15 seasons came to an end Thursday night and the reviews haven't been kind from most fans. Here's my take though.
The 1-hour retrospective show was nice but rushed. It should have been a 2-hour piece. Yeah, they gave love to several recurring fan favorite characters but where were Ellen, Jo, and Ash...Rufus, Charlie, Meg, and Ruby...Lisa, Ben, and Samuel...Gabriel, Billie, and Eileen...Claire, Alex, and Donna? I honestly hoped for the last 3 most of all. Twice, they looked at doing a spin off series. The first attempt, in season 9, focused on clans of monsters running the Chicago underworld...it didn't garner much interest. 4 seasons later, they tried again and instead of focusing on monsters, they focused on family....and instead of introducing a pack of all new characters, they used established fan favorites...Jody Mills, the Sherriff of Sioux Falls, South Dakota...Donna Hanscum, the Sherriff of Stillwater, Minnesota. Both had established themselves as allies and skilled hunters over the years and were to be mother figures to a quartet of young women...Claire Novak, whose father had agreed to be the vessel for the angel of Castiel, Alex Jones, kidnapped as a child and raised by vampires...Claire and Alex became proven hunters and the additions of Patience Turner and Kaia Nieves made it a promising group to focus a new show on. Krissy Chambers could have been a great add to the show as well, the child of a hunter who was killed by a vampire between her 1st and 2nd appearances on the show. But CW didn't pick it up. Anyway, out of those women, only Jody got her due in the retrospective...Donna got mentioned in the finale. Now, I know Kathryn Newton has been a busy lady in Hollywood the last few years but she still appreciates her Supernatural family and I'm sure would've been happy to film an interview for the retrospective. And I know Katherine Ramdeen would've jumped at the chance to portray Alex again.
As great as it was to give love to Mary, Bobby, Castiel, Crowley, Rowena, Chuck, and even Lucifer....I think they shortchanged the fans by not including more...in a longer show, obviously. An hour just wouldn't have given the characters and actors justice.
Regarding the finale itself, I thought it was fitting that it finished with a hunt on the most classic monster...vampires....even bringing back a victim turned monster from season 1. THAT was a great touch. The fact that Dean died fighting monsters....fitting....but impaled on a piece of rebar? Come on! Seriously? The one positive to it was that he was given the chance to talk to Sammy when he knew he wasn't going to make it.
Sammy going on to live a normal life after a final hunt seemed fitting...he had been trying to live a normal life before the series started and gave it a go again when Dean was in purgatory. They didn't show his eventual wife except from a distance....I would imagine it was Eileen. I do wonder what happened with the Bunker, though. Also, when Jack took over for Chuck, he restored the people in the world....did he bring back the people from the apocalypse world as well? Alternate world versions of Bobby and Charlie became beloved characters and allies.
Lots of questions left unanswered
