Supernatural came to an end last year after fifteen seasons, but like many productions, the series had to deal with COVID-19 and shooting was forced to halt due to the pandemic. Even when production did resume months later, there were just certain things that they couldn't do anymore, and that includes the original ending of the series. Spoilers for Supernatural to follow.
The series came to an end with Dean dying while on the job and Sam living out his life before dying as an old man and reuniting with his brother in heaven, but co-showrunner Andrew Dabb originally had a much bigger ending in mind before COVID-19 changed things. The production team had re-built Harvelle's Roadhouse, and the plan was to pack it with cameos from as many Supernatural guest-stars as they could. Not only that, but Kansas was slated to perform the show's unofficial theme song as well, Carry on Wayward Son.
Dean was always going to end up in Heaven, and we were always going to see Sam's life in fast-forward, but those final moments were supposed to take place somewhere else. When Bob Singer and I sat down to talk about season 15, and our inevitable end, we came up with something that felt like a fitting version of Sam and Dean's Heaven: all the people the boys had met along the way (or, at least, those we could convince to fly to Vancouver) crowded into a re-built Roadhouse, as the band Kansas played our (official unofficial) theme song: 'Carry on Wayward Son.'
Andrew Dabb continued: "When we opened back up in August, getting that many people in an enclosed space, much less traveling some of our favorites from LA and making them quarantine two weeks for what would be a half day's work, just wasn't realistic. Even Kansas, always game, didn't feel like they could make that trip, which we completely understood. And so that Supernatural ending … ended. I love what we have now, Dean in the car on the open road, but I have to admit that I sometimes think about our original idea — all of Sam and Dean's family and friends, and one of the greatest rock bands ever on a masterpiece of a set, and I miss is … even though it never really existed." While that certainly would have been a bigger ending to the long-running series, it's completely understandable why they weren't able to pull it off during a pandemic.