Dean Winchester: I thought angels were supposed to be guardians. Fluffy wings, halos — y’know, Michael Landon. Not dicks.
Castiel: Read the bible. Angels are warriors of God. I’m a soldier.
Preventing an apocalypse may be a go-to TV plot, but what about The Apocalypse itself? Few end-of-the-world stories measure up to the bible’s badass Book of Revelation but literal Christian source material isn’t something most TV writers dare to use beyond window dressing.
Not after the failure of Miracles, Skeet Ulrich’s dead-on-arrival 2003 “spiritual X-Files,” or mid-decade girl-talks-to-god series Joan of Arcadia (two seasons) and the more wonderful Wonderfalls (four episodes). Battlestar Galactica sailed through its wildly acclaimed run only to face a furious fan backlash in the finale because it used god and angels to tie up its storyline. (Though that hasn’t prevented prequel series Caprica from further exploring the concept of jihad.)
So, I’ve come here to praise Supernatural. Once dismissed as a macho Buffy rip-off — or perhaps a scarier Dukes of Hazzard, given its good-lookin’ good ol’ boys — it’s been getting righteously biblical as the Winchester brothers battle angels and demons alike in their attempt to stop Lucifer’s apocalypse.
Supernatural initially followed Joss Whedon’s Buffyverse world view, which included demons, witches and ghosts as well as souls, hell and (maybe) heaven. Yet a god and angels were, at best, generalized as “Powers That Be.” Instead of slayers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester are hunters, a family trade that took the lives of both their parents and is part of a subculture of people who roam the land killing monsters.
Then Dean got sent to hell — he’d sold his soul at the crossroads, natch — only to be resurrected in the fourth season by trench-coat-adorned angel Castiel (Misha
Collins). Suddenly, the earlier seasons were revealed as preliminary skirmishes to a proper holy war. Monster-of-the-week episodes remained — the show’s initial genesis was as a weekly horror movie — but Supernatural was now hurtling towards Armageddon.
The brothers also turned out to be unwittingly responsible for kick-starting the End Times. Dean broke the first seal by torturing souls while in hell; last season was spent unsuccessfully preventing the other 65 seals from being broken by the demon Lilith, whose own death, at Sam’s hand, turned out to be the final seal.
Lucifer was loose — which was just how the angels wanted it. Unlike Touched by an Angel or Highway to Heaven, Supernatural’s militaristic heavenly host is unlikely to warm the cockles of Middle America. Aside from Castiel, most angels don’t care a whit about humanity. They dismiss us as “mud monkeys” and are willing to wipe out entire towns (or give someone stomach cancer) without a second thought. Some have switched to Team Satan, but even the “good” angels want to get their apocalypse on so they can finally defeat the devil and create heaven on earth, preferably without humans sullying their paradise.
Meanwhile, Lucifer (Mark Pellegrino, who also played Jacob on Lost) is a soft-spoken, coolly logical and surprisingly sympathetic charmer. There’s almost none of the oily malevolence of Ray Wise’s portrayal on Reaper. Well, maybe the malevolence, but Lucifer, pointedly, never lies — unlike the angels.
As for the Holy Father, according to the angel Zachariah, “God has left the building.” Even when he was allegedly around, only four angels ever saw him and the last to do so, Rafael, sides with Nietzsche. “Do you remember the 20th century? Think the 21st is going any better? Do you think God would have let any of that happen if he were alive?”
Both species, angels and demons, must possess human hosts (“meatsuits”) to take physical form. In a free-will-vs-determinism subtext, Sam and Dean are the predestined vessels for Lucifer and the archangel Michael, setting up a sweet Cain and Abel climax.
As creator Eric Kripke told The Chicago Tribune, Revelation is “a really useful story generator.” But with the mortal likes of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (the latter was referred to as the US President in a recent post-apocalyptic Supernatural episode set in 2014 — shudder to think) currently stoking fears that Armageddon is already upon us, the time is ripe for peering into the darkest corners of Christian belief while reimagining the existence of god.
That this is happening on a himbo-horror show five years into its run seems, well, practically supernatural.
» Supernatural airs Thursday, 9pm on the CW; Wednesday, 10pm on Space.