Flutiebear: Rambling My Way Through Thedas

Why “The End” is what Supernatural is hurtling towards – and why Season 7 may just be the most important one yet.

I know I’m not the first fan to speculate that the Supernatural’s eventual endgame is the bleak, dystopian future presented in the Season 5 episode, “The End”. But with just two years remaining until we actually hit 2014, the year the End!verse takes place, I still haven’t seen very many analyses go through and pick apart the canon to determine how far we are along the road to End!verse.

So, in true Flutie form, I accidentally all the meta. (Sorry if it’s a little rambly and poorly-edited; i’m sick and feeling a little woozy from cold medicine still.) Anyway, here’s what I’ve got so far.

Useful Link: Supernatural Wiki Transcript for “The End”

BEWARE: BELOW THE CUT BE SPOILERS. YARR.

Several details characterize the End!verse, including:

1) The Croatoan Virus Has Spread

According to “The End”:
2014!Dean says that the Croatoan virus started “hitting the major cities two years ago”, and since then, the virus has spread across the globe, causing massive devastation in its wake.

What We Know and How We’ll Get There:
During Pestilence’s reign of terror, we see the Croatoan virus resurface, as Niveus Pharmaceuticals pushes to market a “swine flu vaccine” that actually contains a dose of upgraded version of the disease. Considering the vaccine is set for “simultaneous countrywide distribution”, several hundred thousand, perhaps even millions, of “vaccines” must have been created. But we only saw Team Free Will blow up one distribution center… so what if there were others? Could one explosion really take out millions of vaccines?

Now consider the Leviathan, who we are told are building massive disease research centers dedicated to chronic illness eradication (as well as developing feedstock that promotes slothfulness and lethargy in those that consume it, e.g. The Turducken sandwich). Their M.O. seems to be the same reason one might cure hoof & mouth disease in a cattle herd: that is, herd management and domestication. Humans are food to the Leviathan, and fat, healthy, docile food is easier to manage from a large industrial process standpoint than food that runs away and chops your head off when you come after it.

Now, it’s not too much of a stretch to consider that, in the process of researching illness and disease, the Leviathan would look into the Croatoan virus at these Leviathan CDCs, in order to better understand how an outbreak could affect its domesticated (human) food supply.

So what happens if, during the course of the research, there’s an outbreak? And what happens if that outbreak can’t be contained?

2014!Dean says that the Croatoan virus started “hitting the major cities two years ago”… which would place it at 2012 when the outbreaks began. Which, incidentally, is concurrent to the Season 7/Leviathan storyline.  I don’t think we’ve seen the last of Croatoan… not by a long shot.

2) The Angels Have Left The Building

According to “The End”: 2014!Dean says that he has shouted yes until he is “blue in the face” to allow Michael to take him as a vessel, but “the angels aren’t listening. They just—left—they gave up!” The angels no longer seem to be around for the inhabitants of Earth.

What We Know and How We’ll Get There:
We do know that by the end of Season 5, Michael no longer needs Dean as a vessel once Adam has been resurrected. Adam, like Nick, isn’t an ideal vessel, but he is willing, and Michael needs that more than he needs the perfect body. So once he has Adam’s form, he no longer needs Dean and would therefore not need to answer any prayers he made offering his consent. 

What’s more, we do know that since the end of Season 5, there has been an intense civil war in Heaven with an enormous death toll. When he ascended to Godhood, Cas slaughtered all the angels that had stood against him, not to mention that he’d already murdered a fair number of his own remaining allies. Few, if any, angels remain in Heaven.

Therefore, it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose that if there ARE any angels left in heaven, they aren’t won’t respond to Dean and Sam’s prayers any more –the two men for whom Cas notoriously did everything, including his ascension to Godhood, and who in all likelihood the angels believe share equal blame for Cas’s Heavenly massacre.

Consider too that of all the angels that Dean and Sam interacted with over the years, only Cas still lives, and he’s out of commission at the moment. If the angels are still in the room, they sure as hell aren’t giving much of a rat’s ass about the Winchesters.

On another tack entirely, consider that Jesse Turner, a Cambion or Antichrist, still walks free, and as Castiel remarks in “I Believe the Children Are Our Future”, he can destroy the Heavenly Host – meaning, all the angels – with a single word. Perhaps he has a role to play in the disappearance of the Host.

3) Cas is a Fallen Angel

According to “The End”: Castiel is now for all intents and purposes human: disheveled, drunk, stoned, sex-addicted, and spouting New Age philosophy.  He has lost all his angelic powers, even his ability to heal himself of once-minor injuries.

What We Know and How We’ll Get There:
I’ve written about this before, but since Season 4, Cas has been in the process of falling from grace—so much so that by Season 6’s “The Man Who Would Be King”, even Cas describes himself as a “fallen angel”. And yet, by “The Born Again Identity”, he’s still in control of his angelic powers of healing, smiting and soul-manipulation.

How much longer he retains these powers, who knows, but it makes me wonder if, by taking Hallucifer into himself, he has essentially shut down the angelic portion of himself, sacrificing his Grace to heal Sam.

As for the New Age-y hippie stuff Cas says in “The End”: Note that the Buddhist paraphernalia in Emannuel’s house, complete with altar, matches the Buddhist paraphernalia in his cabin in The End. It’s obvious that Cas has lost his faith in God, which should be no surprise as his search in Season 5 came to no fruition.

But what I find most interesting, in light of Season 7, is this line of dialogue Cas tells the girls before the “orgy”:

“We’re each a fragment of total perception: Just one compartment in that dragonfly eye of group mind. Now, the key to this total, shared perception is surprisingly physical.”

Yes, yes, it’s totally a pervy come on to a bunch of pretty girls. But listen to the actual words he’s saying: Group mind. A shared perception that is physical. For anyone who’s been watching how the Leviathan behave, this should sound startlingly familiar, for the Leviathan are most like an ant colony – that is, they are of a hive mind. Each Leviathan is one head of a shared creature, one fragment of its total perception, and they link to each other physically – by eating each other.

So why is Cas talking like this? Well, consider that he did briefly take the Leviathan into himself – and as one of the Leviathan, Chet, says early on in Season 7, while the Leviathan were inside Cas they had complete access to his thoughts and memories. So is it that much of a stretch to believe perhaps some of their memories or thought processes were uploaded into him as well?

In any case, Cas is fallen, and that’s where he seems to be stuck for the time being. What happens if/when Cas ever comes to his senses? Surely the angels won’t let him back into Heaven, not after what he pulled and unleashed upon God’s favored creations. For better or worse, he’s stuck on Earth—for all intents and purposes, Cas is now a human. A powerful human, but a human nonetheless.

4) Lucifer walks free

According to “The End”: Lucifer is free from the Cage and has taken Sam’s form.

What We Know and How We’ll Get There:
Cas pulled Lucifer’s vessel, Sam, from the Cage in the beginning of Season 6. When Sam’s soul was restored, it came packaged with a hallucinatory Lucifer, which some of fandom refers to as “Hallucifer”.

It is unclear exactly what Hallucifer is, whether he really is just a hallucination, or if in fact some part of Lucifer’s personality has imprinted on or tagged along with Sam’s soul, kind of like how Head!Scorpius appeared in John Crichton’s mind in Farscape. Whatever he is, though, it seems he is transferrable from person to person, or person to angel, suggesting that Hallucifer is more than just vision. It is entirely possible that Hallucifer may hold the key to allowing the real Lucifer to roam the earth once more, just this time with Michael out of commission—hence Meg’s interest in catatonic Cas.

While Sam once assented to becoming Lucifer’s vessel – back in Season 5, in Detroit, of course, just as 2014!Dean said he would – what we don’t know is if that deal needs to be renegotiated every time Lucifer wants to take control of his vessel.

Although in “The Rapture”, Jimmy Novak begged Castiel to once more retake his body, he only did so to save his daughter; it’s unclear whether or not Novak needs to say “yes” to Castiel every other time the angel is banished back to heaven (that is, assuming Castiel doesn’t just take Novak’s vessel along with him) or every time the vessel is destroyed and rebuilt.

If Sam does not need to reaffirm his consent to Lucifer, then as long as Lucifer is in Sam’s head he can do what he wants with the vessel – hence why it’s so dangerous to let Hallucifer to unchecked. It also leads to a higher probability that the Lucifer Dean meets in 2014 is actually using Sam as a vessel.

But if Lucifer does, however, need Sam to say yes again, then perhaps he’ll take another vessel… speaking of which…

5) It All Goes Down At The Jackson County Sanitarium

The End Timeline: The final battle with the devil occurs at the Jackson County Sanitarium. Lucifer, wearing a white suit, tells Dean, “No matter what choices you make, whatever details you alter, we will always end up—here. I win.”

What We Know and How We’ll Get There:
The last we see of Cas, he has taken Hallucifer into himself and is locked in the psychiatric ward of the same hospital Sam was staying at, the Northern Indiana State Hospital. Note that Jackson County is a real county located in Northern Indiana. In addition, the building in “The Born Again Identity” appears to share many architectural similarities with the building used in “The End”.

During their stay at the sanitarium, both Sam and Cas wear an all-white patients’ uniform – a white “suit”, so to speak. Interestingly enough, so too does Meg, Lucifer’s granddaughter, whose game plan remains mysterious even seven seasons later, but has always seemed to revolve around resurrecting or summoning Lucifer.

So if Lucifer comes back, he’ll need a vessel. Assuming he can’t use Sam (see above), who does he use?

Is Jimmy Novak a suitable vessel for Lucifer? Probably not, considering vessel-hood seems to be tied to a unique bloodline. For example, Castiel can take Jimmy or his daughter Claire; Michael can take John or Dean (although interestingly enough, Lucifer can take Sam, which implies that either a) Sam is not John’s biological child (either by conception or by Azazel introducing demon blood into his system), or b) that John could host either Michael OR Lucifer. Food for thought.)

That leaves Demon!Meg’s new body, whoever she may be (not Meg Masters, as that vessel was destroyed); could she be a viable vessel for Lucifer? It is possible, I suppose. We know that Meg is a bit of a sentimentalist when it comes to hosts, and consider that Meg is Lucifer’s granddaughter (she is the daughter of Azazel, who is in turn the son of Lucifer), and she has demonstrated great loyalty to him in the past – in fact, so much so that she seems infatuated with Cas, who rebelled just like her grandfather did. Perhaps it’s possible that this body could be a Lucifer vessel, who knows? (Though that’s petty wild speculation, I’ll admit.)

Note that several other details about the 2014!verse that have already come to pass in the current timeline:

• Dean Returns to Torture.
  2014!Dean, as Cas says, is “all too schooled in the art of getting to the truth”.
  Dean begins torturing again shortly after Alastair’s arrival in Season 4.
• Dean Kills Non-Threatening “Monsters” in Cold Blood.
  2014!Dean shoots a metastasizing Croat in the head before he can turn completely.
  2012!Dean kills a kitsune who is living a normal life, and has only killed in order to protect her sick son.
• Bobby is Dead.
  2009!Dean visits Bobby’s house. This is during Season 5, so Bobby still had a wheelchair—which clearly carries bullet holes and bloodstains, implying that Bobby was shot to death.
  In Season 7, Bobby is shot to death as he sits in the back of a van (which, while not a wheelchair per se, is still a chair on wheels).
• Bobby’s House is Destroyed.
  2009!Dean visits Bobby’s house, which has been smashed and wrecked up beyond livable use.
  In Season 7, Bobby’s house is burnt to the ground, with very few of his possessions and papers making it out unscathed.
• The Impala Has Been Parked.
  2009!Dean discovers the Impala gathering rust outside Camp Chitaqua.
  In Season 7, Sam and Dean are forced to ground the Impala for the time being, as their Leviathan doppelgangers used a similar car to go on a killing spree.

Other things, however, have yet to occur: 

• Dean reclaims possession of the Colt from demons
  After Dean failed to kill Lucifer with the Colt, he dropped it and it was apparently lost in the scuffle.
• Dean founds a safe haven at Camp Chitaqua.
  This could be related to Rufus’s many safe houses scattered around the country
• Most notably, Chuck returns to earth.
  Which is gonna take some major ‘splainin’.

So that’s about all I noticed on a first pass, and I’m sure I missed a ton, but as you can see, we’re already well on our way to End!verse. Indeed, I really hope that’s where all this is going – that Lucifer was right all along, that this was where they always were going to end up. And I hope that that arrogance, that belief in divine will and destiny, is once again blasted apart by Team Free Will. I think there’d be a certain poetry in that, don’t you?