- Jan 9, 2005
- 18,127
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Three thoughts:
1) The current showrunner of Supernatural has said in interviews that this episode was meant to feel like a season finale while the next episode would feel like a series finale. So while I didn't quite understand what he meant (and I still don't think I'll totally understand it until we've seen the finale), I did suspect that it meant that the Chuck problem would be fixed in this episode. So I didn't expect the empty world to last for very long, but I did enjoy it and probably could have watched it for longer.
2) However, as Chuck said, having Sam, Dean, and Jack live all alone in an otherwise totally empty world is a very sophisticated story. Which, based on Chuck's personal tastes, I believed would mean he wouldn't be interested in continuing it for very long. He doesn't feel like he has a very sophisticated story palate. Like, he wants to be taken as this serious, sophisticated author, but he just isn't. So I was expecting him to end it rather than for the brothers to end it.
3) I know this is something that it would probably never occur to the writers of the show to address, but I wonder how the rest of the world is going to react when they realize that we've lost a few days/weeks. After all, the Earth kept spinning during that time. Which means everyone will think no time passed when really quite a lot of time has passed, which is going to throw off all sorts of scientific endeavors, weather predictions, astronomers, etc. There's no way they can hide this from the scientific community unless Jack also reset Earth's place in orbit when he returned all of the people, and I seriously doubt he did that. So there's no way to hide this bit of the supernatural from the rest of the world. People are going to either realize the supernatural exists or think that Earth just time traveled X number of days/weeks into the future in a split second.
When they were explaining the plan to Chuck through the flashback, they showed Dean and Sam noticing the plants dying as he walked past them. So they realized that he was sucking in the divine at that point. However, since the divine is in everything, I don't understand why the life wasn't sucked out of Sam, Dean, or the rocks that made up the concrete in the buildings that they were inside of. It didn't make sense why he would suck up the divine in some things but not in other things. It makes sense why Lucifer and Michael gave him way more power than the plants did, but still... Kind of inconsistent.
Two things:
1) Next week's two hour finale is two separate things: a one hour restrospective reflecting on the past 15 years, and another for real one hour episode following Sam and Dean in this new world. So I guess that last hour will answer our questions about the people who were disappeared, whether monsters were brought back, etc.
2) For a long time I definitely thought that the only way to properly end the show was with one or both of the brothers dying, but a little ways into Season 15, I thought that the writers were going to do something totally different.
(This is basically another draft of what I wrote in my spoiler-marked ending prediction above with some new information. Same conclusions, but more fleshed out (though without as much of the legwork being shown).)
Since Castiel promised to get Ruby out of the Empty, I thought that was a totally useless thing to include in the episode unless there was a possibility Cas could fulfill it. Which meant Cas would have to somehow take over the Empty. Which meant Billie and the Shadow had to fail in their plan to kill God, which would work well with the idea that Death and the Shadow were just using Jack to try to end the universe so that everything can die, nothing else can break the rules, and the Shadow can sleep forever. So I started expecting that the brothers would realize Billie was using them, Jack would stop working for her, and then Death and the Shadow would take matters into their own hands and kill Chuck and Amara. Jack, being the bridge between humanity and the divine, could then use his powers to infuse Sam and Dean with the remnants of Chuck and Amara's powers, allowing them to replace Chuck and Amara to keep the universe intact. Then with Sam, Dean, Jack, and Castiel working together, they would somehow manage to defeat Death and the Shadow allowing Castiel to take over the Empty to fulfill his promise to Ruby. Maybe Jack would become the new Death, since there are four protagonists and four new roles to fulfill, but I couldn't quite make that work in my head until the plants started dying in front of him, but even then it wasn't a good fit. Then I thought Sam and Dean might struggle to adapt to their newfound omnipotence until (I hoped) the real God would speak to them and tell them about Chuck and Amara being two halves of the Demiurge and how to properly contain the Demiurge's powers. Then Alt!Sam and Alt!Dean from the alternate universe would establish Hunter Corp. in this reality, become the new Dean and Sam of this reality, and the show would end with them beginning the search for their father (so basically the show ends where it began).
My pie-in-the-sky dream ending for the show would have been something that wrapped up as many loose ends as possible while incorporating some of the above. I'll spoiler mark it though so it doesn't take up too much additional room here.
Honestly, for my ideal ending we're a little too late in the series. I would have wanted a lot more loose ends to be tied up by this point in the show to set up a final confrontation, but since that's no longer possible, my "ideal" ending is going to feel extremely rushed and fanfic-y, which incidentally makes it not my ideal ending. But it's probably as close as we could possibly get at this point, so I'll run with it.
Chuck wants to make the brothers miserable before the end based on Becky's reaction to his story, so Chuck decides to build up a final grudge match between Sam and Dean, their remaining allies, and their antagonists that haven't been killed off yet. But since he's seen that Castiel is slowly regaining his powers and confidence, he'll first want to deal with him. So Chuck sends the Queen Djinn after Cas. Cas married the Queen Djinn back in Season 13, so she could have some sort of power over him, trapping Cas in a world of torture. Meanwhile, Harper, the necromancer who had a crush on Jack, has teamed up with the remaining Thule due to a strange set of voices telling her to join them to be granted even greater power. (She's no Nazi, but they're a means to an end). They begin performing a ritual when Aaron and the Golem burst in to try and stop them. The latter two fight valiantly and take out the rest of the Thule at the cost of the Golem, but Harper survives, kills Aaron, and finishes the ritual, causing four columns of smoke to burst out of the ground and enter Harper.
Sam and Dean try to snap Castiel out of his torture while fighting the Queen Djinn, but she gives Sam and Dean visions of all the people they've failed. We see Sarah Blake's husband and daughter putting out missing posters, we see Kevin wandering the Earth and muttering to himself, slowly going crazy, we see Bobby in heaven brainwashed to forget about the Winchesters, and we see Bela, about to be attacked by the hellhounds, when she pulls out the mojo bag that Gordon gave her, she pricks her finger, bleeds into it, and the doors burst open. Sam and Dean break out of the torture, stop the Queen, and rescue Castiel, but he is shaken and out of commission. Meanwhile we see Harper confront a shadowy figure in a dark alley. The figure pulls her hood down and says if Harper comes any closer, she'll kill her and take her blood to power the mojo bag, revealing it's Bela who has been using the bag to keep the hellhounds at bay all this time. Harper says Bela won't need that anymore, and one of the black pillars of smoke shoots out of her and into Bela.
Bela and Harper find Amy the kitsune's son and the rugaru's child and each put a column of smoke into them. They track down the Winchesters and reveal that the remaining four deadly sins demons are possessing these four remaining enemies. The Winchesters have to retreat, but Alt!Charlie finds them. She's been tracking down previous Winchester allies to help with the fight against God. Sunny, the mind-controlling psychic, Jesse the cambion, and the Banes Twins show up to help. Using their powers and working together with the Winchesters, they're able to kill the demons, but it's difficult since Sunny isn't well-experienced, Jesse's powers are severely diminished, and Max Banes is trying to keep his sister alive. Jesse, Charlie, and Alicia all die in the fight. Max gets upset and creates another new Alicia. But then we learn that the deaths of all the Seven Deadly Sins powered a spell that Harper and the Thule had prepared which release the shedim. They come out of hell and reveal that they are the link between magic and humans. They give natural witches their power; they were the voices that granted Sunny and her father their powers as well as the voices that guided Harper to re-release the Seven Deadly Sins. And they're able to take away those powers. With Sunny and Max powerless, Alicia falls apart, and then Sunny and Max are killed as well. Michael appears just in time to teleport the Winchesters away. (Jack remains hidden with Castiel.)
Michael tells them that despite the shedim being absurdly powerful, they can be undone by special magic: the magic of the Colt. He gives the brothers a vision of how the gun was created which he learned by looking into the past. The brothers visit Rowena, and she helps them forge new Colts while chastising the brothers for letting the shedim escape in the first place, though she admits she had neglected them in her research of trying to pull demon souls from the Empty. The shedim find all of the Winchesters' remaining allies and kill them as Chuck watches gleefully. Sam, Dean, and Michael fight back the shedim, but Michael is gravely wounded in the process.
Billie says that Chuck has used up his last resources against the brothers, so now is the time to make their move. She takes Jack, while Sam and Dean search for Amara, thinking she'll know where Chuck is and/or that if Chuck dies, they need to take care of her too somehow. Jack, Billie, and the Shadow confront Chuck, when Chuck reveals that Jack is being played. Billie just wants to end the universe to encompass everything in Death and get rid of all rulebreakers, and the Shadow is helping so it can go back to sleep forever once the universe ends. If Chuck dies, Jack will just be killing himself. Amara brings Sam and Dean to Chuck, and everyone is caught up. Jack refuses to kill, so Billie and the Shadow attack. Amara defends Chuck, and both are killed. The universe starts to fade, but since Jack is now the bridge between humanity and divinity, he has Sam and Dean take on the remaining powers of Chuck and Amara. Sam and Dean then use those powers to erase Billie and the Shadow.
At that point a voice rings out and talks to Sam and Dean. It tells them that he is the true God, and he reveals to them that in the beginning he created the Demiurge which split into two separate beings: the Creator, which also called itself God, and the Destroyer, the Darkness. God balanced these two aspects of the universe for a time until he decided to give them free will of their own. This allowed the Creator to seal the Darkness away and begin to create the multiverse. When the apocalypse happened, the Creator decided to be there for the final battle and wrote himself into the story by using Chuck as a vessel. But the Creator basically left Chuck in the driver's seat for the most part, to the point that the Creator began to think of himself as Chuck. However, once the Darkness and the Creator reconciled, the Creator left Chuck's body and returned to the machinations of the universe. Chuck found himself alive and alone again, thrilled with having walked in the shoes of the universe's greatest writer, and decided to use this inspiration to continue and reinvigorate his own writing. But it didn't come easy. Chuck got frustrated, but then learned that he still had access to all of the Creator's powers. So Chuck decided to pretend that he was God as opposed to back in Seasons 5-11 when the Creator decided to pretend he was Chuck. And because Sam and Dean don't respect him, Becky doesn't respect him, and he has access to all of these newfound powers, he decided to end everything in a way that he thought would make him the greatest writer. But now that Sam and Dean have taken over the halves of the Demiurge, they can shape the universe however they see fit, working together.
Castiel is too far gone to be saved but wakes up in the Empty with complete control over it as the only awake creature therein. Sam and Dean work to control their new powers with Jack's help. The three help heal heaven and Earth. And somewhere on the roads of America, Alt!Sam and Alt!Dean from the other universe begin their search for their missing father.
Chuck wants to make the brothers miserable before the end based on Becky's reaction to his story, so Chuck decides to build up a final grudge match between Sam and Dean, their remaining allies, and their antagonists that haven't been killed off yet. But since he's seen that Castiel is slowly regaining his powers and confidence, he'll first want to deal with him. So Chuck sends the Queen Djinn after Cas. Cas married the Queen Djinn back in Season 13, so she could have some sort of power over him, trapping Cas in a world of torture. Meanwhile, Harper, the necromancer who had a crush on Jack, has teamed up with the remaining Thule due to a strange set of voices telling her to join them to be granted even greater power. (She's no Nazi, but they're a means to an end). They begin performing a ritual when Aaron and the Golem burst in to try and stop them. The latter two fight valiantly and take out the rest of the Thule at the cost of the Golem, but Harper survives, kills Aaron, and finishes the ritual, causing four columns of smoke to burst out of the ground and enter Harper.
Sam and Dean try to snap Castiel out of his torture while fighting the Queen Djinn, but she gives Sam and Dean visions of all the people they've failed. We see Sarah Blake's husband and daughter putting out missing posters, we see Kevin wandering the Earth and muttering to himself, slowly going crazy, we see Bobby in heaven brainwashed to forget about the Winchesters, and we see Bela, about to be attacked by the hellhounds, when she pulls out the mojo bag that Gordon gave her, she pricks her finger, bleeds into it, and the doors burst open. Sam and Dean break out of the torture, stop the Queen, and rescue Castiel, but he is shaken and out of commission. Meanwhile we see Harper confront a shadowy figure in a dark alley. The figure pulls her hood down and says if Harper comes any closer, she'll kill her and take her blood to power the mojo bag, revealing it's Bela who has been using the bag to keep the hellhounds at bay all this time. Harper says Bela won't need that anymore, and one of the black pillars of smoke shoots out of her and into Bela.
Bela and Harper find Amy the kitsune's son and the rugaru's child and each put a column of smoke into them. They track down the Winchesters and reveal that the remaining four deadly sins demons are possessing these four remaining enemies. The Winchesters have to retreat, but Alt!Charlie finds them. She's been tracking down previous Winchester allies to help with the fight against God. Sunny, the mind-controlling psychic, Jesse the cambion, and the Banes Twins show up to help. Using their powers and working together with the Winchesters, they're able to kill the demons, but it's difficult since Sunny isn't well-experienced, Jesse's powers are severely diminished, and Max Banes is trying to keep his sister alive. Jesse, Charlie, and Alicia all die in the fight. Max gets upset and creates another new Alicia. But then we learn that the deaths of all the Seven Deadly Sins powered a spell that Harper and the Thule had prepared which release the shedim. They come out of hell and reveal that they are the link between magic and humans. They give natural witches their power; they were the voices that granted Sunny and her father their powers as well as the voices that guided Harper to re-release the Seven Deadly Sins. And they're able to take away those powers. With Sunny and Max powerless, Alicia falls apart, and then Sunny and Max are killed as well. Michael appears just in time to teleport the Winchesters away. (Jack remains hidden with Castiel.)
Michael tells them that despite the shedim being absurdly powerful, they can be undone by special magic: the magic of the Colt. He gives the brothers a vision of how the gun was created which he learned by looking into the past. The brothers visit Rowena, and she helps them forge new Colts while chastising the brothers for letting the shedim escape in the first place, though she admits she had neglected them in her research of trying to pull demon souls from the Empty. The shedim find all of the Winchesters' remaining allies and kill them as Chuck watches gleefully. Sam, Dean, and Michael fight back the shedim, but Michael is gravely wounded in the process.
Billie says that Chuck has used up his last resources against the brothers, so now is the time to make their move. She takes Jack, while Sam and Dean search for Amara, thinking she'll know where Chuck is and/or that if Chuck dies, they need to take care of her too somehow. Jack, Billie, and the Shadow confront Chuck, when Chuck reveals that Jack is being played. Billie just wants to end the universe to encompass everything in Death and get rid of all rulebreakers, and the Shadow is helping so it can go back to sleep forever once the universe ends. If Chuck dies, Jack will just be killing himself. Amara brings Sam and Dean to Chuck, and everyone is caught up. Jack refuses to kill, so Billie and the Shadow attack. Amara defends Chuck, and both are killed. The universe starts to fade, but since Jack is now the bridge between humanity and divinity, he has Sam and Dean take on the remaining powers of Chuck and Amara. Sam and Dean then use those powers to erase Billie and the Shadow.
At that point a voice rings out and talks to Sam and Dean. It tells them that he is the true God, and he reveals to them that in the beginning he created the Demiurge which split into two separate beings: the Creator, which also called itself God, and the Destroyer, the Darkness. God balanced these two aspects of the universe for a time until he decided to give them free will of their own. This allowed the Creator to seal the Darkness away and begin to create the multiverse. When the apocalypse happened, the Creator decided to be there for the final battle and wrote himself into the story by using Chuck as a vessel. But the Creator basically left Chuck in the driver's seat for the most part, to the point that the Creator began to think of himself as Chuck. However, once the Darkness and the Creator reconciled, the Creator left Chuck's body and returned to the machinations of the universe. Chuck found himself alive and alone again, thrilled with having walked in the shoes of the universe's greatest writer, and decided to use this inspiration to continue and reinvigorate his own writing. But it didn't come easy. Chuck got frustrated, but then learned that he still had access to all of the Creator's powers. So Chuck decided to pretend that he was God as opposed to back in Seasons 5-11 when the Creator decided to pretend he was Chuck. And because Sam and Dean don't respect him, Becky doesn't respect him, and he has access to all of these newfound powers, he decided to end everything in a way that he thought would make him the greatest writer. But now that Sam and Dean have taken over the halves of the Demiurge, they can shape the universe however they see fit, working together.
Castiel is too far gone to be saved but wakes up in the Empty with complete control over it as the only awake creature therein. Sam and Dean work to control their new powers with Jack's help. The three help heal heaven and Earth. And somewhere on the roads of America, Alt!Sam and Alt!Dean from the other universe begin their search for their missing father.
Yep. I thought about that too. That said, at a certain point it felt to me like Chuck was making them stand back up so he could keep knocking them down over and over again. Like Chuck was playing "stop hitting yourself" with the brothers but forcing them to stand up so he could keep hitting them. I guess this wasn't the case and they were just buying time for Jack, but you're absolutely right. If he hadn't changed his mind about snapping them away, Jack would have had to attack Chuck with just the power he had absorbed from Michael and Lucifer (or just Lucifer if Chuck didn't kill Michael too), which would have been a distraction, sure, but probably not enough to draw enough power out of him to avoid being snapped away himself. Agreed that it was a much weaker plan than they seemed to think.
Oh good point since they realized Jack was sucking power before Michael or Lucifer showed up. I'm guessing they didn't originally have a plan for Jack when they first realized he was a power vacuum. Then they really did think that Michael could help them open up God's book. Then when they realized that they couldn't read it at the same time that they realized Michael still wanted to be God's favorite, they came up with a plan to manipulate Michael, and confirmed with Jack that he did absorb Lucifer's power during the battle.
Also a really good question. We were told that no one can read Death's books unless Death allows them to, so that led us to believe that's why the book wouldn't open, but in actuality that's why the book looks blank to everyone else. So the book not opening was just to hide the fact to the audience that the book looked blank.
So much for Chuck being omniscient...
Lol, if all the monsters are gone, and all the demons and angels are locked in their respective realms, there shouldn't be a reason for another reaper to die unless another witch pops up and kills one for some reason. We probably won't get a new Death for a while at this point, if ever!
You can probably actually read it now! It was specifically about what I thought would happen with Sam, Dean, Jack, Cas, God, Billie, and the Shadow, and while I got some things right, I got a lot of things wrong. There is still one prediction that theoretically could come true in the final episode, but considering how much I got wrong, I'd say it's unlikely now and is therefore probably safe to read.
A few other things I wanted to mention:
So in my head-canon, God was corrupted by Chuck and the Darkness, and Amara was "corrupted" by God, making him more evil and her more good. So I guess in order to keep this head-canon, I have to believe that Jack absorbed both God and Amara into himself and just left Chuck behind on the ground rather than that still being a God/Chuck mix since Jack said Amara was inside him.
(EDIT: I just read someone else's post online about how dumb it was to leave God alive since he created magic and should therefore know all of it. He should be able to gather the ingredients to do Book of the Damned level spells and beyond with no problem. This also makes me think that I have the right idea with my head-canon, because unless his memories were stolen from him as well as his powers, this is exactly right if Chuck really is God. But if God was absorbed into Jack and all that was left behind was Chuck, it would make sense that he doesn't know how to do any of this kind of magic and is therefore no longer a threat. If that's really God that they left behind, he could make himself ridiculously powerful again in no time, and there would be no way for them to stop him as long as Jack keeps up his no-interference policy.)
But I also find it kind of strange that the universe is still able to exist in this state. If Jack is a black hole for divine energy, how is he able to access that energy? Surely Billie didn't expect Jack to absorb all of Chuck and Amara's energy because then he still would have become the "new God" instead of Billie. She should have expected him to go to the Empty after absorbing them. Then again maybe she intended to kill Jack once he was done absorbing Chuck and Amara, which would cause him to sleep in the Empty forever despite having all that power inside of him. (Though if God can pull things out of the Empty, and Jack has the power of God and the Darkness inside of himself, I think it's theoretically possible that he could just wake himself up.)
Also it feels kind of like a slap in the face for the show to be so anti-God, "God is a villain", "God has to answer for abandoning Earth and not answering all of our questions", and then turn around and say, "Yeah, but God is in everything, he can be hands-off, and we can be satisfied with his presence in everything without needing him to intervene or answer our every question."
Seasons 5 and 11 already said that God/Chuck WAS that kind of God. So why did Season 14 turn him into a villain and ignore all of that just to establish a new God who has the exact same philosophy? (I mean, as a theist, I appreciate that the show wasn't totally anti-God nihilist in the end, but it just made their story of making God become the villain so much weaker and more nonsensical.)
Also, if Jack brought back the multiverse characters, what happens to them when they die? Their universes' heavens don't exist anymore. So are they going to get stuck in this universe's heaven when they die, or are they just going to cease to exist? Or is Jack going to recreate their universes despite claiming to be hands-off?
And since God had to put some of himself into creation in order to let it continue to exist when he left the universe to create the rest of the multiverse, does that piece of God still exist inside creation? Can Chuck access it somehow? Or is that piece of God now a piece of Jack? Or was that piece removed? Surely if Jack is in everything the way God was in everything at the time of creation, you'd think that piece of God in creation is still there. Meaning Jack can die if that is manipulated.
Also I was surprised that there was no role for the Shadow in defeating God/that we never got any extra conclusion on that. Is it still awake/are the things inside it awake? I saw a lot of people speculating last week that the Shadow saying "You made everything loud" to Jack meant his explosion woke up all the demons and angels in the Empty, which would have been interesting. I guess that's something that might come up next week, but I doubt it.
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Back in Season 4 when Lilith was trying to break the seals, Alastair kidnapped a reaper (not Death) in order to kill two reapers under the full moon to break one of the seals. Because that town's reaper had been kidnapped, no one was dying. But once the reapers were free, people began dying again.