Okay, I wanted to keep talking about Supernatural, but it didn’t feel right to put it in that last post.

So this was originally supposed to be the series finale, not just the season finale. And it would have been a great cap to the show. Everything that had been building up for the entire series finally came to a head, with a good and satisfying ending. But then, the show was picked up for another season.

Where do you go after defeating Satan and aborting the apocalypse? Isn’t anything else going to seem a little silly? You can’t really escalate from that. And Sam is trapped in hell, which means there has to be some stupid explanation about how he can escape. And what do you do next season, when you have to end things? Because this seems to be the ending you were working towards all along, so now you have to throw some hasty new ending together.

In other words, though I love the show, they should have let it be done.

I can think of two other series that had this same problem, where they came up with an ending and then the show got extended, forcing them to back their way out of it. On Charmed they changed their identities and walked away for good, only to be back next season with some throw away line like, “Oh, that was a nice vacation, but now we’re back!” And of course you have Buffy, who actually died and had to be resurrected. In both cases, the “final” ending ended up not being as good as the original ending. Interestingly, Supernatural is on the CW, formerly the WB, which hosted both Charmed and Buffy. So maybe the network is to blame. Regardless of who is to blame, I sure hope Supernatural can pull it off.

I have to leave you with a clip, so here you go. (Sorry, I looked long and hard for one you didn’t have to click through to see, but I couldn’t find one. I still recommend you click through and watch the clip. It’s short, I’ll wait.) In order to re-open Satan’s prison, the Winchesters had to get the keys by defeating each of the 4 horsemen, including Death himself: