Warning: spoilers ahead for the Season 14 finale of Supernatural, called "Moriah."
The 2019-2020 TV season will mark the end of an era thanks to the end of Supernatural. By the time the final credits roll next year, the show will have run for 15 seasons and well over 300 episodes with the same two actors in the lead roles. Such a run is all but unprecedented on television, and certainly on The CW. The Season 14 finale, which aired April 25, felt different than previous season finales. After that finale, Supernatural actually feels like it's heading toward an ending. Here's why.
What Happened In The Finale
"Moriah" ended on arguably one of the biggest reveals of the entire series, and that's saying something. With a soulless Jack unleashed on humanity, the Winchesters were desperate to find a way to stop him. Dean thought that the only way to do it would be by killing Jack, and Sam was very reluctantly on board with the plan. Castiel was very much not on board with it, and he wanted to save Jack. What seemed like a big save happened when the long absent Chuck -- a.k.a. God -- suddenly popped back into the picture.
For all his inadequacies considering the havoc regularly wreaked by his angels, Chuck has always been presented as an ally to the Winchesters, and he became a fan favorite. Surely the God character of the series wouldn't be a bad guy with a shady motivation, right? Well, as "Moriah" revealed, not so right. When Chuck handed over a gun that he created to kill Jack, the guys were disheartened to learn that there was a catch: whoever pulled the trigger suffered the same effects as the target. Whoever killed Jack would die.
Chuck wasn't too torn up at the prospect, and he even revealed that Sam and Dean were his favorites of the many people from the many universes he'd created because they were so entertaining. This led to the ultimate reveal that Chuck had been manipulating them throughout their entire lives for his own entertainment. He's the ultimate writer, and as he told Sam, "Writers lie." Dean ended up not shooting Jack, so Chuck killed Jack, and Sam shot Chuck. He only hit Chuck in the shoulder, so Chuck was more angry than actually injured.
While it's objectively a good thing that the deity who created everything and whose existence holds everything together wasn't shot dead by Sam in a fit of despair, Chuck didn't handle this particular twist well. This wasn't how the story was supposed to end, even though Sam wanted the way Chuck was jerking them around to end, and Dean told him to go to Hell. Chuck's response? "Fine. That's the way you want it? Story's over. Welcome to the end."
That's all it took for all Hell to literally break loose, awesomely to the tune of Motörhead’s “God Was Never On Your Side.” Souls began escaping from Hell en masse, the monsters the boys have killed over the years began coming back, and the dead began to awaken. Given that Team Free Will happened to be in a cemetery at the time, the dead awakening was particularly problematic, and John wasn't around with his Negan bat to help them battle the swarming zombies.
Why It Feels Like The End
Well, for one thing, God literally said "Story's over" and "Welcome to the end," so that certainly didn't hurt the sense that Supernatural is working on winding down. Still, "Moriah" was hardly the first time that a season of Supernatural ended with the boys in a seemingly impossible situation, but always with the sense that they still had a long future of saving people and hunting things ahead of them. Even the apocalypse didn't feel like the end.
Chuck raising all the Winchester's old foes from the dead and awakening the dead is something that really can't be topped. Supernatural can go no bigger. An arc as huge as the good guys literally vs. God could really only work for a final season, and the stakes are high enough that viewers really need to begin wondering for pretty much the first time if Sam and Dean could die and actually not come back.
Not a single second of Season 15 has aired yet -- or probably been filmed yet, if Misha Collins' recent words are anything to go by -- but it already feels like the last stand of the Winchesters. Will they get their Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid-esque ending after all? Jack is dead. Bad guys are coming back, if the Woman in White and murderous clown from the closing montage are any sign. Could friends as well as foes return?
Jeffrey Dean Morgan already revealed when he'd want to return as John Winchester, and Lauren Cohan said she would "love to go back." Both of their characters have been dead for over a decade. Long-ago deaths never stopped Supernatural from being people back before, though, and the time is now to pull out all the stops. I'm more convinced than ever that -- as sad as it will be to see such a long-running show end -- the final season could be awesome.
Supernatural actually began to feel like it was tying up loose ends earlier in Season 14 with the deaths of both Mary Winchester and Nick. This was admittedly not the first time either character has seemed pretty definitively dead, but these deaths felt different.
Nick was murdered on screen by a Jack who'd burned off the last remnants of his soul, and Supernatural went pretty far in confirming that Mary is dead and not looking to come back. She's happy in heaven with John, and even the devastated Dean won't yank her out of that heaven a second time just so he and Sam can have their mom back.
It's clear from the emotions of the Supernatural stars when they announced the coming end that they're still all-in on creating an epic show, so we can probably count on some stellar performances from them. Tears will probably flow no matter how the story ends. Jared Padalecki revealed to CinemaBlend that he never expected Supernatural to hit 300 episodes; hopefully the final season and finale will manage to close the saga of the Winchesters in a satisfying way.
Supernatural will return for its fifteenth and final season on The CW in the 2019-2020 TV season.
