How The Winchesters Gave Supernatural the Finale It Deserved

[Warning: The following contains spoilers from The Winchesters Season 1 finale. Read at your own risk!] 

The Winchesters finally just showed all its cards, offering an explanation for why events have played out differently for Mary (Meg Donnelly) and John (Drake Rodger) than they did on Supernatural. The team finally met up with Dean (Jensen Ackles), who they had been trying to track down for most of the season. He was the one who gave John the letter and the Men of Letters key, and now we know why. After dying and going to Heaven in the Supernatural series finale, Dean got wind of the Akrida and their plan to wipe out humanity. In his efforts to keep the Akrida away from his own earth, where Sam (Jared Padalecki) was still living out the rest of his life, he came across this universe and saw an opportunity both to protect it and to give these alternate versions of his parents a chance at a happy life together. He introduced himself as James Hetfield (lead singer of Metallica), gave John his own hunter's journal, and warned Mary about the Yellow Eyes demon before disappearing alongside his other heavenly cohorts—Bobby (Jim Beaver), Jack (Alexander Calvert) and Baby (1967 Chevy Impala). Now, John, Mary, and their friends and family are free to forge their own path and hopefully get a much happier ending than they did on Supernatural. 

Thematically, it's like The Winchesters just gave us the ending that Supernatural couldn't back in 2020. Death has almost never been the end in Sam and Dean's world, and after 15 years spent reckoning with the mistakes and tragedies made and suffered by their parents, it makes sense that Dean would find a way to give them what they never had before and prevent the cycle from repeating. Not only did The Winchesters give Supernatural an ending, but it gave itself a perfect possible ending, while also making it clear that it's not an ending at all. That's not an easy feat, but it's exactly what showrunner Robbie Thompson set out to do when Ackles and wife Danneel came to him with the idea.

"All of us, having watched Supernatural and some having lived it for 15 years, knew that [young John and Mary] didn't quite line up with what had happened," Thompson tells TV Guide. "We were all united in that it was kind of like a physician's Do No Harm. We did not want to do anything that would offend the past, present, or future of Supernatural." 

So Thompson and the rest of the team turned to Supernatural's long history of exploring generational trauma, "the sins of the father and the mother, and in this case, coming back and haunting the children." They needed to find a way to keep the mythology of Supernatural intact and allow for a future in which Ackles and Padalecki could "put the boots back on" if they so choose. Plus, it had to be a story for Dean, and it would all come to a head in episode 13, regardless of how many episodes the first season would actually have. Conveniently, the mothership had already established that the multiverse exists, and as Thompson says, "the multiverse always needs a Dean Winchester." 

So what does this alternate universe ending mean for The Winchesters and for the future of the world of Supernatural? Thompson weighs in on that and more (including Dean's new 1970s look) below. 

So assuming The Winchesters continues, is this the end of Dean's meddling from Heaven? 
Robbie Thompson: We always saw this as an opportunity. We really are supposed to take what Dean says to heart at the end, that now this is an opportunity for these kids to tell their own story. Now, he's given them a journal with all of his thoughts and feelings, so we'll always have access to the same type of voiceover as needed from Dean, but we really want you to see how these kids do on their own. Having said that, this is the Supernatural universe, or the multiverse, and one of the things that was most exciting for us in the writers room was that this really opens the door for a lot of different things. I've said to other actors who have been on [Supernatural], who have asked me about coming back, "Just let me get to episode 13." And then the doors open in very interesting and fun ways, and we really can have fun in this new universe. At the same time, because we've established there's a multiverse, we'll always have access to these people. So I'm never going to say no to Dean or any other Winchester for that matter, but this is meant to be the first chapter of the story, and we're turning a page and in success, in Season 2, we'll see how these kids fair on their own. 

I will say that even if, god forbid, this is the end, it was an amazing ending, not just for this show but for Supernatural. The idea that it all ends by Dean giving their parents a happy ending…
Thompson: Honestly, that's enormously gratifying to hear because these are, shall I say, interesting times. We really wanted to craft an ending that felt satisfying as an end to this chapter, and there's room to move on. We had always planned on ending the Akrida storyline in 13 and revealing the truth behind what Dean was up to in 13, and it was always designed like that for a reason so that we could let the kids tell their own story, but it also felt like a natural ending, or at least a plot ending. But there's obviously still tons of stories to tell within this universe and the multiverse, so hopefully we get a chance to do that. We just don't know, and we had to find a way to balance out leaving the door open a little bit for more story, while also hoping that it feels satisfying for our audience of not only people who just watched The Winchesters, but people who watched Supernatural as well. 

That's quite a balancing act. A great ending for everyone, plus now you have the whole Supernatural universe at your disposal. 
Thompson: The thing we talked about a lot in the writers room and obviously with our partners at WB and CW is that in success, this just expands the Supernatural sandbox. And whether or not we get to tell more stories within this particular universe is above and beyond my paygrade, but I think there's always going to be Supernatural stories, and when I say this, I'm simply speaking as a fan, but I truly believe that there will come a time when Jared and Jensen are going to want to put the boots back on, and I'm really excited to see how they end up returning to these roles and playing in the sandbox together again. 

We sort of got Dean back in the boots here. Can you talk about the idea behind him introducing himself like he did, and the latest fake name he gave? 
Thompson: So it's funny, because on the day, we did one version where Jensen said, "It's Dean, Dean Winchester." And we were like, "Oh my god, what did we just do?" The thinking behind it really was how to give his parents a shot at their own happy ending, and by revealing who he really is, he boxes them into that—Oh, in this universe, you end up having a kid and his name is Dean and you have a kid named Sam—and we really wanted that moment to play like he was going to do it, and we want him to do it, but then he sticks the landing in terms of wanting them to have their own chance. The Winchesters and the Campbells have just been so beaten up by outside forces, and this was really his attempt at cutting those strings, at least for one universe. 

Also I gotta say, when we were shooting that scene, it was amazing. We always have an incredibly talented and respectful crew when we're shooting, but everybody showed up to watch that. We shot Jensen's side first, and it's a long scene. It's five, six pages, and he absolutely crushed it every single take, and I [also] really have to give credit to Meg and Drake. The way they played it at the end was so beautiful, particularly at the end when Meg asks, "Hey, did you find your family?" I think they both are playing a sense of connection with this person, this mystery man. So we left it that way intentionally, and it was definitely Dean not wanting to meddle and keeping his promise to Jack in that regard, or his version of the promise to Jack in that regard. 

Why did you pick James Hetfield as his alias?
Thompson: I knew he'd give a rock alias, so we flirted with the idea of some of the retro ones we used to use. I think at one point it was maybe going to be more of a 70s band, but then we realized the kids would figure that out. We bandied some names in the writers room, and Metallica and James Hetfield felt like the right match. Although I will admit we almost said Bon Jovi. It was like, I don't know if we can pull that off. 

It would have been funny if next season they kept referring to Bon Jovi's journal. 
Thompson: Right. "The Ballad of Bon Jovi." 

Talk to me about the multiverse aspect of this story, because oftentimes the criticism of multiverse stories is that if it's not our universe, it's hard to care about what's happening there. How did you make sure that this story would still mean something, even though it's a different world than the one that we know? 
Thompson: Yeah, a big part of that was the Dean of it all. For returning audiences, I think there's a desire to see more of Sam and Dean and the tease of that, we were hoping, would be enough to sustain returning viewers. But at the same time, you want to make sure that you're not just making it all inside baseball. So to me, it was a tough balancing act and something that in the writers room, we were constantly vetting and trying to make sure we were hitting the right balance between those two things, because you're absolutely right. In a multiverse, it's like, how does this all matter? But at the end of the day, we knew we had Dean to anchor this in a way that most multiverse stories don't. We did talk about recent multiverse movies, particularly Spider-Man: No Way Home. It really resonated, and if you'd seen the Andrew Garfield ones, like for me personally, it was amazing. It was really emotional, that moment where he saves MJ. We thought about that as sort of a touchstone of how we can make sure we're not overstaying our welcome and not teasing things that we can't deliver. I would love to have Dean in every episode, but he's a busy young man, and we knew we weren't going to have that. So it was a constant balancing act, and I'm hopeful that our audience likes what we did in the end. 

Can you briefly talk about Dean's new look? When he showed up in that turtleneck with that swoopy hair, I was like, "Who is this man?" 
Thompson: Yeah, a big credit to Carrie, who runs our costumes and was on the mothership as well. She and her team create these incredible lookbooks, and Jensen had felt like Dean would try to fit in a little bit in the era, and because we were in a bus depot and we knew we were going to have other people there in military uniforms, I think someone had mentioned a merchant marine kind of a look. As soon as I saw it, because she uses stills from movies and I think it was a still of Robert Redford from the 70s, and I was like, "Oh my god, I can't wait to see that." That was the first thing we shot of him on the last episode, and again, I think a lot of people happened to have shown up that day for work that didn't need to do that just to see a very handsome Dean Winchester in a turtleneck and peacoat. He looked phenomenal.

The Winchesters is available to stream on The CW app.