That explains the plot holes and retconning in S6-15 then. Those seasons took place in an alternate universe.

I loved the original series, but it's gonna be hard to do a prequel without massive retconning. Before the Winchester boys came along, there were no angels, leviathans, alphas, etc. Just regular old monsters and demons. That and John was written specifically to be kind of an asshole, even if it was consistent with the narrative.

I watched the trailer, and God it looked absolutely awful.

Supernatural was amazing during seasons 1 and 2, and was good from 3-5. They clearly aren't trying to capture the show at its height.

Or, and I know this might sound like crazy talk, it's just badly written.

Always a possibility, but they have been saying in interviews constantly that there's a reason for the continuity not lining up and that they want to respect the original show's continuity. Doesn't mean the show is immune to bad writing, but a good number of the continuity issues are probably at least partly intentional.

I actually kind of like that except for the fact that Season 15 destroyed every universe except the one that Season 15 was taking place in. You could easily head-canon Seasons 6-15 as taking place in a different universe, but then that would mean that the universe of Seasons 1-5 wasn't the original universe, and it was destroyed in Season 15... (though you could head-canon that Jack rebuilt all of the destroyed universes after Season 15... but not sure how you could get around the Seasons 1-5 universe not being the original universe issue).

Maybe this show takes place in an alternate alternate universe where nothing was destroyed.

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Ahh but they weren't destroyed till season 15, so a prequel that takes place in one of them would still work.

I assume there's gonna be a point where John has to do some big sacrifice thing where he has to leave his memories of Mary and hunting behind in order to save the world from God's Mistake Angels or some shit, and it all just retcons back to how it should be so the showrunners can be smug and pretend like they didn't ruin continuity. Its crazy on-brand for Supernatural, the question is whether they get to that plot point before CW folds and they get canceled.

I don't think these 'plot holes' are particularly hard to explain away.

Remember, the mythology we're talking about is based on what was told to very young boys who barely knew their mother by their overly stoic father. The fact that he left out details he might not have thought important is hardly surprising - and that those boys might have made assumptions that weren't entirely correct.

From a storytelling standpoint, it you go strictly by Winchester boys' canon, there isn't much of a story to tell because John and Mary are hunters at different times.

And even the demons were RARE before the devils gate got opened. It wouldn’t make sense for demons to be as prevalent as the original series. A few big bad ones here and there, but not the common enemy we see in the original series.

I mean, it's a supernatural spin-off on the CW.

Disappointed that they have the couple fighting monsters together. Thought it would be interesting if Mary was off fighting monsters while John is at home, oblivious to what she's off doing. How does she explain the cuts/bruises? How does her family help cover up her disappearing for 2 weeks? Basically how do Hunters hide their activity from non-hunters, and how does that complicate their relationships/friendships?

Good decision if it's true. Otherwise most enemies would have been kinda weak after years of Supernatural and after 1 or 2 seasons they would have to break the lore anyway to make it more interesting.

Winchesters from the wish.com multiverse.

It was a throw away line in the first episode john says someone gave him a letter about his father then that person just disappeared this is where the timeline change

They really should have let the whole thing die. The only thing I hope for in the future would be a team up with Ackles, Padalecki, and Kripke making a new show some years from now. Retcon seasons 6-15 and pick the show up 20 years after the events from Season 5 (which aired in 2010, so 8 more years from now).

I think you could literally have the clichéd sequel that repeats the story from the original but with some changes (like 22 Jump Street) and people would like it. These spinoffs that they do don't work well because people liked the aspect of these two guys hunting monsters. Figure out how to get that going again and you'd have a good show.

Dean is in his early 50's with a family when the same thing that happened to his dad happens to him. He then has to get back into the life while taking care of his kids and basically becomes what his dad was, someone mercilessly hunting the demon that murdered his wife. Turns out the demon that killed his wife is Sam (or someone with Sam's body), returned from Hell. Cue a season or two or good ole Supernatural. Maybe Dean goes on a hunting trip and doesn't come home for a while and his kids have to go after him, leading to some Monster of the Week type episodes. Hit the same story beats they did in the original. Make it a show about people searching the unknown, trying to hunt things and save people. It works best with a smaller cast.

>and was good from 3-5

Imo 3-5 were actually the peak of the series, and it only got worse after that.

It lost the horror element at that time. So it lost me a bit.

Would a Men of Letters show been easier to do?

Like Stargate by the end the Winchesters were all powerful, literally battling God

How can you start afresh with mere demons and having to retcon everything to do so

definitely more places they could go with that, both literally and figuratively. Different eras, different places, etc. It's still hard to follow-up a series where it was literally a battle between God, gods, God's immediate family, etc.

But it would still be like making a spinoff from Buffy/Angel about the Watchers. Fascinating in theory, but they could at best be fighting low-to-mid level threats, which after the Buffy/Angel series, would just not have the same stakes.

I agree that 6+ weren't nearly as good as 1-5, but they were all a net positive. Some episodes fell flat, the Leviathan arc was hot garbage in a dumpster fire, but each season had a handful of standalone amazing episodes, and IMO 14 and 15 were a lot closer back to their roots, with the power creep pulled way back. I think the only reason the finale was so meh was because of Covid protocols. And Sam's gray hair.

Well actually they finished the God battle in season 13. 14 and 15 were more street level hijinx heh.

I'm pretty sure there were a couple of time travel episodes in Supernatural that this contradicts.

Also their mother was resurrected and told them about her past.

It’s really amazing the lengths people will go through to justify their favorite piece of pop culture being shiny and perfect.

Case in point: “making the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs” is obviously just a goof in the SW script that nobody noticed. It’s like running a race in under 12 miles, it makes no sense. But there are a million explanations out there about why “no actually your wrong because…”

And one of them is now canon, because they used the finale of the Han Solo prequel movie to explain that plot hole!

It's possible but the showrunner is one of the few SPN writers that actually watched the whole show and gave a shit about canon/character continuity.

There's no easier way to get the fans to stay with it, than those kind of press sentences.

> And even the demons were RARE

Rare and terrifyingly powerful.

Lots of things would have been easier to do. they went with this crap

That wasn't a goof, people just misunderstood the scene. Han isn't bragging about his ship, he's testing Luke and Obi-Wan to see if they know anything about space travel (because they'll be easier to swindle if they don't).

If you watch Obi-Wan you can tell he sees straight through it. The shooting script actually includes the line "Ben reacts to Solo's stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation."

But people took Han's claim at face value for some reason until the Kessel Run being distance-based became an actual thing.

Sounds like Gabriel is at work here. Plot checks out for me.

If it did id care more about watching it

They’ve said they’re going to reveal why things don’t match up in the season finale, so if they’re going the mind wipe route they most likely did just what you said. However, at this point time travel, reality warping , or alternate universe are probably the more likely answers.

You just...did the thing he mentioned...

This is the same writer who had a character go to heaven and then get resurrected by "Ezekiel" while heaven was locked down and inaccessible to souls or angels. He's definitely better about canon than a bunch of the Supernatural writers, but he's messed up before. (That said, I'm among those who think the canon departures are going to be at least mostly intentional, though I wouldn't be shocked if something slips by.)

Because he's wrong!

It's not really people deluding themselves so much as apologetics being fun. The No-Prize is the single greatest thing Marvel introduced into pop culture. If you can figure out an in-universe explanation for a writing goof, go for it.

Explain the line in the script then

Why would anyone care what happens in the show if they know the universe just gets destroyed?

I'd have liked to see a focus on the Roadhouse. Covering after Mary >!died, but before John died.!<

Are referring to Stargate? Because Supernatural definitely fought God in the last season

Coulda swore God and his sister made amends and just left at end of S13. Perhaps I'll have to rewatch.

No, God was the big baddie of the last season

Because only strong demons could get out of Hell. The reason they became weak is because Joe Blow Black Eyes just walked out.

Yeah….if that was the end of God’s story that would have been great but unfortunately it is not lol

What happened to “there’ll be peace when you are done…”?

No clue. But what if its a new universe created by Jack instead of Chuck? Broke your brain didn't I?

First, acting cues in scripts are cannon now?

Second, “Ben reacts to Solo’s stupid attempt to impress them with obvious misinformation.” Could just as well refer to Solo’s line taken at face value rather than as an elaborate test.

Third, if it was written as an elaborate test it’s one the audience could only understand if they knew what a parsec was. Instead it went over most peoples heads.

Forth, a Parsec is a unit of length equal to the radius of Earth’s orbit. Which is a very strange unit of measurement for a galaxy far far away.

I don't know why I forgot all that but I did just get a month of Netflix to rewatch 13 and 14, even just reading each episode's synopsis is like damn, how'd I forget that. Chuck and Amara this and that everywhere.

>Forth, a Parsec is a unit of length equal to the radius of Earth’s orbit. Which is a very strange unit of measurement for a galaxy far far away.

"He a little confused, but he got the spirit."

You're describing Astronomical Units which, while they are used to define a Parsec, are not the same thing.

Doesn't really matter if the cue itself is canon, because Obi-Wan's reaction is. I only brought up the cue to show that, even in the 70s when the movie was being written, the intent of the scene was that Han was speaking nonsense.

It is kinda weird that they use Parsec specifically, but Parsecs are a thing that exist in Star Wars (Padme uses the same word in AotC, referring to a distance). That's also a different problem from the one you originally outlined (that Han uses a measurement of distance instead of time).

But I basically just see it as translation convention. The characters use an Earth-based word because the film has them speaking in an Earth-based language, even though the actual in-universe language of Star Wars is Galactic Basic, not English.

Yep, my bad, the radius of the earths orbit is an AU.

Parsec still is related to the radius of the earth’s orbit however.

If the story is good people could have overlooked that. It could have also set the stage for a finale where the universe ceases to exist in epic fashion and then is brought back by Jack (somehow) to at least send the show off on a good note…

An alternate universe storyline would have allowed for cameos that wouldn’t break cannon or chronology. Could have even brought back some fan favorite actors in completely new roles.

The fact that he had the bring up the script. Something the audience isn't supposed to read, to justify a goof...

Not even the finale. That was, like, two-thirds of the way through.

That would've been cool. True Lies, with demons

And they absolutely >!did alternate reality angels and demons!< in the original show lol

Remember when they encountered a random demon for the first time on the airplane and it was one of the most threatening monsters they faced that season, and then by the mid-late seasons demons were the biggest mook monster in the setting, getting ganked right and left.

Oh right, the actual finale was lame though. The Kessel Run and the train scene were easily the best parts of the movie

If not for Dean narrating from the "future," part of it could have just been that someone went back in time and changed things, with the divergence point being someone giving John the note and key that he was given in the first episode.

You don't have to read it. You can see Obi-Wan's reaction in the movie. People just conveniently ignore that part.

This is unironically the most logical way to resolve inconsistent multiverse depictions (for example, the MCU saying the Darkhold was destroyed in all universes when that isn't the case in the comics). All it takes to maintain consistency is for whoever says something affected all universes to have been an unreliable narrator, whether because they were just wrong and it really only affected some observable subset of universes or because they were lying for one reason or another.

That actually sounds really cool.

The reaction can be to his boast alone, doesn't explain it.

Is that what they're calling bad writing now? Spn has always been terrible about continuity, not surprising this mess is the same.

This happened, but it was S11. They returned in S14-15

Seasons 6 through 15 were (with varying quality) fan fiction.

Yeah God was the big bad villain when he returned in Season 15.

Also the fact that John didn't know about any of that shit before his wife was set a blaze

Weren't the ori gods?

> each season had a handful of standalone amazing episodes

I agree with this but I strongly disagree the seasons were still a "net positive": if out of a 22 episode season you're getting 3-5 actually watchably good ones then it's a bad season overall and on a large decline. Watching week to week was painful so I started waiting until the whole season was out because bad episodes become forgettable when you're binging, not having a week to think about it.

At a point I had to just drop the show because it wasn't worth the time investment anymore, even now that it's ended I've so fallen out of love with it I don't care to go back and catch up to watch the finale. Sad because I really enjoyed the early seasons.

Well, not always. Those first four, arguably five, seasons were amazing in the level of attention they paid to their continuity. It only started going off the rails in Season 6. The bad continuity didn't become a commonplace, almost expected, thing until Season 8.

Granted, that's like half the show, so it's understandable that someone might think it's always been the case.

As far as I'm concerned, it basically is. Season 11 told us that Chuck was God's meatsuit, that Chuck had his own personality that God was adopting too much as his own, and there's just so many things that don't make sense if Chuck is God in human form rather than a human vessel for God. And since Amara starts acting good and appreciating creation after spending time with God, in my head it makes sense that God and/or Chuck would therefore have been influenced by Amara in their time away together. We know how poorly an archangel was able to handle being exposed to Amara, so a human being exposed could absolutely lead to the maniacal egotist we saw as the main villain in Season 15. I see the Chuck of Seasons 14 and 15 as a corrupted Chuck using God's powers and pretending to be God in an ironic mirror of Season 11 where God pretended to be Chuck. I won't bog down this post with the details unless asked, but the story makes so much more sense this way.

For me Season 8 was a big improvement over 6 and 7. 10 was a big improvement over 9 (but that's because 9 was terrible). 11 was an improvement over 10. 12 was a sizeable improvement over 11 (though that's because I'm a canon nerd, and 12's continuity was the best the series ever got after Season 5, filling in plot holes and unresolved storylines from Seasons 5-9 and recontextualizing the events of Season 6 in a way that slightly improved that season; the actual story of 12 was a step down from 11 if you shut your brain off for both seasons, but 12 did actually make sense in a way 11 didn't). After that it was basically downhill except that 15 was just slightly better than 14 for me.

Basically the show still has plenty of ups and downs after Season 5, and I think I still agree with the "net positive" thing because most of the later episodes of Supernatural are still entertaining even if they're not up to the standard of the first five seasons. The number of outright bad episodes is less than the number of good or neutral episodes by a long shot.

I like that theory except it was only God and Amara in the beginning and he wasn’t corrupted then, so maybe if we go by your theory it’s because she was trapped for so long that hatred and bitterness she had rubbed off on him?

That's certainly a possibility. Another possibility is that the hatred just rubbed off on Chuck and not God. Chuck was twisted and was somehow able to wrest control of God's powers for himself.

Or perhaps in the beginning God and the Darkness were separate, but in the Season 11 finale when we see them flying off and swirling together, perhaps they mixed into what was almost a single being for the first time before deciding they had had enough and separated before Season 14, and that mixing allowed them to affect each other in a way they weren't able to in the beginning when they were separate. Under this line of thought, perhaps they were able to mix and separate because both agreed on the mixing and separating willingly. But when they merged in Season 15, Chuck wasn't willing to let Amara separate from him again.

Damn, if only they found better actors for their attempted spin off years back with the Werewolf mafia family.

Hell yeah. That would have been awesome. Or even just on John while the kids were young.

The shooting script is really clear that Han is just making shit up because it sounds good. No other explanation was needed because its not a goof, Han solo is a liar and a bullshitter

It's in the shooting script for a new hope, it's not inventing an explanation the explanation is obvious.

IMO it's not that 3-5 out of 22 are watchably good, it's 1-2 that are amazing, 2-4 that are good and have standout quips/interactions "I killed hitler", then about 15 or so are average, nothing special but are average, worth watching once, and then like 3 or 4 are just Fartbook, for any Letterkenny fans.

God f dammit. I wish Supernatural had this production.

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I'm really surprised to hear this :p it seemed really hokey to me. It doesn't seem like it has a horror bent to it at all, seems more like the comedic episodes. Am I wrong?

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That's terrible marketing! I'll check it out then. What streaming service is it on?

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Or it might be a sign that the show is ass like most people expected...

I liked SOME episodes in the later seasons. But the seasons basically became Good Episodes, Bad Season.

They would introduce a really neat idea and then basically not follow up on it at all or have it play out in the background (due to not having the budget). Season 6 with Alpha's and the Weapons of Heaven went nowhere.