Supernatural: COVID May Be to Blame for a Lackluster Finale

Supernatural’s series finale Thursday night signaled the end of an era in more ways than one. Way back in 2005, the show about Sam and Dean Winchester—two brothers who fight demons and angels alike, and have been to hell and back more times than even its die-hard fans can count—originally debuted on the now-defunct WB as part of the 90s/early aughts boom in teen-friendly, genre programming like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed. Over the course of a staggering 320 episodes, Supernatural, its myriad showrunners, and charming co-leads Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki have seemingly done it all, from animated episodes to musicals. In the penultimate episode of the series, the Winchester boys actually defeated God with a capital G.

So what more could a loyal fandom possibly want? If the salty tweets flooding Twitter Thursday night were any indication, more than they got. Sam and Dean may have toppled God, but even the Winchester boys couldn’t overcome COVID-19.

Okay, so: what did happen in the finale? Honestly, not much—and that’s part of the problem. In the hour-long retrospective special leading up the final episode, one talking head after another emphasized that the real charm of Supernatural was the brotherly bond between Sam and Dean. While that may be true, it doesn’t mean fans were ready for a finale that featured no series regulars other than Sam, Dean, and, briefly, their adopted father figure Bobby (Jim Beaver).

In the aftermath of their big battle with a God who lost his powers to Sam and Dean’s adopted son (Alexander Calvert’s Jack, who was also the son of Lucifer; yes, that Lucifer, don’t worry about it), Sam and Dean kick off the hour with a montage of a regular day: breakfast, laundry, etc. There’s some beauty to be found in that premise. What do you do once you saved the world yet again? The answer, in part, for the Winchester boys is to go to a pie festival, then go back to doing what they’ve always done best: hunting demons and monsters.

The monster of the week, in this case, is a baffling group of masked vampires who harvest kids. Sam and Dean save two young brothers who have been kidnapped; there’s some nice symmetry there, given that they were victimized by demons when they were tiny themselves. Then Dean just… dies, after being shoved onto a bit of rebar. Once again, I see the narrative logic here. There’s some terrible beauty in surviving gods and demons and coming back to life again and again, only to die from something as mundane as a few inches of rusted metal.

But Sam and Dean’s tearful, protracted goodbye at the halfway mark of the episode was undercut by the fact that the two were reunited in heaven before the hour was up. And all that happens between Dean’s demise and their beatific brotherly hello is a brief Bobby cameo—to explain the new rules of heaven, of course. Then, in a move seemingly lifted from Six Feet Under’s famously beloved finale, Dean takes a long drive in the boys’ iconic Impala while an awkwardly truncated montage of Sam growing old and dying with his son by his side plays out. It’s all set to the show’s favorite tune: “Carry on My Wayward Son.”

This was a truly baffling and clunky hour of television, despite some very convincing (and probably very real!) tears from Ackles and Padalecki. But take a step back, and you’ll notice that while the finale was light on interaction, so was the show’s penultimate hour, in which Sam, Dean, and Jack battled God. Back in April, the show was forced to shut down production due to COVID-19, with just two episodes left to film. That’s, of course, why this final season was split into two parts. And while we may never know the extent to which that shutdown impacted the full shape of Supernatural’s ending, we have some clues.

When Supernatural resumed production in August, it, like the rest of the TV and filmmaking world, had to do so under strict and costly guidelines meant to protect its cast and crew from infection. “There have been some adjustments made from the scripts that we were going to shoot in March to the scripts that we’re shooting now,” Ackles told TVLine in September. “We’ve had to accommodate a pandemic.” According to showrunner Andrew Dabb, those accommodations “didn’t affect the core parts.” He said: “We’re still doing everything we wanted to do from a character, plot [and] mythology standpoint.”

Still, it’s tough not to view those final two episodes through the lens of a COVID-challenged shoot. The third-to-last episode featured a rapture as a vengeful God (Rob Benedict) evaporated almost everyone, including those closest to the Winchesters. COVID might not explain, for example, why Sam loses his love interest Eileen (Shoshannah Stern) over an odd text message exchange, but it could explain why we don’t see her again once Jack returns the evaporated to earth. In fact, we never see any of the beloved characters traumatically evaporated by God, including Charlie (Felicia Day) and Bobby. Instead, there’s a dog who Sam and Dean meet literally in the final two episodes of the series. The pup is zapped and returned, and gets plenty of screen time in the finale—which is more than you can say for Charlie or Castiel (Misha Collins).

“For the finale, we had a big, super extravagant thing planned for that episode, and it wasn’t feasible,” Dabb told TVLine. “But we found an alternative to get to the same place, plot-wise and, more importantly, emotionally, that worked great. So it’s about being adaptable. We had to do some rewriting, but nothing that changed fundamentally what the show is or where it was going.”

That adaptability could explain why when Mark Pellegrino’s Lucifer returned for one last fun tussle with the Winchester boys in the penultimate episode, he did so from a distance. Sam, Dean, Jack, Lucifer, and his brother Michael (Jake Abel) have an odd, socially-distanced fight around the Winchester’s big map table. That final confrontation with God? It amounts to an oddly edited fistfight in the dirt next to a very picturesque Canadian lake. “There aren’t as many bad guys in a scene as we would normally have because of COVID restrictions,” Dabb said. “But in terms of plot, in terms of character, nothing is fundamentally different.”

And okay, fine. For a show that turned a shaggy sneaker-wearing writer character named Chuck into its version of God, a dusty lakeside scrap isn’t a terrible idea for a showdown. And the emotional montage revisiting the dozens of friends and family the Winchester boys made along the way that closed out the penultimate hour of Supernatural’s long journey could have been a fine button to the Winchester story. But that extra, awkward hour introduces a lot more questions than answers. And here, I’m afraid, is where we need to talk about Destiel.

Destiel, if you’re just joining the Supernatural discussion for the first time, is the name that fans used to describe the much longed-for coupling of Dean and the angel Castiel. The writers of the show, who have always enjoyed a delightfully meta and symbiotic relationship with their fans, wrote the term “Destiel” into the Supernatural’s own lore in Season 10’s “Fan Fiction.” One of the biggest controversies in the show’s long history (and you don’t get to 15 seasons without one or two of those) is how Supernatural teasingly emphasized the palpable chemistry between Ackles and Collins without formally engaging their characters in a romantic relationship. Some fans and critics have called out those efforts as queerbaiting—an attempt to please those who want to see a gay relationship without actually having one play out on screen.

When the third-to-last episode of the show aired a few weeks ago, Collins’s Castiel sacrificed himself for Dean with a tearful speech that ended in a declaration of love. Even in the midst of a hotly contested presidential election, the term “Destiel” started trending on Twitter. That “I love you” shocked, delighted, and then disappointed legions of fans who had been holding their collective breath.

After 15 years of fake-out deaths—seriously, every major Supernatural character has died at least twice—there is something rather beautiful about Castiel’s sacrifice being one that sticks. But sadly, the death of a queer character—and for those who would prefer to think of Castiel’s “I love you” as platonic, well, I can’t help you—who has just achieved a romantic epiphany is also a well-trod trope, known colloquially as “bury your gays.”

Even if it did feel important for Castiel to die in that moment and stay dead, and even if Dean Winchester, staunch symbol of aggressive heteronormativity, was never going to reciprocate Castiel’s love, there’s no logical excuse for Castiel to have been absent from a finale that spends half of its run time in the afterlife. With a loaded lift of his eyebrows, Bobby tells Dean that Cass helped create this new heaven and instead of going to see him, Dean, who had not really reacted to Cass’s death in a meaningful way yet keeps his dead friend’s trench coat in the trunk of his Impala, goes for a long, long, long drive instead.

All Destiel feelings aside, Castiel has been an iconic and integral member of the Winchester family. Over the course of the final two episodes, the camera cuts multiple times to a carving on the Winchester bunker table that reads “SW” “DW” “Jack” and “Castiel,” for Sam, Dean, their adopted son, and their adopted brother. A recurring motto of the show is that family is more than blood and, as Dean has said again and again, Castiel is the third Winchester brother. (Sure.)

Look no further than the constant 2021 Supernatural convention ads that aired during the show’s final commercial breaks. The trio of talent in attendance? Ackles, Padalecki, and Collins, of course. Other than aggressive pilot episode symmetry, COVID is the only reason I can see why Castiel wouldn’t be standing next to Sam and Dean on that heavenly bridge in the end. In the words of Bobby: “Everyone happy. Everyone together.”

For the less Destiel hopeful, COVID could help explain why we never see Sam’s girlfriend Eileen again, and why, when Sam’s awkward life montage plays out, the presumed mother of his child is just some blurry-faced anonymous woman in the far distance. It could explain why the run-of-the-mill vampire antagonists battling the Winchester boys stayed largely masked. And whatever frustrations fans may have this this final hour of Supernatural’s long journey, they likely can’t be stronger than the frustrations of a cast and crew who know that they’ve come so far, only to be tripped at the finish line by a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

In an ideal world, maybe Supernatural would have waited until the Covid coast was clear (whenever that may be) to wrap things up. But TV production and contracts are complicated things and Padalecki, at least, already has a new show he needs to get to work on. What has been true throughout Supernatural’s run, though, is that Padelecki, Ackles, and the rest care tremendously about their loyal fans and will have wanted to give them the emotional goodbye they deserved.

Actually, it’s somewhat fitting that Supernatural’s story should absorb one last real-world intrusion. The show’s improbably long journey is like something out of Stephen Sondheim’s famous torch ballad “I’m Still Here.” The Winchesters survived three presidential administrations, the death of the WB, and the Writer’s Strike of 2007. Jared Padalecki outlasted his first show, Gilmore Girls, and its revival. The bank bailouts of 2008? Why, that’s the work of the demon Crowley (Mark Sheppard), according to the Supernatural. The show’s demons borrowed a plane from Donald Trump in 2012 and in 2016, Supernatural put their own version of Lucifer in the White House. Through it all, the Winchesters have carried on.

If there is some small silver lining to be found in this soft and ambiguous landing, it allows the perfect opportunity for the fandom to do what it’s always done: create a version of the story they prefer. Supernatural was born in the Tumblr age, amidst a boom of fan art, fanfiction, and an unprecedented fan ownership of the narrative. Unlike some writers, the Supernatural team has never shied away from this phenomenon. When fans rioted over the death of a gay character, Supernatural brought her back. And when the student writer of the Supernatural-themed meta musical in “Fan Fiction” didn’t like what was happening with Sam and Dean, she shrugged and told the older Winchester brother: “I wrote my own ending.” Thanks to COVID that may be exactly what Supernatural fans will find themselves doing, now their show is done.