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According to recent reports from Vancouver, the cast returned to work the first week of August (about two weeks late). Jensen Ackles also explained in a recent virtual “fan experience” through Creation Con that the writing for the last two episodes has been tweaked to reflect recent events (i.e., the Coronavirus pandemic). With these writers, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. He also said that 15.19 will be a season finale, while 15.20 is more like a series finale (and expressed sadness on Instagram when he got the final script, which said “The End” instead of the usual “To Be Continued”). In an already truncated final season, that likely means we’ll get stuck with some filler clips episode as the last one. Yay.
This week, the final episode of the show, “Carry On,” airs after a one-hour retrospective. Feel free to comment about the episode below as you watch it.
You can find a promo, photos and a synopsis here for 15.20. Maybe someone can make heads or tails of it.
If you’re enjoying these articles and reviews, any contributions are welcome. Even in a pandemic, the kitties still gotta eat and I’ve got a house full of snarfly foster kittens with seasonal eye gunk right now. My kitty Goose is doing much better, thank you (she’s acting as if nothing happened now), but I’ve still got that bill, so every little bit helps.
Scroll down to find links to all of my recaps and reviews of all seasons up to this point.
Recap: Typica recap of the previous episode, with a focus on The Empty Entity’s deal with Billie and with Castiel, Chuck absorbing Amara, and Chuck being a dick.
Cut to a few seconds after Chuck disappeared and last week’s credits rolled. Sam is hauling Jack up to the Library (Oh, I see, now he wants to carry Jack). They set him in a chair. Dean is in a panic, with no idea what to do, and Sam is even more useless. Castiel keeps telling Jack to “breathe,” which is also unhelpful.
Jack says that he can’t stop the process (which, you know, is what Adam and Serafina already told him last week). He asks them to bring him outside. He will try to fly away as far as he can before he explodes. Castiel says no and Jack shouts at him that he doesn’t want to hurt him and the Brothers. Dean tries to think of one of Rowena’s spells. Surely, there’s something.
Billie appears at the other end of the room, seriously pissed, and says, “I think you’ve done enough.”
Dean flat-out tells her that Chuck saw her entire plan coming, but when Sam tries to back that up, by saying the plan was “doomed,” Billie looks straight at Sam and tells him he’s to blame for that. Well, somebody’s finally calling it as they see it.
Dean asks if Billie can do anything for Jack. She says she can do one thing. She TK’s his chair around, lifts his chin with one hand, and makes him vanish. Dean then gets shouty about what happened to Jack.
It turns out she sent him to The Empty. The Empty Entity is there on her throne, lazily commenting that he doesn’t look so good. After shivering and grunting and glowing, he blows up, to her horror.
Cue title cards.
In the Bunker, Billie explains that Jack is in The Empty. Since Chuck and Amara weren’t around, she needed someplace safe to send Jack that would absorb the explosion. The Empty, she says, is not as “strong” as either Chuck or Amara, but it is “vast.” Jack may or may not survive, ditto the Empty. But if the Empty does survive, it will be “pissed.” It already is angry with her, but fortunately, it can’t reach her here.
Sam unwisely decides to draw attention to himself and note that the Empty Entity can only come to earth if she’s “summoned.” Billie says that’s right, but then she focuses on Sam and says he has something of hers. Instead of being conciliatory, Sam stupidly thinks challenging Death is a good idea and pissily tells her he did it because she was going to “betray” them.
Billie shrugs and says sure, she was going to kill off everyone who was supposed to be dead, anyway, but that Sam doesn’t have any choice. Unless he gives her God’s death book, she’ll leave Jack in the Empty and “he won’t last long” there. Sam looks constipated. I’m kinda laughing at him here because Billie is really sick of his shit and so am I.
When Sam comes back in with the book, he tosses it on the map table rather than hand it to her, in a final bout of immature pique. Unimpressed, Billie picks it up. Dean wants her to bring Jack back right away, but she insists she has to read the end of the book, first, seeing as how the Brothers (well, Sam) have ruined the previous ending. What she sees, and her reaction, makes even Sam sit up and take notice at the change in demeanor and the tone of menace, but all she says out loud is “Interesting.”
In The Empty, Jack comes back into one piece. The Empty swirls around him and then reconstitutes herself. She is not happy because now he’s “made it loud.” But just as she’s about to put some major hurt on him, he disappears. Billie has called him back to the Bunker.
Billie then suddenly pulls a double-cross. She won’t let the rest of TFW near Jack because now she has a different use for him. But Dean surprises her by picking up her scythe and slashing her with it. White light spills out as she tosses him across the room, then flees by teleporting away, leaving the book and her scythe behind. Everyone then runs to Jack, Sam at the front of the herd. But it’s Castiel who comforts Jack, while Dean is picking himself up from across the room and Sam rushes to … open the book. But it’s stuck closed.
Nighttime outside the Bunker. Dean can’t sleep, so he’s nursing a bottle of whiskey in the Library. Sam comes in. He can’t sleep, either, so Dean slides the bottle over to him and Sam pours himself a dram. Dean apologizes for pulling a gun on Sam and explains that he was so tunnel-visioned about killing Chuck that he couldn’t stop himself. Sam points out that Dean did stop himself, though, that he was able to pull himself out of his killing trance as he has pulled Sam out of trances in the past.
It doesn’t occur to either of them that Dean was acting that way, perhaps, because he was being written that way, or that Sam was acting the way he was for the same reason. Or that now Sam has buggered up Billie’s plan, they have no more “heavy hitters on our side” Dean does actually point out the latter, but he’s a lot kinder than I would be and doesn’t blame Sam for it. Not even when Sam says they’ll think of “something,” which of course means Sam expects Dean to come up with it. Dean ruefully makes a toast to “something.” That finally shuts Sam up and they drink in silence.
Billie stalks into her Library. Seems The Empty Entity didn’t manage to kill all the Reapers. One survivor who is filing books, or something, tells her he’s reinforced the warding as ordered so that the Empty can’t get back in. He then asks her if “the plan has changed.” Looking back, while holding her shoulder in obvious pain, and looking mighty pissed off, Billie confirms this.
In a kitchen somewhere in Middle America, a young African American woman named Stevie is explaining how to cook scrambled eggs to alt-Charlie, who is (rather disrespectfully) ignoring said woman’s injunction against cleaning weapons at the breakfast table. Fortunately, Stevie isn’t standing for that, so Charlie has to put aside her kit in order to get breakfast, while babbling about their hunting some shapeshifters that night as a date. She is shocked to find that the eggs are really good, but in the middle of telling Stevie that she now has to make these eggs for Charlie for the rest of Charlie’s life (lovely), Stevie vanishes without a trace and her plate clatters on the floor. Shocked, Charlie calls out her name.
Cut to the outside of Stevie and alt-Charlie’s apartment house (which has the date 1928 on it). Inside, alt-Charlie is explaining to Sam and Dean how she met Stevie when Bobby asked her to help Stevie out on a djinn hunt. Turns out Stevie didn’t need the help. They bonded and hooked up. Now Charlie had no idea whom else to call but the Brothers. She doesn’t understand why this happened to Stevie and not her. Dean says they’re trying to figure that out. Sam asks her if she can think of anything that might identify the MOTW. In distress, Charlie says that she can’t.
Outside, Castiel is standing near the Impala, telling Jack that the Brothers didn’t want them to come in so they wouldn’t “overwhelm” their friend. Well, that’s one way of putting it. Castiel asks how he’s doing, saying that he’s been “quiet.” Jack asks how long he’s been waiting to “ask me that.” Castiel admits that he may not have wanted to “overwhelm” Jack, either.
Jack says that he’s not sure. He feels “strange,” but he’s not sure if it’s because of what happened to him or because his quest is now “over.” He doesn’t know what to do next, especially since dying was going to be the way he made things right.
Castiel proceeds to lie a rug that Jack never needed “absolution” from either him or Sam and Dean, that they weren’t using him as a weapon or for his powers. He claims that they only care about him for him. Excuse me while I snort at this porkie.
Jack admits that with all the heavy hitters who are angry with them, it scares him that he has no powers to defend TFW. He feels useless. Castiel admits he’s scared, too.
Inside, Dean is giving alt-Charlie the bad news about the angry heavy hitters. He and Sam admit that their biggest enemy now is Death and that she wants to send everyone from the alternate worlds back to their worlds – which no longer exist. When Dean says Stevie’s disappearance “fits a pattern,” Charlie starts to dither that she wasn’t going to fall in love again and the Brothers just consider her and Stevie “collateral damage,” and so on. As Sam is interrupted by a call from alt-Bobby, Dean apologizes to Charlie for what’s happening to her. When Sam gets off the phone, he has more bad news – alt-Bobby was on a hunt with a Hunter from Apocalypse World who just vanished. Says Charlie, “It’s spreading.”
Dean notes that everyone who came over from another world or who died and came back is now on Billie’s hit list. Sam belatedly realizes that includes Eileen. Charlie actually gives Sam her blessing to go rescue Eileen.
On the road (Dean driving, Castiel and Jack in the backseat), Sam is texting Eileen, who is confused. He’s telling her to just wait for him to get there when she goes silent. Dean notices Sam’s expression and speeds up. When they arrive at her home, they find Eileen’s car abandoned, with her phone lying nearby. It shows that she was texting him when she vanished in mid-word. Dean tries to comfort him, but Sam says he can’t “let go” or “I’ll lose my mind.”
Sam then goes into Hunter King mode and starts saying they need to get everyone in the above endangered categories together in one place, one central to where they all are, and then ward it with everything they have.
Dean says that’s fine, Sam should do that, but it won’t last forever. So, while they’re doing that, he’s going to go kill Billie. After the nonsense he pulled last week, Sam actually has the gall to protest, but Dean’s having none of it. They still have Billie’s scythe and it’s not as though it’s his first time killing Death. After Castiel volunteers to go with Dean, Dean hugs Sam and then heads to the car.
Dean: C’mon, Cas. Let’s go reap a Reaper.
As they drive off, Sam stands rigidly, tears running down his face. The next day, he’s talking to Donna (who has found a silo where everyone can hide out) on the phone, while gassing up and peering through the backseat of his ride (a nice old red car, a Mustang, I think) at Jack. Donna asks Sam if they have a plan. He says they’re “working on it.” He then asks Jack to drive, since he has to work on research along the way. They drive off.
In the Bunker, Dean is giving a plan to Castiel that he’s making up as he goes along. His plan is to enter Billie’s library with her scythe and “smoke her out” by wrecking it.
Donna meets Sam and Jack at the silo, where people are already arriving. Jack offers to set up the warding. Donna hugs Sam and says she’s “sorry about Eileen.” She says she’s alerted Garth, Jody and the Wayward Sisters, who are all ready to help. Sam figures that all of them and Donna are probably fine, since they haven’t died. But he could use Donna for backup. Donna also says that Bobby and his “crew” are inside, with more on the way. Alt-Charlie also drives up in a pickup, determined not to let the same thing that happened to Stevie happen to anyone else.
Inside, people are setting up lights and drawing sigils on the wall. Alt-Bobby blows smoke up Sam’s ass about how he’s the “big man around here.” Mmkay, Show. Sam admits he’s a bit in over his head, here. They’ve got every type of warding they know, and he has one of Rowena’s spells to supercharge it, but he doesn’t know if it will be enough. He just hopes Dean and Castiel will take care of the Billie situation quickly enough that it won’t matter.
Donna and Jack are painting sigils on the wall when Jack discovers he makes plants wither just by holding his hand over them. Yay. A shiny, pointless new power.
Dean and Castiel enter Death’s library. Dean has Billie’s scythe. With silent hand signals, they try to sneak up on Billie, Dean with the scythe and Castiel coming in sideways with an angel blade. But she sees them coming and says, “Hello, boys.” She susses out that the plan is to attack her with her own weapon, but she questions Dean’s aim, since he only nicked her last time. Dean says he wasn’t trying to kill her, then. She asks what has changed. He says that now she is killing people he cares about.
She TK’s him across the room and when Castiel goes after her, she easily grabs him by the throat and shoves him against a wall. She references, bitterly, the time he stabbed her in the back. Alas for her, this gives Dean time to come up and poke her in her wounded shoulder and then shove the scythe toward her throat. She grabs it (bleeding white light) and holds it off, just barely, teeth bared and pissed off. When Dean shouts at her to “stop killing my people!” she laughs at him and tells him he’s “in the wrong place.” Uh-oh. In fact, Billie has a pretty strong theory about the culprit – Chuck.
Cut back to the silo, where Sam is saying the super-charging spell. The sigils glow and at first, it appears to work. But then a little girl disappears. When her sister runs to her parents, all three dust at once. People start running and turning into dust. Among the last to go are alt-Charlie and alt-Bobby. But it gets worse when Donna starts to panic and also turns to dust. Sam and Jack are left alone in an empty silo full of the sound of silence and failure.
In Death’s library, Billie has another revelation for Dean. When he stabbed her before, despite it’s being just a nick, it was “fatal.” Now that she’s dying, she has only one wish left on her Bucket List – to kill Dean Winchester. She then manages to get the scythe away from Dean and knock him down. Wisely, Dean and Castiel run. But even as they go through the door to the Bunker, Death is stalking them and she has her scythe back.
In the silo, realization is setting in. When they leave, Sam starts calling Dean, but can’t get hold of him. Jack wonders if the only people they lost were inside the Bunker. Sam says he doesn’t know, but we then get some shots of empty playgrounds and roads. It appears that the entire planet is now deserted.
In the Bunker, Dean is panicking, but still trying to come up with a plan, while Castiel tries to be supportive. This is cut off by Dean doubling over in agony. Billie has appeared on the balcony above, using a withered crone hand to squeeze his heart from the inside. As she monologues, Castiel grabs Dean and hustles him deeper into the Bunker, trying to find a way to escape.
Billie: It’s you, Dean. It’s always been you. Death-defying, rule-breaking, you are everything I live to set right, to put down, to tame. You are Human Disorder Incarnate.
Castiel, reassuring Dean as they go, takes them down to the Dungeon and uses an angelic blood sigil on the door to block Billie out, at least temporarily. Billie slowly stalks them down the hallway, running her scythe along the walls, throwing out sparks, and monologuing. When she gets to the door, she starts banging on it slowly, like a gigantic drum, making the sigil glow red, but the sigil block has at least released her grip on Dean’s heart.
Castiel tries to be upbeat. Billie said she was dying. Maybe they can wait her out. And if she gets through, they’ll fight. “We’ll lose,” Dean says woefully. “I just led us into another trap.” Dean blames himself for the failure to kill Chuck, feeling he failed because he was “angry” and a killer, that killing is all he knows. The worst part is that the real MOTW “was Chuck all along.” TFW shouldn’t have split up. They should have stayed together. “Everybody’s gonna die and I can’t stop it.”
Dean: She’s gonna get through that door.
Castiel: I know.
Dean: And she’s gonna kill you. And then she’s gonna kill me. I’m sorry.
Castiel suddenly has an idea (though I’m pretty sure Dean’s not gonna like it. At all). He then tells Dean about his deal with the Empty Entity. He explains that he made it to save Jack and the price was his own life. The terms were that “when I experienced a moment of true happiness, the Empty would be summoned and it would take me forever.”
Dean: Why are you telling me this now?
Castiel: I always wondered, ever since I took that burden, that curse, I wondered what it could be, what … what my true happiness could even look like. I never found an answer because the one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have. But I think I know, I think I know now, happiness isn’t in the having. It’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.
Dean: What are you talking about, man?
Castiel: I know. I know how you see yourself, Dean. You see yourself the same way our enemies see you: You’re destructive and you’re angry and you’re broken. You’re Daddy’s Blunt Instrument. You think that hate and anger, that’s … that’s what drives you. That’s who you are. It’s not. And everyone who knows you sees it. Everything you have ever done, the good and the bad, you have done for love. You raised your little brother for love. You fought for this whole world for love. That is who you are! You’re the most caring man on earth. You are the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know. You know, ever since we met, ever since I pulled you out of Hell, knowing you has changed me. Because you cared, I cared. I cared about you. I cared about Sam. I cared about Jack. But I cared about the whole world because of you. You changed me, Dean!
By this time, Castiel is crying freely, but also smiling with joy. This is his moment of true happiness. Dean, also with tears in his eyes, very quietly asks, “Why does this sound like goodbye?”
Castiel replies, “Because it is. I love you!”
With increasingly desperation, Dean turns to see the Empty gurgle black goo out of the wall behind them and begs Castiel, “Don’t do this.”
“Goodbye, Dean,” Castiel says, as the door behind him splinters open. He grabs Dean by the shoulder and tosses him out of the way, into a corner, just as Billie enters the Dungeon. With the brand of Castiel’s hand once again on him (though now over his clothing), Dean watches, helpless, as the Empty takes a smiling Castiel and a startled Billie. He is left alone.
Afterward, Dean weeps, totally broken. Not even seeing Sam’s call on his phone motivates him to answer it. He just sits there and cries.
Credits
Ratings for this new episode rose again to a 0.3 in the A18-49 demo, a 0.4 in the A25-54 demo and a 0.2 in the A18-25 demo, and 1.024 million in audience.
Review: I’ve seen a lot of trash talked about “Despair,” and I’m not arguing it’s perfect (among other things, there’s a lot of set-up with redshirts we don’t have much emotional investment in during the first two acts and speaking of which, I couldn’t care less about any version of Charlie). But I am going to go to bat for it because I think this was possibly the best episode in the season and probably one of the greats for the series overall. Kind of a shame about the episode after this one, but there you go.
What I loved about this episode (and it really lived up to its name) is that it was all about consequences. Because of this, it was the culmination of different storylines where bad luck and bad decisions have now led to bad outcomes. It was Classical Tragedy. In Tragedy, catharsis (the release of emotions built up over the course of the story in the audience) is a big thing and this episode had a lot of catharsis, despite the sense of another shoe needing to drop with the Castiel storyline.
We always knew that in a good story, Castiel’s deal would not be forgotten. We always knew that at some point, should he be lucky enough to know true happiness, The Empty would take him. His story would not be complete without that cathartic moment. Sure, I’d like to see a final ending in the last episode where Dean returns the favor and gets him back out of The Empty, but it’s still a good ending, even if Castiel’s story stops here.
We saw a juxtaposition of Sam discovering that he could be looked up to by his Hunter crew all they wanted, but he still couldn’t protect them from Chuck, with Dean losing Castiel due to teaching Castiel a little too well about love and heroism, about what it truly meant to be human. In Sam’s case, his Hunter crew looked up to him because they expected him to protect them. It was a largely one-way dependent relationship where Sam played Big Kahuna Hunter King and got lots of ego-boo in exchange.
But he learned a harsh lesson about the limits of his power when Chuck simply snapped that crew away (an obvious ripoff of the Thanos “snap” storyline from the MCU movies, so they’ll probably all be back in an episode or two). For all his talk about saving everyone last week, Sam’s actions still led pretty directly to the same people dying this week – even worse, to the entire earth being emptied of higher animal life. “Saving” Jack had a very high price.
In contrast, Castiel sought to use his final moments to repair the seriously frayed relationship between him and Dean. Castiel had consistently chosen Jack and Jack’s welfare over Dean for years, to the point where I wasn’t too sure I wanted these two to stay as friends, let alone anything more. It was getting pretty neglectful and even abusive on Castiel’s side.
But Jack was largely absent this week (thank God) aside from the obligatory “Oh, look, he has a shiny new power in place of a personality” trope. Not even getting yelled at by The Empty Entity saved him from irrelevance. So, we were left, in the last act, with just Castiel and Dean.
Castiel had an epiphany about that relationship. He realized that forcing Dean to carry all the emotional weight for everyone else’s happiness was unfair, but that poor Dean could not truly receive the message that he was worthy of love, especially from one who had been giving him pretty much the opposite message for quite a while. What to do?
So, Castiel made it clear what his deal with the Empty entailed, what it meant when his confession of love summoned her. And this also made it possible for him to get through to Dean that when he said Dean had shown him how to love, by loving the entire world, he was being entirely sincere. By summoning the Empty through a moment of true happiness, Castiel was putting himself through the most accurate and unimpeachable lie detector test ever, right in front of Dean.
Now, the Christological elements in this were right off the scale. People were wondering if the show had finally made Destiel canon and here I was, wondering if anybody had noticed that they’d finally revealed their Jesus figure. In Judeo-Christian terms (which is the main system the show uses), the being who loves the world so much as to die for it is Jesus Christ (talking about mythology, here, not trying to proselytize). And by his sacrifice, Christ teaches everyone else how to love the world that much, too. Keep in mind that Castiel’s relationship with Dean began with resurrecting him from Hell after Dean died to save Sam from Sam’s Original Demon Blood Sin.
We also see the negative side of this in Billie’s monologue when she’s stalking them, when she refers to Dean as “Human Disorder Incarnate.” That pretty much sums up the demonic view of Jesus in the Bible and how his human enemies perceived him, as well. Jesus is Death’s conqueror, its annihilator, its eternal nemesis. Of course Death hates him.
The reason I think this works for me (as well as Dean killing Death – twice) is that, again, it’s an allegorical metaphor that evokes the emotional resonance of a deeper truth. Whereas, Jack and his shiny powers are just a convenient deus ex machina that incompetent writers use to get themselves out of a corner.
Now, as I said last week, I’m not very happy with the way the show has been killing off its most powerful female characters so that we could end up with a white-bread sausage fest next week, but it must be said that Lisa Berry knocked this one right out of the park. She brought all this subtlety of sheer rage and grief and disappointment and bitterness to Billie that certainly wasn’t there in the script. And right before she was about to have a baby, too. Give this woman an Emmy, already. Billie was scary.
And who wouldn’t be? Despite the show’s attempts to villainize her, she’s just an allegorical figure of a natural process. She’s necessary and the Brothers have been cheating her for a long, long time. Can we really consider her the villain of this story?
Let’s talk about Castiel’s death. There was a lot of talk online (whining might be the better word) that the fact that he died immediately after declaring his love for Dean Winchester not only was homophobic writing, but it meant that Dean Winchester, and even the actor who plays him (Jensen Ackles himself) was homophobic.
As an actual member of the LGBT community (Hint: I’m the B word), I’m gonna have to say “Oh, hell, no, Ghost Rider” to that one, especially the last conclusion. But let me explain.
First of all, while internalized homophobia is definitely a thing in the gay community and especially among closeted gays (lookin’ hard at you, Lindsey Graham), it’s more than a tiny bit questionable to call out a gay male writer as homophobic in his writing about two men. I’ll grant you that I haven’t loved a lot of what Robert Berens has done lately, but I’m reasonably confident that he knows a lot more about what gay men are like in their relationships than straight teenage girls who think they’re “woke” because they ship two men together.
There’s nothing woke about fetishizing gay people as your sexual fantasy. Just because what’s up on screen is not what you imagine two gay men must be like does not make that representation homophobic. Yaoi has about as much to do with actual gay experience as hurt/comfort does with hospice care or the meat grinder that is a city ER on a Saturday night during a full moon. Life is not fanfic.
This is especially important in talking about Supernatural versus other CW shows. While the CW has improved somewhat since the Dawn Ostroff era in terms of representation, there’s definitely something stale about how they go about it. It feels as though they just dusted off the WB playbook from the late 1990s and started re-doing their greatest hits.
Thus, you have women of color, but they’re young and pretty and have an older male mentor (because all the older women in the story are evil or dead). The balance of men versus women remains seriously lopsided and the women seem to be there mainly to provide relationship drama. Women with superpowers get held to much higher standards than their male counterparts and experience much harsher criticism from other characters in the story whenever they fail to meet utter perfection. You have lesbian and bisexual women in major roles, now, but they’re all young and pretty (that male gaze thing), and it’s funny how one woman in the couple always gets designated the Romantic Interest, and gets fridged, turned EVOL, or made irrelevant in some way. It all feels like something that seemed progressive in 1998. Not so much in 2020.
Supernatural never fit that mold and all attempts to make it do that came off as awkward. Contrary to what its critics claimed, this did not mean that it had no GLBT representation. Part of what makes the idea of Castiel having been fridged questionable is that his relationship did not fundamentally alter at that moment of confession, let alone reset when he said, “I love you.” There had never been anything secret about Castiel’s feelings about Dean toward Dean over the 12 years they’d known each other, any more than Dean and Crowley’s relationship (often elided by a lot of fans) between seasons had been “just” a friendship.
There was simply a difference in how Castiel and Dean expressed love for each other. Castiel said it (and so did others). Dean showed it. He trusted Castiel in Season 6 long after it was clear Castiel was lying to him. He refused to leave Purgatory without Castiel. When Castiel essentially forced him to leave without him, Dean developed guilt-driven hysterical amnesia about the event. And when Castiel was making his declaration in “Despair,” Dean was begging him, with tears in his eyes, not to do it and end up in the Empty. Dean. Loves. Castiel.
It’s not whether there is Destiel on the show. We’ve had this relationship for 12 years and the episode framed it as romantic by leading up to it with two, increasingly important relationships where Chuck dusted one of the couple. It’s how you choose to define it and interpret what you saw onscreen.
But Dean’s love for Castiel on the show was always framed as familial, brotherly, not romantic (though Castiel’s was certainly romantic on his side, just as Crowley’s had been, albeit with a noir twist). Now there’s a very logical, non-homophobic reason the show couldn’t have Dean be in love with another man. His most important relationship was never romantic. It was always brotherly. He always put Sam first and he made no bones about it.
But for Dean to fall in love with another man would not only be “cheating” on Sam (just as, say, Dean’s connection to Amara was framed), but it would imply that Dean’s love for Sam was romantic and sexual. And while the CW may be up for a gay male relationship, it’s definitely not up for one that’s first-degree incestuous (no matter how many jokes the Kripke Era made about it). This ain’t HBO.
Castiel recognized that Dean would always love Sam first and I think that was what he meant when he said he could never have what he truly wanted. What he truly wanted wasn’t just Dean’s love, but Dean’s exclusive love. And Dean’s love, as Castiel himself admits near the end of this episode, is universal. Hence why the title reflects what Dean feels right before the credits.
Next week: Inherit the Earth: On a deserted planet, Sam, Dean and Jack go up against Chuck one final time.
The Kripke Years
The Gamble Years
The Carver Years
The Dabb Years
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I read fanfiction on AO3. There has been an EXPLOSION of Destiel stories since this episode: yesterday over 200 stories posted (and self-proclaimed ‘fixes’ of the Finale).
In Don’t Call Me Shurley (BTW I watch AIRPLANE! today) Metatron described to Chuck the JOY his angels received from being near his Presence. To ME that always read like a drug HIGH.
Castiel imo shifted the JOY he felt from that Presence to Dean Winchester. After all, when he finally ‘met’ God, well, after a while it ALL turned bad. Chuck was not really what Castiel thought he was, was he?
But Dean was always GLORIOUSLY exactly himself.
I also want to say I don’t ‘twitter’ but I gather MANY fans are enraged that Dean did not say ME TOO. I think it was kind of a stunning moment for Dean. I think ‘he’ was interpreting it as a romance-type thing because of the WORDS Castiel was using. And he did not interrupt except to beg Cas to stop talking, because he knew what this ‘chick flic’ moment was going to cost.
Anyway, I thought it was a good good-bye for Castiel for me anyway. Mischa’s eyes really glowed while he was smiling and crying to Dean.
The magnitude of Dean’s cosmic impact was probably the most overt it’s ever been. Death had a personal scythe (hehe) to grind with him, singled him out as “human disorder incarnate,” was the second version of Death to be killed by his hand. Cas actually became recognizable again and barely mentioned Jack in his confession speech, instead honing in on Dean, alone, as the sole influence for the person he became. He literally declared him the most loving and selfless human in the world.
Even without considering the undeniable romantic angle, that whole scene bulldozed me flat. To have Berens, of all people, write that speech and have it spoken by Dabb’s Antichrist Babysitter version of Cas, I was dumbfounded (in a good way). We all know that the next episode utterly failed to follow through with Dean’s cosmic significance, but at least we had this. Better than nothing, I guess.
Jack and Sam really did look puny and inconsequential by comparison, but Dabb was nonetheless determined to stuff bland, white-bread-shaped Jack Sue into the Dean-shaped messiah hole. He literally turned his shiny self-insert OC into God, like some fifteen-year-old self-indulgent fanfic writer would do. What a hack.
Do you think they’re finally going to address Dean’s death books in the finale? Even if the truth was that Billie lied to Dean so that she could trick him into taking himself out of the picture, that would also need to be addressed and confirmed in the show, right? RIGHT?!
I don’t think Billie ever actually lied to Dean. She even showed him one of his books–as in, he actually read the thing. Yeah, Sam seemed shocked and surprised when The Empty made the probable consequences of Billie’s plans really obvious, but Dean wasn’t, at all, when Sam told him. I don’t think Dean was unaware of what Billie was likely to do. I think he was okay with it.
Remember that he’s the one who spent a day as a Reaper and saw the results, first-hand, of messing around with people’s projected death dates. It’s not something you do lightly–other people end up suffering your consequences and Dean is firmly opposed to doing that. He does not believe that either he or his team are so special that helping them avoid cosmic fallout for their actions is worth wrecking the world. That one’s on Sam.
When I was referring to Billie lying, I meant back in 14.10 when she’d told him that either he died after putting himself in the Malak Box or he died after Michael took over and burned down all the universes. She’d said that all of Dean’s death books had changed to the same outcome, with just one outlier. Obviously this was false, since Michael is not in the equation anymore and whatever Dean’s death turns out to be will not involve either of these scenarios.
So the only answer I can think of is that Billie lied about the Malak Box being Dean’s only acceptable death, and that she’d done so because she wanted him gone and unable to disrupt her natural order any longer.
Thing is, though, Billie doesn’t write those books – people’s choices do. And she showed it to him so that he could actually read from it. We don’t really know for sure what his story actually said. We know he concluded the Ma’lak Box was for him, but that may not have been what it said, specifically. It may have just said he needed to build it and what it was for.
Then how would Dean’s death have figured into building the Malak Box, since it was still his death book he was reading from? I think we’re supposed to take what Billie and Dean said about his water-bound coffin at face value, since we’ve been given no indication otherwise and the writers suck at subtlety and plotting. And if it WAS Dean’s choices that somehow changed his death books again, this will still need to be explained in the show, since Dean’s “inescapable” fate was the central mytharc for a hot sec in season 14.
Ultimately, whatever the answer is doesn’t matter that much to me. But I will be BOGGLED if the show doesn’t address this hanging question at all, given that Billie being “wrong” about Dean was mentioned in 14.20 and also as recently as 15.12. I just can’t believe we’re down to the literal last episode and it still hasn’t happened yet, not even when Dean was actually back in the library in 15.18.
Since his (and maybe Sam’s) final death is probably coming in the finale, I really don’t know what to expect. It’d be ludicrous if they didn’t follow up on his death books, but they’ve done plenty of equally nonsensical crap already.
I can’t help thinking something major happened behind the scenes last season to derail the alt-Michael plotline and make it a Jack Gone Wild plotline, instead. Because Billie lying to Dean in Season 14 doesn’t make much sense.
Well you were right about it not making sense. Dean died of a totally different cause and not a peep was made about his death books…
Brilliant how you framed it, Dean’s love is universal and that’s why he’s so exceptional, he fights for everyone equally, no matter how bad or good, he doesn’t weigh if someone is worthy of help. I’m minded of Folsom Prison Blues when he’s single-minded in helping the prisoners when Sam argued with him and his view was they didn’t deserve to died horribly. It was a beautiful selfless moment. Dean didn’t know them or what they did and he helped anyway, because it was the right thing.
It’s a shame it’s taken so very long for anyone in his orbit to tell Dean he’s worthy to sit at the dinner table, and then they die. It’s sad, the same thing happened with John, he finally acknowledged how much Dean did, then he dumps nasty secret on him and dies. Is it any wonder he’s a mess in that moment? Trauma on trauma.
I was very excited when this episode, and the show, started to FINALLY admit Dean’s true significance as the Christ figure. Exactly as you said, he killed death, he was the only true disturbance in the natural order and he turned out to be the embodiment of love. Sam and Jack looked like complete false prophets next to him. I doubt the show will play it right in the last episode, but at least Dean finally gets the recognition he deserves.
Given the heavy religious tone it was very hard for me to perceive Castiel’s confession as anything “Destiel-y”. I am not religious, but I did go to Catholic school and spent way too much time with people of faith. The language Castiel used is almost word for word what I’ve heard them say when professing their love for Jesus. To me this was not a romantic catharsis, but a religious revelation and the final change from a cyborg-like “dick with wings” into a human person.
I am not a fan of Destiel for many reasons, mostly because I do not want abuse to be considered any kind of a romantic ideal. And Castiel is very abusive and manipulative. But I also do not want to consider this a Destiel moment because Destiel is very earthly, very carnal. Sex can be a cosmic power, but Destiel usually is about more primitive passions. People can ship and fantasize however they want, but this is the impression I got over the years. That, and that it is something very forced, artificial, unlike the synergy between the two leads.
This moment was so much more than love between two people, or simple passion. It was about cosmic love and personal growth. Something of greater magnitude then just two people. And as such it is much more interesting than fetishising yet another unhealthy relationship. I would like to see an interesting representation of a same sex romance, but this was not it. This moment was about something else and I am sorry to see it was lost or downplayed by the fans.
Medieval mystics often appropriated romantic and even carnal imagery to express the inexpressible–the love for the divine. This is why nuns are called Brides of Christ. Having sex, or even sexual thoughts, for a nun is essentially cheating on Jesus.
Mystic imagery could get pretty strange, especially with female saints. For example. St. Catherine of Siena, a 14th century Italian mystic who led such an ascetic lifestyle that she essentially starved herself to death, age 33, had mystic visions in which Jesus married her, with his mother and several apostles in attendance. Her wedding ring (which she claimed was invisible) was his holy foreskin.
I know, that always weirded me out how they could just mix the two together. I can’t even begin to list all the wtf moments during my visit to Israel and Rome where I was exposed to a lot of this. For someone not fully immersed in this mindset it is very disturbing. Thank you for those examples.
But then it makes even more sense with Castiel – a being from Christian mythology. This way it really is a religious form of love for the Christ figure, rather than the homosexual love closer to the Ancient Greek tradition. They could have made a show involving two brothers in arms developing a relationship as they faced challenges together (though it would’vehad to be something much less abusive), but this show has had religious context from the start. I can’t just forget that context now.
Sometimes this show can be deep, smart, layered and stimulating for an educated person. I hate when these moment get twisted and lost in favor of something more mass market.
Don’t forget St. Theresa of Avila and the sculpture of her ecstasy by Bernini.
Wowsa!
Heh. Yeah, was thinking of that one, too. “Religious ecstasy,” my ass.