rewatching 15.18 and suffering afresh!
I need to talk about Billie, though. While Cas is telling Dean he’s made of love. We all know.
But Billie.
For years, I’ve been writing about how she’s Dabb’s avatar in the story. She was. Which makes it pretty damn poetic how-- and when-- she is taken out of it.
(I just watched her and Cas get ripped from the story and am currently sobbing on the floor of the dungeon beside Dean)
Cas’s love confession is the mechanism of his own happiness that summoned the Empty. But he triggered it deliberately to also remove Billie from the narrative.
Metaphorically, Dabb’s control over it.
And this is why I’m just as mad about Billie’s lack of redemption as I am about Cas’s lack of redemption.
She was tricked just as much as TFW was in this episode. She truly believed that her mission of Killing Chuck was their only salvation, just as much as Dean in 15.17 had become single-minded in that mission to the point he nearly destroyed everything else in pursuit of it. He pulled a GUN on SAM. That needs a lot of exclamation points for emphasis, but I try to be a decent person to those with screen readers, so y’all get this whole sentence instead of a string of bang marks...
As Billie told Dean and Cas when they broke into her Reading Room to try to kill her, they were in the wrong place. She had no interest in killing all their friends. It wasn’t her disappearing everyone as they’d been led to believe. It was always Chuck, all along. He was to blame for it. They’d wasted their time going after her. But without her, they also had no real hope of killing Chuck... or so SHE believed.
She said her ONLY mission now that she was dying was killing Dean.
Which... actually happened in the finale.
Because Billie didn’t understand how she’d been manipulated into doing Chuck’s bidding for him until it was too late. She spent all of s15 single-mindedly devoted to killing Chuck when that was never going to succeed. Because Chuck wrote ALL the rules to the universe, including the ones that Billie existed by as Death.
She had Grand Plans to just... keep the balance (as Amara had been urging Chuck toward in 15.17 before he broke her will and devoured her... yes Amara got short-shrift just as much as Billie did... and I won’t even go into how Rowena received the exact same treatment as a self-sacrifice in 15.03, other than to just state it plainly here).
But Chuck-- the one who can changes the rules on the fly and bend everything in the universe to his will EXCEPT for the will of humanity-- was too committed to the Writer Bit. Too invested in his own story to let it go. When it didn’t go his way, instead of adapting and letting it become something else, he chose to punish all the characters he claimed were his favorites.
Chuck ended up writing the worst, most nihilistic fanfic of his own stories just to burn it all to the ground. Tormenting his characters for no other reason than pettiness. Because he could.
Dabb was never Chuck. Dabb was always Billie. And in the final season-- out past 14.20 when we got that wild shot of Jack, Billie, and the Entity in the Empty... Dabb was all three of them.
And what happens to Jack in 15.19? He’s been Emptied Out, having been destroyed in the Empty and then brought back to Earth with no power, involuntarily absorbing power and draining the life from everything around him until he becomes... the perfect vessel for Chuck. He becomes Chuck at the end of 15.19.
Just in time for Dabb to execute... whatever the heck that finale was. Chuck’s final story.
Chuck won. He got the last say using Dabb’s in-story avatar like a puppet to bring it all to fruition. And Billie is the proof of it. And I am so tired now and can’t bring myself to watch 15.20 again yet, so I’m turning off the tv now before it’s too late and probably gonna go read my post 15.19 fix it fic instead that puts all of this to rights.
