Characters That Need To Return For Supernatural Season 15

It's here, folks: the time we all thought would never come — Supernatural is ending with its 15th season. The show has been for some years a perfect engine of self-perpetuation by having a just-rabid-enough following and maintaining its place on a second-tier cable network that needs Just One Crown Jewel to secure success. Now, Supernatural will join the frightfully short list of honor for television shows that get to decide their own destinies and leave on their own terms. Its legacy as the CW's content juggernaut for a solid decade and its creation of one of the largest media fandoms on Earth will live forever. 

This is the victory lap, and a show as into its own metatextual humor and nonsense as this one has plenty of room to make a whole parade of it as it indulges in retrospective. Death is immaterial to the logic of Supernatural and always has been, so the last-chance opportunity to revisit long-lost friends and enemies has never been more ripe than during the series' 15th and final season. (Chuck-God has literally raised the dead en masse, after all.) Spin the wheel of a thousand pieces, because that's just about how many dead recurring characters in Supernatural there are to choose from to bring back — but let's visit a few of the most entertaining and emotionally profound options.

Here are the characters that need to return on Supernatural season 15. Plenty of spoilers incoming!

Played by Jim Beaver, Bobby Singer is a long-time fan favorite character and a truer father to the Winchester boys than John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) can ever really claim to be. His sass, badassery, and genuine human empathy were a standout part of Supernatural, and he is sorely missed by many fans. Though we do currently have an alternate-universe version of Bobby from the Apocalypse World of season 13 and 14 running around, that's not the real Bobby, you know? 

Original-flavor Bobby died during season 7 as the result of a gunshot to the head during the struggle with the Leviathans. We watched him confront the demons of his past and take pride in the achievement of being the person who raised Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) to become the men they are. That greater self-assurance and peace with the self is the kind of guiding hand Sam and Dean could really use (and have always cherished from Bobby) right now. In all honesty, what could be more entertaining than resurrected-Bobby interacting with his apocalyptic alternate self on Supernatural's last season?

It's been a very long time away for Jo and Ellen Harvelle, portrayed by Alona Tal and Samantha Ferris, respectively. The mother-daughter pair died on season 5 in a glorious act of self-sacrifice while they, Sam, and Dean were all being hunted by hellhounds. 

Harvelle's Roadhouse, the bar that Ellen owned, was once upon a time a central meeting point of the series for Sam, Dean, and all hunters alike. It's a touchstone of the show's history, and revisiting both the place (yes, it was burned down, but again, all death and loss is immaterial to Supernatural) and the people who existed there that were so important to Sam and Dean feels extremely appropriate. The show's universe and subsequent stakes have exploded in size since the humble stories of seasons 4 and 5 when the Winchesters were simply trying to defy their destinies as holy vessels for archangels rather than literally fighting God. Revisiting a couple of humans whose deaths underlined human powerlessness and courage in the face of it would be profound.

Baby-brother Archangel Gabriel (Richard Speight Jr.) has benefitted from faked deaths of plot convenience before. We were all quite sure he died on season 5 after his elder brother Archangel Michael blew him up. But then it was revealed he was the prisoner of Asmodeus during season 13... and then he died... again... ash-wings burned into the earth and everything. 

Of the four Archangels, Gabriel best encompassed the emotional tragedy of The Fall that Michael and Lucifer are far too busy trying to kill each other to show. He's tortured by his terrible familial circumstances and makes for a bit of mirror to the Winchesters in his own right. Immediately before his death on season 13, we see a Gabriel who's triumphant and brave after millenia of dodging responsibility and strife. He shouts down Lucifer and calls him out for what he is before making his final hopeless stand against Michael. That's a neat and tidy bit of narrative sewing-up, but it doesn't settle the core of the issue: Dad. Everything comes back to Chuck-God (Rob Benedict), and Gabriel has a fair amount of reckoning to potentially mete out on his progenitor like Sam and Dean do. The man who portrays Gabriel, Richard Speight Jr., is directing a few episodes this season, too, so y'know, while he's there, maybe he'll grab a cheeky scene or two.

For specificity's sake, we are referring to, colloquially, Ruby 2.0 as played by the actress then known as Genevieve Cortese. A demon working on behalf of Lilith and Lucifer, Ruby was initially an important recurring character on Supernatural season 3, when she was played by Katie Cassidy. That role expanded on season 4 when Ruby returned to Earth in a brand-new meat-suit. Both versions of the character had a manipulative romance arc in which Ruby played Sam as a sucker to release Lucifer from his Cage by making him addicted to demon blood.

The Easter egg here, however, is the fact that Genevieve Cortese and Jared Padalecki met and eventually married as a result of their time together on Supernatural. Jared himself has expressed his wish to have her back on Supernatural one last time just for fun. That would be a particular treat: the return of Sam's literal ex-girlfriend from Hell. 

Ruby's time on the show was under very different plot priorities than where the show is now, and a whole lot has changed for the universe and its Archangels. Would she still ally with Lucifer now, after everything? What would she think of Sam and Dean turning down the mission to kill Lucifer? We're dying to have these questions answered on Supernatural season 15.

One of the most profound temporary recurring characters on Supernatural was Benny Lafitte (Ty Olsson), a vampire and friend to Dean Winchester. Dean has always had Castiel (Misha Collins) to point to as his most important relationship beyond his brother Sam, but for a handful of episodes on season 8, we watched him craft a special brotherhood with Benny as they fought together to escape Purgatory. Their mutual trust was so complete, one couldn't help getting a little teary-eyed when Benny voluntarily submitted to die at Dean's hands to re-enter Purgatory and rescue Sam and Bobby. In Benny's final moments on the show, a pack of other vampires swarmed Benny, which gave Sam and Bobby the chance to escape. That is far from a canonical death since we never actually saw Benny die on screen, and anyway, Purgatory is all monsters' plane of afterlife. Dean hasn't forgotten him, either: Benny appeared to him in a hallucination during season 10. Doesn't Benny deserve a last free-for-all monster slaughter with his bestie on Supernatural's final season?

Like Ruby, Meg Masters had two iterations of existence in two actresses-as-possession-vessels. Rachel Miner portrayed the second version of Meg on seasons 5 through 8, which saw her move from enemy to hesitant ally to loyal friend and even the short-lived love interest of Castiel. Meg's death towards the end of the Leviathan arc fostered some fan upset at the time, and she's certainly a character who continues to be missed, but her departure from Supernatural was eventually revealed to have a real-life reason: Miner was diagnosed with MS in the last year of her time on Supernatural. She has since described the cast and crew's graciousness and magnanimity in the wake of her diagnosis in glowing, grateful terms, and has expressed interest in returning if asked. No better time than now, we say. In the six years since departing Supernatural, Miner's illness has progressed and she now uses a wheelchair, but that small change is dwarfed by the greater significance there would be in having her come back for a last goodbye.