To get ready for The Winchesters, Metacritic highlights the key Mary and John episodes of Supernatural to bone up on, in timeline chronological order. The Winchesters is executive produced by Ackles, Danneel Ackies, and Robbie Thompson, who all worked on the flagship series and therefore know a little something (oh, OK, a lot) about canon.

Mary, meanwhile, has been toying with giving up the hunting life but finds she can't quit that easily, so she continues to fight the good fight along with some very special friends, as the trailer for the new show teases.Īlthough The Winchesters will be telling a longer, more fully fleshed-out story about Mary and John, that doesn't mean you should completely ignore what Supernatural already set up.

The show, which is narrated by their adult son Dean, starts in 1972, right after John gets home from war and meets Mary - and also begins to learn about his own lineage. In The Winchesters, Meg Donnelly takes over the role of Mary (from Amy Gumenick and Samatha Smith in Supernatural), while Drake Rodger steps into John's shoes (vacated by Matt Cohen and Jeffrey Dean Morgan). But what if that's not the whole story? The forthcoming prequel spin-off (on the same network) titled The Winchesters delves deeper into Mary and John's backstory to show that when he gets home from Vietnam and meets Mary, he ends up quickly enmeshed in the world of the, well, supernatural. It also implied that John only got into hunting after Mary was killed.

The CW's long-running, demon-hunting drama Supernatural revealed that it is Mary's side of the family who are hunters, while John is a legacy for the Men of Letters, a more academic organization designed to keep monsters far away so you don't end up having to engage in combat. And in order for that to happen, a lot of things had to be on their side, including timing and the at-least temporary distance of monsters. You've heard it before: Before there could be Dean or Sam Winchester ( Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, respectively), Mary Campbell and John Winchester had to meet and fall in love.

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