By: Matt Spaulding
This review is over a week late. And I'll tell you why. Because I forgot about this episode. Which isn't something I should be saying about the season finale of one of my favorite shows. But this episode was just forgettable. After a season long arc in which Amara is supposed to destroy the world and the Winchesters are supposed to stop her with the help of Lucifer and God and Crowley and Rowena, this episode was dull. No big showdown. No cool action. Nada. Zip.
At the beginning of the episode, Lucifer is finally gone from Castiel's vessel and Cas is back in control, but Chuck is mortally wounded. Because of this, the sun is going out and the darkness is taking over. The world is going to end. In a last ditch effort to save the world, it's realized that, to keep the balance needed to keep the universe in existence, they must kill Amara as well as Chuck. To do this, they must build a bomb made out of souls. Sam and Dean go to an old abandoned asylum to gather ghosts to build the bomb in the episode's only real action sequence.
Eventually, with the help of Billie the Reaper, enough souls are gathered and Rowena makes the bomb and places it into Dean, because he is the only one who can get close enough to Amara to make it go off. However, the bomb will kill Dean as well as Amara and he and Sam agree that it must be done.
Meanwhile, Amara is learning that the world is beautiful. She is seeing flowers (and realizing that, if she touches them, they die). She meeting an old lady feeding birds. Basically, she's realizing Chuck's creation is awesome and she's being kind of a bitch.
Oh, and somewhere in there a mysterious lady in London gets a call about Sam and Dean and the events going on and goes into this little mystery room with pictures of them everywhere and then loads up to come to America. More on her later.
Dean visits his mom's grave and he and Sam have a semi macho goodbye moment and then Chuck teleports him to where Amara is. Amara reveals she knows about the bomb, much to Dean's surprise. But she admits that she feels bad about what she's doing because, even though she's mad, she loves Chuck. Dean convinces her to save Chuck, to rebond with her brother and she brings Chuck to her and heals him. She admits to him that she loves him and was just jealous of Creation because she wanted him all to herself, but she realizes now that Creation is beautiful and she wants to share it with him. God forgives her and they go off together. The universe is saved. The rest of the gang, thinking that Dean is dead (because they don't know the bomb didn't save the world), mourn.
Cut to Sam going back to the Men of Letters bunker where the mysterious woman from earlier is waiting, a gun trained on him. She's revealed to be a Men of Letters member from London, sent to stop the Winchesters, who the Men of Letters feel have endangered the world too many times. Sam tries to stop her and she fires her gun. Cut to black, Sam's fate unknown (but let's be real, this is Supernatural. He's not dead. And, if he is, he won't stay that way. Even if Billie the Reaper has said no more coming back to life for Sam and Dean). Cut to Dean, who is wandering in the woods when he hears a cry for help and finds, to his shock, that his mother has been resurrected as a gift to him from Amara. End episode.
Look, I don't mind if episodes aren't necessarily action driven. Quiet character pieces are good, too. But this was meant to be the big showdown at the end of the season after an epic struggle against a seemingly unbeatable foe and this is what we got? Not cool. Very disappointing and anticlimactic.
As much as I have loved Supernatural, eleven seasons in, it's starting to wear thin. And the cliff hangers at the end of this season don't leave me with a lot of hope for Season 12. I can only hope I'm proven wrong.
Final Grade: C-