The Confession edit.

THE WINCHESTERS AS DEAN’S STORY: An untraditional video essay showing Dean’s physical and emotional state after the Supernatural finale.

Whether you’ve never seen The Winchesters, haven’t thought about it much in years, or know it inside and out, this should be watchable and understandable to you!

(This project is on AO3 here, as part of my Chuck Won meta series.)

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The Winchesters, as a prequel-sequel show, acts as a thematically consistent commentary on Supernatural. It explicitly brought SPN’s depths to the surface by spotlighting themes like found family being vital, cycles of intergenerational trauma needing healing, and real love triumphing over predetermined fate.

From episode one, Dean is framed as the show’s narrator and he has a voiceover in every episode. This means that The Winchesters is a story being told from his point of view. The show is Dean’s story in the sense that he’s telling it to the audience; but also, metatextually, it’s Dean's story in the sense that it’s all about him through mirroring and parallels.

I tend to fondly refer to The Winchesters as “The Dean Hall of Mirrors show” because that’s exactly what it is. While watching the adventures of John, Mary, Carlos, Lata and Ada—and the struggles they face—we can recognize they provide a secondary purpose of being commentary on Dean’s life. Through parallels, we learn more about the struggles Dean’s been facing since episode 15x20 of Supernatural. The Winchesters is a deliberate, repetitive condemnation of the false veneer of Dean’s “happy ending” in Heaven that some audiences took at face value. It tells us that he’s trapped. And the fact that the show’s plot lines culminate in Jack arriving to subtly threaten Dean back into “peace” is no accident.

Consider this a video essay, but in an untraditional format. Clips from the shows are interspersed to showcase their parallels and construct a full story, with no additional narration from me. Everything that I need to explain and everything that you need to understand is conveyed solely through dialogue and visuals from the shows themselves—demonstrating just how clear and cohesive the full picture is.

This video constructs an argument to show you (rather than tell you) this:

Chuck was not entirely defeated. Jack’s not okay. Dean and his family are trapped and fractured. And true freedom can only be achieved for all of them through speaking truths, trusting in real love, healing trauma, and breaking cycles of violence together.

Aside from a short opening and ending, this video has 5 chapters:

DESTIEL

JACK + DEAN

CHUCK WON

THE TRAP

THE PATH TO FREEDOM

The sections are designed to build upon each other.

As a (very optional) primer before you watch, a short breakdown of that is below.

team free will & chuck

an exploration of chuck's control over dean, sam, and cas. and maybe propaganda for the chuck won theory.

Collection of my pieces breaking down the Supernatural finale, its context, and its aftermath.

Reference thread link

"This is about stories, and the intricate ways in which they become part of us and our world– the ways our lives and struggles are reflected, subverted, and reinforced."

"At the end of Supernatural, the same institutions and cultural powers that have always suppressed stories and voices were still waiting on the other side of the screen. Our gods had not been defeated."

"Supernatural was not building toward a tragic end, it was actively commenting on the ultimate uselessness and sin of demanding tragedy in a story about love, self-acceptance, and truth."

"If Supernatural is about the denial of self and breaking cycles of manipulation, anger, and retribution through the truth, our experience in its aftermath has been about what we do when that truth gets fed back into the cycle."

"In Supernatural, the characters got to be real, if just for a moment, and it was this moment of being that revealed how the story would fail without the having. No matter what came after, that is why we are still here."

Bonus:

"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."

"The sunrise observed in a puddle-- a great metaphor."

Oh, huh. I always mentally grouped it with "Happiness" and "Sunshine." Cas gets planted in front of a yellow house for example at turns, and his flying My Little Pony after he dies in season 6 looks a bit like dead happiness/sunshine (Dean's rear light is out in the rental car, the way Sam's side was out after Jess died).

In Unity Jack has his soul back, and he's a sacrificial son/sun, so there's something to this too. Interestingly, both Jack and Amara are dressed much more different than Chuck this episode. It's as if Chuck has BECOME the Darkness.

As if, as Amara becomes grayer, lighter, he's drenched in dark red blood and black:

CHUCK: "You know the rules. I can create. I can destroy. But I can't do a hard reset, reboot everything, without you."

Kind of interesting that the bomb with Jack was "lit," but didn't actually "go off" until after this happened:

CHUCK: "Have fun watching him die." *sound effect of activation*

And then in Despair, Jack becomes a Big Bang that wakes up all the demons and angels that ever were. We have The Empty in the shape of Amara, crying about the loss of peace.

Essentially, the first step in a reset. It's not even until AFTER this event happens that Lucifer randomly gets fished out of the Empty BY Chuck. Makes you wonder.

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But it's weird too because Jack HAS become a "black hole," sucking the life from things after this, LIKE AMARA. The tan jacket is his "Lucifer" look too, so it makes you wonder about the nature of Lucifer's original sacrifice, and what that actually looked like.

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