‘Supernatural’ Kicks Off One More Apocalypse in Final Season Premiere (RECAP)
Spoiler Alert
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Season 15 premiere of Supernatural, “Back and to the Future.”]
What’s one more apocalypse when you’re a Winchester?
The road so far has been a long one, but the finish line is in the distance — and Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) can see it, as they prepare to take on whatever “end” God (Rob Benedict) has in store for them.
First, they must contain the situation, which is easier said than done for the Winchesters and Castiel (Misha Collins). So, it’s a good thing they get some help from a somewhat familiar source in a too-familiar body. (But hey, at least no one has to sell their soul.)
The Past Comes Back to Haunt Them
Sam, Dean, and Castiel (with Jack’s body) flee the souls God unleashed from hell and hole up in a mausoleum. “He didn’t deserve this,” Dean laments as he stares down at Jack’s body. But they don’t have time to mourn because they have to act before they, too, end up dead, from the souls outside or starvation. (“I wouldn’t starve,” Castiel unhelpfully interjects.)
Dean thinks they should have expected something like this from God, “with the robe and the beard and the smile that’s half-nice, half-I’m going to rip your throat out, oh, let me play you a song.”
Then to their surprise, Jack’s (Alexander Calvert) body stands up. “I just got here, and I needed a body,” the demon Belphagor explains. He can’t flash his eyes since this body doesn’t have any. (He puts on a pair of sunglasses to “blend.”) Though Castiel is angry he’s “defiling Jack’s corpse,” the Winchesters know they have to at least listen to what he has to say before stabbing him.
(Dean Buscher/The CW)
There’s no need for introductions; Belphagor knows who the Winchesters are from the papers. “The Wi-Fi sucks” in hell, he says. After realizing they’re serious about God’s role in what’s happening, he says they’re “twinsies.” He, too, wants to get the soul problem taken care of; he punches a clock, torments souls when they come in, and likes hell the way it is. He takes care of the souls outside the mausoleum with a spell, but where did the ghosts go?
Belphagor sticks with Sam, Dean, and Castiel as they seek out to find them (there are two to three billion souls in hell, the demon informs them) and even knows a spell to contain them in one town. But first, they have to get its residents out.
Sam and Dean already see signs of their past coming back to haunt them when they find an abandoned car, blood on the windshield: a Woman in White, possibly their Woman in White. If she’s back, “then they’re all back,” Dean realizes. “Every last one we ever killed.”
A Bad Sign for Sam
All it takes is a couple FBI jackets and fake badges to get the sheriff of the town to buy the gas leak cover story and agree to evacuate. Castiel, unable to even look at Belphagor in Jack’s body, joins Sam in going house to house. While Castiel can’t help the two girls who encountered Bloody Mary, Sam must once again deal with the clown when he finds a mother and daughter hiding from it. (“Happy Birthday” has never sounded so creepy.) The ghost manages to slice at Sam with a knife before Castiel uses the shotgun to blast it away.
(Shane Harvey/The CW)
While Castiel can heal that wound, the same cannot be said of the one in Sam’s shoulder from when he shot God. (“It’s a long story,” Castiel explains to the flabbergasted civilians.) When the angel tries to heal it, we see flashes of dark Sam (Samifer?) and hear Dean begging, “Sammy, please.” He can’t fix it. “There’s an energy in that wound,” Castiel says. “I’ve never felt that before.”
Meanwhile, Belphagor comments about how attractive everyone is. (It is the CW, after all.) “The last time I was on Earth — I was human, it was a while ago — we were all worshipping this giant rock that looked like a huge penis,” the demon shares. “Folks back then were ugly, had a lot of humps.” He’ll leave Jack’s body when he finds another, non-wormy one, but asks who he was. “He was our kid, kind of,” Dean tells him.
Belphagor also reveals he’s a fan of Dean’s, from the Winchester’s time torturing in hell. “It was art,” he says. As for what hell’s like now, the souls got out when every door opened. And yes, that includes the door to the cage. Last Belphagor heard, Michael was just sitting there, but if he got out, “He wouldn’t hold a grudge, right?”
For the spell to contain the ghosts, the demon needs a bag of salt and a human heart — “fresh would be better.” One practically falls into their laps after the Woman in White kills the sheriff. “I remember you,” the ghost tells Dean. “You took me home.” And she does hold a grudge, knocking him back into a dumpster. He eventually takes care of her, and Belphagor starts the spell.
(Dean Buscher/The CW)
Sam and Castiel struggle with the ghosts chasing them, but manage to get the mother and daughter across the line once the spell is activated. “Shut up,” Sam tells the trapped clown when he yells. They leave the mother and daughter with the rest of the town (with advice to not tell anyone about ghosts or angels).
Dean checks on Castiel only long enough to hear he’s okay. “Awkward,” Belphagor comments. “Want to talk about it?” The angel walks away.
Sam joins Dean at the trunk, where his brother insists on patching up his shoulder. Dean remembers telling Sam bad jokes when he was a kid and he had to rip off a Band-aid and insists on doing it again and Sam playing along to “knock knock.” It’s hard to believe the days of moments like these between these brothers are numbered.
Now, they have time to wonder what God meant by “the end.” Dean, for one, feels like they’ve just been “rats in a maze” this entire time. What does everything they’ve done even mean? “It meant a lot,” Sam tells him. “We still saved people.”
Furthermore, he thinks that God’s gone now — and that’s a good thing. “That’s what he does. He gets bored,” Sam says. “If he bailed, it’s just us, for the first time. … What’s one more apocalypse, right?” And he sees a light at the end of the tunnel because, “If we win, when we win this, God’s gone. There’s no one to screw with us. There’s no more maze. It’s just us, and we’re free.”
Sam and Dean like the odds of them against every soul in hell, which means … “We got work to do,” Sam says before we flash to him saying the same thing and closing the trunk from the end of the pilot.
(The WB)
What a way to kick off the final season.
Supernatural, Thursdays, 8/7c, The CW
