Cursed finale meta
The more I look at Spn’s 15x20 the more I think it’s very vindictive … with the express purpose of casting the boys as villains with little room for anything else:
Chuck was always obsessed with monsters. More teeth. More power. In the end he had an epiphany!
(TW) murder - this might ruin SPN for some. It’s a retelling of 15x20 as The Most Hopeless ending there is. You have been warned. If you want to lose hope in SPN then this is the meta for you! If you’re a fan of the serial killer angle you’ll probably like it though.
For the record, I do think it’s a charming acres situation. Too much serene beauty and pot roast mentioned. ;) Buuuut I also wanted to thought experiment the gritty story Chuck is trying to tell.
… this is the unmasking of the show with the implication on it all being Sam’s dissociative roleplay “miming” of his serial killing (which is, incidentally, his special interest) ... and Sam is one sick dude. It’s really ableist to portray D.I.D. this way, but after I’ve sat with the show this weekend, I really think it’s what they were going for.
Some depressing things:
(1) Figment-Dean is less real than ever before. We see Sam doing all the “real” things like taking showers, laundry, cooking his own breakfast. Dean sort of goes through the motions of cleaning up and interacting with the imaginary dog. Figment-Dean may have been getting out of the life, even in Sam’s fantasy, if you look at his preference for a pie festival and his job application. Which may be when Sam decided to “kill” him.
(2) It’s clear in the first few minutes that it’s quiet out there. Sam feels unfulfilled. Figment-Dean has “got something” on his laptop but it’s just a … pie festival. There is zero evidence that there’s a case so far. Zero. Dean inexplicably cries (emotional lability?) when they reach the pie festival and it’s played for laughs. Sam ominously asks if Dean is ready for this. His destiny. (Sam has already subconsciously decided to sacrifice figment Dean.)
(3) At the pie festival, Sam feels “sad Sam” and picks out a Happy Family to be jealous of. I mean, to feel sad about. Then he symbolically destroys the apple pie life by smashing Dean’s face in it. (A god looks joyously on in the background. Singer and Kripke can’t wait to gut you!) Sam “feels better.” Time to destroy more “pie” to feel even better.
(4) Quick cut to Sam’s chosen victims. I mean, the happy family. The youngest, Brady, and his older unnamed brother are playing a game in the living room. Black-and-tan dressed dad answers the door only to be killed in a way reminiscent of Lucifer killing Cas at the end of season 12.
(5) Sam and Dean enter the house, miming the actions of monster vampires. It’s supposed to be funny because the family and we the audience invited them in, right? As the two figures enter, the Sam-coded vampire disappears, and one Dean-coded killer remains. But it’s really just Sam. Also the music is VERY intro to ghostfacers. Cause uh…they’re “sick people,” as Dean said in Thinman.
(6) Due to this referencing mime theater (that’s why they’re masked figures), there is no focus on the face or ability to see their expressions. Instead, we focus on their hands, and there’s lots of gratuitous focus on the weapons of choice: machetes. The narrative is showing you that the monsters are Sam. “Go with the machete.” You’re invited to look at the killing itself this time and not be swayed by the characters.
(7) The green-eyed mom from above reacts to her husband dying the same way Dean reacted to Cas dying in All Along the Watchtower. Sam feels good that someone else gets to feel the pain. Sam feels released when re-enacting the trauma. She tells the boys to run and she leaps up the stairs, her gray dead guy robe cardigan swishing as she goes. The Dean-coded killer kills her and cuts out her tongue. (Can't have her telling the audience that the boys are the "full-service" FBI, I mean the killers.)
(8) The boys hide under the bed. In the room there’s an odd painting of a rabbit, a callback to Golden Time’s “Steve was a good bunny. Jessie just needed his bones.” And there’s a cheeky painting over the bed of a beach/island. When they’re under the bed, the long-haired, Sam-looking older brother gets yanked out first and the golden-haired younger brother looks on in terror (trapped Jack?)
(9) At the crime scene the next day, Sam says he knows about the juicing due to the wire, but as you will see, it’s strongly implied Sam did the juicing himself in order to create monster-killing bullets drenched in a dead man’s blood. Dean cheekily asks if anyone saw what the killer looked like. That’s intentional by the writers. It’s also intentional that the boys “recognize” them.
(10) Cut to Sam and Dean reading from their kill fantasy playbook. I mean John’s journal. The details, as you see, are becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy as time moves forward. The unauthenticated script goes to great pains to underline that this is a single man-figure. Not two like in the first scene. Not six like in the second. One. Anyway, they speak aloud their modus operandi—targeting rural, isolated families. Then they take off to the exact house these “monsters” happen to show up at. Perfect interception, huh? Then Sam stares into the camera and shoots. Uh-huh.
(11) The interrogation is fascinating. The tone is very different to how we usually see (just like how their respective voices are in general off this episode) and the unmasked monster is John-paralleled. This actor makes a pretty good young Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Notice that Dean calls it an “it” and “evil.” The scene is set so that Sam’s figments are both on one side, away from him. There’s an amazing cut where the vampire is making a gleeful face and we cut to Sam who has the same expression for a brief moment before morphing into Sam persona.
On the script there’s a small break in the fantasy, that the vampires don’t like fast food. Sam points out they iced the dad and no good explanation is provided except that his blood or his meat didn’t taste good to Sam. Or that Cas’s tears were gross from the confession scene. Or that his fans were salty. You know, just things.
Or maybe it’s the age-old “salt the earth” with victory. This ritual symbolized a curse on the defeated and surviving inhabitants. Basically the new king has won.
Or maybe we’re just full on leaning into Sam-the-cannibal. The police woman did mention cannibalism. Jack, the true Sam hidden self, did eat hearts. Jack sought absolution through Sam, Dean, and Cas by putting his actions on them and reframing it as heroic. Now Jack is integrated and he can see things how they are and put his figments to rest.
(12) Then they go to the Wes Craven fantasy barn where the kids are “saved.” The previous snippet strongly implies they weren't saved though. Them kids're dead. This Sam needed their bones. I mean we tell ourselves we saved more people than we hurt, right? And then the fake monsters materialize in Sam’s mind. There’s no sound as the vampires materialize out of thin air. Not even a door makes a sound until the boys leave. They’re all utter figments. They’re also hunters. Really, look at them. It’s more blatant than it’s ever been. Look at their weapons. Jenny appears because Sam is reliving all his best memories today (with some relish I might add). Sam is giving up hunting, after all, or so he thinks. The hunters in Sam’s mind create monsters and do evil in order to feel important and heroic. As Sam says when Dean is grilling him about Gadreel in season 9, “I am everyone, Dean.”
Or as Dean says when he dies, “it’s always been you… (heavy pause) …and me.”
(13) For reasons unknown, Sam finally kills Dean in his mindscape. Dean got boring. The fire went out. He wasn't living up to the Dean Sam remembered. Recall Bobby and Dean's reactions to post-Purgatory Dean and Benny. Perhaps this whole pie thing was him feeding the Dean his last supper before crucifying him. Dean seems to feel “uneasy” and “weird” throughout the script. He’s worried about the dog in the deleted script scene and feels "uneasy" when talking to Sam about it. Like he knows he ain’t coming back. Sam hallucinates a tearful goodbye where Dean tells him everything he wants to hear about himself.
(Just like how when Sam integrated Cas, he made Cas tell Dean everything Dean wanted to hear about himself. I’d argue he was maybe ready to lay both Cas and Dean to rest here in this dungeon for their feelings. But instead he symbolically cut Dean’s tongue in order to hang on to his idea of Dean. If Dean and Cas ever were real in waking life, Sam has finally figured out what they were to each other. He hangs on to this Dean for 6 months, but just like after All Along The Watchtower, none of the treats restore his sick dog to optimal health. So he kills it and puts it in heaven where it’s happy and Sam can return to it when it’s fully restored to health).
(14) So on that note, Sam cries but it’s not for Dean, it’s for the loss of the road life of pure, free killing. When he sits in the impala and relives his memories in the montage, just like with Emily in Golden Time, we’ve misread it: he’s reliving his kills. Dean is just his instrument to kill with, so when they’re reunited in heaven, Sam has indeed been waiting…for permission to kill again on the open road without guilt. That’s it. In this dark version, Dean is just a vehicle to alleviate his guilt. Like the car.
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Final notes:
You just pray that Sam was so incapacitated by his condition that he’d simply been in that bunker for years, and most of his killings played out only in his head.
But uh…sure seems like he killed a lot of people in the bunker. Like Charlie in Slumber Party. Also note how she describes hunting at the beginning of the episode. In this reading, Dean discovered Charlie was dead in season 10 buuuut Sam actually killed her and consumed her in season 8.
It’s hard to ignore that he kills people and potentially eats them to integrate them into his self. That’s why it’s—uh—so hard to bring people back without bodies. (Sam started burning his victims to keep himself from eating them.) It’s why there are missing hearts, too. Sam eats his loved ones and reimagines them reborn in his mindscape. Then he starts breaking his own rules and brings ppl back anyway.
Also from Slumber Party, we have a wicked witch who was soul-bound to Dorothy…with the witch’s tongue cut out. Although it was hard to keep the witch’s tongue silent for long…
You pray that Miracle is a callback to ScoobyDoo and that it signals we’re watching a completely different universe.
And you pray this is just Chuck’s ending. That this Sam and Dean are simply possessed by Kripke and Singer, and real Cas, Dean, Sam, and Jack…are trapped. Hopefully not inside this sacrificial family.
—
Get it, guys? They’re the monsters! “I am so deep—my writing made you feel something,”said Chuck. “You want laundry and chores, Becky?! I’ll give you a whole day in the life montage!” Wrapped in hopelessness.
Get it guys? They always choose family.
Oh and Chuck got the idea from Scooby-Doo too. Look who’s under the mask! It sure as hell ain’t me! It was Sam all along!
“If you’re dead, you better stay dead. Otherwise, we’ll kill you.” -Ghostfacers
Or… it’s Jack and his comfort characters. He’s putting Sam and Dean to death and creating another trauma narrative out of his previous trauma narrative to deal. But now Brady, the youngest boy, is the center of it.
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A kinder reading? These particular monsters are us. We pick kids, raise em, and juice em. Sam and Dean are hunting us, the masked apparitioms. And WE kill Dean.
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