The Official Supernatural: “Inherit the Earth” (15.19) Recap and Review

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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.

Tonight, 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: Brief recap of the past two episodes. Cut to Now in Kyoto, New York City … and then they run of budget and we get British Columbia masquerading as Middle America – sorry, Hastings, MN. Sam and Jack are wandering around in a daze, looking at a wrecked car, as the Impala pulls up and Dean gets out. Boy, Dean sure made it there in record time.

When Dean gets out, Sam states the obvious: “Everyone’s gone.” Not just humans, either. There are still trees and other plants, but all the higher animals are gone, too. Sam asks Dean if he saw anyone else and Dean says no. Jack asks where Castiel is and Dean about breaks down right there. He explains what happened to Castiel in the last episode, that Billie was trying to kill them, and Castiel summoned the Empty to take her out, getting killed in the process.

Sam is in denial that everyone could possibly be gone, even though Dean tries to bring him down to earth. As Sam starts calling Jody and Garth, and getting voicemails, Dean goes to Jack and apologizes for not saving Castiel. We get a telescoping view out, up and away from the street until we can see the entire Earth in space, just sitting there.

Cue title cards.

While Jack waits outside, the Brothers enter Sammy’s Highway Cafe. Music (pretty sure it’s Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty”) is still playing, food on the shelves. There’s a soccer game on the TV, but no players on the field or fans in the stands. As Dean turns off a tap (astute regular commenter here, AlyCat 22, noticed that the beer was from Jensen Ackles’ brewery, FBBC, and is called “Ghost Ale”), Sam is starting to realize that yup, everyone on Earth appears to be gone for real.

Outside, Jack forlornly and pointlessly calls out to Castiel. As he heads inside, all the plants he passes by wither and die. Inside, Sam is tailspinning. He blames himself for everything because he was stubborn two episodes ago and just had to scupper the latest Get Chuck plan to save themselves and their un-dead friends. Now everyone on Earth is dead. Dean starts to contradict him, then just lets him roll on because, well, Sam’s not wrong about that. When Sam starts to throw in the towel, though, Jack protests that he can’t just give up.

Cut to an urban night scene outside a curious building that looks like a modern ziggurat. Sam and Dean are waiting for Chuck to show up. And, presumably because he’s bored and wants to gloat, he does.

The Brothers offer him a deal – they will kill each other, just as he wants, but he has to bring everyone back, first, including Castiel (this is Dean’s request) from The Empty. Chuck gives it a microsecond of thought, then says no. As much as he savors watching them “wave the white flag,” he likes this new story better. He gets to watch them and their “pet” Jack “rot” on an empty Earth, all because “you wouldn’t take a knee.” He looks at Sam (so does Dean) while saying this and Sam looks really uncomfortable.

Cut to Jack lying on his bed inside the Bunker. Sam is wandering down the hallways with a coffee cup. He finds Dean passed out on the floor, head on top of a bottle, in the Library, and wakes him up. Dean is mighty hungover.

Jack then looks puzzled and comes out in his pajamas. He says he “senses something.” After cracking a joke about how he senses that they need to get some aspirin, Dean asks how Jack can sense anything, when he’s “powered down.” Jack says he doesn’t know, but he knows there’s a “presence out there.”

They get in the Impala and go investigate at an abandoned gas station, the Top Buz: Route 66 (a rather obvious call-out to the original inspiration for Supernatural, 1960s road show Route 66).

Dean finds the “presence” first. It’s a dog, which Chuck “somehow missed.” Immediately calling it “Miracle,” Dean picks it up and brings it out to the car. Sam snarks about Dean actually liking dogs, now (Well, Sam did sleep through half of “Dog Dean Afternoon”). As Dean puts the dog in the backseat, he comments that it’s only been a few days since the “Rapture.” But then the dog dusts out and Dean looks up to see Chuck smugly watching him from a field before vanishing.

In the car that night, while Jack sleeps in the back, Dean is upset that they “couldn’t even save a friggin’ dog.” Glumly, Sam says the lack of people left to save may be the point. You can’t save people or hunt things if there are neither people nor things left to save and hunt, I guess.

They arrive at a church, still at night. Turns out the dog wasn’t the presence Jack sensed. That presence is in or near the church, as lightning and thunder flash all around. Jack states the obvious that they may be walking into a trap. They go in, anyway, because really, what else is there to do at this point?

They pass under a crucifix to find an empty church full of lit candles that haven’t burned down (remember that it’s been a few days) and open liturgical books strewn about.

“So, you survived,” someone says behind them, from the doorway they just entered. They turn around and Sam says, “Michael?”

Michael explains that he’s been hiding out inside this church (a St. Michael’s) since “the Rapture began.” He’s been avoiding using any powers that might attract his father’s attention. Sam asks him about Adam and he says Adam got raptured, too. Dean mourns that poor Adam “could never catch a break.” Michael asks how they survived and Dean says it’s because Chuck “has a sense of humor” and wanted to strand them “on an empty planet” for funsies.

They ask him what he’s doing there. He says, “I never spent much time on Earth.” He’s been reading up on what humans think (well, thought) of God. It turns out that after Chuck left Heaven, Michael was so sure his father would return that he got all the angels and prophets to “burnish” his father’s image as much as possible. So, believers loved God a whole lot, through many religions. Unfortunately, now that his father knows that he helped Sam and Dean, Chuck’s a bit pissed off at him. Dean points out that they did “reach out to him” again before it all went higgledy-piggledy. Jack asks how he feels about God now.

Michael loses some of his arrogance and his shoulders slump. Dean glances again at Sam.

Back in the Bunker, Sam shows Michael Billie’s God’s death book. Michael tries to read it, but he can’t even open it. He tries hard, though. He does make the book all glowy and stuff for a moment.

Sam and Dean sit down for a talk on the steps to the Library (going down to the bedrooms), Dean with a beer. Sam says they need to get God’s death book open, but they have no current options about how to do it. Dean says that means they’re “screwed.” Then he gets an odd call on his phone (well, any call on his phone would be odd). It’s from Castiel. When he answers it, Castiel’s voice sounds weary and hurt, saying he’s just outside.

Still holding the beer, Dean races up the steps to the outer door and opens it to find … Lucifer.

Dean can’t slam that door fast enough. The look on his face is hilarious.

Nevertheless, Lucifer is able to fly in and land on the floor below them before Dean can get the door shut. He explains (well, infodumps) that The Empty is very, very angry with Chuck, having gotten exploding Jack all over her and killed Billie and all. She resurrected him to go find God’s death book and read it for her. His plan is that he also brought back a Reaper with him (named Betty), who appears as a chained and gagged young woman. Lucifer kills her with his archangel blade. Being the next Reaper to die since Billie, she resurrects as Death, with both the scythe and the ring.

Dean moves forward cautiously to untie her gag. She rewards him by head-butting him. She then stands up and bursts her chains. Betty is just as sarcastic as Lucifer and demands the book from the Brothers in belittling terms. When they bring her to the Dungeon, where it is, she tells them reading it is “not a group project” and shuts the door in their faces.

Michael comes into the Library, where Lucifer is making a house of cards (cheating by TKing them together). Michael is not at all happy to see Lucifer, especially when Lucifer mocks him for getting no more love out of Chuck than anyone else ever did, for all his loyalty and devotion.

Their family spat is interrupted, however, by Betty, who calls all present “asshats,” then proceeds to read from the book. She doesn’t get very far, though, before Lucifer turns her to ashes from across the room. Bye, Betty. Note that the only way to kill Death is to use their scythe on them, but considering this episode is written by the same tedious incompetents who once claimed Lucifer was the oldest son of God, it’s probably just a big plothole.

Anyhoo, Lucifer TK’s the book to him and brags about how Chuck was the one who actually busted him out of The Empty. He’s also been souped up a bit, as he easily dodges Michael’s blasts and knocks him down with his own blast from across the room – after knocking Sam and Dean across the room, too.

Lucifer then turns to Jack and suggests he join the Chuck Team, since that’s the only way he will be leaving the Bunker alive. Jack winces in pain as Lucifer mocks him. Michael then sneaks up behind Lucifer and stabs him with his archangel blade, which the Brothers had snuck to him. Jack winces again and looks dizzy as Lucifer blasts white light out of his mouth and eyes, and then bursts into embers.

Later, Dean meets with Michael in the kitchen, gets a beer, and asks how he’s doing. Michael admits to being a bit “winded,” having not fought anyone in “several centuries” (Oh, so, now, they remember that Hell time is different from Earth time? What about “Taxi Driver,” then?). He’s also hurt that Chuck chose to resurrect Lucifer from The Empty rather than “reach out to” his eldest son.

Dean speculates that Chuck is so afraid of what the book contains that he sent someone else, rather than come in person. Michael says the book is useless without Death to read it, but Dean begs to differ, now that the book is open. He says that Sam thought he recognized some of the symbols in it, that they looked like Enochian, and is trying to decipher it using the Book of the Damned (Why not ask Dean, whom we know has been able to read the Book of the Damned when he had the Mark?).

Later, we see Dean getting drowsy over research in the library. Jack is sitting nearby, reading a book. Michael comes in and fake-casually asks if Sam has had any luck in deciphering Billie’s book. Sam walks in and says that he has been able to “piece together” a spell that can create “an unstoppable force.” But it has to be done in a specific spot at a specific time of day (Conveniently, this spot is in North America). Off they drive to that spot, a secluded beach along a peaceful lake.

Sam and Dean set up three bowls, while Jack and Michael watch. Then they light them up. The bowls shoot three blasts of white fire into the sky and then fly apart. Nothing else seems to happen.

Dean asks why it didn’t work and then Chuck shows up. Chuck blasts Sam and Dean one way, and Jack the other. It turns out Michael sold them out and warned Chuck about the spell. But Chuck is still mad about the time Michael “sided with the Winchesters.” Even as Michael begs for his life, Chuck blasts him into nothingness.

As the Brothers crawl to their feet, Chuck tells them he’s bored now and is “canceling your show.” Sam figures he might as well get a lick or two in as he goes and punches Chuck. It has little effect. Chuck makes the Brothers crumple with pain, but just as he’s about to snap them out of existence, he has a better idea. He’ll just beat them to death. And boy does this scene go on for a while. Neither of them will give up or stay down, even as Chuck keeps telling them to lie down, and breaks some bones and pulverizes their faces. They get up, even when they have to support each other.

Chuck is confused about why they’re smiling. Sam says it’s because “you lose.” Chuck turns around to see Jack standing there. When he approaches him and snaps his fingers, Jack is unaffected. Then Jack’s eyes glow. He grabs Chuck’s face and kinda … sucks out all his power, basically, while sad violins loudly play. Their faces glow and get veiny. Then Jack lets Chuck drop to the ground and turns to the Brothers, still glowing. He snaps his fingers and they’re instantly healed. They approach Jack and Chuck, and Sam picks up God’s death book.

On the ground, Chuck wonders what happened and Dean replies, “We won.”

Chuck’s confused. So, this is how it ends for him? Sam drops the book in front of him and says to look for himself. But when Chuck scrabbles through the pages, the pages are blank.

Dean and Sam take turns infodumping the plan they had. It turns out that after Chuck sent Lucifer, they realized that Michael was jealous and desperate to get back into Daddy’s graces. So, they set him up with a fake spell to lure Chuck there. The real plan was to get Jack, who had turned from a bomb into a divine power vacuum (Well, Adam and Serafina did say he would turn into a black hole), to suck up enough energy to be able to defeat Chuck.

Chuck desperately tries to claim this is why they’re his “favorites.” This is the first time he doesn’t know what comes next. Will they kill him now? He’s practically ecstatic about goading them into killing him, especially “Dean Winchester, the Ultimate Killer.”

With a mix of disgust and pity, Dean says, “Sorry, Chuck,” but as Chuck is cringing at the final blow, Dean and Sam both just walk away. Dean turns around to tell Chuck that that’s not who they are. They aren’t just killers. Sam quietly asks Jack if Chuck can ever get his power back. Jack says, “It’s not his power, anymore.”

Sam and Dean tell Chuck that his ending is to die like an ordinary human. He’ll “grow old, get sick, and die.” No one will remember him. They then get in the Impala and leave him there as he runs after them, begging and pleading.

After driving back into town, Dean has Jack bring everyone back to the tune of The Youngbloods’ cover of “Get Together” (1967) – oh, look, finally some Classic Rock. Well, we get a bunch of no-name redshirts and Miracle the dog back, anyway. Not anyone we know or care about (besides the dog). And no mention whatsoever of Castiel. Sam doesn’t call Eileen, alt-Bobby, alt-Charlie, Jody, Donna, Garth, or anyone else.

The Brothers have questions and Jack answers a few of them. For example, Amara is inside him and they are “in harmony” (Even saying that out loud sounds so misogynistic; what were these writers thinking?). He then blathers on about how he’s not coming back to the Bunker because he’s now “everywhere” and people are just going to have to find their own answers.

He’s basically going full-on animistic and “won’t be hands-on.” He’s not going to make the mistake Chuck made this season of putting himself “in the story.” Nope, he’s just going to make the mistake Chuck made the previous several thousand years of buggering off and abandoning everyone, leaving the bigger fish to bully and gobble up the smaller fish in some weird and desperate attempt to get God’s attention with each new apocalypse. And bail is precisely what Jack does, in a glow of light.

He claims to have learned from the Brothers, his mother (you know, the one he murdered by being born, with no mention of Mary) and Castiel (whom he couldn’t be arsed to rescue from The Empty) that “when people have to be their best, they can be.” Which just demonstrates that he didn’t learn a damned thing in the three seasons he was Cousin Olivering this show. Also, that has got to be the most inane inspirational slogan I have ever seen.

Ironically enough, despite all the “I’ll be around” rhetoric, when he walks off and disappears in a glow of light, it feels a lot like the show just killed him off permanently. This seems to be his final exit. Too bad there’s only one episode left. Gee, I wonder how the writers will cope without this convenient deus ex machina character.

Back at the Bunker, the Brothers mourn his loss over beers. I roll my eyes really hard. They get over it quick, though, as they realize they finally have their lives back for real. “Finally free,” Dean says. Sounds like a book about lion cubs who end up getting released into the wild and killed by poachers.

Well, it seems that even with all the tedious monologuing and backstabbing and plotholing, the Nepotism Duo just plain ran out of story (looks like this recap may be shorter than usual, too!), so Sam and Dean leave behind their carved-up table (their initials, their mother’s initials, and Castiel and Jack’s names) and go off on a two-minute road trip full of clips from the show to the tune (again) of Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty.” The clip show is more thematic (famous and not-so-famous scenes) than character-driven, with major recurring characters jostling for attention with barely-seen one-shots. That still doesn’t explain the extreme lack of Castiel in it. He only gets three brief shots. Jack (hell, Charlie, for that matter) gets more coverage. Frankly, they’ve done better mid-season recaps. The montage ends with Sam shutting the trunk on the Pilot episode.

Credits

Ratings for this new episode remained steady at a 0.3 in the A18-49 demo and a 0.4 in the A25-54 demo, but dropped slightly to a 0.1 in the A18-25 demo and 1.003 million in audience.

Review: “Ted Nugent called. He wants his shirt back.” That’s from Ocean’s 11, a film that was a lot better than “Inherit the Earth.”

Look, we knew it was the Nepotism Duo, so the odds were this wouldn’t be a very well-written episode. But still, damn, son. And after last week got my hopes up, too.

Sure, the Jack and Brothers-only stans were happy because they got an entire episode of those three characters (and they even ditched the “annoying” angel), but I don’t think a whole lot of other fans were. In fact, I kept seeing fans on Twitter who wondered if it was a fake happy ending engineered by Chuck and if next week would cast this episode in a whole other light. I suppose it’s possible (As infuriating as it would be that they wasted yet another hour on fake-out nonsense after poorly setting things up for the end of the series, it would be nice if this foolish episode weren’t real). But considering the show’s track record with these two writers, I doubt that will be the case.

Now, some have talked about the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on filming this season. However, this was, in fact, the first episode when that was an issue. They had only filmed one day before they had to stop production for several months. So, that probably influenced the idea of doing a pared-down cast and evacuating the Earth, as it were.

But alas, a completely depopulated Earth turned out to be rather less exciting than wet toilet paper drying in the sun (the writers even have Chuck admit that right before the climactic fight). There were ample opportunities to make the set pieces with no people, in situations where ordinarily there would be a ton of people, properly eerie, but those scenes didn’t creep me out at all. They just seemed to be there to pass the time and make a point.

“Inherit the Earth” was tedious, talky, flabby, self-indulgent and just a tiiiiiny bit condescending in spots. For all the pomp and circumstance about its being the “season finale” before the series finale, not much happened in it. At the end, I was like, “That’s it?” So, a typical Nepotism Duo episode.

It also sidelined Sam and Dean’s story in order to indulge Jack Sue’s dull, subtext-free-when-it-wasn’t-totally-inappropriate-subtext apotheosis plot. And after last week’s far-meatier Christological metaphors, too. Gee, it’s almost as though Buckner and Ross-Leming had no clue what they were doing when it came to writing about religion – oh, wait. They don’t.

The idea that Jack was just going to become an animistic god-in-everything after the show hammered away at Judeo-Christian mythos for 15 seasons was faintly condescending to much of the audience on a religious level. I mean, really, Show? You’re not going to do anything truly interesting with all that mythology and set-up at all? Bad enough what they did to and with pagan mythologies over the years, but this was their central belief system in the show. And look how they dumped on it.

There are a lot of rumors that Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles (especially Ackles) had grown disenchanted in recent years with the quality of writing on the show. “Inherit the Earth”’s damp squib of a payoff after 15 seasons is a pretty big hint why. The saddest thing is that these two writers are incompetent enough to think they actually did a good job.

But the wonky theology wasn’t a tenth as offensive as the dippy misogyny involved in fridging Yet Another Important Female Character (Amara) to prop up Jack Sue. I mean, they literally took away her voice and had Jack speak for her after she was transferred from her brother to Jack like a crown jewel. Or a piece of luggage. They basically turned her into Nefertiri (“I am Egypt!”) from The Ten Commandments.

I felt as though the show did a bait-and-switch with the audience along the lines of what the showrunners did near the end of Game of Thrones. To Benioff and Weiss (and perhaps George R.R. Martin), the idea of a woman ruling in her own right was so horrible that they had to demonize the only real candidate for that. In Supernatural, we get a lot of dithering and hand-waving about how Billie wasn’t worthy to become God (an attitude Sam himself admitted this week was a costly mistake on his part). We then have Amara disqualify herself from the competition, reducing herself to a princess whose nephew marries her in order to become King (I’m kinda hoping The Empty Entity steps up this week and eats Jack).

It seemed that the show promised us a story where an unjust and tyrannical monarchy would be overthrown by a revolution led by the Brothers Winchester, in favor of a kinder and more just world. Instead, we got a palace coup, nothing much changed, and the Brothers were sent off like good peasants with a crust of bread and a pat on the head. That is pretty messed up.

The idea of Jack being a hoover for divine energy was quite daft enough when Adam and Serafina explained it (and it was never explained why he would now be killing plants, but Sam and Dean were safe around him), but it must have been too difficult for the Nep Duo to grasp the implications. A black hole doesn’t release energy once it captures it. A living black hole Jack certainly isn’t likely to become a divine being due to sucking up energy. He’s liable to collapse into a highly unstable magical singularity.

But let’s be silly and assume that’s the case. In order to become more powerful than Chuck (who also had Amara inside him), Jack would actually need to suck up energy from a source outside the SPNverse. You see, Chuck created the SPNverse. Yeah, he used material from The Empty (according to him, anyway, in some now-long-forgotten canon), but the SPNverse is not more vast and powerful than he is. Jack could have hoovered up the entire SPNverse remaining and still not have been powerful enough to take on Chuck. That just made no sense.

While one could fanon that Jack killed the plants because he had sucked up enough Empty after exploding to defeat Chuck, there really wasn’t anything in his Empty scenes to indicate that. And the show banged home far more obvious points than that, while ignoring this one. After all, he lost a lot of energy exploding in The Empty and it doesn’t make a lot of sense that he would have sucked up any more Empty than he lost of himself afterward.

Equally stupid and lazy was having Sam and Dean infodump the plan they used to trick Chuck. I mentioned the Ocean’s 11 quote before because they do something fairly similar (at least, we get an explanatory flashback, though the protagonist does not let the antagonist in on the plan). But in that case, much of the film had already shown us the plan, just from an angle where it wasn’t initially clear.

In this case, after wasting most of a season not bothering to set anything up, this episode just winged it. And it was such a simple plan, too. It’s never explained why Chuck never saw it coming. Did Billie’s death change his ability to predict their behavior? He just seemed entirely in the dark about what the Brothers were doing, once she died. Except that he did do that trick with the dog, so he was watching them.

What similarly made no sense (and was probably a plothole) was how Lucifer could kill Death. Yes, okay, he can probably kill a Reaper that easily, but Death? Death requires some work and her scythe. Also, why make the new Death such a bitch? Why do these two writers write women so poorly when one of them is a woman? I mean, she was the only female character in the entire damned episode and she lasted all of a hot minute. And who is Death now? Seems to me the position is wiiiiide open.

It did not help that at the end, Jack brought the world back, but he made no effort whatsoever to improve it. Chuck created the SPNverse with loaded dice. Innocents die and go to Hell. Bad people go to Heaven if they donate enough money to causes archangels care about. If you get turned into a monster, you get stuck in Purgatory forever. Heaven is just an endlessly repeating mixtape of your greatest hits. Plus, Heaven is about to fall apart and crash down onto the Earth due to a lack of angels.

Yet, Jack had no interest in changing any of that. I mean, when Eileen dies, she’s still going to go back to Hell. Kevin is still condemned to being a wandering spirit. John, if he’s not already back in Hell, will likely end up back there, too, since he can’t go to Heaven. Either that, or he and Kevin deteriorate into mad and vengeful ghosts.

Even if Dean’s not going to ask about Castiel (surely, that would be a priority for Jack), Sam would have asked about Eileen. And the other worlds that got dusted. But nope. Even worse, Jack has now shown every ambitious would-be power broker the path to displacing him and becoming God in his place. I mean, it’s not as though he’s ever been the sharpest tool in the cosmic shed. The end of this episode is supposed to be happy, but it’s just such a hot mess.

Honestly, a lot of this could have been avoided if the writers had given more seriously thought years ago to whether making the Prophet Chuck be God (the ultimate Author Insert character) was a good idea. As I’ve said many times in the past, I thought it was a stupid, self-indulgent concept, a one-trick pony with too many Unfortunate Implications for the longer haul. And that’s precisely what happened.

I mean, what was even Chuck’s motivation this season? Hell, what was his motivation for bringing back Lucifer or Lilith, or for their serving him? Okay, sure, he wanted Sam and Dean to kill each other, but why? He never clarified why he loved that ending (aside from some blather about how it was emotionally cathartic), or when he settled on it.

The way that Chuck’s various drafts in the multiverse fit together, when each was formed, how they affected each other or even how they represented the progression of his writing ideas, these things were never even touched on, let alone explained. To make God a writer, hack or no, and make it work, required much better writing than was available from the writers room most of the time.

Unfortunately, the weakest link on Supernatural has often been whoever the writers and showrunners were at any given time. I don’t think it helped that Executive Producer Kim Manners died during Season 4 and his counterpart Bob Singer appears to be stuck back in the 1970s in terms of what kinds of storytelling he’ll tolerate (plus, he’s been clearly burned out on this show for years).

Stellar acting from most of the cast, and a consistently professional and creative crew on-set, often helped to paper this over, and raise pedestrian or even childish storytelling to a much higher level. Hopefully, that care will allow Supernatural’s legacy to remain golden for years to come, even if tonight’s series finale sucks mutant donkey balls. But all-too-frequently, LA let Vancouver down.

There were a lot of unanswered questions that just plain didn’t need to be left unanswered. How complete was the Rapture? Where did everyone go? Were people dusted earlier, like Becky, brought back?

The plot made it sound as though even Hell, Heaven and Purgatory were cleared out, but no one even mentioned those realms. Whatever happened to the fairy realm(s)? Was it destroyed along with the other non-Earth Prime worlds or did it, as the Leprechaun heavily implied in “Clap Your Hands If You Believe,” exist outside Chuck’s multiverse?

Why didn’t Sam immediately call Eileen? Why didn’t Dean ask Jack to bring Castiel back? What about The Empty, which is, you know, now even more pissed off than ever? An episode this late in the game should not have so many unanswered questions, especially since it appears they will now never be answered.

Next week: Carry On: It’s the last time in the saddle for Sam and Dean.

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14 thoughts on “The Official Supernatural: “Inherit the Earth” (15.19) Recap and Review”

  1. This whole business of leaving Chuck to be human and to suffer age and die was very reminiscent of Castiel refusing to kill Metatron in Book of the Damned when Metatron was begging Castiel to kill him.

    That IS the worst punishment for ‘beings’ like Metatron and Chuck.

    My issue is I ‘hated’ Lucifer showing up; ‘hated’ that Michael undertook his ‘sudden but inevitable betrayal.’ But Chuck by the end deserved no loyalty from anybody.

    Also, it was like Swan Song in which DEAN enraged Chuck to beat the crap out of him like he did with Lucifer in the ‘earlier’ series-ender-that-wasn’t.

    I wish we had a 2m monologue from Chuck WHY he was so obsessed with Dean and making Dean do what HE wanted him to. What was up with THAT?

    I thought Dean was quite crushed by Castiel’s sacrifice and I liked his immobility in the after-scene. I also hoped ‘somehow’ Castiel’s handprint would again be on Dean’s skin ‘through’ the clothing.

  2. I have to admit, I haven’t been keeping up with the last few episodes of Supernatural, having bigger fish to fry right about now. But I did watch the final two episodes.

    You know, I don’t really have a problem with Dean dying, even in such a random way. After all, the SPN verse had always been cruel. (And dead is not done when your name is Dean Winchester.)

    Nor do I have a problem with Sam going on and having a full life. What I do object to is how they seemed to diminish Dean. To reduce him back to childishness. As if he has no role in the new order, or has to be humbled lest he take control.

    Also, I don’t think John was ever included in Dean’s heaven. At least in the old heaven, they took into account what you valued, even if it was just a retread of your greatest hits.

    As for the penultimate episode. Meh. I wouldn’t want a three year old as God.

    1. The things that happened in the finale were not necessarily bad (as opposed to the penultimate episode, which had a lot of stupid in it). The way they were written was not good. This was not the worst series finale I’ve ever seen, by far, and it didn’t make me want to throw away my DVDs, or anything. But it was irritating that they did finally have Dean finally break up with Sam, push Sam to go have his human, apple pie life, while Dean went on to a higher plane, and what they came up with for Dean to do in those last twenty minutes on that higher plane was have a short convo with Bobby and … take a drive in the car.

      1. I was reading this again and I mulled it over.

        WHAT turned Chuck from the God the Angels so loved and who appeared time and again to be ‘good’ to what he became this season?

        He went off with Amara. They UNITED but what made them split up again. I think that Chuck had been too used to being the only BIG THING and Amara being independent but JUST AS powerful as Chuck, well. HE could not stand that. Then everything began to piss him off. He could not kill HER but he wondered why he was so dissatisfied with his existence now. And it all came back to DEAN BROUGHT BACK AMARA. And that infuriated him. And the fact that Amara and Dean liked each other. (My God is a Jealous God is some quote from the Bible. If not, it should be.)

        I think having Amara back did not bring him companionship (and I found it odd that neither one of them discussed why they were not UNITED anymore) or completeness. And he went a LOT crazy.

        I hope Jack is off with Great Aunt Amara recreating the universes that Chuck destroyed.

        I believe Jack left Castiel in charge of Heaven. Jack is as absent as Chuck ever would be. And I would like to think that Castiel would have angels occasionally answer prayers. The world needs some miracles.

          1. AMARA said it was Dean. I mean if we want to be technical, it was ROWENA who did the spell that removed the Mark and freed Amara.

            I also think that Amara ‘cared’ about Dean and for CHUCK, well, Dean was supposed to be HIS GUY, dagnabbit.

            It’s just Chuck was ONE way in Alpha and Omega and by Moriah he was a piece of garbage.

            1. She did, yes. She was incorrect, but she did. It kinda chapped Sam’s buttcheeks, too, that she did that because it pushed him right out of the mytharc as she focused on Dean. I don’t consider Rowena the author of making that spell happen, though. Sam literally put her in chains to force her to help him. Note that she wasn’t being a threat to him or Dean at the time. He enslaved her simply for his own goals.

  3. Ok, the finale kind of wrecked me. Dean deserved to live a long and happy life of peace and freedom, not to die within like a week of earning it. The manner of his death doesn’t even bother me that much; there’s a dark element of poetic tragedy in reminding us that he was always human, and that what he’d made of his mortal existence–his endless virtues, everything he accomplished, and all the people he saved and influenced–was all the more remarkable for it.

    What I am truly angry/depressed about is that it had to happen so SOON. Why couldn’t Dean have had at least a decade or two of freedom before it was all so cruelly ripped from him again? Why did he have to die exactly as he said he would, as if he didn’t deserve so much better? Well, Dean has always deserved better and never gotten it. That’s one way the show’s been consistent, I guess.

    I hate that one brother got to live a long life (complete with kid) and the other didn’t. And there are fans saying that Dean’s premature death was actually GOOD because that meant Sam could leave the hunting life. Because Dean was only ever an obstacle/tool in Sam’s way, and his existence meant nothing on its own, right? God, I despise them for that.

    I guess I can’t beat the dead horse of Dean’s death books anymore. They really just dropped it like a hot potato and hoped we’d forget about it, huh?

    1. I just watched it (after the special) and let’s just say the snark’s gonna be high and deep with this one. Then it’s back to Season 9, y’all. Also, thinking of doing something special with “A Very Supernatural Christmas.”

      Also, I would watch the everlovin’ shit out of Dean and Castiel as a new and an old angel putting the rest of the SPNverse back together right in the time it took Sam to grow old and die.

  4. Well that episode was less than stellar, not really a surprise. Chuck /Jack just overpowered the story we are interested in and sucked the life out of this season.

    It was pretty offensive the token Women got subsumed or killed, but not surprising from the duo that wrote the even more offensive ( probably one of the most offensive ever) Man’s Best Friend with Benefits. Worse it made no sense, a scythe was required previously to kill a reaper, why not now, such a small stupid thing to miss.
    Ah well that’s outta the way, back to the Winchesters story…..

  5. I agree with your assessment of this episode. I was mortified when I saw who wrote it. And it went as one could expect from these writers. OMG, what a clusterfuck! The only good moments were where the J2 did their part. I was grateful to these two for still committing to their characters and in doing so saving the say.
    And I hate the showrunners for giving Jack Sue the role which should have been taken on by one of the brothers. Again!!! I haven’t forgiven them for giving alt-Michael to Jack instead of Dean, and here we go again. Jack’s new title was not earned, he didn’t evolve as a character to merit such a big promotion. He is still a half-baked lump of dow, but now he is running the world??? I wouldn’t want to be a part of a universe where THAT is the ultimate God figure!
    Funny how with all of this Jack worship by the writers, Dean still shines through as the True Power. Chuck called him “The Ultimate Killer” and seemed to concentrate on beating Dean more than Sam. At the very least he was more focused on hurting and subjugating Dean. And it was Dean who judged and sentenced Chuck in the end. Never during that scene did I feel that anyone would question his verdict, whatever it would be.
    Dean Winchester seems to be a very unique character in screen history. He lives his own life somehow, going outside of the confines of the script. I don’t know how that works or how it is possible since JA is not a diva type of a star who would do anything for the spotlight. So, if it isn’t Ackles or the writers, it’s… Dean?)))

  6. I believe we both expected Rowena to have a significant role in the finale, or the lead up to it. Did Covid derail that option, or could she conceivably appear in the final, final episode?

    You rightly pointed out numerous unanswered questions. While it might not have been feasible to settle all these matters within a 44 minute time-span, if the show had kept the focus on the main arc in the run up to the finale, instead of dropping so many MOTW episodes, these question could have been properly addressed.

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