Chapter Text
I don’t think we talk about Bobby and Ellen briefly being married in 6x17′s alternate universe enough as an example of bizarre non-canon canon relationships. Has there already been a long essay musing on this as part of the evidence in the whole AU where it’s literally “the angel who’s in love with you” [paraphrasing] as Balthazar says?
The show has a ridiculous number of alternate universe style episodes, or episodes which take place in a different level of reality, but only 2 which are really genuinely alternate universes, and they happen right near each other in the mid-late part of season 6.
Let’s take a quick look at why alternate universes, though. 6x17 is a weird anomaly for why it happens, both inside the story and from a narrative point of view, which makes WHAT happens in it all that more interesting, and I’ll elaborate on that when I get to it.
For the most part, the original “alternate universe” episode, 2x20, did the best work in showing us why you would use alternate universes in your story. It is actually just a dream, but for the best part of the episode Dean believes it’s a parallel universe and narratively, for the viewer, this is showing us the sort of exploration you get out of sending a character to a parallel universe, once you have a good grasp on the layout of the main universe.
We get to see a different version of the story, with huge changes to canon that could never have existed with the main story continuing as it did: the fridged women who powered the narrative from the first episode lived, and the main characters weren’t even retired from hunting - they literally never had been hunters. It’s the most extreme end of an alternate universe, and it works emotionally because at the far end of season 2 we’d been through just enough with the characters to be really emotionally affected by seeing them living a life like that, and at that point that was pretty much all it needed to do: fuck both us and Dean up with this glimpse.
The next three “alternate” realities are really weird and 2 rely on time loops/time travel effects and all are sort of “pocket universes” in their own ways: Mystery Spot, the Groundhog Day section aside, contains a 3 month bubble of time, which has been deleted from the universe’s canon after Sam is reset to Wednesday, creating an alternate universe only he knows about (which 6x17 follows the logic of). I still (but not for the sake of argument here) personally believe it was a pocket universe same as Changing Channels’ TV Land and that Dean never “really” died on the Wednesday even when it was currently happening to Sam, but either way, the other “alternate” which never happens is the 2014 of Endverse, so these 3 back each other up however you shake it, as that too was a timey wimey mess of a paradox that wrote itself out of happening by happening. (Here, let Edlund explain it.) Similarly, TV Land is much larger than the warehouse it’s contained in, and impervious enough it takes Cas days to break in to find Sam and Dean, and I’m literally only mentioning it to back up the existence of the others’ mechanics, as if you can get logic from TV Land. :P
Thrown in with that are It’s a Terrible Life, which was not an alternate universe, merely a memory wipe and change in their circumstances masquerading as an alternate universe very effectively, and to reach deep into the far end of the show from all this Apocalypse era stuff, Metatron’s fake Gabriel story from 9x18, that seems to just have been a very interactive vision, if you compare the transition back to the real world between that and Changing Channels, where there was a visible transition and continuity between how they were standing (and the holy fire staying in place and being a real thing rather than part of the fake TV world - don’t question a literal storywriting ass pull :P)…
Anyway, the point is that all of these are chosen specifically to teach a lesson to the main characters; of them all, I think Endverse and Mystery Spot are the only examples of actual parallel universes, as they were the 2 most based in actual canon as it could have happened, and ended up being realities that no longer existed after the respective sufferer of each was put back to their original timeline, rendering the events in them as something else that had happened and branched off from the main timeline but were no longer a part of it. So the sort of “trousers of time” approach was already in play, much more by season 5 than 3, which didn’t make much of an effort to explain what had just happened. In both cases anyway, you can imagine a parallel 3 months during season 3 where Sam was not off on his revenge mission but living the main plot as we know it, and of course, now we’ve got through 2014, we know canon carried on past the events of Endverse without ever ending up there (metaphorical reinterpretations aside as an argument for another day). We can agree that every instance I’ve mentioned so far has served a very clear purpose to the narrative.
Then we come to season 6. Which no one ever seems to talk about probably because interpreting it’s plot is a headache and a half and there’s not a great deal of love for it, structurally, thanks to it being a “woah plot twist” ending that doesn’t have enough legs to stand on re: foreshadowing in the first part of the season. When I attempted to start rewatching it I was musing a little on how the sudden use of two confirmed, proper alternate realities fits somewhat thematically. However, the actual use of the alternate universes is somewhat bemusing, as both mirror each other in actual pointlessness of application.
Let’s start chronologically. 6x15 aka “the weirdest headache you will ever have” is blatantly just a concept episode to play with wanting to write the episode, and then justifying it. It’s amusingly, deliberately, avoiding being a major plot episode: the script that Sam and Dean attempt to act out/run lines with Misha is clearly the events that would have happened had Balthazar not thrust them into French Mistake!AU. The actual plot probably would have been something like the events of the actual episode, with a random scary angel coming to get them while Sam and Dean argue with actual Cas about locks needing keys and keys needing locks (while pouting horrifically). This splits us into 3 universes already: the one where Balthazar clearly failed to punt them into Actor AU, and it was played straight and was a pedestrian plot episode. The AU Sam and Dean ran around in. And of course the “Bobby comes downstairs to see a smashed window and spell ingredients everywhere, shakes his head, and goes out to the store to buy more liquor while he waits for Sam and Dean to come back from the AU” really boring version that actually happened in the main canon, where they were missing from the story.
As such, Sam and Dean vaguely attempt to derive a moral from their adventure, but the entire exercise was pointless on their end as they were only a distraction. The last minutes of the episode get back to the main plot, but basically serve to illustrate much more literally than normal that the angel war stuff of that season literally only really happens when they aren’t there, because it’s too big budget for the show to have depicted, hanging one final lampshade on that fact.
Likewise, 6x17 is one of the few other episodes where it takes centre stage, as the main plot (the cowboy episode features some of the fighting, but it’s not the motivator for the main plot, which is the Eve arc, merely a device to add tension and foreshadowing within the episode). I suppose coasting off the success of their side of the story in 6x15, Cas and Balthy hatch a new plan involving alternate universes, meaning to permanently abandon the old timeline for one that’s working in their favour a little better. The quickest way to achieve that is meddling with the past and using the butterfly effect from one event to create a huge chain reaction in the universe.
Within the episode there’s the confusing suggestion that it is somehow still the main timeline but broken, mostly thanks to Atropos’s annoyance with the change, as well as Sam and Dean having memories of it without travelling there. This really isn’t consistent with any of the other world building, so let’s just assume that it was an unsustainable pocket universe because time travellers of the level of Balthazar meddling with shit are not on the harmless level of hapless humans changing tiny things like, for example, Sam and Dean time travelling and changing things in the past without spawning an unstable AU with Atropos popping up like “SERIOUSLY WHAT DID I TELL YOU!?!” and confiscating their phoenix ash to stop them fucking with the natural order by changing the past to obtain biological weapons (aka the plot summary of 6x17 from C&B’s POV) literally the next frikkin’ episode.
(Seriously. I wasn’t joking when I said how much this fucks me up. My Heart Will Go On barely fits the show’s own rules about time travel OR alternate universes.)
So: like with Mystery Spot or Endverse, there’s a ~bubble~ universe that is the same size and general shape of the main universe, but with events that never took place in it, altered by time travel.
If it’s an off-shoot of the main universe but with Cas and Balthy totally aware of what happened in the main universe and maybe even employing French Mistake levels of awareness between universes (since they know they changed it and clearly have memories of the old one - Balthazar makes a dig about Dean’s car) it creates an instability that has to be corrected for one reason or another.
Atropos, despite having presumably existed in that universe long before the Titanic sunk and all through that time until the present, if she truly belongs to the universe that was only created when Balthazar sunk the Titanic, is clearly only able to become aware it’s a tampered with reality that is damaged in some way once the damage has actually happened. Since she starts attempting to correct it not at the time of the Titanic sinking, but in the present day equivalent to when the main universe C & B made their move, she must only be aware of the situation after the point in time in which Cas and Balthazar decided to sink the Titanic.
This makes it the moment the universes branched off: the universe didn’t exist until the day the episode started in 2011 or whenever S6 was airing, as *that* is when the decision was made and the point the time traveller was fixed to in time as B’s present day, and so it is only afterwards when the universe officially exists, despite having a long history, is she able to attempt to fix it: she couldn’t immediately go Final Destination on the unexpected Titanic survivors and was faced with their descendants only, at which point all she can do is try to kill off the people who shouldn’t exist before they create any more deviations from the template universe that got changed.
(I feel a good way around this is to look at her as destiny or at least an entity working for that purpose if it’s not personified… If the universe was meant to run on the timeline it did, and she knew what was supposed to happen right up until it didn’t with them averting the apocalypse, then she had a template from the universe where the titanic sank to work from, so even if the AU only sprang into existence the day the episode started, it was an AU which had been changed by time travel, therefore she was allowed to know the “plan” for the main universe with and without Titanic, from “without” being written down but “with” what had actually happened - there was no point in this universe where the Titanic had sunk. Assuming Sam and Dean stopped the apocalypse in the exact same way (but with a Mustang instead of an Impala) I don’t recall her saying anything that would suggest the Ellen Lives timeline hadn’t happened all the way through from her POV)
Also, as with Metatron’s story, Sam and Dean wake up elsewhere than they’d been, whereas there was clear geographical or spacial correlation between the universe hopping in The French Mistake or Changing Channels. I kind of feel, considering that unlike It’s a Terrible Life, Sam and Dean of the AU were complete characters who had lived that AU their entire lives and knew nothing different, that the memories “our” Sam and Dean woke up with were merely given to them by Cas from their AU counterparts, and we literally watched an episode with genuinely alternate, out-of-continuity Sam and Dean.
Anyway, tl;dr on the Watsonian side of this, the universe suddenly started to exist, then Atropos freaked out because she knew it had been meddled with: her solution was to fix what she could within the universe, while the bigger fix was to delete it entirely, leaving it to implode. (Likewise the potential Mystery Spot and Endverse AUs ceased to exist - Atropos’ methods would be more like, for example, Sam getting the Trickster to resurrect Dean without returning to Wednesday, but just continuing down that timeline with the 3 months of revenge hunting still something he’d literally, physically experienced in his actual past.)
So in an EXTREMELY convoluted way, back to those tags.
Like I said somewhere near the top, all the original AU episodes were about teaching lessons of some sort, with some cross-over for our entertainment. 2x20 was not aimed as a moral lesson for Dean but mostly served to enlighten the viewer on character and world. The meta references in the “trickster” episodes are more for our entertainment doing double duty. The French Mistake is entirely fan/show communication with Sam and Dean as tools for that. There’s little to enlighten us on the characters, but a lot on how the show views them, how it views itself, and how it views the fans viewing it. My Heart Will Go On is another episode presented at the END as a lesson to Sam and Dean, and that’s certainly the writing point of it, but emotionally that’s not where the episode was at from the character point of view: we got an accidental glimpse of an AU that even Sam and Dean weren’t originally meant to know had happened - the point from Cas’s side was pretty much to let the new universe stay and hopefully Sam and Dean never find out that they used to drive a much sexier car or that Ellen was supposed to be dead. Of course, the biggest tragedy is Ellen and the question of her existence.
There’s a few things going on here. I’m going to have to take a weird walk through some odd thoughts here: first up, J2:
(I really have no interest in elaborating on that, not shipping it, but it seems a fairly logical train of thought to agree with the existence of the joke (a repeated theme in 10x05 with the Cockles dig which makes it seem that much more likely this was intentional if they will sneakily engage with RPS repeatedly) and therefore the suggestion that French Mistake verse at least teased that ship with a hook up seems plausible.
Then there’s the timing of it all, with “And Then There Were None” sandwiched between these episodes, and if you haven’t just blinked in confusion at that title and clicked on it in Superwiki to remind yourself what it was, it’s the episode where they helpfully kill off Samuel, Gwen Campbell and Rufus. Which I always forget exists, but when you watch season 6 in one go, makes it pretty clear Bobby is in such a slump in the episode because he’s mourning Rufus and tbh I kinda ended up shipping Bobby/Rufus a wee bit, and it always made me squint that Bobby literally materialises a wife while having a period of Intense Feelings about a guy… For some reason Ellen’s presence kind of really is the only thing there aside from “I wonder what they got up to when they were younger” that leads me anywhere with those idle thoughts, just because it’s such a weird way to disrupt Bobby’s mourning. (I suppose it’s much more likely they wanted to put Ellen back on the show and worked around that, but these things you don’t know when you watch it for the first couple of times.)
So going via J2 and Bobby/Rufus from the 2 previous episodes, we get to 6x17 which is referencing a film that retold a story but threw in a ton of extra gratuitous romance and we’re contemplating a random new marriage with a ship that was never really suggested at all in previous canon, and one of the more overt Destiel jibes in the show… Heh.
The thing is, like I said, these two AU episodes near each other don’t do a great deal for Sam and Dean except for the last 2 minutes of each rolling on the angel plot a bit with the very same basic premise (Cas and Balthazar are working together, Raphael sucks, Cas is desperate to win the thing… At least 6x17 introduces the souls thing a bit more directly, but basically this is the part of the middle end of the season where the plot gets stretched and stretched to fit between the MotW and the other subplots. The episodes are mostly left to entertain us with surface value action and drama plus, since there’s little to nothing for Sam and Dean to glean from the environments for plot or character purposes (unlike literally all the others, 2x20, 3x11, 5x04, 5x08, even 9x18 for Cas as an intentionally bad example…) what meaning is to be found in the episodes is entirely left to us. In fact by mirroring The French Mistake’s format so closely but with the main characters actually oblivious to the change, My Heart Will Go On ends up asking us FAR MORE than 6x15.
Of course, 6x15 has all its entertaining fan/show interaction, but 6x17 is left following its identical formula, without the interactive gimmick of utter fourth wall annihilation… Instead it presents us, as with What Is And What Should Never Be, with a sort of wish verse, except this time genuinely an alternate universe, where, if circumstances had not gone to shit with angel war stuff beyond their control or Atropos trying to fix it, they could have happily lived it out, with no ill effect, unlike Dean dying in a djinn coma had he stayed in his personalised reality.
In this case Ellen has to come to terms with her unexpected life (do we think Atropos would have come for her eventually as she tidied up?) and fact she’d disappear right out of it if the problem were fixed. In the end her contribution is meaningless, as it’s human interest fluff compared to Atropos, Cas and Balthazar having a cosmos-level conversation that takes nothing about Ellen’s life or death into consideration, and Sam and Dean are frozen off to the side; as in The French Mistake, their contribution to the plot is utterly useless, and they’re left out of the drama for the sake of the main plot remaining concealed from them.
In fact, the viewer interaction is that we see what Sam and Dean do not, which is everything that happens between them being frozen in time, and the waking up in the Impala, with Cas leaving them a very selective version of the story as their “lesson” at the end, something I think tbh would have been braver storytelling for Cas to have not reappeared, and Sam and Dean and Bobby to go about their “normal” lives for a minute at the end, utterly oblivious to the world changing.
So in terms of character in the episode, all we’re really left with is compare and contrast what is and what should never have been. For Bobby, that’s easy: he’s sad as fuck, but he has a romantic partner with him supporting him through his grief, so you can only imagine how much MORE sad as fuck he’d be feeling without Ellen. Ellen exists as a wonderful fantasy, filling the mom role for them and hinting at Jo alive and well off hunting, but not, crucially, on screen or, say, romantically entangled with Dean or something. She exists, emotionally, on the absolute fringe of the episode. I can’t even remember if they say “Ellen and Jo” when talking about who dies. Ellen is the one with the emotional stake and one last chance to do anything.
Like with 5x15 she briefly offers Bobby 1 episode of domestic marriage, this one much more realistic than Karen’s sad zombie return, and this time Bobby is left none the wiser to his loss. This mirrors 2x20 with Ellen as Mary - the dead woman back in their lives, but this was through no conscious choice or decision, presented as a quirk of fate, and it’s Bobby who gets the most care despite being a passive character all episode: at this point the show has stretched outside of Sam and Dean, and the episode covers Cas’s arc and makes us emotionally invested in Bobby’s grief, using the AU scenario to explore it in a safer, and more palatable way with a feminine influence to help present Bobby’s feelings and to look after him. Since Ellen ceases to exist in this role and Bobby doesn’t remember it, this is presented as entirely for our own feelings, once more with the interaction between the audience and the show more the point of writing it this way than for character development. It’s our own wish verse, not one of the characters’.
(and it HURTS)
AND SO FINALLY that is all the context behind me pointing and giggling at Ellen and Bobby and saying “lol Destiel”
The universe is clearly established as wrong, within the show’s own practice of making AUs, more in fitting with the moral lesson AUs like Endverse or Mystery Spot, but instead of for a characters’ lesson, it is for our own. Like with The French Mistake it offers us a chance to interact with the story more than the characters are currently involved: we have more agency and stake in both episodes for one reason or another, comedic or emotional. We are also in a stretch of random unexpected ships being teased - J2 and Bobby/Ellen - using the nature of alternate universes to put them on the table in a way that would be impossible otherwise.
We are presented with characters who have a nearly identical history to our own Sam and Dean but are not, and have their own identity and set of life-long memories and experiences which, by nature of growing up in the Impala in the main timeline, are definitely changed pretty much from birth in meaningless ways, manifesting in tiny ways such as the different rock paper scissors outcome. But basically, we can’t say they’re our Sam and Dean.
The AU is left exploring the differences of the world, in many unstated, quiet ways such as the aforementioned sublime rock paper scissors moment.
Finally, if Atropos has only become aware at the point of change about the people she has to kill, despite them existing, and their parents and grandparents and great grandparents all existing since the Titanic didn’t sink, then the Castiel (and I suppose, Balthazar) of that universe were likewise unaware of their own change to the universe, only becoming aware at the point of change, by logical extension of the rules that clearly must have governed Atropos’ awareness if we assume they’re similar enough entities.
Therefore, there is an entirely unexplored alternate range of possibilities for the relationship between Dean and Cas.
We don’t even know that, for example, Dean even was with Lisa over the year - with Bobby and Ellen and Jo all in one place and domestic (and Sam seeing how much Dean hit on Jo) for all we know Jo’s continued existence derailed that arc just enough (without her becoming a clearly labelled love interest) that Sam didn’t push Dean at Lisa, but that Dean was left to hang out with that little family. For all we know, he never lost contact with Cas. Or never stopped hunting while Sam was in the Cage.
Or maybe he did all those things from the real timeline but some other chain of events affected things…
Anyway, it’s left delightfully open and even leading that, even if nothing was implied from Cas or Dean over that time (Cas acting weirdly stopping him from, I dunno, greeting Dean with “hey babe” since he just inherited the memories/realisation of the universe where Dean and he had not hooked up yet and “our” Cas sort of reasserted himself over the old one, with the awareness of what he’d done to create that universe and why showing up and ruining the party, unintentionally derailing the DeanCas progress of that universe to the main universe’s angstfest) that Balthazar’s snide comment, to a Dean who knew exactly what was up with him and Cas, was actually face value.
The only actual question is what does our main Dean remember of his AU’s reactions to that line, and if he realised that the other Dean was reacting to that line aware that Cas was in love with him?