I cry when I am overwhelmed by beauty. Imagine how surprised I was to watch the fifth season finale of Supernatural, Swan Song, which originally aired on May 13, 2010, and discover that tears were welling up in my eyes. Immediately after watching it, I bought the episode and periodically rewatch it if I need to be moved. Not many shows ever reach perfection. (Please note that soon thereafter, Lost aired its series finale, which was the polar opposite of Swan Song.)
The fifth season finale of Supernatural was a perfect culmination of five seasons of mythology surrounding Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers who were hunters since they were children and survivors of unintentional abuse/neglect by their parents. Hunters are blue-collar, rock n’ roll loving, beer drinking, everyday people who defend humanity against the supernatural after surviving a traumatic encounter with these larger forces. The odds are never in their favor. In the Winchester brothers’ case, they are pawns in an irreverent twist on a Biblical apocalypse. Archangels Michael and Lucifer were supposed to possess the brothers and fight each other, but the Winchesters wanted to prevent the fight and save the world, but more importantly each other.
What makes the Supernatural fifth season finale amazing: the music by Jay Gruska, the editing, the story, specifically the narration and the acting. There were two things that made it perfect. First, the role that God plays in the story. He cares about the details, the little things that make our lives better, and the minutiae history of people and objects. God does not actually want the apocalypse, but is working through people to get the desired outcome. “It is the blemishes that make it beautiful. The devil does not know or care what car the boys drive.” (Side note: for the record, I always knew that Chuck was not a prophet, but God.) There is not a moment when the characters do not complain about God’s absence and inaction, but in Swan Song, we see behind the scenes.
Second, that the love of two people are stronger than Lucifer or any supernatural force and can save the world. The larger conflicts in Supernatural always mirrored the difficulties faced by the main characters. Hallmark did not correctly depict family. Family was a messy rats nest of conflict, resentment, rivalry and emotional landmines, but the Winchester brothers always found a way back from it. Then the separation and self-sacrifice of the brothers becomes as painful and poignant as the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine when Sisko and his son are so close yet so far.
I am extremely surprised that Supernatural did not get more complaints from Christians for how it used and twisted Biblical stories into something familiar enough to be recognizable, but dissimilar enough to possibly garner cries of blasphemy. As a Christian, I never had a problem with Supernatural’s obvious departure from the Biblical text. Supernatural is fiction and a TV show, not the gospel. Angels are just as problematic for humanity as demons. God can be killed and is not as powerful as others. I always enjoyed Xena: The Warrior Princess’ mashup of pagan mythology with Christianity, and Supernatural was its natural heir by taking on various mythologies.
Still I found that Supernatural captured the spirit of the gospel more accurately than some movies that claimed to accurately depict the Biblical text by dealing with the messiness of relationships and past actions. Life is about a lot of hard work and death with no end in sight and little obvious reward, but you keep fighting and doing what is right even if you think that you are going to lose.
Unfortunately Supernatural did not end with Swan Song, but is still going and about to enter its twelfth season this year. I wish it would end, but it never will, and I’m a completist so I’m not leaving though it has hit extremely low points-anyone remember Supernatural: Bloodlines. Each subsequent season is not as impressive as the fifth though they are not all bad. Most of the Big Bads are just a remix of threats that they faced before: Leviathan, the Alpha monsters, the Steins (should have given them a different name), angels and demons fighting on earth, Castiel as a false God, Abaddon, the mark of Cain. Each are vanquished using a variation of the same weapons used in the past. Sam and Dean die and live, get knocked over the head, etc., but they will never stop.
So why do we keep coming back? Supernatural has given us beloved characters that viewers will always love: Jim Beaver as Bobby, Mark Pellergrino as Satan (he also played Jacob on Lost), Mark Sheppard as Crowley, Misha Collins as Castiel and now Emily Swallow as Amara/The Darkness. I probably stay because of the characters even after they are gone such as Benny, the vampire and Dean’s purgatory battle brother, Ellen and Jo, the Tran mother and son. Even when Supernatural is utter crap, at the end of the day, we love Sam and Dean. Some part of us wants them to keep going and living. I am begging for Supernatural to end, but I’m not leaving until it does.