The Winchesters Season Finale: Is It Really No Way to Say Goodbye?

The season finale of The Winchesters was called “Hey, That’s No Way To Say Goodbye,” a nod to the fact that it’s some kind of ending even if we don’t know what kind yet or how final that ending might be. If it doesn’t get picked up by the CW, which seems unlikely as it’s not picking up many scripted shows, Chaos Machine has said they will shop it to other networks and streamers, so who knows what will happen. Showrunner Robbie Thompson, in his finale week interviews, made it clear that it was their goal and priority to deliver a solid season ending that could work if the show went forward and also work if it did not – which is no easy task, I’m guessing!

The Supernatural fandom has a lot of big feelings about endings.

I know I do, and most of my fellow fans and fandom friends do too. I loved the series finale of Supernatural and feel protective of it when misinformation about it gets passed around. So I’m sure that plenty of people will feel protective of the ending of this show as well. I’m sure too that, like OG Supernatural, emotions around this finale will be mixed.

Some of my closest friends didn’t love the Supernatural series finale because they had a very hard time with Dean dying, and for some of those people somehow this episode of The Winchesters felt healing. I confess I don’t entirely understand why, since Dean was just as “alive” at the end of Supernatural as he was at the end of this episode, which is to say not alive at all but very much existing, as Jensen said to me long ago, on another plane of existence. This episode didn’t change that; Dean was happy and at peace at the end of Supernatural, and he was more or less the same at the end of The Winchesters. In fact, one could argue he had more peace at the end of Supernatural than at the end of The Winchesters, after finding out about Chuck’s fail-safe plan instead of believing that he and Sam had defeated Chuck, peace when you are done, end of story. But if some people felt they needed healing and they got it from this show, I am all for it! Most of us are very motivated to get back to some kind of equilibrium when it involves something we care deeply about, and if you can figure out a way to do it, go for it.

For fans who ultimately found Supernatural as Kripke created it too dark, The Winchesters may have felt healing in that sense too. It was a 2023 show, with a more diverse cast of characters and hunters who aren’t averse to therapy or meditation to try to cope with their anger issues and trauma instead of enacting them and periodically taking them out on other people unintentionally. In a sense, Robbie Thompson wrote a sort of fix-it fic for those aspects of Supernatural, with an ending that parallels 15.19 instead of 15.20, with John and Mary driving off into a hopeful new life, as Sam and Dean did at the end of 15.19. I didn’t need a fix-it fic; for me, ‘Carry On’ was the ending that made sense and felt right for a show that was a 42 minute horror show, dark and disturbing and sometimes hard to watch but ultimately incredibly inspiring. Its heroes were flawed and nuanced and not black and white, ever, and they lived through tragedy and always kept fighting. I felt – feel – incredibly grateful that we got the bridge scene after the barn, a far more happy ending than I ever thought we’d get on Supernatural. But I can see why people who didn’t feel that way about the finale could have found The Winchesters healing, like the best fix-it fics are undeniably healing. Again, if it feels that way to you, please revel in it and feel better. Fandom itself will certainly be the better for any healing that brings.

For me, I felt a mix of things as I was watching, and still do now after taking a week to let it all digest. I was entertained for sure – I’ve said in my last few reviews that the show seemed to be finding its feet in terms of its look and timing – and I felt relieved that my tentative theories about what was going on were mostly correct. (I’m protective of Supernatural canon, so while I trusted Robbie and the EPs to be protective also as promised, I still felt a sense of relief that this was indeed an Alternate Universe John and Mary who we were getting to know this whole time, which made the inconsistencies nothing to do with canon and everything to do with this not being OUR John and Mary.)  The cast were all able to bring their characters to life in a way that made them unique and provided enough backstory so that we felt like we were getting to know them – and they are all delightful in real life.

I’m still a bit confused about the progression from the pilot to the finale, since it started out sounding like Dean was trying to figure out his own parents’ past (not another world’s John and Mary) and that their epic love would save the world – it turns out that Baby sort of saved the world (again) with some help from all the characters plus one Dean Winchester. Most of us pretty much knew that Dean Winchester would make an actual appearance in this episode. Anyone who has ever met me knows that I love Dean Winchester like I love breathing. I can’t wait to have him and more Supernatural back on my some-kind-of screen again and more of the adventures of Sam and Dean. We didn’t get alot of Dean in The Winchesters, though intended or not, Dean’s appearance was a big part of why many people tuned in – but we got more in the season finale than in any other episode. I think because I was satisfied with how Supernatural turned out, I didn’t have a burning need to see Dean in this show, and thus his appearance in the pilot didn’t feel like relief, it just felt like having an old friend back for a bit. Without Sam, it also didn’t feel like Supernatural, so the pilot gave me a confusing Dean, the story left intentionally murky about what he was up to and why.

The rest of the season gave us Dean Winchester bits of narration as he (we now know) added to the hunting journal that I don’t think we ever saw him keep on Supernatural but he apparently did – it seems a bit more like a Sam thing to do, but hopefully this AU John and Mary benefited from it. (ETA: Apparently we did see Dean have a journal back in Season 1 episode 18, which I totally did not remember!)  I still have questions, but by the end of this episode it did feel like Dean Winchester himself was on my TV screen, albeit not in an episode of Supernatural. That was the intention for this show, to stand on its own two feet and introduce a new cast of characters that would hopefully intrigue fans enough to keep going – and Robbie has said that if that happens, it won’t be the Dean show, but the newly minted hunters in this AU world who will ‘carry on’. The show’s future is still up in the air, but I think the show succeeded in creating some memorable characters in this world’s Mary and John and Carlos and Lata (and Millie and Ada too).  It doesn’t hurt that the cast is absolutely lovely – it was a pleasure meeting many of them at New York Comic Con for interviews and at a recent convention.

So what actually happened in this episode? A LOT. Phew. We start off earlier in 1972, as John buries his friends after serving in the war, traumatized and unsure where he belongs or what he wants to do.

He sits down in a bus station, looking lost, and a mysterious man approaches and gives him an envelope – who John calls “Sir” because he’s clearly older than John himself.

Me: Jensen Ackles?!

I still can’t rewatch the episode and see that as Dean Winchester, it looks too much like Jensen. (I’m not quibbling, because the reason he needed the long hair and beard is, I’m guessing, to return to playing a character that I’m really freaking excited about! And yes it’s Heaven, he’s dead, he probably can look however he wants, so there’s no canon issue, but I still can’t see that person as Dean Winchester of Supernatural no matter how hard I try). But I’m okay with it, and the merchant marine lighthouse keeper Ernest Hemingway Robert Redford look, unsurprisingly, totally works for him.

(It worked for Redford too…)

Anyway.

He gives John the letter from his father and disappears; we see him looking down on a confused John from the balcony.

gifs justjensenanddean

The plan worked, as John buys a ticket back to Lawrence, Kansas. And then the show pulls off a well-kept secret as we pan out and see none other than Bobby Singer standing next to Dean-who-does-not-look-like-Dean.

Bobby: We’re not supposed to meddle with things, ya idjit!

Me: Bobby!!!!!

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‘The Winchesters’ Gets Scary with ‘Tears of a Clown’

The penultimate episode of The Winchesters’ first season was what Supernatural used to call a ‘Monster of the Week’. The open is frankly terrifying, two guys out to have a good time – at a closed carnival at night? Uh oh.

Not-very-happy guy finds a ticket, hears music that his friend doesn’t, and heads right toward the creepiest looking carnival tent you can imagine because of course he does. Limbo’s Hall of Happy – and here he is, Limbo himself, waving and beckoning the guy to come right on inside. WHY, DUDE? Who would follow a clown that looks like this???

First he’s trapped in a hall of mirrors (look, those things were terrifying when I was a kid – not fun!) and then confronted with Limbo and his own face in clown makeup staring back at him. Somehow he manages to smile anyway and AAAHHHHH I am totally with Sam Winchester and his fear of clowns!

Kudos on a truly creepy scary opening, The Winchesters!

‘Tears of a Clown’ is a classic song that makes a good episode title. Dean Winchester narration kicks off after that.

Dean: Hunting’s a dishonest business. You gotta lie all the time, about who you are and what you do. But the hardest lies aren’t the ones you tell other people, they’re the ones you tell yourself.

Yes, that was a predictable ending to that sentence that I spoke right along with Dean, but it is something that Sam and Dean learned the hard way. It’s also, as I’ve written before, a big theme of this show. Who are you? Is reality what you think it is?

John and Mary are pretty good with the musical aliases, just as their sons will be. (It is so confusing that this is a prequel, and that John didn’t know any of this in the OG show, constantly making my head hurt!) Even Karen Carpenter got a shout out here, very 70s.

John is channeling his inner Dean Winchester (I know, I know, it’s gotta be the other way around), snapping at Mary when she questions if he’s okay after he was ‘overly aggressive’ with apparently more than one person. He just wants to put what happened with Kyle in the rear view, but Mary’s not so sure that’s possible. I am still not totally sold on the John-has-anger-issues thing – we don’t see a lot of it, and just hearing about it isn’t as convincing. I can understand the John has PTSD thing more, and perhaps anger is one of the things that he’s dealing with as a result, but I wish we saw more than we have. I imagine having only 13 episodes to get to some revelations in the next episode has made things more compressed than they wished they could have been.

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The Winchesters: You’ve Got a Friend

And let me tell you, they all really need one!

Last week’s episode of ‘The Winchesters’ starts right off with the Dean Winchester narration.

Dean: Being a hunter means always being on the move. And no matter how hard you plan, no matter how hard you work, at a certain point we all run out of road. It’s what we do at those crossroads that define us.

The crossroads certainly defined Sam and Dean’s lives in multiple ways – literally, and at those points where a hard decision had to made, one that would impact other people too (or maybe even the whole world). Is Dean facing one of those decisions again?

Back to the story, John shows up at the club house covered in blood, Mary asking in shock where he’s hurt. John echoes his eventual son (or is that really Sam echoing his dad….never mind…brain hurts…) in Born Under A Bad Sign, one of my favorite episodes.

John: It’s not my blood.

At least he doesn’t turn out to be possessed by a demon! But yes, he’s in alot of danger…

He is pretty traumatized by what happened to Kyle, and feels extra guilty because he was a friend/one-time-date of Mary’s.  Millie, of course, much like her eventual grandson Dean, believes her son no questions asked and helps him escape.

In a common horror trope (because it’s endlessly terrifying, playing on our very human need to be able to predict when there’s danger around us), there’s no way to know who the Akrida are controlling – which Lata suddenly remembers could be rectified by Maggie’s magic bracelet that can pinpoint anyone harboring a dark secret or “being a monster”!  Why Lata didn’t think of this before and why Maggie kept it hidden is a mystery. I mean, that could be handy, right? Carlos and Lata head off to search Maggie’s room for it, with a reminder to John from his meditation guru (aka Lata) not to forget to do his breathing exercises.

Lata later: He hasn’t meditated in weeks.

Fandom (and echoed by Drake Rodger on twitter): Most terrifying thing about this episode: John hasn’t meditated in weeks omg!

Mary to John (just as all Winchesters say when they’re in serious trouble): Hey, we’re gonna figure this out.

Lata and Carlos find some old photos of Maggie and Lata on their way to see Alice Cooper (I would have picked Bowie or Mott the Hoople or Lou Reed, but to each their own). And within a minute that photo and the resulting conversation quickly clues Lata in on where to find the bracelet. I really wish these kids had to struggle a bit more!

It’s in a box of Toastettes that’s Maggie’s private stash (in the rat poison box which seems like a terrible idea – hopefully she washed the box really really well!)  I would say they must be super stale by now when Carlos eats one, but if they’re anything like Poptarts they apparently last forever).

The bracelet is supposed to uncover your enemies’ hidden secrets, but unfortunately it immediately clasps itself around Lata – and some totally scary shadow monster locks them into the house and blows out all the lights. I do like that the show is learning how to be scary with the less is more rule.

They find out from the lore books (that are locked in there with them luckily) that if someone wears the bracelet who is harboring a dark secret of their own, the bracelet will force them to reveal it – or the shadows will consume them.

Oops.

Carlos (incredulous): You have a dark secret? What, like overdue library books?

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‘The Winchesters’ Ramps Up The Stakes With ‘Suspicious Minds’

‘The Winchesters’ has three episodes remaining in its first season after this one, so I expected things to ramp up as far as finding the Big Bad (aka the Akrida queen). That ramping up did happen, it turns out, in both expected and unexpected ways.

The Akrida have apparently been wreaking havoc since the 1950s, killing poor Dorothea who was only trying to be helpful by fixing a car (I love all the women on this show who are so mechanically talented, even if that is so not me).

The Men of Letters didn’t manage to send all of them back to their own universe, so some have been hiding out ever since – including the Queen.

I’m not as invested in the Akrida as I’m probably supposed to be – this show is more interesting when it’s telling me something about these characters that I know and love from OG Supernatural, assuming it feels like it can connect the two. So as soon as John finds a letter from a university amongst the pile of mail on Mary’s table and asks her about it, I was instantly thinking of Sam Winchester getting a similar letter – and having to hide it from his family.

Mary has been paralleled to Sam in wanting to have a “normal life” and get out of hunting in this show and in the original, and in this episode that’s made explicit. It made sense in the context of this show, so I enjoyed the parallel – it’s only when it seems like a stretch and doesn’t make sense that they don’t work for me. Mary is luckier than her son, who clearly takes after her. In this time (or this world), Mary opens it and John shares her excitement about being accepted – unlike the John Winchester of Supernatural. By this time, even her dad is somehow on board with her getting out of the life – that would have meant so much to Sam!

We get the Dean narration early on, a bit of a warning about expecting happy endings from this show (just as we were warned in Supernatural, and if you didn’t heed that warning, you probably had a tough time with November 2020).

Dean: Hunting and happy endings don’t usually mix. So when you get your chance, you’ve got to ask yourself, how far will I go to get it?

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It’s A ‘The Winchesters’ Watch Party!

Last week’s episode of ‘The Winchesters’ was extra fun – because I got to watch it with my friend Nightsky from The Winchester Family Business. We’ve been friends since the early seasons of Supernatural but we live in different cities, so getting to watch anything “live” together is rare. We went to the premiere of A Knock At The Cabin in New York City the night before (it was awesome fyi), so were both at my house on Tuesday – which meant viewing party for The Winchesters! Here’s our morning after thoughts on the episode….before coffee, so keep that in mind….

Let’s start with our OG Supernatural fave, Dean. Here’s his narration from the episode:

Dean: This isn’t how I saw things going when I pushed over that first domino. Thing is, I’ve had more than a few dances with free will and fate, but as my dad used to say, “fate is what you make it.”

Lynn: Wait, did John Winchester actually say that on Supernatural?

Nightsky: I don’t remember him saying that, and if he didn’t, this is huge! It means that Dean is changing the timeline.

Lynn: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! I don’t want OG Supernatural’s timeline changed!

Nightsky (not at all rattled by the outburst): Including Dean’s narration, fate is mentioned fifteen times in the episode. The gem is the Gem of Ursitoare, the Roman gods of fate.

Lynn: Okay, so it’s about fate. That’s a Supernatural theme for sure. But what was it trying to say about fate?

Nightsky: Lata says, “fate has a different meaning for the undead… It shows the next fated moment in your destiny. According to the legend, the leader saw he was fated to die and chose to save himself over the clan… Once the object reveals your fate, it is sealed.”  But John proved that the context of fate is unknown, and within his control. Dean is “undead” in a way, so are they hinting that Dean is trying to change his and Sam’s fates, and maybe even the entire Winchester clan’s fate?

Lynn: That makes me nervous. I didn’t necessarily see this as John changing his fate though. In this episode’s climactic scene with John and the vampire, I saw the fact that the outcome was not what we first expected as made possible because John didn’t know the full context of what was happening in that vision of the future – it didn’t necessarily show that he was being killed, only that the vampire was biting him, and we don’t know what happened before or after. What if that is exactly what happened before and after, and he just figured it out? That would mean John didn’t change anything.  The combination of time travel and changing fate makes my head hurt though.

Nightsky: Even though Dean remembers his dad saying “fate is what you make it”, going back through the episode, it was Millie who said it, not John. Maybe this is where John learns that lesson from his mother.

Lynn: A lot of this show is about where John or Mary learned things from their parents, that’s for sure.  (What’s also interesting is that Nightsky and I both thought that John DID say it, but it’s not in the transcript we’re looking at over breakfast…)

Nightsky: In the pilot of The Winchesters, Dean says “I know this story might sound familiar, but I’m gonna put the pieces together in a way that just might surprise you, and in order to do that, I have to start all the way at the beginning.” In this episode, that’s exactly what John did. He was shown a vision of one version of events, but he put together the pieces of that puzzle in a way that wasn’t initially what he thought it would be. Maybe that’s what this series is doing – putting a context around the Winchester story that we know. They’re not changing anything, but fitting it into a larger, more complete, paradigm.

Lynn: Maybe, though that still makes me a little nervous. It still feels like change, even if it’s not going to change those goalposts they talked about not moving.

Nightky: In my reviews, I’ve been noting how I’m getting a much deeper understanding of all of the Winchesters because of the context of their history. It’s not changing anything in their personalities but I’m understanding so much more about them than I ever did before. It’s giving me “aha” moments that are enriching my love of Supernatural.

Lynn:  There are some times I can fit them into the canon of Supernatural and then I can feel them as expanding my understanding of them, but there are those other times when I can’t make them fit, so I’m just left scratching my head. One of my hopes for this show is that it doesn’t change anything I know and love from Supernatural – hence my persistent concern – but instead fills in some blanks. There are moments that make me go, huh? That doesn’t sound like anything this character would have said or done in Supernatural!  Times when I can’t see Samuel ever saying that, or Mary, or even Dean in his narration. It’s only sometimes, but those times are confusing – hopefully they will all make sense in episode 13!

Nightsky: So besides the theme of free will versus changing or contextualizing fate, what were the highlights of the episode for you?

Lynn: There was a lot of Millie, and that always makes me happy. Bianca Kajlich is amazing, and I believe every single ounce of her portrayal of Millie. Whenever she and Drake Rodger get a chance to interact in an emotional scene, I’m captivated by it because it feels so genuine.

Lynn:  You can feel her anguish there, having to do that to her son. I can’t imagine… I love her toughness, and the fierce love underneath, maybe because it appeals to the mom in me, but I also love how we get only little glimpses of that reluctant vulnerability. Hmm. Am I saying she reminds me of Dean? Because sometimes she reminds me of Dean. We haven’t heard her say “no chick flick moments” but that’s one of those things that I can trace forward to Dean and it feels like it makes sense.

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