“You're on the road for so long, it's a matter of time before you come across a monster, and then something has to die— the dream or the monster.” - The Winchesters, Episode 8, “Hang on to Your Life”
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In The Winchesters’ ninth episode, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind”, John Winchester dies.
He and his mother are trapped in the depths of his father’s vault, and vampires with peculiarly mime-like makeup are pounding on the door, taunting through the metal that he cannot escape his fate. A higher power has shown them a vision of his death, so it must come to be. And so it does. John is bitten in the neck by a vampire, and dies on the blood red floor of his trap.
But context matters.
The where, when, what, how. And most importantly, for our understanding, the who and the why. The context that truly matters for John, here, is who is telling this story, to whom they are telling it, and why we’re all even here in the first place.
The context is that The Winchesters is not actually John Winchester’s story. It’s not Mary Campbell’s story. It’s not really about anyone in Lawrence, Kansas, 1972.
This does not diminish the value of these characters and the new enterprise of the prequel— Mary and John, Carlos and Latika, Ada and Millie, all of these new faces and perspectives are significant and stand up on their own. But it is impossible to separate this series from its source, from its context, which is that the prequel is both the direct prelude to and continuation of a show much of the audience just spent fifteen years watching. The one we saw, all too recently, come to a bitter and painful end.
In the context of Supernatural’s ending— which featured, in brief, the angel Castiel’s death and permanent removal from the story after he confessed his love to Dean Winchester, Dean dying violently and prematurely on a routine hunt shortly after, Sam Winchester abandoning everything they had all built together to live in the burbs with a blurry wife and questionable hairpiece, and their collective son Jack sacrificing his identity and future to absorb the power of God, the almighty toxic father himself— the prequel acts as something of an autopsy. How did we get here? What could we have done differently, and is it too late to change, to break the cycle that led us to these fated conclusions in the first place? And at the end of it all, whose story are we seeking to change? Whose story is this?
Well. It’s Dean Winchester’s, of course.
Dean guides us through the prequel, framed through an ambiguous ride down an empty road, journal in hand. He narrates his lessons and observations, and he haunts the background of his characters’ story in grainy photos and fleeting exchanges. Dean, much like Supernatural itself, is a shadow hanging over the whole show, but not in the way you might expect. Rather than an original character and show demanding their successor live up to their expectations, both Dean and Supernatural seem to be asking it to defy them. They seek to help it along, to prevent its mistakes. To change the game for those still playing.
He is telling us the story of his parents, but it’s not the story we already know. It’s not the tale the original show laid out for us at all. Mary and John don’t follow the same path, they don’t hit the same beats, they don’t even seem to live in the same world. They have friends and adventures we never conceived of. Even Dean’s own role in their early relationship, as shown in Supernatural, seems to differ here.
As Dean retells, or perhaps creates, this new story, he shapes a more forgiving and empowering world for his parents. It’s as if he— and by extension, the real life creatives— are trying to fix it for them, trying to change the start by gently applying and subverting the failures of the finish. We are revisiting the beginning together to not only make sense of how we got here, but to course correct each fateful mistake as we see it about to be made. This story gives Mary and John what they need. They get friends, a found family. They get a joint purpose. They get their own parents back, if only for a few moments, and they get to say what they need to say and hear what they need to hear. They get literal therapy.
It’s like Dean is giving his parents all the things that allowed him, or could have allowed him, to recognize and fight against his own trap. The trap that was closed by the cycle of control that their mistakes perpetuated and built around him. This cycle is driven both by what controls us from within— traumatic memories, emotions, and their outlets, and from without— systems of control that are maintained by our inability to make choices that would defy this control when we are prevented from recognizing, accepting, and freeing our true selves. For Dean, this was a spiral of anger, fear, and self sacrifice fed by his mother’s abandonment and his father’s controlling grief, feeding the structure of a false god’s plan for him to live and die as a pawn in a predetermined story. For his parents, the internal cycle takes on a similar shape. And if the god within this story isn’t Dean’s, well, the “gods” without almost certainly are.
Every episode of The Winchesters is about these same things, over and over. Characters who have been denied choices, who have had their lives laid out for them, struggling to break free and define their own paths— especially when their paths have already been trudged by their parents’ footsteps. Characters whose trauma keeps them stuck in violent cycles of fear and anger, fed by generations of pain and guilt. And above all, characters who begin the process of healing through forgiveness, truth, and the giving and accepting of love.
It all comes down to the choice: do we continue the cycle, or do we break free. Are the choices we do have shaped by the cycle themselves, and how do we identify and actualize choice outside of it.
We have seen firsthand what happens when this choice is denied. Lives and deaths devoid of meaning, stripped of what makes us real. Emptiness, no matter the vessel of earth, heaven, hell, or the void itself.
Nearly every monster on this show takes its victims to another place— hidden lairs, pocket dimensions, buried spaces inside their own minds. Escape, every time, means the same thing: transformative catharsis centered around truth and the breaking of traumatic cycles. Telling your parent you believe in yourself, letting go of your father’s plan even if making your own is scarier, telling your childhood self that you’re going to fight for them and give them back their choices, confessing your guiltiest secrets and allowing your friends to accept and love you as a whole, giving up false peace for real love. Characters are offered ways to forget, to live free of their guilt, pain, and trauma, but this is never the answer. This isn’t real. They learn instead to let themselves examine the bad, embrace that it is part of them, and use it to inform and strengthen their ability to fight for the good as a more complete and centered person.
It is fundamentally a story about healing, being told to us by someone whose own story ended with profound pain. Whose story ended in a trap, never escaping the cycle, never getting to speak or fully embrace his own truth or choice. Never getting to live.
Rather than avoiding the narrative burden of Dean’s death and all the circumstances, both in story and out, that led us to it, The Winchesters is breaking it down. It is examining each theme that was regressed by the finale and pointedly reaffirming it. It’s telling us that what happened to Dean was wrong, that there is something to be done about it. It’s, maybe, trying to help us heal too.
The Winchesters occupies such a truly strange place in this context. It’s a continuation, it’s a set-up, it’s an apology, it’s a rebuke, a path forward and a look back. It’s complicit. It’s subversive. It’s maybe a figment of the imagination of a fictional character roaming in an eternal search for meaning across the emptiest of afterlives where he was sent because a man said he loved him and he wasn’t allowed to say it back on our good, wholesome television screens. Like, there is no how-to for navigating this situation.
Many thought, and still think, that Supernatural lost its chance. That a prequel, especially one seemingly so far removed from the damages of the finale itself, could do little to bridge the chasm that formed after such a serious break in trust. I know I didn’t want to watch this or give anything to do with it any kind of chance, and I refused to until very recently. How could this show, even with the best of intentions, do what Supernatural couldn’t when so little had changed about the constraints of its network, industry, and history? And how could it be fair for this show to be given from the very start what Supernatural fought to have for over a decade and was ultimately shattered over? I myself had accused The Winchesters’ premise of this exact problem, of being a return to the start that avoids responsibility for the end.
But here it is, loudly addressing everything that led Supernatural to its demise. Naming nearly every trap, every choice, that kept the original story and its characters stuck. And because the trap within the story of Supernatural was so deeply tied to what kept the show itself stuck in the cycles perpetuated by its real world circumstances, this is all the more important. And, possibly, all the more subversive.
The Winchesters has used its cover as a small, known story to tell a much bigger and more disruptive one. A creative bit of misdirection— reframing an old beginning to veil its dissection of the end. The success of its challenge and critical examination of Supernatural is now tied to these new characters and their ability to overcome all that led their predecessors, and their own previous iterations, to fall into and perpetuate those oppressive systems. And their success in turn is tied to the show’s own effective subversion of the real social, cultural, and financial constraints that created the trap for the original.
Dean, or really, the creative spirit carrying the original series into the new, seems to be giving them a chance. He is giving us a new story, giving his own a new beginning built on everything he’s learned up to and from its end. Providing his family everything he learned to need, presenting them with choices he had and didn’t get to have. But is it enough? Dean can only set them up so far, after all. He didn’t break free— he died in silence, his journey cut swiftly and obviously short.
The Winchesters is primed to deliver the final lesson from his story, the key that only his tragedy can impart to change the one that is fated for these characters, whose ends we already think we know.
Dean Winchester died. But context matters.
Dean’s death pulled back the curtain. It revealed, at great cost, everything about Supernatural that no longer fit with the story or what it came to mean— and in turn it shed light on the biases, motivations, and systems of the real world influences that shaped the story from without. This is not unique to Dean’s story, though the circumstances of its end were unique to say the least. This is what any creative pursuit that challenges expectations— especially, and most poignantly here, when these expectations are set by controlling social, cultural, and economic structures— seeks to accomplish whether it is ultimately suppressed or not. What happened to Dean cannot be separated from the expectations for his character set by cultural biases around masculinity, sexuality, and self acceptance and expression. What happens with The Winchesters will be fundamentally tied to its ability to break free of these very same limitations. To break the cycle.
To prove that its ending is not inevitable, that it’s not just a matter of time before you kill the dream to kill the monster. It’s not just a matter of time before the controls you’ve pushed back catch up to you.
Not only does The Winchesters seem to have embraced this challenge, but it is perhaps taking the natural next step— to help Supernatural remove its own constraints and move forward in kind. Choosing not to forget what happened, but to use what you have learned from the bad to save something good, something real.
It’s as if these shows and their characters are building a new cycle. Dean helps his parents heal, and maybe they can heal him in turn. Maybe their new start will provide Dean and those he loves with a new chance of their own. Supernatural helps save The Winchesters, and maybe the prequel can save the sequel. Maybe the one thing Supernatural wanted but couldn’t have was only half of the statement. Maybe The Winchesters’ reply will be, you already have it.
Hope is a difficult thing in situations like these. Especially when that hope is so profoundly tied to what makes you vulnerable. Yet this vulnerability is also the very reason we keep taking chances. This is the essence of queer history, and our media, and our relationships with ourselves that we derive from it and offer back to it.
We are driven to turn the bad into good.
And so, John Winchester dies. His own mother helps to kill him, stopping his heart so that his dead blood will poison the vampire inevitably coming to feed. John may not be able to sidestep fate, but he can change the circumstances in which fate steps up to him. He dies, but he makes sure that his death will take what kills him down right along beside him.
With the hope— the trust— that, when it’s all over, someone who loves him will restart his heart.
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