Supernatural: The Show that Never Ends, Even Four Months After it Ended
Here we are again: with me writing yet another way-too-long post about something that no one I know has any investment in.
Before I officially begin, here’s a (perhaps necessary) warning: this post is very very long. It is easily the longest essay I have ever written, in school and for myself. And if the website I chucked it into is at all accurate, it’ll take about 30 minutes to read in its entirety. So, I’m sorry, but also thank you for bearing with me. Hopefully I’ve finally gotten this show out of my system.
(And in case it isn’t obvious, I’m not the only one still spiraling):
But, alas. Let’s get to it.
If you knew me when I was 14 (which, first of all, I apologize) you know that I was a little bit more than obsessed with a certain CW horror-fantasy show called Supernatural. You’ve probably heard me talk about this show enough for an entire lifetime, but lucky for us all, I’ve got even more to say. One might say...I haven’t yee’d my last haw.
(I apologize yet again)
Before I get into the actual meat of this blog post, here’s a rundown of what the show is (I’ve seen years worth of it so that you don’t have to):
Supernatural follows brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, sons of John and Mary Winchester, as they roam across America hunting demons, ghosts, and the like. Supernatural beings, in short.
Castiel (affectionately referred to as Cas), introduced in season 4, is an angel who disobeyed his heavenly orders to form allegiance with the Winchesters, and is the most prominent character after Sam and Dean.
Formulaically, Supernatural can be likened to a procedural. Procedurals are your run-of-the-mill medical dramas and police TV shows. It’s stuff like Grey’s Anatomy and NCIS and 9-1-1. All TV shows have seasonal arcs and individual episode conflicts, but because the nature of this show follows the characters as they solve a new monster-related case almost every episode, “procedural” is the hat that best fits.
I do want to say — because frankly with how much research I’ve done for this post and how much of a hold this show has on me, it might not be apparent otherwise — that I stopped watching Supernatural over five years ago. The last full season I saw was season 10, which aired in 2015. After binge-watching seven seasons in one summer (the first show I’ve ever binge-watched, incidentally) and living and breathing in its universe for years, I went cold turkey. Why? Because honestly I got tired. The writing got worse. The seasonal arcs started taking precedence over the individual episodes. Even Mark Sheppard, who played the demon Crowley on the show, recently said the most difficult part of his role was “making some of it make sense,” and that his character “was good until we got into [season] 11 and 11 became a bit superfluous. And then by 12 [the character] was sort of pointless.” The actors themselves were having trouble with the writing, so it’s no wonder that I jumped ship along with many other fans; viewership was in a steady decline in the show’s final years.
But then, something happened. Namely the show ended in a spectacularly devastating way, but even beyond that and before that, it went to a place that I don’t think I would have ever expected. And it went to this place during election week. So you’ll imagine my absolute shock at opening up my various social media accounts the day after the election to see, no, not voting results, because those would only come in two days later, but Supernatural trending. I got sucked back in — in terms of emotional investment, I didn’t go back and watch the show, I mean even I’m not that crazy — but really, can you blame me? It was a rough week.
Supernatural is not the pinnacle of television. For the most part, it doesn’t feature meticulously planned or clever writing. It isn’t some seminal work of the television form. It is a show that started 15 years ago. And it is a show that despite its many (many) issues and misgivings, features themes and characters that are so utterly relatable and sympathetic that viewers were willing to look past the many logical and story issues of the show just to see the characters exist on their TV screens a bit longer.
Every TV show has a couple of good episodes. And I mean really, truly good episodes. The ones you would recommend to someone regardless of if they’ve seen the show, because they’re just that good. I recently came across a list of the “best of” from Supernatural, so I went back and watched these so-called best episodes.
The first on the list: “Mystery Spot,” season 3, episode 11. Since it’s season 3, I knew going into this that I had seen the episode before, even if I didn’t immediately recognize it on title alone. That said, one second into it and I remembered. “Mystery Spot” is just a classic. It follows Sam as he’s forced to relive the same day over and over again in a time loop, the day ending every time with Dean dying. Not only does this episode hit the sweet spot between heartfelt, dramatic, and comedic, it exemplifies the brothers’ intense codependence, a major theme of the show. Would it help if you had context going into the episode? Yeah, of course. But not having that context doesn’t make the episode any less entertaining.
Next up: “French Mistake,” season 6, episode 15. Supernatural, for what it’s worth, plays around with breaking the fourth wall and meta ideas a lot. Like, a lot a lot. And that literally happens in this episode. “French Mistake” follows Sam and Dean as they’re thrown into an alternate reality where they’re both stars of a TV show called Supernatural. It’s Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles playing Sam and Dean Winchester playing Jared and Jensen who are playing Sam and Dean. It’s genuinely hilarious and brilliantly executed. There’s an angel-related seasonal arc at play but it’s insignificant enough to ignore if you watched this episode on its own. It’s so well thought out, exploring the idea of what these characters who are so detached from “normal” life would do if they suddenly woke up as the people who play them on TV. It’s self-aware in a way that shows that Ben Edlund, the episode’s writer, of course knows what happens in the making of the show but that he also has an understanding of what the audience likes and wants to see.
The last major one: “Fan Fiction,” season 10, episode 5 — the show’s 200th episode. I remember so clearly when this episode came out. It felt like the internet had exploded. Like “French Mistake,” this episode is very meta. It deals with storylines set up by the character Chuck/God (who is a whole can of worms that I’m not going to get into), and follows Sam and Dean as they’re put face to face with kids who, in essence, are fans of the story Supernatural. The episode is an ode to the fans of the show — literally, seeing as it’s a musical episode. But beyond that if you’re a casual or non-viewer of this show, this episode would tell you pretty much everything you needed to know, specific storylines aside. The episode is genuinely heartfelt, and gets at the core of the characters and the show while also calling itself out a little bit.
Two other episodes that were mentioned are “Regarding Dean” (season 12, episode 11), and “Scoobynatural,” (season 13, episode 16). I watched these two in preparation for this post and while I see why they’re fan favorites, I think the aforementioned three episodes are better examples. “Regarding Dean” is essentially a heartbreaking character study of who Dean is and who Sam would be without him. Jensen Ackles acts phenomenally in it and it’s heart wrenching to watch, but you definitely need context. “Scoobynatural,” on the other hand, is just fun. It’s a Scooby Doo episode, with Sam, Dean, and Cas thrown in as animated characters with the regular gang. You don’t really need any context and it’s a fun watch, but is nowhere near in the same realm as “Mystery Spot,” “French Mistake,” or “Fan Fiction.”
Okay, so, you’re probably wondering where I’m going with this. (I might be wondering the same thing, to be honest). Basically I wanted to set up for you the things that this show did right, because it did a whole lot more wrong. There are of course more wonderful episodes of Supernatural that I didn’t mention, but when it comes to overarching themes and hard-hitting details, the show kind of messed up, especially with the finale. Honestly if this show had ended in a different way, I probably wouldn’t be writing this post. But it ended the way it did, so here we are.
Before I even fully get into the nitty-gritty of the finale, I need to address the elephant in the room: the queerbaiting and queer coding that is at the heart of this show. I’d be willing to bet that if Supernatural was ever in your online peripheries while it was on air, you probably heard about something called “Destiel.” But before I get into that mess, let’s have some definitions:
Queerbaiting is when creators of a work of fiction, usually a TV show or movie, consistently hint at a character being queer but do not actually follow through, therefore never canonically making the character queer. It’s a way of pulling in an audience of queer folk and allies to watch the work in the hopes that they’ll see themselves represented only for the representation never to come, therefore not alienating a more conservative viewer base. It also doesn’t always come in ways you might expect: recently the show 9-1-1: Lone Star came under fire for queerbaiting despite the show featuring two gay characters. It essentially used footage of these characters in the promotion of the episode only for this footage to not be present in the episode itself. It was a bait and switch, and the show has done it before.
Queer coding is when a character is written in a way that heavily implies that they are queer, as seen through subtext and the text itself. It can be through following stereotypes but even more than that comes through the actions of the character themself. In a way it’s a relic of Hollywood’s Hays Code, under which queer characters were not allowed to be explicitly shown in movies (amongst many other terrible restrictions and censorship under the guise of “morality”). The line between queer coding and queerbaiting can be difficult to navigate. Queer coding is about the growth and portrayal of the character. It’s about writing and acting and production design and more. It’s all related to the creative production of the show and characters. Queerbaiting is more to do with promotion, and the corporate aspects of art. It’s how the characters are portrayed to the public in advertisements and by the creators when asked about it in interviews. For an example, take Jess and Jules from Bend it Like Beckham. Both of those characters are queer coded, in that at the end of the film if they were queer it would make a lot of sense. But it isn’t queer baiting, because at no moment do you actually believe that they’re going to be made explicitly queer. The text doesn’t make you think that and neither do the filmmakers.
The line between queerbaiting and queer coding is already fuzzy, but it gets more difficult when it comes to characters who eventually do come out. Does the fact that Cas admits his love for Dean in the last season of Supernatural erase the years of queerbaiting that preceded it? In my opinion, no, and a lot of that has to do with Cas’s confession itself. But first let’s go back to the queerbaiting, because boy oh boy does this show have a history of it.
Personally I don’t even know if “queerbaiting” is the right word for it, but I don’t have anything else. Ever since a large population of the Supernatural fan base started advocating for queer characters in the show (specifically Dean or Cas because of reasons I’ll get into but also just any character), the relationship between fans and creators has been tense. And sure, a lot of this tension comes from some pretty egregious things that the fans themselves have done (fandom in the early 2000s was like the wild west), but there’s always been this level of hostility, like the creators were saying, “yeah, we know what you think and we know why you think what you think but it doesn’t matter because we’re the ones in charge and you have to listen to us. This is our show, not yours.” Which in a way is true, and as someone interested in writing for television I don’t think it’s a smart idea to just do everything for fan service, but I also don’t think it’s healthy to alienate the people who love your show so much.
I do want to make clear, though, that it was very rarely, almost never, the actors who alienated the audience. The community that has formed around this show is encompassing of the actors and writers, who took it in stride and returned the love and appreciation they received. I can’t say I’ve noticed the network act the same way.
A good way to see if a show is queerbaiting its audience is to take the two characters in question — in this case Dean and Cas, two men — and make one of them female. If they were a heterosexual pairing, would you assume they would be in a relationship? If the answer’s yes, it (generally speaking) is queerbaiting. So let’s take Dean and Cas. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that Cas was female-presenting (and I say presenting because angels are technically genderless beings but that’s besides the point). If a female character looked at Dean and said they shared a “profound bond,” if she said “I’m the one who gripped you tight and raised you from perdition,” if she rebelled against the entire nature of her being and then told him “I cared about the whole world because of you,” would you question how she feels? If Dean took all that and responded, “I forgive you, of course I forgive you” and “I’m sorry it took me so long,” and “I need you,” the last of which was enough to break her literal mind control, would you even wonder if he was in love with her? Chances are, probably not.
Which brings me to my next point: amidst all of this queerbaiting, Dean is actually queer coded. To a greater and more explicit sense Cas is as well, but for now this is about Dean. Dean is shown repeatedly in the show to have a love for certain “masculine” stories and tropes, in everything from horror movies to westerns. But in reality, horror and westerns as genres have deep histories in queer storytelling and ideas. It’s possible that this is a mistake on the writers’ parts, and they wanted Dean to be an ultra-macho man, but at the same time this feels unlikely considering he was named after Dean Moriarty from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a character based on the real-life bisexual Neal Cassady. It’s true that the common name is where the similarities end between Moriarty and the older Winchester, but it’s interesting to note. Dean also goes through this arc from openly flirting with Sam’s girlfriend in the pilot to comfortably loving Taylor Swift by the later seasons. His relationship to femininity is significant but also not an inherent indicator of his queerness. Femininity in men isn’t a signifier of queerness. But it is a subversion of societal expectations, and when coupled with the other subversions within Dean’s character, it works in favor of the interpretation that Dean is queer, or as many people assert, bisexual.
For the sake of clarity and my own ever-slipping sanity, I’m going to try to go through The Saga of Dean’s Bisexuality as chronologically as possible.
First, and potentially the most obviously when it comes to dialogue, is the fact that he’s casually referred to as gay or interested in men over the course of the show, even just in passing. In 2x11*, Dean asks Sam why people assume that they’re a couple instead of brothers, and Sam jokingly responds, “well you are kind of butch. Maybe they think you’re overcompensating.” Beyond this, various characters refer to Dean and Cas as being in a relationship. The angel Balthazar tells Dean in 6x17, “sorry, you have me confused with the other angel. You know, the one in the dirty trench coat who's in love with you,” and the demon Meg says in 7x23, “ask [Cas], he was your boyfriend first.” These latter two quotes stand on that blurry line between baiting and coding, but regardless, they’re significant. (Additionally is the fact that if these moments were not, in fact, instances of queer-coding, they’re just straight-up homophobia, and while Supernatural did begin in the early 2000s, I find it unlikely that there would be this much discrimination in the implied meanings of the dialogue when at the same time the show itself features genuine and beloved queer characters).
*From here on out I’ll be referring to episodes in the style of Season#xEpisode#, so 2x11 means season 2, episode 11, etc.
One of, if not the most cited episodes for “evidence” of Dean’s bisexuality is 4x14, “Sex and Violence.” Simply put, this is a case episode where the brothers are after a siren who shapeshifts to present as the perfect romantic partner for their victims. When the siren encounters Dean, they present as a man instead of a woman for the entire episode. It’s attempted to be explained away at the end by saying the siren chose to represent familial instead of romantic love and therefore was choosing to replace Sam instead of a romantic partner, but seeing as every single other victim was preyed upon romantically and the idea of a siren representing familial love is never mentioned until that point, I personally find it hard to believe.
Another popularly cited scene is from 7x20, “The Girl with the Dungeons and Dragons Tattoo.” In this episode, Charlie, a friend of the Winchesters, finds herself at a loss when she has to flirt with a man for a case because she’s gay and only has experience flirting with women. So, inexplicably, Dean steps in and coaches her through flirting with the man over the phone, because it somehow makes sense that Dean, a supposedly straight man, would know how to successfully flirt with another man.
A large reason, I think, people feel that Dean is bisexual, is because of how he reacts when confronted with ideas of homosexuality or other queer characters. In the middle and later seasons of Supernatural, there’s an uptick in the number of queer side characters, in what seems like an attempt at appeasing fans’ pleas for more diverse stories while also not giving into making one of the main characters explicitly queer. But on the other side of that coin is the fact that many of these side characters end up forming significant familial relationships with the Winchesters, but specifically with Dean. So much so that a large portion of his associates and found family outside of direct blood relatives are queer. Which (and I’m almost certain this wasn’t intentional) is incidentally a very common American queer experience. Members of the LGBTQ+ community tend to inexplicably gravitate towards each other, intentionally or not, closeted or not. So to surround Dean with openly queer characters who all put great trust in him says a lot more about Dean than I think was intended, and actually raises more questions about his sexuality instead of putting the already-present ones to rest.
But even beyond family-like queer characters like Charlie are potential romantic interests. For most straight people who are comfortable with their sexuality, if a person of the same gender expressed interest, it’d be fairly simple to say, “hey, I’m flattered, but I don’t feel the same way.” But not Dean Winchester. Dean Winchester loses every ounce of his cool that he was already barely grasping onto. In 8x13 “Everybody Hates Hitler” (side bar: I am now realizing how odd these episode titles are), a man flirts with Dean at a bar and Dean gets flustered, but not in the way that someone who’s homophobic or merely awkward would. Dean has also never been homophobic so it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense that he’d start here. Later in the episode it’s revealed that this man was actually tailing Dean and the flirting was a distraction, and Dean seems genuinely disappointed by this. At the bar, it would have made complete sense if Dean had just refuted the man’s advances and said he was in the bar interviewing someone for the case, but he deliberately closes his fake FBI badge (which for some reason there’s an extended shot of when normally the badges are minimal props in the stories) and continues the conversation.
(and it isn’t even just Dean reciprocating, it’s him reaching out)
I will say that while I think the points I have here about Dean’s alleged bisexuality are solid, a lot of it is borne out of something else entirely. Supernatural is just so incredibly misogynistic (I mean truly, this show has been killing off female characters for the sake of male character development since the pilot) that it ended up with pretty much just three main (male) characters, two of whom are related. They swung the misogyny bat so hard that they made it all the way around the other side and ended up implying that they’re queer. That’s also how you end up with hilariously absurd goofs like Dean in 13x16 alluding to his experience with the “Cartwright twins.” Undoubtedly this throwaway line is in the episode to hammer in the idea of Dean as a ladies’ man, but instead it ended up implying that he slept with an entire Canadian minor league men's baseball team. It really is just absurd. But, let’s get back to the main idea.
Whether or not Dean is definitively bisexual or queer is a question mark. He (spoiler) dies before anything can be addressed. But if there’s anything in this show that feels akin to addressing it, it’s in 10x16, “Paint it Black.” Dean sits in a confessional booth, and says, “there’s things, people, feelings, that I want to experience differently than I have before. Or maybe even for the first time.” Now I will be the first to say that this could mean a lot of things. It could mean he’s tired of hunting, that he wants a “normal” life. It could mean he feels like he missed out on certain aspects of his 20s and 30s because of his lack of this normal life. It could also mean that he’s ready to say he’s queer and wants to experience it now because he never could before. It’s open ended, but the point is that none of these explanations, given the context and circumstances, are far fetched. Art and fiction are about interpretation, and this interpretation tracks.
There is no final answer and frankly I don’t think there ever will be. But part of what makes art interesting and magical is the fact that it begs to be interacted with, and that different people will have different interpretations of it depending on their personal perspective and life experience. That’s how you get hot takes asserting that Paddington actually died at the end of Paddington 2. That’s how you get people making these mile-long masterlists of reasons why they think Dean is bi. And that’s a wonderful thing. As an artist all I can ever hope is that someone cares enough about the things I make to do something like that.
Now onto the reason I’m sitting here on a weekday writing about a show I stopped watching half a decade ago: the finale. Well, the antepenultimate episode of the show and the finale. Supernatural might have had some slip ups in the past, but they really screwed the pooch when it comes to the ending. And boy are people mad about it.
Let’s start with the third to last episode: 13x18, “Despair.” And that’s a fitting title if I’ve ever heard one. This is Cas’s last episode in the show. And to be quite frank, it shouldn’t have been. Castiel has been a major part of Supernatural since he first was introduced in season 4, and he’s been in every single season finale since then. He has been through heaven and hell with and for the Winchester brothers, with and for Dean. He cares about them and they feel the same way about him. Cas’s arc has always been about rebellion for the sake of free will. His story was one of fighting for freedom in a world where that simply shouldn’t have been possible. He along with Sam and Dean coined the name “Team Free Will” to refer to themselves. The three of them, but specifically Castiel, fought for the idea of choosing your own destiny. That’s why this episode is so messed up.
Cas’s whole arc was about learning to allow himself to love humanity and learning to be human. It isn’t the fact that he dies at the end of the show — because all things considered, death doesn’t mean a whole lot in Supernatural because the characters really do tend to just come back to life — but it was the fact that his arc, his journey to self acceptance and humanity, is undercut. He had been growing towards this goal since his first moment on screen and finally when he achieves the thing he wanted this whole time, he’s punished for it. His humanity, his happiness, is the reason he dies, and I mean that quite literally in terms of the storyline. Supposedly his one act of free will as an angel is to confess his love for another man. His feelings are his downfall. If he hadn’t fallen in love, if he hadn’t become his own being, he would’ve lived. And what does that say? What’s the moral here? Because from what I can see, it isn’t anything good.
This is about bad storytelling but it ties into queerbaiting because that’s essentially what happened with Cas. You build and build and build and hint and hint and hint that these characters are queer, you do it for fifteen years, and then you decide, okay, it’s true. They’re queer. And then you kill them. Kill them for being happy. And the issue is that it isn’t just Castiel dying just seconds after his character is made explicitly queer (although that has to be a record of some kind). It’s the fact that this is done so often that it has become a whole trope, called “Bury Your Gays.” It’s happened throughout queer cinema history, in everything from Brokeback Mountain to The Walking Dead. At this point, it’s safe to expect all queer stories to end in tragedy.
After Cas dies, it’s barely addressed. And that doesn’t make sense. For just a second, forget about what I said about queerbaiting and queer coding. Forget about the years-long tension between Cas and Dean. Let’s just pretend that Castiel was just an angel who gave his allegiance to the Winchesters and aided them over the years in their adventures. Let’s just say he dies in the third to last episode, barring his confession and all. Even then, his ending doesn’t make sense. The fact that Cas’s death is glossed over isn’t an issue because people want him and Dean to be together. It’s an issue because he deserved a reaction from Dean in the moment, whether that be one of reciprocity or not. (A real reaction, not just a line that’s neither here nor there in now both the Spanish and French dubs of the show). It’s an issue because for a show with major themes surrounding found family, members of the Winchesters’ found family seem too easily brushed aside. Cas was part of these brothers’ lives for over a decade but his final moments, the fact that he’s actually gone for good, is barely mentioned let alone properly addressed or reacted to.
For how heartbreakingly Cas’s arc ends, Dean’s hurts more. And I’m fully willing to admit that this might be because I always liked him best. But I do think there’s something devastatingly sad about the way his story ends. Dean’s arc is about self acceptance and self love, about learning to exist for himself instead of other people’s expectations of him. The entirety of “Regarding Dean” (12x11) deals with exploring who Dean Winchester would be if he lost his memory, if he wasn’t a hunter. He’s been through literal hell and purgatory and has killed Death but he dies in the most random of ways. His death loses its weight. He’s robbed of his chance to choose how to spend the rest of his life, something he’s been robbed of and fighting against since the very beginning, ever since his father made him choose this life when he was too young to know any better. In season 8 he tells Sam, "I’m gonna die with a gun in my hand. ‘Cause that’s what I have waiting for me – that’s all I have waiting for me,” and Sam argues back. It’s clear that the show frames Dean’s almost suicidal mindset as negative for him, and negative for those around him. His growth is about accepting and loving his life and his found family, so the fact that he does die on a random hunt and no one but Sam is left to mourn him undermines his character’s whole arc and growth. Being left in heaven with nothing but Sam and his car does nothing for his character. He had the Impala and Sam when he was on Earth. What makes it special now that he’s in heaven? I understand the sentiment behind “starting with the brothers and ending with the brothers,” but why do it in a way that erases every other important person in their lives? It can end with Sam and Dean and still honor the other people who came to matter to them along the way. For years, Supernatural built up the idea of found family only for them to say, at the end of it all, the only thing that matters is blood.
Which brings us to Sam Winchester. He’s always been interesting to me. Out of all the characters, Sam is the one who didn’t totally buy into the monster-hunting life. His arc was about him struggling to balance the pull he feels within him towards hunting and his desperate want for normalcy. The series begins with him leaving his education at Stanford after seeing that the supernatural aspects of his life will never truly leave him alone. But the supernatural aspects take over. Over the course of the show, they just do. And so by the last episode, you have this character who’s been yearning for something since the pilot but there’s nowhere for him to turn, no one to turn to. He’s lost his brother: his best friend, his only family. He’s lost his livelihood. This man has enough trauma for fifty lifetimes. And the writers expect the viewers to believe he can just turn a corner and find a nameless, blurry-faced wife and have the perfect suburban life? That he can just live happily ever after and then die of old age and go to heaven and continue this dream of perfection for all of eternity? It just doesn’t check out. Part of this ties into an issue I’ve continually had with the Supernatural writers, and that’s their reliance on the idea of a nuclear family. Despite the boatload of trauma that the characters have gone through there’s an underlying expectation on behalf of the writers that if the brothers were to choose to fully and permanently step away from their monster-hunting life (something I personally think isn’t possible) they would be able to turn the corner and find a girlfriend, find a wife, and have a traditional, normal life. Even Dean knows the reality of this. In the pilot he asks Sam, “you think you’re just going to become some lawyer? Marry your girl?" He asks if Sam’s girlfriend knows the truth, and when Sam says no, Dean responds, “well, that’s healthy. You can pretend all you want, Sammy. But sooner or later you’re gonna have to face up to who you really are.” Dean knows this, and he’s known it since the pilot. So why does it seem like the writers don’t?
In all honesty, Sam’s arc reminds me of Steve Rogers’ in Avengers: Endgame. And, spoiler: I didn’t like his outcome either. Both arcs feel like the writers are holding onto this version of the characters that the characters themselves wouldn’t be holding on to were they real.
At the end of it all, though, my issue isn’t with the fact that our three central characters permanently die in the last three episodes of the show. Sure, for the decade and a half that it was on air, Supernatural consistently and constantly told its audience that death for these characters means nothing. Not that it doesn’t impact their arcs or the other characters’ relationships to and with them, but that if they die, they’re going to come back. The ending goes against precedence, but death isn’t inherently negative for who these characters are. It’s not the fact that they die, but the fact that after all they’ve been through and how much they’ve grown, they choose death. Supernatural was a show about fighting against fate, destiny, what the world says you have to be, and the characters ended up falling into the boxes they were originally assigned. And worst of all, it’s a story that blatantly ends in tragedy yet is forcefully framed as a happy ending.
At its core — and this is a personal theory — Supernatural is a show that started off with a target audience of traditionally masculine white men who could find a thrill in fictional monster-hunting, and ended up with an audience of women, of teenagers, of people of color, and of queer people. It ended up with an audience of people who grew up with this show and cared too much about it and then ended up getting degrees in history and English and film, and wrote endless prose about where and how and why the show failed. And this dissonance between the writers’ and even more significantly the network’s target audience and the actual one is apparent. I don’t think anyone, creator or audience member, could have predicted the trajectory of Castiel’s arc when he was first introduced in season 4. But with the way the audience and the world evolved, and the way the actors performed and embellished, it was unavoidable. Supernatural has always thrived in its absences. That is to say, the parts of the story that were left unsaid are what drew people in. The potential that lays in the absences and the gaps between threads are the reason this show had such a dedicated and active audience. Gaps lend themselves well to interpretation. Categorically this is a horror show and I’ve always personally subscribed to the idea that horror thrives in what isn’t shown. Even the best writers in the world can’t compete with an average person’s overactive imagination. I jokingly (maybe less jokingly recently) say that Supernatural is a bad TV show but really it’s a decent TV show that’s fun. If it was just a decent show, or if it was a decent show that took itself just an ounce more seriously, it wouldn’t be the same. It’s rough around the edges but has enough genuine heart that it’s easy to look past it in favor of filling in the gaps with your own imagination.
Now that it’s over, the worst part about the way Supernatural ended is the fact that it needed to be better. This show needed to be better, not just for itself or the story or the actors or the fans, but it needed to be better for what it is. Supernatural is a relic of older television. There just aren’t shows that have been on that long anymore, not really. And sure, personally I think that’s not inherently a bad thing. I think shows should end when they end instead of beating the dead horse until it stops spitting up money. If you know me you’ve probably heard me wax poetic about how wonderful shows like Fleabag and Schitt’s Creek are for knowing how and when they wanted to end and following through with it. But I also miss the length of shows. I miss their ability to have seasons-long arcs that are resolved after years. I miss the universality of them, the planning that goes into them. Shows made for streaming just don’t have that pull, don’t have the underlying tension. A post I read (which I’ll of course link below) when doing research for this likened Dean and Cas’s relationship to that of characters like Josh and Donna from The West Wing. I mean, I love that show. I’ve seen it two and a half times over. And part of the magic of Josh and Donna is the fact that they dance around each other for years. So when they finally get together, it feels cathartic. There just never has been (to my knowledge) something like that for queer characters, and with the death of this era of television, I don’t think there ever will be.
This new era of television is more straightforward. It’s made to be streamed, to be watched all at once. The story arcs get resolved in a season, maybe two, and sometimes in just a couple episodes, just for a new arc to be introduced. There’s no need to get people so interested in the story that they tune in again the next week, because you just need to get them to click on the next episode in one hour. And all things considered, it makes sense. People have shorter attention spans now. More shows are started and less are continued. There’s no guarantees about anything. So yeah, it makes sense that storylines have to be wrapped up quickly and neatly but god do I miss the messiness of traditional television. Yes, modern network television to an extent is a result of a late-stage-capitalistic world where the most relaxing thing you can do after a week of being overworked in a bland corporate landscape is to sit down on your couch in front of the TV. But at the same time, there are real people out there making this TV and putting their stories, putting your stories — of trauma and pining and heartbreak and growth — into these characters, all for you to safely explore from your living room.
Supernatural is from an era of television that just doesn’t exist anymore and as much as it pains me to say it, I don’t know if it’ll ever exist again, at least not in the same way. It’s from an era of analog filmmaking and bad special effects. Call me a purist but there’s something wonderful about that warm, grainy look of the first three seasons of this show, which were shot on film. It lends itself well to the story it’s trying to tell. More recent shows just don’t have that. It’s the same reason why The X-Files reboot didn’t feel the same as the original show. Supernatural was also referential and connected to the culture in a way that I never have seen before, and I think I took for granted when I used to watch the show. It references itself and its genre roots but even more than that, it references random TV shows and movies and books and music that are significant to the characters but also significant to the formation of the show. (Nearly every single episode title is a reference to something else, whether it be folkore or a song title). It’s distinctly American and is in touch with the history and culture of media and movies and art in a way that goes against the logline of the show and is also a rarity nowadays. Dean referencing Zeppelin and Butch Cassidy and Thelma and Louise in a way that actually drives the plot forward and isn’t just a fun quirk about his character is something that doesn’t happen anymore. I love David Rose (Schitt’s Creek) but his love for Celine Dion just isn’t the same thing.
All this to say, Supernatural is a flawed show. It’s flawed for its inconsistencies and its queerbaiting and its theatrics and its ending. But it also has heart and drive and tension and feeling, enough to carry it fifteen whole years. We all deserved a better ending. The characters, the actors, the fans, the television historians of the future, everyone. They’ve messed up before but they really did it badly this time, because this time it’s over, and there’s no going back. So, we do what we must: we carry on, and eventually, move on. ⬥
Reference sources beyond the show itself that I didn’t already link in this post:
Bonus meme, just because:
