The Winchesters is finally back to ring in the new year after taking a month-long hiatus following the show’s mid-season finale, and this week's new episode did not disappoint. Episode 8 has been one of the strongest installments of the season, in terms of both storyline and nostalgia for the early days of the Supernatural series.
One of the biggest issues Supernatural fans have had with The Winchesters is how the new show’s plot disrupts the canon that was already established throughout all 15 seasons of the original show. However, there were two big bomb drops this week that just might explain all the canonical discrepancies.
For starters, one of the biggest and best surprises this week was the return of the trickster, a character Supernatural fans met all the way back in 2006 when SPN season 2 originally aired. Much like Sam and Dean, The Winchesters gang is under the impression that the trickster is actually the demigod Loki, which Supernatural audiences know isn’t quite the case.
The tricker is actually the archangel Gabriel, as he revealed in season 5 while trying to encourage Sam and Dean to fight in the apocalypse. Although he’s currently trapped in a mirror, those who have watched Supernatural know that a hunter needs an angel blade in order to kill a creature like Gabriel.
Supernatural fans will likely also remember the time Gabriel told Sam and Dean that their birth was predestined, because Heaven and Hell needed two brothers to serve as vessels for Michael and Lucifer. John and Mary’s eventual marriage was also pre-planned so that Sam and Dean could one day live.
So, it’s quite possible that Gabriel’s appearance in The Winchesters will have something to do with the impending apocalypse. Perhaps his real goal was to meddle in the affairs of John and Mary to change the events that go down in seasons 4 and 5 of Supernatural.
There’s also a chance that Gabriel made a guest-appearance just to please SPN fans by including a familiar face, but based on promises made by Jensen Ackles, it’s much more likely Gabriel’s return will have something to do with explaining the wonky Winchesters plot line that’s been messing up the SPN canon.
Ackles was also involved with the next big bomb drop in episode 8, which came right at the end of the episode and officially brought Dean Winchester into the fold. Ackles has only appeared as Dean in The Winchesters through narration, except for a single, solo scene from episode 1.
As it turns out, Dean is the one who gave John the letter written by Harry, upon John's return from the Vietnam War. Having just been photographed by Samuel’s cameras and semi-identified by his future parents, John and Mary will surely get to the bottom of why Dean is following them, even though they don’t know who he is yet.
Additionally, Dean’s physical presence in the series strongly implies he’s jumped through time, given that he shows up as an adult and isn’t born until 1979, according to Supernatural. Fans will hopefully get a more in depth explanation as the latter half of the series airs throughout 2023, but Dean’s journey through time likely has something to do with why the story of John and Mary in The Winchesters differs from the one that was told in Supernatural.
But aside from the return of a couple familiar faces, episode 8 also gave a lot more screen time to Carlos and Lata than usual. Slowly but surely throughout the first 7 episodes, pieces of their past have been getting uncovered, and another bit of Carlos’ pre-hunting life reared its head in the form of an ex-band mate.
Millie Winchester was also present a lot more in this episode, and it’s becoming very clear that she wants to be as involved as hunting as possible, without putting herself in too much danger. She and John also seem to be at a very great point in their relationship, posing a great juxtaposition to the warring Samuel and Mary.
Mary and Samuel clearly still have some father-daughter issues to work out, but they started making progress towards healing their relationship near the end of the episode. Samuel seems to know he messed up by abandoning Mary to find the Akrida on his own, but he does reveal that he did so because his heart was in the right place.
Samuel and Mary’s issues also led John to give Samuel some ironic parenting advice, in which he tells Samuel to treat Mary like a daughter, not a soldier. Supernatural fans know that John winds up making that same mistake in the future, but his quip does eventually lead to some healthy problem-solving between Mary and Samuel.
The Winchesters truthfully depicts much healthier parent-child relationships than Supernatural ever did, and episode 8 made it very clear that the prequel has much more in store for all the characters in the ever-expanding SPN universe.