does too good a job of convincing us that the Brits’ way is better at killing lots of monsters expediently, how about their presence in the story being a point-of-no-return as far as the old way of hunting, with hunters organizing more and being more tactical with better weaponry? (We do get shades of this later on when they bring over the resistance fighters from ‘apocalypse world’, but it doesn’t last.)
Instead we get foreigners are evil, kill them before they kill you, and we will never open the door to how cool the international Men Of Letters stuff should have been after this.
And at the end of the arc…immediately after Sam has just been informed that Lucifer is out walking the Earth again…he and the other hunters blow up the BMoL’s entire American operating facility and sever all ties with them, important tech included.
Ever since, there have been glimpses of the kinds of worldbuilding expansions that the show could have glommed onto – the late-game episode Last Holiday, for instance, shows us that the bunker has been operating in, essentially, nuzlocked low-power mode all this time, and at its full capacity, it has things like an interdimensional telescope and that big central table with the world map is actually a radar for hunting monsters. That all gets used for exactly one episode then it’s taken away forever. As they lose the stuff, Dean says something like, “Who needs a monster radar anyway?” You do. You do, you numpty. It’s that sort of thing that feels like the show’s pull to status quo is constantly fighting against the kind of organic metamorphosis that it could have had.
What’s interesting is the sheer caustic fatalism on display in the writing of the BMoL arc, contrasted with what came immediately after. Coming along after everyone from demons to angels and everything in between has been established to have deeply dysfunctional hierarchies, the BMoL arc sends the ugly message that almost everyone are assholes and the ones who aren’t get snuffed out along the way by those who are.
But then they promptly launched into the series’ long-form endgame with Jack’s arc. As the son of Lucifer with nearly limitless power, everyone on every level of the cosmic hierarchy who’s in the know either is watching events play out with a keen eye, or trying to intervene, and there’s a constant tug of war, between celestial power-players, between the brothers themselves: will Jack be a weapon of evil, or will he make his own choices for good? Ultimately, Jack chooses life, light and humanity, assumes the mantle of a benevolent God and starts making things better for everyone – fulfilling the prophecy that Castiel saw in Season 12’s episode The Future. Because Jack was nurtured the right way, because those close to him believed in him (despite some rather huge speedbumps along the way), because he chose on his own terms and made the right choice. The endgame resolution of Jack’s arc was a startlingly warm, optimistic and life-affirming turn quite welcome on a show that had so often dwelt in the mire of cynicism, and there’s no better, or worse, example of that than the British Men of Letters arc.
II: You Knew This Was Coming
Castiel’s arc is the Mass Effect 3 of long-form character arcs on prime time television: 99% of it is absolutely fantastic. A story of falling, of impossible choices, of loyalty and betrayal, of retribution and redemption, of humanity and divinity and everything in between.
And then the thing happened.
This is one of those things where the chain of events leading up to it is so balls-in-the-halls wilding that I have to back up and break it down before we can even begin talking about the thing.
So Castiel gets killed by Lucifer in All Along The Watchtower, and by that point Cass has died and come back so many times that it had been canonically established by now that God is actually just playing favourites and hitting the revive button whenever Cass dies. But this time, it looked like it was the real deal: for the first time, Cass got the “angel wing silhouettes burned into the ground behind the body to let you know it’s a real angel death” shot. And this was the same episode where Mark Sheppard’s Crowley really did die for real.
Never mind that fans did know before Season 13 that Cass was coming back, because Jared Padalecki accidentally spoiled it at a fan event between seasons, to which Jensen Ackles just slow-turned and stared at him until he realized it and it was amazing
Some time later in Season 13, in an early showing of just how cosmically powerful Jack is, him being sad about Cass’s death hard enough causes Cass to awaken in the Empty, the shapeless void where non-human, non-monster beings (so angels, demons) go when they die. And the eldritch abomination lurking in the Empty isn’t super chuffed that one of its charges is awake instead of eternally slumbering. I can’t really give too many details on this entity – it never identifies itself by name (though Naomi calls it ‘the Shadow’ so we’ll go with that), claims its true form would cause Cass to go mad on sight, and can be inferred to be as old as the Empty itself – as in, older than God and the Darkness, and it’s a way more accurate sort of take on a Lovecraftian type of creature than anything we got during the arc where Lovecraft actually showed up all the way back in Season 6.
Long story short, the Shadow realizes the only way to make Cass stop bugging it by being awake is to send him back to Earth. So boop, Cass is back again. The next time we see the Shadow is in Season 14, when it invades Heaven seeking Jack after his death. Cass demands the Shadow take him instead of Jack, and the Shadow accepts – with the caveat that to truly make him suffer, it will claim him once and for all only when he’s obtained true happiness. Cass thinks it’s a sneaky loophole on his part, because his life since the Apocalypse has been so tumultuous and miserable that he doubts he’ll ever find true happiness.
Now we find ourselves in Season 15, the final arc. God himself has been outed as the Big Bad of the entire saga, taking the age-old Problem Of Evil to its natural conclusion, and naturally the stakes are absolutely as high as they can get. And fans were on board. With God being presented as a nebbish, squirrely writerly type who views creating worlds as telling stories, and with the brothers no longer on board with the twisted game God is playing, the season takes the opportunity to be meta without pretension and deconstructionist without condescension; the Season 14 finale Moriah shows us the breaking point comes when God’s proposed solution to their crisis is arbitrary, nonsensical and stupid, which is a fracture-point that makes them seriously question what the hell is going on here. In essence, what causes the creations to rebel against their creator is when they become cognizant of said creator’s bad writing. It’s genius.
Throughout Season 15, literary tropes like Main Character Syndrome and plot armour (or the lack thereof) are deftly dissected; there’s a twist that the brothers aren’t even the first Sam and Dean, with Sam getting glimpses into what God reveals to be how their past versions died in previous realities as God continually reworked and perfected his favourite tale, in what almost feels like a lowkey jab at franchises that suffer endless reboots; it all checks in as a brilliant deconstruction of creators who don’t appreciate what they’ve created and misuse their properties (almost like the themes present in DC’s Death Metal, itself putting the company’s former crisis-event writers on notice hard for their screwing about with continuity instead of embracing it). The entire season up through Unity is a masterclass. That moment when we realize just how much of this final arc has been masterminded by God – “What part of omniscient do you people not understand?” – is a chillbump scene. “This is my ending. My real ending.”
Honestly, I could have done a whole piece about the final arc and the things it has to say about the creative process, narrative tropes and when creators go astray. There’s a very real message baked in there about creators who refuse to listen to what their creations have to say and let them grow organically, instead railroading them and making the world and story lesser for it.
All of which is pretty ironic considering what came next.
Fast forward to Despair, the third-to-last episode of the final season. Dean and Cass are trying to outrun Billie, a reaper who’s taken up Death’s mantle and is hell-bent on their demise. With them trapped and cornered, Cass realizes that the only way to beat Death is to summon the Shadow.
So Cass confesses everything he’s held back, and obtains true happiness by revealing to Dean that he loves him. Not in an “I love you guys, you’re my family” way, that’s happened before. A real, no-bullshit, from-the-heart, life-affirming gay love confession.
The speech itself is one of Misha Collins’ crowning moments as an actor, showing us genuine joy unburdening years – perhaps millennia – of self-denial manifesting in finally living his truth.
A portal to the Empty opens and the Shadow slithers through, consuming both him and Death, saving Dean.
I need to make one thing clear, since it only occurred to me as I was doing the final edits on this to upload it that readers might get the wrong idea here: I’m for the love confession. I never shipped anything as far as this show goes (and it’s not really something I do in general with other people’s work), but purely based on the story that we’ve seen on screen, it makes perfect sense and tracks beautifully. This isn’t about that in itself. This is about the fan reaction to what happened next.
Misha Collins himself, as he talked about on social media while shit was exploding around him, perceived the scene during shooting as a noble, beautiful sacrifice: Cass saving the one he loves, and literally beating Death, through the power of a gay love confession, the ultimate endpoint of an inhuman entity who had become beautifully human in every way that really mattered. He thought it would be seen as empowering to the show’s many, many queer fans. And it’s important to note that for the tsunami of anger that this brought on, none of it was directed at Collins. He didn’t write it and the fans understood that, and I think the fans also understood that Collins had for years been an incredibly warm brand ambassador between the show and its fans and that he only wanted the best for everyone.
So let’s start to unpack why shit went so horribly sideways.
But first, I’ve always been sort of disconnected from the actual Supernatural fandom; I’ve never participated in it despite following the show since all it had to its name was one season, an Impala and a dream, so I don’t know exactly how the British Men of Letters arc was received by the masses, but considering God Himself refers to those events as a ‘little weak’ a few seasons later, I can guess it didn’t exactly set hearts afire.
But the Cass thing brought a fire that burned right through the membrane of fandom compartmentalization and sizzled right into the mainstream catch-all fanosphere. Fan or not, you heard about how horrible the final season of Thrones was. And fan or not, it was also really hard to get away from the backlash to this.
If you fancy to look, you’ll find tons of fans have written whole essays on the ways in which they feel the ending dropped the ball, such as how Sam ends up with some random woman who appears once out-of-focus in the background, and not Eileen, which bafflingly discards their well-written and convincing romance subplot at the literal last minute with no explanation. But I’m just going to drill down on The Cass Thing.
So, the scene itself. The first thing that got people’s attention, in a bad way, was the fact that Dean does not in fact reciprocate, or at all validate Cass’s confession. He just says, “Don’t do this, Cass.” On first viewing, I didn’t think anything of it. I was too wrapped up in the feels from Cass’s speech, and picking up the coding they were putting down that this was really it for one of the show’s best characters.
But, looking at it through the eyes of – okay, look, I’m queer. I’m bisexual. But that means I ‘pass’ should I choose to. Looking at it through the eyes of someone who can’t pass so easily, who followed the show for years and years, hoping that its many queer references were inclusion instead of baiting – the fact that Dean doesn’t validate the confession, something that the showrunners probably saw as trying to have their cake and eat it too so as to not bump off the fans who didn’t want that, almost certainly stung like an absolute motherfucker, somewhere way down deep. I use that word very specifically. Validation.
In fact, in some circles to this day there is a meme where in one panel, Cass confesses his love, then in the next panel, Dean says something completely irrelevant or gives a long wall of text about the breaking news that was happening when someone made that version of the meme. Not to be the one who ‘explains the joke’, but, I think part of the reason that meme has such longevity is because it hits at the deeper issue with the scene that Dean’s reaction is so incredibly far below satisfactory considering what it follows.
Heck, have a whole blog chronicling the memes.
I am aware that there was one regional dub where a rogue translator with the local network took it upon themselves to have Dean say “And I you” instead of “Don’t do this”. That caused another whole thing within the thing.
Second, let’s talk about the concept of queer fridging. You might also have heard it called Bury Your Gays. Essentially, it’s this narrative trope that queer characters are more expendable than ‘normative’ characters. What Collins viewed as a heroic sacrifice that was empowering for the queer community because it wielded queerness as a shield and sword of sorts, was instead seen by many fans as queer fridging, Castiel being shunted off forever immediately after he unambiguously and definitively comes out as being in romantic love with a male human.
So that we’re clear, Charlie’s death in season 10 was not a queer fridging. She was openly and proudly lesbian but her sexuality was established from the start of her arc and didn’t play into her demise. She dies on her own terms, helping to translate the accursed Book of the Damned to remove the Mark of Cain from Dean before it turns him into an unstoppable monster, killed by the scions of the house of Frankenstein, her death is properly mourned and the entire Stine bloodline is slaughtered in retribution. It’s pretty epic, and the whole thing is a testament to how major character deaths could still hit even long after the show had established anyone could come back from anything.
Back to Cass, was it a queer fridging? I come down on the side of, I absolutely don’t blame anyone who reads it that way, because my god, they do an absolutely miserable job of making it not look like that. That is the last time Castiel actually appears on the show, which is an important distinction to make. Collins returns in the penultimate episode as a brief voice on the phone, but that’s just Lucifer mimicking Cass’s voice to trick Dean. The final scene of the show takes place in Heaven, everyone reunited, everyone happy.
Everyone.
Except.
Castiel.
It’s even explicitly mentioned that Jack brought Cass back once he took up God’s mantle, and as it stands, not having him there at the big sendoff even though he’s been established as back is conspicuous in the worst way, in light of everything. That, above all the other things, is what to me makes this read as a fridging, because they went well out of their way to not have him in a final sendoff where his presence would be completely appropriate, moreso than not having him.
They dodged every possible easy fix that could have made this all work just fine. Having Dean validate and/or reciprocate during the scene itself; having Cass appear in the final scene of the series instead of just getting mentioned as being brought back by Jack. Have him meet up with Dean in Heaven, and have them hug. (That is having your cake and eating it too, incidentally – they’ve hugged plenty of times before, but it would have a whole new context in light of the ending of Despair, and those who weren’t into that didn’t have to read anything into it.)
Do that and you’ve successfully sunk it in the basket as a beautiful romantic sacrifice. Everyone comes back on-screen from everything in Supernatural in some way, shape or form – except this.
Speaking of which, the alternate-reality Charlie who joins the cast during the dimension-hopping arcs, who is seen making a life with her new girlfriend, gets shown vanishing during the part where God Thanos-snaps away every human in the brothers’ reality except for them, but when Jack brings everyone back, we don’t ever see Felicia Day’s Charlie again. If she gets a happy ending, it too is offscreen, which, again, didn’t bother me on first viewing, but I mention it because people have definitely talked about it as evidence that the showrunners didn’t really care at all about incorporating full-bodied queer stories on their show and just tossed it aside when convenient.
And that really hurt a lot of queer fans, whether or not the showrunners intended it. Because, on another level, what happened intersected with a broader trend in entertainment narrative, which is to perform queer allyship by treating queerness as a trope, as a layup for points, as a coat you can put on and take off. For the longest time, Supernatural had courted the queer side of its audience, teased and traipsed about with it – in some cases genuinely doing a great job like with Charlie’s fantastic arc. But this ending, to many fans, made it feel like all that was just a cruel joke to which they were the punchline.
Now, I have to make a distinction here – with Supernatural fans, there’s always been a certain level of ‘hurt me daddy’ ‘thank you sir may I have another’, like when the fandom was written into the show as thirsty incest shippers, so on a certain level the show often poked fun at elements of its fandom, but the people who were fine with that, weren’t fine with this. It’s because there’s a big difference between poking fun, and what was perceived as a direct fuck-you on a deeper level.
If you’ve watched it, what do you think? An ending that fridges queerness harder than a Maytag outlet run by a sentient MAGA hat, or showrunners tunnel-visioning in on the ending they wanted and accidentally sending off a number of extremely unfortunate implications? The queer community is very, very good at close reading stories that incorporate queerness. This was not some vocal minority of toxic fans being angry at a show for not going the exact way they wanted; this was a large subset of fans feeling knifed in the back by a story they loved.
When people revolted against the final season of Game Of Thrones, it was because the showrunners transparently stopped giving a shit. But what happened with Castiel – for a lot of people, there was a much more personal, visceral sense of betrayal, and that’s what got me to sit up and pay more attention to the controversy. I’m being very guarded and specific with how I’ve been wording things as I talk about this, because while I met the BMoL arc with personal distaste as it happened, I come to the Cass ending controversy as someone who didn’t read between the lines on airing, but who read up after the fact as to just why people were so mad, parsing out, analyzing.
I can’t read the showrunners’ minds. But I can tell you, honestly – there’s not nothing to this. Season 12 left me wincing, as a fan of the show, a fan of great stories, and a not-fan of nationalist crap. But for many, many people, the Cass thing hit in a much deeper place. And I can’t, and won’t, tell them they’re wrong.
I don’t believe that an ending is the only thing that matters in a story. Far from it. The fact that I was able to do this almost-complete marathon of the series and fully enjoy Cass’s role in it, even knowing how it ended, is just more evidence that stories are more than the sum of their parts. It’s no secret that Supernatural’s endgame was a mixed bag; for all the stuff like the Cass thing and the nose-thumbing to some supporting cast members, we also got stuff like the way that whole Heaven postscript in the finale is expertly curated to wring out those deep-dish emotions in all the best ways.
And it does kind of suck that I’ve been sat here talking about the show’s two lowest points when, for the most part, Supernatural is a sterling example of long-form narrative done so, so right. I’ve been talking about teachable moments, and it’s easier to pick at the negative, but I need to emphasize how these decisions stand out so much more because Supernatural was on the whole so much more than just another prime-time CW style show, and as the story went on, they really did take to the escalating stakes, higher budgets and expanded worldbuilding like a fish to water, for the most part. Watching it back now, years after the curtains fell, I was also struck by how wonderfully paced it all is, the seasons balancing character arcs, plot-whammy episodes and monster-of-the-week adventures without breaking a sweat. (Contrast with something like The Walking Dead, which devolved into whole episodes wasted on things that didn’t even matter.) I’ll always cherish this show in its fullness, and I don’t want you walking away thinking otherwise.
But just ask the Winchesters: all it takes is a couple of imperfections in the devil’s trap to let the demons in.
Somehow, by complete coincidence, this went up three years to the day since the final episode aired. Felt fit to mention that.