“Inherit the Earth” and the Fakeout
Absolutely genius. Amazing, iconic, legendary, something only our showrunner Andrew Dabb can pull off.
“But Lilly, the episode was so bad! It was just the brothers, they didn’t look for Cas and Eileen!”
YES. THAT IS EXACTLY THE POINT. THIS WAS A FAKE ENDING, THE END OF THE SEASON, NOT OF THE SERIES.
An empty world. No one left but Sam, Dean, and Jack.
So Dean ran, he somehow managed to pick himself up off the floor of the dungeon and meet up with Sam and Jack. That jacket was this silent reminder. Remember what I’ve been saying, Cas has occupied the negative space all season, this is no exception.
Dean can’t look either of them in the face, he’s doing that thing, where his eyes move everywhere BUT where he should look.
“I couldn’t save anybody.”
Sam couldn’t save the world and Dean couldn’t save the one person that means the world to him.
I think it’s there, in that pause where Dean tries to push down the emotions, continue the fight, not think about the memories he left in the bunker, that Jack realizes what must have happened. Jack is the only one that knows about the deal, he has to know what Cas not being there must mean.
“He saved me. Billie was coming after us. Cas summoned the Empty. It took her…and took him. Cas is gone.”
This may shock you, but I am GLAD they didn’t talk about Cas, especially with what happens at the end of the episode. Cas is allowed to just take up unsaid space. It’s obvious he’s missing with the way they blocked things, obvious he’s missing here. This whole “oh well they don’t care about Cas because they didn’t talk about him”? Malarkey.
Guilt. Regret. Pain. Dean will carry this with him for the rest of his life. Not only that he lost Cas, but that Sam lost Cas, that Jack lost Cas.
That SHOT, with the distance between Jack and Sam where Cas is SUPPOSED TO BE, and then a zoom out to…THE WORLD.
Okay, as usual, Bucklemming has the subtlety of a sledgehammer lmao.
Jack crying??? Praying to Cas???? Bruh?????
Also it’s just straight-up frightening for everything around my boy to die he is my baby son.
Also not to point out the incredibly obvious, but Dean starts drinking immediately, and continues drinking throughout the whole episode. Grief arc 2.0 babey.
“We can what, Dean? There’s no one left to save! Everybody’s gone!”
“You can’t just give up.”
“What other choice do we have!”
Idk why, but for Sam, who’s the constant, the one who’s always had hope, through everything, through all these years, when he finally says this, when he finally loses his hope? It hits the hardest. Sam is the leader, so not only is he grieving the loss of Eileen, he is a general grieving the loss of his soldiers, his friends, the world that he feels the duty to save.
When they go to meet Chuck, I just can’t get that image of Dean, leaning against the car, handprint still on his jacket, staring at the ground out of my head. It takes him a few seconds to catch up to Sam, like he’s pulled out of thoughts like deep dark water. Remember friends, it doesn’t have to be loud to be powerful.
Chuck wearing BLACK? FEAR.
“That’s right, the whole Cain and Abel thing. Us dead, whatever. I’ll kill Sam, Sam’ll kill me, we’ll kill each other. Okay, you pick. But first? You gotta put everything back the way it was. The people, the birds…Cas. You gotta bring him back.”
Willing to kill his brother. Willing to die. Tears in his eyes, begging God to bring Cas back.
And Chuck? Chuck doesn’t care about their surrender, he knows he’s already got them beaten. He cares about their pain, he cares about them suffering, because to him? That’s the entertainment. He’s not entertained by their found family, by their happiness, by their joy. He wants them to suffer, all of them.
“Eternal shame. Suffering. And loneliness.”
And he leaves them with just that. No hope, no family, just the three of them, broken, alone. Jack locked in his bedroom, Sam trying desperately to make life “normal” again. And Dean. Dean who drank so much he passed out on the floor.
He doesn’t feel terrific, he feels like shit, because not only is he dealing with the shame of an empty planet, he’s dealing with the guilt of being back in the place where the Empty took Cas.
This whole thing with the dog was just absolutely heartwrenching shit and if I didn’t hate Chuck before, him snapping Miracle right in front of an already fragile Dean would seal that deal.
I just want everyone to know that this is a Jake Abel stan account.
“Daddy’s boy” is a big insult for my boy Dean to use considering his own past with his trash abusive father but I’ll allow it.
I do think it’s interesting, ending of his arc aside, that Michael is willing to help them now. What changed? Sure, he ended up trying to help Chuck, running back to his father, but why get back in the game? I wonder if it has anything to do with the loss of Adam. It’s an interesting parallel, a man loses his angel while an angel loses his human.
Everything is so DARK in the Bunker now too, even the lighting is loud.
When I tell you I lost my shit when I saw Cas was calling Dean, when I heard Misha’s voice?? I knew it didn’t make any sense but I didn’t care, I would’ve been one step behind Dean as he sprinted towards the door.
I mean it’s torture not only to Dean, who looks beyond fucking crushed when it’s damn Lucifer at the door, but for us too. Who the FUCK wanted Lucifer back? And to tease Cas??? Garbage.
I mean…fam. Listen, we know who’s writing this episode, this whole Betty thing is just like blatantly unnecessary but again, Eugenie loves Lucifer, gotta distract her with a shiny toy lmao.
It was cool to see Michael and Lucifer onscreen together. It was a cool dynamic that we rarely got to see.
The whole episode is just twist after twist. Listen, it’s their last episode so I guess they needed to fit in a season worth of twists in one episode.
Bye Lucifer. We know Eugenie can’t bring him back. Blessings to all.
This scene with Adam is the FOURTH scene where Dean is drinking…big yikes to my guy’s liver.
Here’s the thing about Michael. He’s a mirror for Dean in season 5. Loyal to an absent father. He has never changed, but Dean has. Dean is able to acknowledge now, the trauma that his father put him through, he was able to move past the need for pleasing him at any cost. Michael and Chuck? Are John and Dean, if Dean had never been allowed to grow. And Chuck proves, like John did, that he would always put his wants (in John’s case “the mission”) over his children.
Also not to beat a dead horse but Michael’s death was also peak Eugenie.
Sam getting to punch Chuck in the face? Thank you, he deserves that.
Obviously I don’t love any scene of my boys getting brutally beaten. But what I love, what I will always love about them, is what Chuck hates about them: they won’t ever give up. They know they won’t win against him, they don’t even land any hits, but that’s not what matters. What matters is their controller doesn’t control them anymore, that they really are free. No matter how hard they get hit, the get back up. It is their choice to stand up to him, no matter the cost.
The moment where Sam and Dean are supporting each other, covered in blood, and they look God in the face, and they laugh. That is why I will love them unconditionally for the rest of my life. That is who they are, they will never cow to the villain, whether that’s Azazel or Alastair or Zachariah or Lucifer or Amara or Death or Metatron or Cain or God. They will always choose to stand up.
And Chuck is left, small, human, no longer a villain, no longer anything.
Gotta be real, woulda been nice to, idk, not see all this essential plot in a flashback, but I know I can only ask so much of Bucklemming.
For Dean to walk away from killing Chuck, right after he’s called him “the ultimate killer” is quite simply the most beautifully heartwrenching thing I could ever ask for. Because that’s who Dean was under Chuck, that’s who Chuck wanted him to be.
And he would have before:
But he’s heard some things since then, heard some things about how others see him. Not as the killer, not as a monster, not as angry and broken or his daddy’s blunt instrument:
I’m not saying that Dean doesn’t kill Chuck for Cas. He doesn’t kill Chuck because he doesn’t think he has to anymore, he doesn’t kill Chuck because he listened to Cas, he took Cas’ words to heart. He made the choice not to be the killer.
“See that’s not who I am, that’s not who we are.”
And Chuck is angry, because he thought, after everything, even after losing, that he would still know Dean well enough to know that he would kill him. But Chuck has never really known Dean, he has never understood where he’s really come from. Cas understood, Sam and Jack understand, but Chuck never did, and writing off Dean as angry and broken is his biggest mistake, because that’s never been Dean.
“It’s not his power anymore.”
And it’s not just his physical power, it’s his power over the story, over the boys that’s the real power taken from him.
For Jack to be the one to bring everyone back, for him to be the hero of the story? That’s poetic right there. Now, I will say, I don’t think this story ends with him as God, because for him, the child, to take on this burden, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to me for his arc, but we shall see next week. It felt pretty tied up, but there’s one major loose end: and that’s Jack seeing Cas again.
“Just you and me, going wherever the story takes us. Just us.”
This doesn’t feel triumphant to me, it doesn’t feel like relief. It feels like they’ve settled, like this is the best they’re going to get, so they might as well make the best of it, at least they have each other.
For Cas and Jack to be carved into the table? I cry.
And for the montage, very similar to “Swan Song” to be set to “Runnin on Empty”? Sorry but that’s just too sus to be ignored.
They packaged this episode as an ending, because for many, it might be. The season’s story, the season about fighting Chuck is over. So, you might be asking (or, well, screaming, judging by my replies lol), what’s left? And that’s a good question, Chuck has been defeated, so what is left? What’s left is what’s really mattered all season: the relationships that have been crafted over the years. Dean and Sam’s unhappiness at the end of the episode, where “just you and me” sounded more of a grudging acceptance than anything else, is one of the clues that has to be looked at. Why didn’t Sam find Eileen, why didn’t Jack bring back Cas? Those two characters specifically are the ones we need to watch out for. As I’ve said over and over again, peace, contentment, satisfaction, those don’t come from Sam and Dean on the open road together anymore. They have a family, more of a family than they did when they started hunting together all those years ago, and that family is what holds them together. They need each other, of course, but each other isn’t enough anymore. Sam needs Eileen, Dean needs Cas. That is where they will find their peace.
This episode, as many written by Bucklemming was sloppy, rushed, packed full of shit, and had little gems that we can talk about forever, but that was the end of the season, and next week? Andrew Dabb brings us home, where Dean and Sam will finally be able to choose what they want for themselves, and that, my friends, is Eileen and Cas.
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