The TV Gods Are Watching: Why Supernatural’s Metanarrative Matters
By: Deirdre T.
Tags: Supernatural, Media Criticism, Film And Tv, Television Reviews, Television

The importance of how stories are told and who gets to tell them. [Warning: Spoilers for season fifteen of Supernatural.]

A show tells you its own worst ending. Then it delivers.

Perhaps it’s a warning, an ironic statement, fumbled foreshadowing. A receipt. There must be a reason, right?

Supernatural’s metanarrative gives us what we need to understand its disastrous finale, and the abrupt departure of the ending from the story’s themes and character development. More critically, in doing so it shines a light on something much bigger and more impactful than one television show. The Winchesters’ fight against God — the story of Supernatural rejecting its own writer — reflects an ongoing creative struggle against media and cultural structures that have been influencing stories since we began telling them.

Supernatural has always been a meta show, poking fun at genres, archetypes, and the very methods of storytelling it relies on. One of its earliest meta devices is the in-universe Supernatural book series detailing Sam and Dean’s adventures, written by none other than God (“Chuck”) himself, with its own fanbase whose depiction throughout the show’s run shifts from homoerotic nerdbros to enthusiastic queer women as Supernatural’s understanding of its own real life fans progressed. Further memorable meta moments include the cable-hopping Changing Channels, Sam and Dean’s visit to the real actors’ lives in The French Mistake, and the subtext-poking and unreliably narrated Meta Fiction.

But nothing beats Supernatural’s meta pièce de résistance: a final season predicated on not only beating God, the ultimate writer of the story, but dismantling the structures of storytelling itself.

When Sam and Dean find out they are just characters in a story, that Chuck has been writing their whole lives and setting up each wall in the maze to guide them toward his own fatalistic ending, they are devastated. Has anything in their lives been real? Has their entire journey — everything they’ve lost, sacrificed, loved, and fought for — been some kind of meaningless game, sick entertainment for a bored writer? Can they ever, truly, be free; and what does a world without God, a life without control, faith, or fiction even look like?

The story poses essential questions: Who are you, when you get to choose who to be. What makes you real. And the goals of the final season, of the series as a whole, become clear.

Defeat God, free the story. Defeat the story, free yourself.

But what the Winchesters and the audience didn’t quite realize is that this God, and this story, were not all that needed to be defeated. That there were and are things in the world beyond that would always seek to carry out Chuck’s plan, would always seek to control what story gets told and who gets to tell it. And they are not so easily overcome, no matter how real the fight against them.

God gets his finale in Supernatural, and it is the worst possible ending. We know this because there is an entire episode in the final season dedicated to exploring this exact scenario, its impact on the fans, and the devastation it would deal to the characters and story.

In Atomic Monsters, Chuck pays a visit to his (former) biggest fan, Becky Rosen, whose character serves as the writers’ stand-in for real life fans: a now well-adjusted, thirty-something woman with a family and successful career creating and selling Supernatural fanworks. With the Winchesters constantly resisting him, Chuck is at a loss and needs some feedback on his writing; his characters won’t follow his story, and now he’s out of ideas to force them to carry out his favorite ending.

One brother dead, ideally at the hands of the other, with any hopeless and twisted scenario on the table to get them there.

He is surprised when Becky reveals her own — the fans’ — preferences for the story: enough with the monsters and cheesy villains, let them all talk. Let the family come home and get over their issues. The narrative demands togetherness, actualization, and hope, not tragedy.

A story about free will, found family, and love as the ultimate truth of reality demands an ending with this love at its core.

Chuck doesn’t like this one bit.

He ignores her to write his ending anyway, and we watch Becky read through, unimpressed. With the hindsight of the final two episodes, her complaints ring familiar: boring villain, stale climax, no Cas. Hello Inherit the Earth.

So he keeps writing, and Becky reads again — now horrified, disgusted, devastated, by what he’s done to Sam and Dean. To the fans. Angered by her rejection, Chuck destroys her family before getting rid of Becky herself. Hello Carry On.

It cannot be emphasized enough that there is an actual episode where the stand-in for the fans tells the stand-in for the writers (or so he appears) that his finale for the show is the worst case ending. That Supernatural itself acknowledged everything wrong with this ending and its total betrayal of all the show had grown to stand for. And then it nonsensically delivered that exact ending.

Fans were utterly shocked. But it is clear, as the dust settles, what is now better understood with this new and depressing perspective.

It is clear now that Chuck was never just a proxy for the writers, never just a cartoonish and self-deprecating personification of creative frustration and surrender. Chuck is external controls over storytelling — he is the powers and structures of this world that have always dictated what stories are told, what stories are heard. Controls that threatened this story, and demanded it abandon its identity to submit to the narrative that served them.

And they won.

At the end of Supernatural, the same institutions and cultural powers that have always suppressed stories and voices were still waiting on the other side of the screen. Our gods had not been defeated.

We knew they were there. Anyone familiar with film or art history and their industries knows about the legacy of the Hays Code, foreign and domestic censors, and financial and cultural considerations of target audiences and future markets. The systemic regulations and the social, political, and economic structures that have been in place for a century and beyond that curb creative and personal expression. Structures and power dynamics that have bled into the very mechanisms of storytelling themselves — the codes, cues, and languages we’ve had to develop to communicate meaning despite these controls, the empowering and limiting tools that both allow subtle narratives to escape through the cracks and prevent them from being fully heard. After all, these powers give rise to the same creative elements that are used to defy them.

And so Supernatural’s metanarrative plays out clearly. A repressive creator punishes his subjects, angry that they won’t fall into the narrow lines he has drawn for them. Angry that their queerness became too loud, that they found families he didn’t plan for, that they chose to love outcasts, monsters, those who are different — the people meant to stay in margins of his story who fought their way to the center. A creator angry, above all, that they chose to love themselves, to love the people they managed to become despite his writing, not because of it. External controls force a story back in line when it begins to give voice to what threatens them.

This is a tale of stories told at the margins taking power, and the backlash of those who rely on their silence. It’s a tale that queer folk, people with disabilities, people of color, women — anyone whose stories, whose very existences, have been dictated, ignored, and suppressed — know well.

Supernatural’s characters dared to take their story back from God, and his ending erased them. Supernatural itself dared to take back its story from the culture that restrained it, and its soul was eliminated. We dare to claim our own stories, and we’ll get the same.

Whether it is money, power, intolerance, or the simple indifference of a world that does not want to see us, that despite all the progress we have made refuses to hear our voices when they get too loud — a culture that will close its eyes until we step back into the shadows, then tell us we are lucky we got to feel the sun at all — the truth is that this has happened before, and it will keep happening without substantive and persistent change. Such is the nature of systemic, institutionalized, and culturally sustained inequities.

This is one story stifled among countless more. But what is so particularly devastating about Supernatural is just how close the characters were — how close we were — to finally winning. Sam, Dean, Castiel, and Jack did beat God, they freed the world from his control and took their lives back. For one crucial and hard-fought moment they had the chance to tell their own story, to live their truths.

Sam, finally lifted from doubt, could lead and love in balance. Dean, finally free to speak, could ask for what he wanted. Cas, finally ready to hear the truth, could return to live it. Jack, knowing true divinity belongs to humanity, could shrug the world from his shoulders. Eileen, alive and powerful and done being saved, could carry on the fight.

For one euphoric, cathartic moment, they were free.

But this freedom, this sheer relief, is all the more devastating in its impermanence, isn’t it. Because it’s in that moment we can see the world for what it could be, not what it is. When our worlds become one — in that intrinsically empowering instant when the characters and their victory become ours — we can feel what it is like to be heard with them.

And when that moment ends, when their story, so clear and palpable in our hands, is ripped from our grasps once again, we remember what it is like to be silenced. Painfully, viscerally, and bitterly.

One brother dies a violent and meaningless death. The other lives an empty shell of a life, then follows. The rest are forgotten. We are put back in our place.

Ultimately, Supernatural is a story about breaking free of control, of the lies we are told and the lies we end up living. From the epic lies of dictated destinies to the simple, devastating ones — that you must be the monster you see in the mirror, that you are still the child who hid beside it in the closet. That your story was never yours, but your silence was. It’s about breaking free of this story, and finally telling your own.

And it’s about what happens when, in the end, you can’t.

The villain won, fictional and real. They did, after all, tell us exactly why he would.