The Winchesters is a supernatural horror series on The CW that began airing on October 11, 2022. It is a prequel of Supernatural, which ended its fifteen-year run in 2020, and is the network's third attempt to spin off the series. Unlike the previous two attempts, which were pitched as backdoor pilots,note The Winchesters started out as a standalone pilot, and was picked up to series for The CW's 2022-2023 season. The show is produced by Supernatural star Jensen Ackles, his wife Danneel, and Robbie Thompson.
The show focuses on John Winchester (Drake Rodger) and Mary Campbell (Meg Donnelly), the future parents of Dean and Sam Winchester, as they battle dark forces to save their love and the world. Joining forces with hunters Latika Dar (Nida Khurshid) and Carlos Cervantez (Jojo Fleites), their quest leads them to meet Ada Monroe (Demetria McKinney), a bookstore owner with an interest in the occult. Meanwhile, John's mother, Millie (Bianca Kajlich), has been doing her best to protect her son and stop him from hunting or discovering the truth about his father.
The series was canceled in 2023
, with attempts of finding a new home being unsuccessful, ending the series with just one season.
Preview: Official Trailer
This series provides examples of:
- The '70s: The series begins to unfold in 1972, when Mary Campbell and John Winchester first meet.
- Action Girl: As a female hunter, Mary almost by definition fits this trope, and is capable of beheading an entire corridor's worth of vampires on her own. Averted by Lata, however, due to being a Technical Pacifist.
- Affectionate Nickname: "Losi" for Carlos, primarily by Mary.
- All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In the first-season finale, "Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye", the Akrida attack the Men of Letters clubhouse in order to destroy the spell restraining the bulk of their queen's magic so that she can open the portal for the rest of their species.
- Amicable Exes: John and his ex-fiancée Betty Donelon, a policewoman, are still on friendly terms although they effectively broke up when John enlisted for Vietnam. She and Mary aren't fond of each other at first, however, since Betty suspects Mary of being up to no good and getting John embroiled in whatever it is.
- And I Must Scream: Ada threatens to trap a demon inside a bonsai tree for interrogation. Once he complies, she does it anyway to prevent him from talking to other demons.
- Badass Family: As was established in Supernatural, Mary's parents are both hunters, as are her cousins, and generations of Campbells going back a long time. The Hopkins family were hunters, too, going back even further, and hunted with the Campbells back in the day until their line ended in the 17th century.
- Blood Knight: John repeatedly shows indications of being on the path to become this, taking a bit too much pleasure in stabbing or beating creatures to death and getting covered in their Ludicrous Gibs in multiple episodes. It's Discussed or even Invoked by both friends and enemies. In "Masters of War", the god Mars Neto wants to train John into his warrior against the Akrida, and in "Art of Dying", the group draws parallels between John and the ghost of a hunter whose friends turned against him for becoming increasingly dark and aggressive.
- The Bus Came Back: Ruth Connell returns as Rowena MacLeod in "The Tears of a Clown", after being Put on a Bus early in the last season of Supernatural.
- The Casanova: Carlos is openly bisexual, highly flirtatious with everyone else, and indicated to have successfully had numerous affairs with both men and women (including an ex-boyfriend of Mary's).
- Continuity Nod:
- John makes reference to the famous Arc Words in Supernatural, "saving people, hunting things" when speaking to his mother about hunting in the pilot.
- Mars Neto says that John "has centuries of violence in [his] blood", likely referring to the Winchesters being descended from Cain and Abel.
- John having been given a music box that plays the song "As Time Goes By" by his father after a night at the cinema was mentioned in a Deleted Scene of the episode "As Time Goes By".
- As in "Dead Man's Blood", a group of vampires in "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" get a vehicle to stop on the road by pretending to be accident victims (easy for vampires since they lack a pulse).
- In "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye", Dean knows Carlos by name and Word of God from showrunner Robbie Thompson says this is because the unseen Carlos whom the Winchester brothers spoke with on the phone in the Supernatural episode "Meta Fiction" was his counterpart in the parent series's universe.
- The incantation the team use to contact Henry Winchester's spirit in "Reflections" is the same one used to communicate with Bobby Singer in Heaven in "Inside Man".
- Crazy-Prepared: Subverted when the team thinks they're dealing with a shapechanger that can be hurt by copper. Carlos admits that's pretty much the one element he doesn't have in the van as he prides himself on "quality" weaponry, not something made with such cheap materials.
- Damaged Soul: In "The Tears of a Clown", Rowena reveals that Ada will need to use part of her soul to charge the magical crystal that can kill the Akrida queen. Fortunately, Lata figures out a way to restore Ada's soul by the end of "Hey, That's No Way to Save Goodbye".
- Dark and Troubled Past:
- Carlos discusses this trope in the pilot, telling John that "the only thing worse than how it starts for a hunter is how it ends."
- Carlos became a hunter after killing the ghouls who murdered his family. He felt misplaced guilt for a long time because they were there in Phoenix playing a gig to raise money to buy him the guitar he wanted.
- Mary is still emotionally scarred from losing her cousin Maggie (who was like a big sister to her after moving in with her family following her own parents' deaths, as well as a best friend to Lata) while hunting vampires a year ago.
- Both Carlos and John had traumatic experiences where they lost friends during the Vietnam War.
- Ada had a star-crossed romance with a djinn named Ali, but he eventually went dark side and started feeding on people's minds and was killed by hunters, after which she discovered she was pregnant with their child. She didn't tell her son, Tony, the truth about his father until his powers manifested in puberty, and they became estranged.
- Mary and John's walk through the former's mind in "Legend of a Mind" exposes two traumatic memories: when she was five and told her parents she was afraid of monsters under her bed, only for them to put a knife in her hand and tell her that monsters were real and it would be her job to hunt them, and when she was ten and killed a boy in a werewolf pack her family hunted, who reverted to human form and begged her not to do it.
- Lata's father fought in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 and came back full of anger and is implied to have become physically abusive. When Lata shared some leftover dessert from a meal he'd hosted for work colleagues with their housekeeper Sania, he accused Sania of stealing despite Lata's attempts to defend her, and when Lata ran away because of it, he locked Sania in a room where she froze to death overnight, which Lata blames herself for.
- Deadpan Snarker: Each of the core four characters has their own flavor of dry wit.
- Deus Exit Machina: Jack could have pretty much easily ended the Akrida by himself, but he has established a firm no-interference rule, setting the plot for the whole series.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Dean traveled the multiverse in search of a universe where his family got a happy ending; he believes this universe is the one he was looking for.
- Evil Versus Evil: Even demons are scared of the Akrida.
- Fallen Hero: It turns out that the queen of the Akrida used to be a hunter in the 17th century named Joan Hopkins, who decided that monsters were right about the mass of humanity being good only for eating and hunters needed to be saved from having to save people.
- Foreign Cuss Word: A mild example. Betty, who is Hispanic, exclaims "¡Dios mio!" ("My God!") after Lata proves the existence of the Akrida by slapping the second-sight-granting bracelet that used to belong to Maggie Campbell on her wrist.
- Friend on the Force: Betty serves this role as of "You've Got a Friend", once the others convince her the Akrida are real.
- Friendly Address Privileges: In the pilot, Latika tells John that her friends call her Lata.
- Funny Background Event: In "Reflections", at one point in John and Mary's fight with Akrida mooks, the camera focuses on Mary while John is being carried overhead by a mook from one end of the hallway to the other in the background with his legs flailing.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: The core four consist of two women (Mary and Lata) and two men (Carlos and John). They sometimes skew female when they're joined on a hunt by either Ada or Millie, who are the other two series regulars. Out of the six credited main characters, there are twice as many women as men. As Jojo Fleites is non-binary, although Carlos is male, Drake Rodger is actually the only cis male among the main cast members out-of-universe.
- Generation Xerox: Mary and John have several moments that Call-Forward to attitudes or circumstances of their future sons Dean and Sam. Although each parent has parallels with both sons.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: What Limbo the clown does to his victims in "The Tears of a Clown", turning them into Monster Clowns like himself so they'll be happy forever, like he is. He sold his soul to obtain the mirror that does this in the first place because he was driven to the Despair Event Horizon by the "one-two punch of the Dust Bowl and the Depression" (as Lata puts it) causing his original carnival to close down, and he needs to spread the magic to keep it up.
- Gibberish of Love: The normally smooth Carlos finds himself reduced to this when he meets monster-taxidermist Anton in "Art of Dying", apparently from Love at First Sight.
- Grand Theft Me:
- The Akrida take over human bodies by biting them in the neck and implanting three stingers into the brainstem, then controlling them remotely.
- In "Suspicious Minds", Jack Wilcox, a booted member of the Men of Letters, attempts to use modified Akrida stingers to transfer his and his wife Dorothea's minds into John and Mary's bodies so they can live the full life together they were denied, since Dorothea was left comatose after being blunt-force-traumaed by an Akrida puppet in the '50s.
- Green Thumb: Ada's spells work best through plants, and she keeps a conservatory within the clubhouse. In "The Tears of a Clown", Rowena pushes her into actually commanding vines to sprout with her mind to prove she can be a real witch and not just a dabbler in magic.
- Half-Human Hybrid: Ada has a young adult son, Tony, who is half djinn, from a relationship with a djinn named Ali.
- Hive Queen: The Akrida have a queen whom their existence in this dimension is tied to, and any Akrida connected to her will die if she does. In the finale of the first season, "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye", it turns out that the queen is not actually an Akrida herself; she's a former hunter and former human named Joan Hopkins from the 17th century who lost all her family and loved ones fighting monsters and stopping apocalypses. So she came to believe that weak humanity, always needing saving by hunters, was the problem and decided to Put Them All Out of My Misery, consuming the essences of monsters to become powerful enough to Kill All Humans. After the Men of Letters banished her, she ended up in the Akrida dimension and gave them a new purpose. This actually makes her closer to a regular queen, apart from the Akrida being connected to her.
- Home Base: The heroes use the abandoned Men of Letters clubhouse in Lawrence as their HQ.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: The Akrida are bug-like Eldritch Abominations said to consume entire worlds. In fact, the word akrida is Ancient Greek for "locust", and they're most likely a reference to the "locusts" (described far more monstrously than real locusts) in the Book of Revelation. Chuck from Supernatural created them to destroy everything in the event that anyone ever managed to defeat him.
- Humanoid Abomination: The queen of the Akrida still looks human, but hasn't really been for a long time.
- Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Every episode after the pilot is named after a classic song.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: Mary is determined that she'll get out of hunting once they've found her father and dealt with the Akrida threat. To that end, she's applied to Kansas University.
- In Spite of a Nail: The Men of Letters, including Henry Winchester, disappeared in both this alternate universe and the original Supernatural universe, with basically identical practical effects in both universes such as John growing up believing that his dad abandoned him, even though the causes were different. In this universe, it was the Akrida queen who wiped them out, whereas in Supernatural it was the demon Abaddon.
- Internal Reveal: In "You've Got a Friend", Betty finally learns of the existence of monsters.
- It Only Works Once: The crystal that Rowena gives Ada to kill the Akrida queen with can only be used once. Ada uses it to save Lata by killing an Akrida possessing her instead, forcing the heroes to find another way to kill the queen.
- The Lancer: Carlos is the most likely to dissent from whatever Mary is planning. He admits that he's not used to functioning as part of a group, "especially if Mary is the lead singer."
- The Leader: Mary is officially the leader of the team of hunters consisting of herself, Carlos, Lata and John.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The pilot ends with Dean's narration explaining that the story he thought he knew of his parents was different from reality as he researched them. He explains that he's "still putting the pieces together, and there are a lot of surprises ahead," which seemed to be the show addressing fan worries about going against the established history.
- Lighter and Softer: While the series still depicts monsters and bloodshed, it doesn't get as dark or cynical as Supernatural had been known to get, likely because the core four are younger than the Winchester brothers were. You can also tell from the dialogue that this series was written post mental wellness revolution.
- Mad Scientist: Jack Wilcox, a former member of the Men of Letters who was banished for conducting unethical experiments on humans in his efforts to find a way of fighting the Akrida (they had no problem with his dissecting and lobotomizing monsters before that, however, even though it shaded into Van Helsing Hate Crimes). In the series's present, he attempts to perform a Grand Theft Me on John and Mary.
- Mama Bear: John's mother Millie Winchester is fiercely protective of her son and not someone you want to mess with.
- Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: John's parents; Millie is a tough Wrench Wench who succeeded her father in a traditionally masculine occupation, owning and operating her own garage, while Henry was a mild-mannered Man of Letters trained to fight the supernatural with book knowledge rather than brute force and wore a well-tailored suit.
- Monster Clown: The gang face one in "The Tears of a Clown", who kidnaps people who are grieving or upset to make them eternally happy by turning them into Monster Clowns themselves. Including Mary and John.
- More Diverse Sequel: More Diverse Prequel. All the main cast members in Supernatural were white; here three of them are people of color: Carlos is Hispanic, Lata is South Asian, and Ada is black. Also, Carlos is unambiguously bisexual, whereas if any Supernatural main characters were LGTBQA+ it was left to subtext, till Cas made his love for Dean verbally clear in the antepenultimate episode.
- Mr. Fanservice: John is shirtless in his training scene with Mary in "Masters of War", and wearing a tank top afterwards.
- Narrator: Dean Winchester provides narration at the beginning of each episode.
- Older Than They Look: Carlos lampshades this in "Legend of a Mind", being shocked that Ada is a mom. Demetria McKinney is 43 but can easily pass for a decade or more younger and blends in standing next to her castmates who are playing 19-year-olds.
- Period Piece: The show is set in the 1970s. Specifically, it starts out in 1972.
- Power Copying: The Akrida queen has the powers of multiple monsters from consuming their essences. She also gained their weaknesses, like being hurt by silver, although it's not enough to kill her.
- Prequel: The Winchesters is a prequel to Supernatural and is set before Sam and Dean's births. There are indications, however, that it's actually an alternate universe: in the Supernatural episode "In the Beginning", set a year after this show begins, John has no knowledge of the supernatural and has explicitly never hunted. In the pilot of The Winchesters he joins up with Mary, Carlos and Lata because he goes to the Men of Letters clubhouse in Lawrence and witnesses Mary fighting with a demon outside. This happens because an unknown man gave him a letter from his father, Henry. A later episode reveals that a self-resurrected, dimension-hopping Dean, from the original show, was the man in question, suggesting that his intervention changed history for this reality.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: An Akrida makes Kyle stab himself to death while puppeting his body in order to frame John for his murder at the end of "Suspicious Minds". The same Akrida later threatens to do likewise to Lata in "Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye".
- Relationship Upgrade: After being ship-teased for several episodes, John and Mary become an Official Couple at the end of "Hang on to Your Life".
- The Reveal:
- The reason why this story goes against the established canon is that Dean somehow traveled back in time to give his father a letter, setting John on a different path.
- The season finale finally explains everything: Dean didn't time travel; after his death in the series finale of Supernatural, he traveled The Multiverse to find a universe where his family had a happier path, confirming that The Winchesters is in an alternate universe from the original show (explaining all the discrepancies). Also, the Akrida were created by Chuck as a backup plan to destroy everything if he lost.
- Romantic False Lead: In "You're Lost Little Girl", Mary goes on movie date with a journalist named Kyle.
- Series Continuity Error: The vampires in "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" are affected by holy water, which was established in Supernatural as not doing anything to them. Justified by The Reveal that The Winchesters is set in a different universe, as Supernatural had established that different universes have different rules for their magic and monsters.
- Ship Tease:
- Lata is teased with Ada's son Tony at the end of "Legend of a Mind". In "Suspicious Minds", we learn they've been dating in dreams.
- Mary and John, obviously, since they're a Foregone Conclusion.
- Shout-Out:
- In "You're Lost Little Girl", they say that the first rule of Monster Club is to keep it secret (not directly quoting Fight Club since it won't be written for well over a decade, but the meta-reference is clear).
- In "Reflections", Carlos refers to Ada as "our very own Samantha Stephens."
- In "Cast Your Fate to the Wind", Carlos says that bank-heisting vampires would make a fantastic movie.
- The Smart Guy: Lata and Ada both primarily contribute to the hunts through research, lore knowledge, forensics, and using magical items, concoctions and rituals if one is called for.
- Spin-Off: Again, a prequel spin-off of Supernatural, the third attempt at a spin-off, after the backdoor pilots for Bloodlines and Wayward Sisters failed. Interestingly, the spin-off that's actually going to series is the one that didn't get a Poorly Disguised Pilot on the main show.
- Stealth Sequel: Despite the series being billed as a prequel, the finale confirms that the series takes place after the events of Supernatural, in an alternate universe where it's still the 70s, influenced by a postmortem Dean, with other influences of Jack as the new God and a backup plan from former God Chuck.
- Strange Minds Think Alike: In the pilot, both John and Carlos say the Men of Letters are "like paranormal freemasons" when they learn of them, to Mary's annoyance.
- Technical Pacifist: Latika is a self-described pacifist who doesn't fight monsters directly. She's more than happy to help the others identify them and exploit their weaknesses, though, and also had no problem using a monster-eating box against a demon in the pilot.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted. In the episode "Masters of War", John and Carlos investigate suspicious deaths among a veterans group at a psychiatric hospital by checking in under the pretext of receiving therapy for their (real) traumatic experiences in the Vietnam War. Carlos actually gets a lot out of their first session and decides to keep seeing Dr. Z long-term. John is much less receptive.
- Things That Go "Bump" in the Night: In "You're Lost Little Girl", the team battles a Bori Baba, a Hindu demon that kidnaps children by baiting them with beloved lost objects.
- True Companions: The core four characters, with Carlos outright referring to the others as his family in "Hang on to Your Life".
- True Sight: In "You've Got a Friend", Lata and Carlos recover a bracelet Mary's cousin Maggie owned that grants its wearer this, blessed by the Greek god of darkness Erebus to help his followers uncover secrets. Putting it on exposes Akrida-possessed people to the wearer. Unfortunately, if the wearer has a dark secret themself, they'll be forced by Living Shadows to confront it first, as Lata discovers.
- Unwanted Assistance: John's attempts to help Mary fight a demon in the pilot result in him accidentally hitting her instead multiple times, prompting her to exclaim, "Stop helping!"
- The Vietnam Vet: John is one, and returns home to Lawrence, Kansas in the pilot. Carlos also turns out to have served in the navy for a while.
- The Virus: A variation, since they don't pass it on through direct bodily contact, but people who have been turned into Monster Clowns in "The Tears of a Clown" will try to get others to look into the one special mirror in the funhouse that turns them into more Monster Clowns.
- Vitriolic Best Buds: Mary and Carlos. They've been friends a good while, but their relationship has had its ups and downs. Carlos and Latika engage in Snark-to-Snark Combat as well.
- Wham Shot: The eighth episode, "Hang on to Your Life", ends with John recognizing the man in a photo taken by Samuel Campbell as the same man who gave him his father's letter when he came back from Vietnam. It's Dean.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: When they were operational, the Men of Letters had no problem with conducting extremely invasive experiments on monsters both living and dead, including lobotomizing some to turn into guards for their more secure locations.
- Wrench Wench: Millie Winchester is a mechanic who owns and operates the Winchesters Garage.
- Wrongful Accusation Insurance: At the end of "The Tears of a Clown", finding a witness who can testify that Akrida-controlled Kyle lied about being attacked by John in his emergency call to the police is enough to get John cleared of all charges so that he and Mary can return to Lawrence. This is despite the fact that John illegally escaped custody and Mary is known to have helped him do it, assaulting and disabling police officers in the process, which in Real Life would still result in jail time for both of them.
- Yoko Oh No: Discussed by Millie in "Masters of War", using "Is Yoko Ono unfairly blamed for the breakup of the Beatles?" as a rhetorical "yes".
- Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: After using the Ostium box to exorcise the Akrida leader possessing Rockin' Roxy in "Reflections", the team discover she was not the queen as they'd assumed.
