#15x20 spec

[mybrainproblems]

i think something to remember when folks talk about "pre-covid" scripts for 15x20 is that, well... that's anywhere from may/june 2019 to march 2020. a "pre-covid" script isn't necessarily the script that was being worked on immediately before set shut down, just a version being worked on before the set shut down.

bc there are a lot of draft versions a script goes through even before prod draft and it's super interesting to look at the handful of arenas/boards/outlines we have access to (full list on superwiki) vs the later drafts or final transcripts. and you can see how things will change and either get fleshed out or cut over that process. so who the hell knows how many pre-covid "versions" of the 15x20 script there even were before the prod draft in march 2020.

link sources: (robbie) (adam), descriptions in alt text

[fanfic-corner]

Supernatural Fics

Welcome to my Supernatural fic rec masterlist! Please use CTRL+F to search if you are looking for something specific. All of these fic recs are Destiel-centric, unless stated otherwise!

Contents:

Alternate Universes

Angst + related tags

Character-centric fics

Episode Specific

Holidays

Other ships

Tropes

Word Counts

Misc

Alternate Universes:

Apocalypse/Dystopia AU

Café/Coffee shop AU

College/University AU

Soulmate AU pt1 // pt2

Angst etc

Angst with a Happy Ending

Dark fics

Hurt/Comfort

Hypothermia

Major Character Death

Whump

Character-centric fics:

Bisexual Dean

Writer!Castiel

Episode Specific:

15x18: Despair

15x19: Inherit the Earth

15x20: Carry On

Holidays:

Halloween

Christmas pt1 // pt2

New Year's

Other Ships:

Sabriel

Saileen

Dean/Other or Cas/Other

Tropes:

Bed Sharing

Case fics

Domestic Fluff

Emotional Hurt/Comfort

Enemies to Lovers

Established Relationship

Fake/Pretend Relationship

Fix it fics

Fluff

Humor

Friends to Lovers

John Winchester is an Asshole

Love Confessions

Marriage

Mutual Pining

POV Outsider

Slow Burn pt1 // pt2

Word Count:

Under 2k

Under 10k pt1 // pt2

10–50k pt1 // pt2

50-100k

Over 100k

Misc:

A-Spec

Cockles

Faves

Lesser Known fics pt1 // pt2 // pt3

Podfic

Wattpad

[mybrainproblems]

i am so very sorry but i am mildly unhinged about the finale bc i am an absolute sicko who has watched it nine times. no, i'm not kidding. (sadly not live tho. rip.)

the short and Normal tl;dr is that i took a stopwatch to 15x20 and it...

is the standard 42min (41m48s) of any spn ep

has a lot of really long stretches in the back half where you can't drop in an ad break unless you want the chef kiss black comedy of dean dangling off a rusty nail and cut to personal injury lawyer commercial

i would not be shocked if the CW saw how the episode was cutting together (which i do think was happening late, but was bc the pacing sucked) and realized that they either needed to put another ad break in earlier or have the later ad breaks be a lot longer.* given the absolutely baffling pacing in the back half of the episode, i'm guessing it was less jarring to add another break to an earlier point in the episode vs killing the flow even worse with longer breaks at the end.

* i may be thinking of radio but i want to say there's some sort of rule around the proportional length of tv ad breaks?

for the less hinged essay inclusive of timing marks and some more spec... please, by all means, continue below the cut.

so about a year ago, i was going nuts from how many times i'd seen the rumor that 15x20 had been cut down and was (depending on who you asked) 3-6 minutes short from a normal episode. what an insane thing! how wild! how did they get away with it?!

i never really saw anyone agree on just how short it was cut so.... i opened up the stopwatch app on my phone. and lo and behold, it's the same 42min runtime (specifically, 41m48s) as any other spn ep! the crazy thing about a rumor is that the easier it is to fact check, the less likely it is to be fact checked. if it's repeated enough, it becomes its own truth.

also i checked the timing on both dvd and netflix! just to make sure!

i had an inkling that maybe the claims that it was short were coming from how the ads broke down the ep, so i started trying to backwards engineer where they might have gone just based on plot beats, scene changes and camera cuts. i would love to watch a version with the ad breaks still in it. do tv show reactor folks leave in ads?

these are pure guesses but the ad breaks i'm most confident about the placement of are:

(03:59) immediately after the title card

(14:46) as they enter the barn

(26:03) before sam wakes up in the bunker

potential ones i'm less certain of:

(05:57) right before the home vampvasion

(12:47) before they arrive at the barn OR

(16:41) after jenny reveal but before the fight starts

(34:01) before the first montage (super weird placement but the only place late in the ep i could imagine putting an ad)

the thing is that they are having to schedule ad breaks around the following chunks that really cannot be broken up:

(17:12-24:29) dean's impalement until his eventual demise - 7m17s

(34:02-41:48) driving montage until end of episode - 7m46s

there's the possibility that there were no ads from dean waking up in heaven (30:24) until the end (41:48) which is a truly wild length of TV time to have no commercials and why i think there had to be one before the driving montage, no matter how odd that placement is. there's also the possibility that the credits/4th wall break had a split screen with an ad break, but i doubt it for a finale.

totally separate but given covid, i can't imagine they would have gotten too much extra footage given the restrictions they were under. so there wouldn't have been a lot to "plug the holes" of cutting other footage. what we do know was cut from 15x20 is stuff that (imho) would have been less weird to pad out time than 7min of dean driving aimlessly interspersed with (very intentionally shot) sam moments.

alex, why the hell does any of that matter?

it doesn't! and yet it feels so crucial... fascinating!

ok so like. thinking about the fact that there was an extra commercial break in the finale

In 2021 I used to work for [major US cable company] on a team that manually scheduled all of the ads that aired on their network every single day. While the exact shit that airs gets put in there the day before by a team of approx 10 human beings (insane), the tv show schedule & the breaks themselves are SET IN STONE. It takes a really specific, heavy-hitting request from a network and a LOT of people & moving parts to make an extra commercial break happen. That shit is built into the system way in advance!!!!!

I wish I had thought to ask my coworkers if they remembered anything happening then. Things were ofc moving around a lot because of the election coverage, BUT that was in the news networks, not on the fucking CW. Do we think that request was made last minute??? how long did they plan to have that extra break in there?????? were they cutting that episode up until the last minute after the networks saw the reaction to 15x18??????? we will probably never know but it is gonna bug me forever

[biceratops7]

Forget about the lamp for two seconds...

Can we just acknowledge how eerily fitting the actual song is for destiel this season? Especially considering this is Dean’s fever dream in the same episode he reminisces having someone to “dance” with in a carefree family setting.

When this episode aired, this wasn’t true. They had chuck breathing down their necks and the world seemed to be imploding in on them. He’s dreaming of how it could be... or... how it is now.

Jack’s in charge now, but he’s a friend to humanity and very hands off. The world being in slumber can reference everyone being yeeted for a hot minute, but also everything at last being at peace. It’s a perfect time to “misbehave”

I’m struggling with the word child here, so I think in this verse he’s referring to jack. Jack is a true “wild child” in the sense that he’s literally the antichrist but also rebelled against god in the most drastic way possible: dethroning him. It’s wonderful, it’s inspiring, it frees everyone around him... Dean’s now truly free to “misbehave”

Later it’s revealed that Adam left Eve, the mortal woman chuck set up specifically for him, to be with the real love of his life: an angel named “Seraphina” ... need I say more?

“Out of season” can also be a convenient meta reference to Dean’s previous “dude bro lady’s man” ways in earlier seasons, saying that version of him is inauthentic or outdated.

“Birds” can be an allegory for angels. Jensen revealed recently that Dean previously was unsure Cas was even capable of feeling human romantic love because he’s an angel. So either this is hinting at human Cas endgame, or the fact that Cas’s confession challenged and shattered that perception. Either way, Dean feels current events now mean he and Cas can “misbehave”

Aaand this one’s just huge foreshadowing to destiel going canon and the internet exploding 😂

In short, Dean’s been wanting to dance with that “lamp” and “misbehave” aka defy Chuck’s story and be with the one he loves safely and permanently for quite a while, and this song proves where we are in the show rn is the exact blueprint he’s been waiting for to do that.

[mattzerella-sticks]

Given how Jensen always enjoys having Dean hunt/be a man of action, and that Purgatory!Dean is "his favorite version of Dean" (which if we don't look through shipping lenses was a Dean who just kept hunting non-stop), I'm wondering if in this finale we see Dean "retire".

Having Dean retire is a kind of finality Jensen "Blaze of Glory" Ackles might not have been comfortable with at first.

It would make sense narratively of Dean "breaking the cycle" and choosing love over anger (he's not the world's most lethal killer, that's not who he is)

Like goals for Dean Winchester is just opening a sort of halfway house, alongside Cas, maybe for hunters but also for anyone who just needs a place to rest and recover. To get healed and feel loved.

[ain-t-bovvered]

Me getting ready next week for 15x20

[homosexual-declaration-of-love]

at this point we are literally manifesting manifesting and i am on the edge of my seat

[dean-is-bi-till-i-die]

Just saw this on Twitter

Anyone have any thoughts??

[ksapphicbi]

uh,,,,,,, just had a thought,,,,,,,,,,,,, may need to find a very tall building to fling myself off of now. stay tuned for the thought

ok so what if like. what if there’s a PROPER montage at the end of 15x20. but like instead of (kinda random) past moments like in 15x19, it’s either all future moments or a mix of past AND future moments........ like literally just random cute fluffy scenes. sam & eileen fluff? saileen wedding?? saileen KIDS??? dean & cas fluff????? soft little destiel kisses and dean cooking cas breakfast and them slow dancing in a kitchen???????

especially if intercut with soft AND emotional moments from throughout the show....... and then just all overlaid with a super emotional song........... maybe even carry on wayward son (if that makes sense depending on if they use it in the intro like normal or not- or if they really wanna emotionally devastate me EXTRA they could do the 10x05/fan fiction version of it. like oh my GOD i would DIE)

but just like,,,,, oh my god you guys i think i would literally BECOME a being made up entirely of tears. i would just straight BECOME the act of crying. i would have nothing else, no other function in the whole entire world than to sit and cry at that montage. i have no idea if there’s any chance whatsoever of us actually getting that or anything like it but i DO think that if we somehow do, my heart will probably (definitely) explode

so anyways you’re welcome for putting this thought in your brains!!!!! now you can all suffer with me <3

[mybrainproblems]

aaaand... adding even more to this post since some of it is a follow-up on the above, I want to keep it on the same post.

so after making the above post, @happilyfeatherafter reminded me that some of the times i remembered misha talking about returning to set were from a livestream and community texts, not from twitter.

in the livestream with michael sheen from 30 july 2020, he talks about taking cas' coat from set bc he wasn't sure if they'd be going back (gif set here) [disclaimer that i've only skipped around through that livestream and not watched it start to finish in its entirety.]

also, the 15x20 script was way sketchier than i remembered and @lets-steal-an-archive made a post about it back when it was being auctioned about why they wouldn't be bidding on it that goes into more detail. and yeah. with the additional context (and some x files script pics they sent for comparison), that script is super sketchy. i'm not about to waste the printer ink to sit down with a copy and do a read-along with an 11th watch of the finale, but it doesn't inspire confidence no matter how close it is to the final product.

also, the seller had the benefit of listing it post-finale airing but two months prior to the s15 DVD releasing with deleted scenes so... idk. this is super outside my wheelhouse so i won't spec further. the script is just really sketchily sourced and iirc the bidder got a refund since the seller then offered PDF scan versions for very cheap to others who asked... none of which inspires confidence.

further shenanigans from the past few days' life ruining research! not calling any of this a smoking gun, but based on the tumblr source time stamps; it looks like misha sent out the below pics as community texts post-finale but the pics themselves were taken during 15x18 filming - if anyone has the actual time stamps i'd love to know! even after half a day of searching, i couldn't find versions with a time stamp on them. in both cases, they seem to indicate that he knew this was his last day or last episode filming for the show. (he's also mentioned that they threw him a good bye party after 15x18 and idk why you'd do that if you intended for the actor to come back.)

(left pic source) (middle & right pic source)

whenever misha has talked about being in the finale, it's been in reference to an "original" pre-COVID version of the script where he would be jimmy novak and not cas. but given that 15x18 wrapped before shutdown, my guess is that it had already been settled that he wouldn't be in the finale. so yes this would have been a "pre-COVID" script, but probably not the prod draft script from march 2020.

(and having spoken with ppl who were already in the fandom when s15 started airing/looking at posts from fall 2020/pre-15x18... a good chunk of ppl didn't expect misha to be in the last two eps when it started airing again)

i would also like to note that when talking about "pre-COVID" scripts from s15... that could be anywhere from may/june 2019 to march 2020 when set shut down, which @swordofsun and I went back and forth on a bit discussing here wrt revisions of 15x20.

and i'm loathe to bring it up without a source, but i know there was something floating around about misha(?) saying in a m&g at the las vegas con in march 2020 that the finale script was still going through a lot of revisions. so at that point, a kinda short window before they returned to set to finish 15x19 and 15x20. iirc there was a tweet about it that has since been deleted but i tend to take m&g stuff with a grain of salt.

point being - the 15x20 script is way sketchier than i remembered and there's more actual evidence that misha wasn't intended to be in the finale from before set shut down (and the "misha filmed but was cut" conspiracy continues to be my personal bugbear)

hello, i'm finales georg...

i don't want to further clutter up the notes on this post while responding to the tags below but the persistence of the "finale is short/scenes are missing/extra ad break” conspiracies drives me absolutely bananas when i've watched the finale ten times and have posted about this A LOT trying to clear things up. (disclaimer that yes, i'm a goddamn destiel shipper but i care about Facts above all.)

ok but this is weird because i'd swear the episode was shorter (11 missing scenes!) but okay. maybe we all mandela effected ourselves into #beleving that. because it felt shorter. but i will die on the hill that it had another ad break. i understand this person has the thing #recorded with ads so i am thinking maybe different ad breaks in different idk time zones??? #because the finale did air an hour earlier in canada so maybe idk i am reaching here but maybe different states or whatever had different #ad breaks??? as for the last minute changes - wasn't the cover band asked for permission to use their version of carry on like a week before #the thing aired??? so even if the episode was 42 minutes and had no additional ad break - which i am side eying but lets say all was normal #i will always say they were changing thing until the absolute last minute (carry on my wayward son X 2 #the crew on the bridge which is not only giant 4th wall breaking but also wow they really got all those people in one place in times of #covid???) #anyway. tinfoil hat stays on sorry guys :/ (via @officialmisha)

short and snarky: there are plenty of real and sourced examples of network homophobia and scripted/directed destiel scenes being cut to point to. we don’t need to make this stuff up just bc the finale wasn’t what we wanted. so it’s not the mandela effect — it’s ppl repeating a conspiracy/rumor bc it supports their narrative and it’s easier and more fun to repeat something that supports a narrative they already believe (misha or something destiel was cut) vs the boring act of fact checking.

longer circumspect answer with links bc like many ppl i am in my debunking era and i rewatched "roblox_oof" last night.

like i said. i've watched the finale ten times. i’ve gone over the episode with a fine toothed comb and posted a detailed breakdown of timing marks on my blog. it’s actually extremely obvious where the ad breaks are once you know roughly where to look for them (they have a longer fade to black instead of a quick cut scene change). there’s no room for extra ad breaks and i think this conspiracy/rumor persists in part bc the episode feels so sparse in terms of cast and the fact that the episode’s momentum hits a barn post (and rebar) less than 20min into an hour-long programming block.

also i’m begging ppl to actually look at that timing mark post. it’s very straightforward and i spent a lot of time on it. i don’t care if ppl plagiarize it at this point if it means this conspiracy stops. i've got almost every second accounted for.

the "eleven missing scenes" that you're thinking of are probably from the finale script of questionable authenticity that @spnscripthunt acquired back in 2021 which can be found here. it's dated as the “final draft” from 11 sep 2020 and filming on 15x20 wrapped on 10 sep 2020. as noted at the bottom of this superwiki page "[the] script came from someone claiming to have been the person who did the closed captions for the show in Russia. There are some indications that it possibly may not be authentic, but this has not been confirmed."

if we go with the possibility that this was a transcript meant for subtitles, the "omitted" scenes were probably written but never filmed since it's the "final draft" and not a color revision (blue, green, yellow, etc). unfortunately, i’ve lost track of where i read it and a preliminary duckduckgo search isn’t bringing it up bc there's a program for script writing called final draft, but iirc the “final draft” version of a script is a transcript of what was filmed (e.g. there are parts of that 15x20 script that ended up being deleted scenes on the DVD). spnscripthunt also has an example of a confirmed final draft for 09x02 (funnily enough, also a dabb-penned ep). if anyone can confirm with a source that i have the purpose of the “final draft” version designation wrong, please let me know! i love being proven wrong with Facts.

i do want to acknowledge that the two “final drafts” do look different from each other and the 15x20 one doesn't look like a “real” final draft script since it lacks the revision/versioning dates that a script would normally have on the cover page. it could be that it was intended for subtitles; there's the chance it's been re-typed to anonymize it if there was anything indicating who the "owner" was, tho that seems a wee bit cloak and dagger to me. and again: it's considered of questionable authenticity. there are some things that don't quite line up but oh dear god i don't want to get even further out into the weeds than i already am.

i won't disagree that it's weird as hell that neoni only got asked about using their cover seven days prior to the episode airing (tiktok here). my personal theory is that they were hoping to get a more expensive song (maybe a zepp song, idk) and didn't manage to secure the rights in the end. again: this is pure conjecture on my part! but i could absolutely see someone working on the show hearing neoni’s cover and liking it and then maybe they were using it as a placeholder until it got down to the wire and they had to make a call/send the ep to networks. because yes, it is baffling they played a song and then a cover of it with only a 40 second break between. (i do actually really like the neoni cover! the placement is just weird and i think it could have worked if they had the kansas version at the beginning and closed with neoni's full cover.)

as to the 4th wall break COVID stuff: robert singer talked with variety magazine about filming the last two episodes and the logistics of filming during a pandemic. whether they should have been filming during a pandemic is a separate discussion but their use of office vs set pods, strict quarantining and daily testing meant that they had zero positive tests in the month they were filming (18 aug to 10 sep). so given all that, i personally don’t think it’s totally out of pocket to have everyone standing outdoors on a bridge for maybe an hour to get a drone shot of them together. (i won’t get into incubation periods and viral load, but if everyone tested negative that day and every day for a month prior, it was a fairly low risk scene to film outdoors and for all we know everyone was masked until the last possible second. there were plenty of outdoor masked protests in 2020 that weren't superspreader events.)

and before anyone brings up “but misha was in vancouver!” i know someone who looked into it and they said no dice, nothing matched up between the backgrounds in those pics and places in vancouver. his statements about “us” going back to set over the summer were pretty generic in hindsight and “we”/"us" could be him or the spn crew generally. unfortunately i’m not able to find those tweets but the use of “we” was likely so as not to give away he wouldn’t be returning to set. (bc we were absolutely casbaited!) and bc it comes up a lot: the "onion field pic" was from when they were filming 15x17 and was not taken while filming 15x19 and 15x20.

besides, it would be ridiculous to go through the financial and logistical headaches of bringing someone into the country to film during a pandemic, only to cut their scenes in the end! honestly, the script is pretty tight when the scenes are given so much breathing room! the only thing i could see being further cut down is The Monologue and even then, i don’t think there was any intent to cut it down given it was filmed in fairly long takes.

i’ve said it many times before, but i believe the finale was fucked long before they returned to set. walker got the green light in sep 2019 and it was being marketed heavily as a “follow on” show to spn given jared’s involvement. the demo they were courting for walker has little to no overlap with the demo for destiel fans — why would they want a finale that catered to a demo they weren't interested in courting? we just went through a historic double strike that exposed so much of the rot of business interests overriding creative vision. this isn't completely unfounded conjecture.

i will not apologize for the length of this bc i wanted to be thorough, but i do want to give context that i think the reason these conspiracies and rumors grind my gears so much is because anyone can fact check all of this. the truth is out there and absolutely none of it is that hard to find. the most time consuming/difficult part of this was finding someone who had a DVR’d copy of the finale from when it aired live and they actually found me themselves after i’d been low key asking around for a year!

and like. i get it. conspiracies are fun. but there are so many sourced instances of network homophobia and destiel being cut that it's like. why is this something folks are hanging onto? the cw is notorious for having upper level meddling with finales bc there's a follow-on show they want to shuffle fans along to and spn is no exception.

[ghostl0re]

⚠️IF YOU'RE ALREADY ANXIOUS OR NERVOUS ABOUT THE ENDING DON'T READ THIS. PESSIMISTIC ALERT⚠️

i see too much optimism for next episode. So, here goes reality guys.

15x20 will most likely just be a haunting episode and at the end they take diffent paths and that's all. Cas is not coming back. the whole thing of the empty will stay like so many other holes in the story, unresolved.

this, what i'm saying, is the classic decitions the writters have been doing for years. don't expect too much from them.

[castielific]

I had this thought in the middle of the night (because who sleep anymore nowaday huh?) of 15x20 starting with Becky calling the boys and being like:

"Is it the good end then? The one where you got Cas back?"

[bookdork1]

jesus christ the entire dialogue from the end of 15x04 actually spells out for us exactly how dean and sam are feeling at the end of 15x19:

dean: now that chuck’s gone, we’re finally on our own. we are finally free to move on, you know? 

sam: i don’t know...i don’t know if i can move on. i can’t forget any of them. dean, i still think about jessica, i can’t just “let that go”

dean: nah, man, that’s not what i’m talking about-

sam: no, no, sorry, i know, but what i’m saying is that i don’t feel free. what we’ve done, what we’ve lost, right now that is what i’m feeling. and sometimes its...sometimes its like i can’t even breathe. maybe tomorrow. maybe i’ll feel better in the morning. 

dean: and what if you don’t?

sam: i don’t know

like the end of 15x04 has them in a very similar place as 15x19, only in 15x19 they no absolutely that chuck is defeated, rather than only a vague hope that he won’t be returning. but literally, this is the exact same place where dean and sam are left in the penultimate episode. the so called happy ending the bibros think they got has literally already been disproved *this* season through a very similar conversation and end scene, only this one isn’t accomanied by a nostalgic montage to trick you into thinking its happy ever after. plus everything they were feeling in 15x04 has only been escalated. in 15x19 sam is missing eileen, the person he is currently in love with, rather than focusing on the old and painful ache of missing jessica. and dean is in literal mourning, rather than just trying to get through his breakup in one piece. if they weren’t close to happy in 15x04 when the emotional stakes were lower, i really doubt they’re happy in 15x19 after such escalations.  

[ofstarsandfireflies]

I swear if we get to the very end of the episode and Dean dies and goes to Heaven and all we hear is “Hello, Dean.” Im going to flip my shit

[mattzerella-sticks]

If Dean is searching for Cas in the Empty what if he uses the Amulet to track him down, a la "it glows in God's presence"?

[kida-was-my-sexual-awakening]

for the past week we’ve been pleading our cases for why (and how) cas will come back in the finale. but now. there’s 24 hours until the finale. i’m sensing everyone getting a little nervous bc what if we’ve been speculating and connecting dots these last twelve years this past week and cas just

doesn’t come back

but it’s okay clowns cas is coming back cas is coming back cas is coming back