How are you doing? What did you think about the final?
fam, I’m doing fuckin great.
Like-- okay, I’m just gonna ramble.
A while back I made a really bitter post about how, for me, Supernatural was already over. It’s no secret I think that I’ve found the Dabb years... trying. Individual things were fine but it seemed like the grasp of how stories are built and arcs handled and themes threaded through all of that had completely gone out the window. That, to be clear, I still think is true--there’s a way in which the thing that made SPN itself cracked in two, maybe somewhere in like... s12 or s13, and it never really recovered. I was so eager/relieved when they announced that they were ending with s15 because I thought -- oh, thank god, at least they’ll have a real endpoint to work towards. Then, s15 started happening, and it was so amateurish and terrible that I just stopped watching because frankly it was just a form of self-harm. I kept up with gifs, but that’s about it.
Last night, I went and dug up something I’d said a while back in our discord:
I was right about the first part -- and I’m so, so happy to have been wrong about the last part.
The thing about writing is that you have to make choices. A lot of what the Dabb Era has been is a lack of choices. Kill someone off but immediately bring them back; strip sacrifice of meaning; try to have your cake and eat it too. I’ve gotten actually-angry about it, to the point that I had to like step back and regain perspective about how this is a low-rent sci-fi show on the CW. But writing’s important to me, as a craft, and I couldn’t understand how it was going so badly.
The best thing about finales is that those choices are real. No matter what--there’s an ending, and this is the only ending it’s gonna be. With most shows/movies, this is fine--you watch it, you’re done, you move on. With rabid fanbases this can go very badly, because the various too-invested factions have been writing the ending in their head for so long that the choice the writer makes--no matter what choice it is--will be wrong and bad and evil, because in contradicts their expectations. (Here I remember the phrase: those are very nice receipts, but you wrote them yourself.)
What was totally shocking to me last night, as I was watching live (for the first time ever, with SPN), was how strongly and clearly and completely Dabb was managing to nail this landing. He made a choice and he stuck to it, and it turned out that here was the show I’d been missing, all this time. Here was the SPN I thought about when I remembered Dark Side of the Moon, or All Hell Breaks Loose, or Head of a Pin. It was fully invested in the two main characters, and it was generous to them, and it was generous to us, all at the same time. And all those actual decisions were backed up with the most skill the crew has shown in yeeeeeaaaars -- from editing to camerawork to acting to lighting, everyone brought their absolute A-game, when it seemed like they’d been phoning it in all year. (Except The Wig. I feel like I could write a full essay about The Wig, but you know what, I love that wacky thing too.)
What’s further shocking to me, and absolutely kind, is how open the ending is, too. We have an unspecified length of time between 5.19 and 5.20, and we have no idea how many mornings might’ve been just like that one we got in their sweet domestic montage. Look at all the story you can fit into there. Dean got to be purely happy, before the end. Sam was, too. Everything about the barn scene, which is fodder for a billion fics. That kind, kind heaven, where you can make it what you need it to be to feel right. The opportunity for those who need it for Castiel to be free; the opportunity for those who need it to let Sam have another life. Hell, Sam basically had a reader-insert fic delivered in 5 minutes, and you can fit any interpretation at all into that. For a season about stories, it was pretty shittily delivered, but somehow the endcap was exactly what it needed to be: a gentle, kind way to say hey: this is our story, but you can make it what you need it to be. Like that line in Fan Fiction, all over again.
And then--that ending. All I needed. A bittersweet singing joy to it. I’m just being hammered all over again by--yeah. It was just kind. For that, it was just about perfect. I’m not interested in quibbling over details or fandomite wars, and tbh it’s been depressing as I find out who I need to unfollow or even block, but I’m glad. My show pulled it off, inexplicably, right at the end. Very Winchester of them. :)
