"Ouroboros" – Supernatural S14E14 Review

And... The End?

By the end of "Ouroboros", I mean the end of Michael. He seems to be wrapped up nice and tidy at the end. Sure, a bunch of Hunters are dead, including Maggie. Not Maggie! But there's no more Michael. No more Dean going in a coffin on a one-way trip to the bottom of the sea.

That leaves Lucifer, and Jack, and maybe Michael in Jack's body. And a few other subplots floating around. But as a Big Bad, Michael wasn't much of a threat, was he? He was more impressive last year when he was ruling over a ruined Apocalypse Earth. This year he got to dress up in 20s-style clothing. He made some threats and created a monster army, then disappeared, then reappeared, then got captured, then got locked up in Dean's mind prison, and then got freed. And now he's dead. It's not exactly the kind of thing that makes a Supernatural Big Bad a Big Bad. Maybe that's why he's been dealt with and we still have nine more episodes to go in Season 14.

So how did Team Winchester defeat Michael? The episode starts off on a tangent when we see a guy named Noah (Philippe Bowgen) snacking on a guy's corpse and cooking his body parts. Noah gets a vision of Sam and Dean arriving but not Jack and Castiel. The gourmet leaves, and Dean, Sam, Jack, and Castiel arrive a few minutes later and discover Noah has escaped them yet again.

We soon discover that Team Winchester has been hunting Noah for a while. He's been leaving a trail of corpses behind him as he's moved west across the U.S. Noah has stayed ahead of them even though Rowena has been helping out the team by casting a location spell.

A few lore books later, we find out Noah is a Gordon: a demi-god who was the basis for the myths. Noah kisses men and gives them a paralytic venom that immobilizes them so he can chop them up and eat them. The only way to kill him is to decapitate him with a silver blade. Dean and Castiel track down Noah's most recent victim and discover Noah can "see" Dean and Sam but not the angelic Castiel and Jack. Rowena needs to make a potion involving anti-venom and we get a brief bit of her and Sam posing as a married couple with a dog, and taking a transformed-into-a-dog Jack to a vet. One rectal thermometer later and Jack reverts to human form and steals the anti-venom from a supply closet.

During all of this, Rowena realize there's something wrong with Jack and eventually figures out the magic used to cure him is siphoning off pieces of his soul. Which as she notes, is a bad thing to do.

Castiel and Jack confront Noah, but he paralyzes Castiel and when Sam and Dean come in as reinforcements, Dean gets a head injury. Jack decapitates Noah, and the group take Dean to the bunker. The head injury has released Michael, who cuts a deal of sorts with Rowena so he can use her body. But... Jack has been having issues with realizing his human friends will eventually die. When Michael/Rowena start killing Sam, Dean, and Castiel, Jack draws on more of his soul to shrug off Michael/Rowena's spirit blasts, then yanks Michael out of Rowena's body, and swallow Michael's essence. In the end, Jack says he's back to his normal self and sprouts his angel wings.

And thus endeth the threat of Michael. And now we have a super-powered Jack: powerful enough to take down an archangel and absorb his essence. The creative team strongly suggests Jack is going to become an even bigger threat. Not only was he able to beat Michael, but he's apparently added Michael's power to his own.

That's basically the effort. Noah seduces a truck driver, the victim Dean and Castiel investigate. There's some Girl Power! type speeches about how women are more aware of dangers to them so Noah has to pray on homosexual men. Make of that what sexual politics you want. Phillipe Bowgen does a decent jaded demigod part, but there's not much made of it and he's pretty easily disposed of.

On the one hand, they dealt with Michael pretty easily and got him gone with a third of the season or so still left. So I'm glad they didn't bother wasting a lot of time with him: I've never been that thrilled with his presence on the show. On the other hand, it feels like he was short-served, just like he has been the whole season. Maybe that was the creative team's plan, but it still feels like weak sauce. So while I'm thankful they got rid of a weak Big Bad, it's like they made him a weak Big Bad just to set the stage for a bigger Big Bad: Lucifer or Jack or both. Overall, I feel rather conflicted about the whole thing. I would have rather they made Michael into a decent threat before removing him from the board.

Then again, maybe Michael isn't removed from the board and he'll be back. It's Supernatural, so it's quite possible Michael could have survived being eaten or inhaled or whatever by Jack. Still, it feels like a weak ending to a weak character who has been pretty weak throughout Season 14. And if Michael was weak, then the whole, "Dean is sacrificing himself to trap Michael permanently" plot feels a bit weak as well. Why was Dean angsting about the whole trapping himself for eternity thing when all they had to do was have Jack unleash some major mojo on Michael?

Overall, Season 14 to date has felt rather disjointed. "Ouroboros" throws a lot of what's happened into the toilet. Michael isn't a threat, Dean didn't need to be worried about him, and the Apocalypse World Hunters are all swept off the board because Michael kills them when he gets out of Dean's mind.

Presumably the Big Bad will be Jack, just because they're spending a lot of time on him living, and dying, and worrying that he'll lose his mortal human friends, and wondering why he can't do more with the power he has. But while Alexander Calvert is a decent actor, I'm not sure he can hold up that burden. He's going to have to spend a few episodes "becoming" a Big Bad before the eventually 3-4 final episodes of the season where he actually does become a Big Bad. Good luck with that.

Or maybe they'll switch tracks and toss another Big Bad at us. We're still waiting for the "real" Lucifer to show up, presumably with Nick in tow. But if Jack is a Big Bad, what that does that mean for Lucifer? Is there room for two Big Bads on Supernatural, or will they become a father-and-son team of Big Bads? Or will Lucifer show up and get "eaten" by Jack and make him even more powerful? Questions, questions.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?