Showrunner Robbie Thompson explains how the Season 1 finale of The Winchesters opened new doors for the Supernatural universe
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.
The Winchesters, Drake Rodger, Meg Donnelly The CW
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.
Foundation Showrunner David S. Goyer on Landing the Season 2 Finale and What Made It Work
Season 3 is already written and will “get even wilder
Season 3 is already written and will “get even wilder”
Scott Huver
Sept. 15, 2023 at 3:40 p.m. PT
Jared Harris and Lou Llobell, Foundation
Jared Harris and Lou Llobell, Foundation Apple TV+
Foundation, the pioneering science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s legendarily epic series of novels and short stories written over the course of five decades and chronicling the various rises and falls of galactic superpowers throughout several centuries, was a singular achievement in genre storytelling, and the Apple+ television adaptation of the collective work — long considered unadaptable by Hollywood — as helmed by writer-producer David S. Goyer (Dark City, The Dark Knight trilogy) is itself breaking new ground in longform storytelling with massive scope.
Following a debut season that rendered the interplanetary landscape, laid down the history and rules, and introduced key players that will either endure or leave a lasting effect on the millennium-long tale, Foundation’s second season wowed fans and critics alike by ratcheting up every element of its long game, from ever more compelling, endearing, and relatable characters to a richer, juicier mythology to dramatic stakes with immediate and long-term repercussions that resonated on both cosmic and deeply personal levels.
Following the Season 2 finale, Goyer joined TV Guide to explore the payoffs of the big swings taken — in an already huge-swinging high concept storyline — that revealed to viewers that surprises lurk around every corner, no character is safe from an unexpected fate, and that every season — including the already-written, if not-yet-greenlit, third installment — offers the promise of a massive reset by hurtling decades, perhaps centuries, into the future.
TV Guide: This is such a creatively challenging project, taking the essences of Isaac Asimov’s literary Foundation series but “remixing” it — a phrase you used the last time we spoke — into something fresh and new. Tell me a little bit about the vision for the entire second season, the elements that you wanted to take from Asimov’s works this time around, remixing them, and how you envisioned getting from start to finish.
David Goyer: Well, first of all, as we embarked on Season 2, I felt like I had a huge weight lifted off my shoulders, because there was so much exposition that we had to get through, particularly the first three episodes of Season 1 in terms of the table setting, the Galactic Empire, the Foundation, jump ships, psychohistory, how the Genetics Dynasty worked, and we didn’t have to do any of that for Season 2. So that was really exciting for me, because I felt like we could hit the ground running.
The other thing that’s exciting about the structure that we came up with is, the show is this odd hybrid between a serialized show and an anthology, meaning that as we go to each season, many times — not always, but many times — the plan is there’s this big reset and so we get to introduce a whole bunch of new characters. Or in the case of the clones, we get to meet whole new iterations of them, and that’s really invigorating for us as showrunners because it means we can pick up the story in an entirely different way.
I’ve always loved the characters of Bel Riose and Hober, so I was really excited to get to them in Season 2. I was always intrigued with the idea that Asimov came up with the Church of Scientism, of the Foundation, selling technology via religion, and I thought that was something that we could expand upon. I think a lot of our jobs, particularly in Season 2, is expanding things that Asimov hinted at or glossed over in his early short stories. And then I think what’s generally the case with a lot of our show is, a lot of our characters are composite characters, so Gaal is really Gaal Dornick and kind of a fusion with a character named Wanda Seldon, who was Hari Seldon’s granddaughter. Hober Mallow is sort of a fusion between Hober Mallow and another character called Lathan Devers.
I was excited to introduce more black humor, excited to, in the case of Lee Pace’s naked fight scene, very early on, shock the audience and say, “Hey, you thought we were this dry academic show?” And yes, we’re a very heady show, but I wanted to show early on that it was a big tent and that we could do things that, at least coming from Season 1, one wouldn’t expect in Foundation, and my hope… It seems like the fans and the critics really embraced Season 2, and Lord knows the audience has really broadened and Apple’s very happy, but my hope coming out of Season 2 is that fans will say, “Wow — expect the unexpected. Anything could happen in this show, anyone could die, anyone could live.”
I mean, we’re just going to take big swings and we’re going to go wild places and sometimes we’re going to subvert expectations.
Or even, if you look at Episode 10 of this season, shows like Game of Thrones have this habit of [saying], “Well, Episode 9, the penultimate episode, is the really big episode, and then Episode 10 is the falling action.” And there’s no question our Episode 9 was really big, but then if you think about the events that happened in Episode 10 — in some ways, in terms of what is happening to our lead characters, even bigger dramatic events happen in Episode 10, and that subverts the expectation of how these shows unroll. And that’s something we’re very cognizant of, is thinking about the rhythms that we’ve fallen into as an audience and saying, “How can we do something different?”
The best shows and movies on Apple TV+
You mentioned the reaction from the audience and from the critics, and if you set the table in Season 1, you set the hook in Season 2. A lot of that is because of what you just referenced: You took some big swings. Tell me about what felt risky or seemed like a big swing when you thought of it at the beginning, but really played out as well as or better than you even expected?
Goyer: I would say that the reaction to Season 2 is better than I had hoped for. I was hoping that we would build our audience, I was hoping that people would embrace the show even more, but [the praise seems] universal, and that’s wild. It’s nice to see that a lot of our instincts seem to have paid off.
It’s also important to remember: I know some people are upset that we killed certain characters, and some people might be wondering even at the end of Season 2, “Well, why did they do X? It’s not readily apparent.” I’m comfortable with that. One of the things that we’re doing with the show is trusting the audience of playing the long game. People are debating why Dr. Seldon gave Demerzel the Prime Radiant — they should be debating that. We’re going to answer that question, but they should be debating that. That is curious.
People are wondering how much agency Demerzel has with our reveals about the programming. They should be wondering that. We haven’t answered certain questions — they should be wondering that. People are wondering about how much the Vault can do and how Hari could have built that, and I think that’s a valid question to ask. Maybe another thing to ponder is whether or not Hari had help at some point and who helped him and why, and so, we try in each season to answer a lot of the questions that have built up over the course of the season but leave some big things hanging.
Frankly, I’m trying to make the kind of show that I would like to watch, and I love sticking into a big, giant epic, I love being surprised, I love the kind of show that I can watch more than once, where I could go back and pick up nuances that I might’ve missed.
So I’m trying to make the kind of show that my wife and I love and like to get lost in. And particularly in science fiction, I felt that no one had really taken this kind of epic big swing before, and there was an opening in the market for that. And so what I’m hoping with Season 2 is people go, “Oh wow, I see what they’re doing now. The possibilities are limitless.”
And I will say this: we’re still waiting on a Season 3 pickup. We’ve written Season 3 — because we have to write these seasons sometimes years in advance — and as wild as Season 2 has gotten, in many ways it’s only prelude for Season 3. Season 3 will get even wilder.
Ben Daniels, Foundation Apple TV+
Because of the epic time span, we know that no character is truly safe in this story, and in this season you developed so many characters that really resonated with the audience. I’m curious about that process for you, about “killing your darlings,” especially when some of these actors breathe so much wonderful extra life into the characters that you’ve conceived. Tell me about those hard decisions of, like, “We’ve got to let this character go even though we know the audience loves them, and we love them!”
Goyer: Look, it was really hard for me to kill Salvor, but I thought it was right for the story. Bel Riose and Hober Mallow are two of my favorite Asimov characters of all time, and I think Ben Daniels and Dimitri Leonidas just did spectacular jobs. And there was a part of me and my fellow writers that thought, “Oh, could we figure out a way to save one of them?” And I’m sure we could have, but it just felt like their journey had come to an end.
And I know that we’ve done a couple of fake-outs, the fact that we’ve destroyed the planet but saved the citizens of Terminus, and I just felt like we can’t do that too many times and some of these deaths have to stick, and shockingly, we killed off six major characters in Episode 10, and I think if we had saved Hober or Bel at the last moment, it would’ve felt cheap.
You can’t save everyone, but the inverse of that is everyone assumed Glawen is dead, and Glawen survived, which I think is a lovely dramatic flip around that people weren’t expecting. I don’t believe in characters having “plot armor,” but even the characters we love… that’s another reason why I think it was important to tell the audience that a character like Salvor could die, everyone assumed because she was dying in the future, that at least until we got to that fight with The Mule, she was safe, and I think it’s important to let the audience know that that’s not necessarily the case, but her sacrifice did two things, it brought Hari and Gaal closer together, and it taught Hari and Gaal, and it taught the audience, that the future isn’t immutable, that even with the advent of a character like The Mule, humanity writ large has a chance.
I think one of the most effective elements of Season 2 is the use of the Genetic Dynasty, which I know is an original creation of yours that you were able to insert into this franchise that you’ve loved for a really long time, and it’s really worked. I’m curious about that, that sensation for you to know, “Okay, I took a swing here to add this new layer to Asimov’s story and it’s just worked terrifically.” What’s that felt like for you?
Goyer: Look, it’s enormously gratifying, because I didn’t know how people would respond, I didn’t know how diehard book readers would respond because it’s such a huge departure from the books, but it has led to all of these incredibly juicy stories, and a lot of people assume after Episode 9 that the Genetic Dynasty would be over and done with at the end of the season, which is not the case: There’s still quite a bit of story to tell, but we turn the screws quite a bit and that tension will continue on to next season. It’s gratifying. Most of our instincts seem to have paid off, and you never know how the audience is going to receive what you put out into the world, and you can’t hang your identity on how that’s received, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t gratifying that a lot of these gut instincts have paid off.
You’ve got Season 3 written. How far ahead have you conceived this entire series, even if it’s just gaming it out in your brain? Do you know the whole scope of what you’d like to do if you’re able to?
Goyer: We have the broad strokes of [Season] 4 all mapped out. We know where all the major characters wind up at the end of [Season] 4. It doesn’t mean we might not shimmy along the way. We have some very broad strokes for how some of the subsequent seasons would map out. I don’t know how many seasons I’m going to get and I don’t want to leave the audience hanging, so we’re building a satisfying offramp that can be achieved at the end [Season] 4 and another one at the end of [Season] 6, and the ultimate one at the end of [Season] 8.
I kind of know what the last episode is and what the ultimate fate of some of our ongoing characters will be, and it’s just a question of whether or not that happens at the end of Four or whether or not that happens at the end of something like a Season Six or a Season Eight, but I certainly know what the last 15 minutes of the show are, and I doubt that’s going to change much, and we’ve planted seeds for those even from the first episode.
There’s a pretty strong indication with that last moment in the finale that the next season may belong in large part to The Mule, which is a character fans of the books have been anxiously waiting for and you’ve gotten to as quickly as you can. Is that safe to say that Season 3 is going to be The Mule’s big season?
Goyer: Yeah, that’s safe to say. Season 3 is definitely the season of The Mule, and it’s very exciting. It was exciting to me when I met that character through Asimov because he kind of T-boned all of psychohistory, and it’s exciting to me a character like that will be entering the fray into Season 3.
And the other thing that’s neat about that is when you have a character like that, one that poses an existential threat, both to the Foundations and to whatever remains of the Empire, then you create the opportunity for some really unusual alliances. So I think audiences can expect some characters that might have been considered enemies or antagonists of one another to team up when The Mule is around, and that provides for some really interesting pairings and some really juicy themes.
I will say, in the interregnum between Season 2 and a hopeful Season 3, if people want to check my website, davidsgoyer.com, I’ve been posting show notes and behind the scenes photos, and I reluctantly joined Instagram a couple of weeks ago and I just got a trove of stuff from the last four years that I’ve been trickling out, and when we hopefully get the nod for Season 3, people can absolutely be expecting some updates on both my website and on Instagram.