All signs point toward The Winchesters happening in a separate universe to Supernatural, but other clues subtly suggest the spinoff’s world was already mentioned during the main show’s final season. The continuity discrepancies between Supernatural and The Winchesters, the spinoff prequel developed by Jensen and Danneel Ackles, are no secret. The prequel follows John Winchester and Mary Campbell saving people and hunting things in their late-teens, even though the entire premise of Supernatural depends on John remaining ignorant to hidden paranormal threats until Mary’s death much later in the timeline. Ackles has promised answers are forthcoming but, until then, glaring canon issues cast a shadow over The Winchesters.
A potential explanation for The Winchesters playing fast-and-loose with Supernatural history is that the two shows take place in separate universes. The multiverse is a concept Supernatural knows frighteningly well, and season 15 featured a parallel world in which John Winchester, alongside his two sons, created HunterCorp – a corporation dedicated to saving the world from monsters. In this alternate timeline, Sam and Dean became rich hunters pampered by their still-alive father – utterly unlike Supernatural‘s usual sibling protagonists. Strange though it may seem, evidence hints that The Winchesters is actually a HunterCorp universe prequel, and follows the parents of the rich Winchester brothers from Supernatural season 15.
The Winchesters Probably Takes Place In An Alternate Universe
With each passing episode, The Winchesters continues to rack up continuity wrinkles, contradicting Supernatural in more ways than just the central premise of young John Winchester becoming a hunter. The spinoff must also explain how Carlos Cervantes and Latika Dar, who are as close as family to John and Mary in The Winchesters, receive nary a mention throughout 15 entire seasons of Supernatural. In that same spirit, it seems astounding that Sam and Dean never came across the significant threat posed by the Akrida during their hunting adventures. With so many Supernatural deviations to explain, a parallel universe setting is rapidly becoming The Winchesters‘ most attractive get-out clause.
Throwing further weight behind that theory, The Winchesters‘ very first big bad in season 1 are an interdimensional adversary identified as the Akrida. Led by their Queen, the Akrida possess the ability to traverse parallel universes, and the weapon used to defeat them, the Ostium, can also crack open portals to faraway worlds. While the connection between Supernatural and The Winchesters remains ambiguous, the presence of universe-hopping Akrida and an interdimensional vacuum box points toward the spinoff happening in a universe quite apart from Sam and Dean’s.
The Winchesters’ Canon Changes Can Explain Supernatural’s HunterCorp
In the name of tormenting Sam and Dean, Chuck created a host of different universes, and The Winchesters could, in theory, take place in any of them. With that said, John and Mary’s spinoff shares a surprising amount of crossover with the HunterCorp universe. Logic would suggest that for John Winchester to establish a corporation dedicated to hunting, he would need to enter the business much earlier than the night Mary dies in 1983. According to The Winchesters‘ canon, John began killing monsters a decade earlier in 1972, and this timescale affords much more time for Sam and Dean’s father to turn his youthful hunting activities into a fully-fledged enterprise.
Jojo Fleites’ Carlos and Nida Khurshid’s Lata act as constant companions in John and Mary’s The Winchesters Scooby gang. If The Winchesters takes place in the HunterCorp universe, one would imagine Carlos and Lata both occupy top jobs within John Winchester’s corporation. In this version of events, young Sam and Dean would grow up spending far more time with Carlos and Lata than gritty, rural hunters like Bobby Singer. This change can help explain why HunterCorp Sam and Dean are so radically different in Supernatural season 15. Both characters have sharper fashion sense – Carlos’ influence peeking through, perhaps – and appear more erudite, alluding toward some input from Lata.
HunterCorp Fits John & Mary’s The Winchesters Stories
The connection between The Winchesters and Supernatural‘s HunterCorp universe grows stronger still when examining the emotional arcs of John and Mary in the prequel spinoff. Drake Rodger’s young John undergoes an identity crisis in The Winchesters. Uncertain about his life post-Vietnam, John is desperate to leave a mark upon the world and live up to his father, Henry, who John knows saved the world through his work with the Men of Letters. John’s existential uncertainty works perfectly as a motivation to establish a hugely successful global hunting operation. Supernatural‘s original John was driven by revenge, and had no such dreams. The Winchesters‘ John is ambitious and eager to give his life purpose.
Meg Donnelly’s Mary Campbell, meanwhile, is desperate to quit hunting in The Winchesters. Mary resents how Supernatural Campbell family members are expected to hunt monsters for a living, and new pal John has been vocal in encouraging Mary to explore her dreams and aspirations beyond beheading vampires and making pretty patterns on the floor with salt. Creating an organization like HunterCorp, where the workload of vanquishing monsters is spread around and rewarded rather than forced upon small groups of hunters like the Campbell family, could be how John creates a world where the likes of Mary can break away from the hunting lifestyle should they wish.
The Winchesters Happening In HunterCorp World Explains Dean’s Role
Canon conundrums aside, Jensen Ackles’ role as Dean in The Winchesters adds a different angle of curiosity to the spinoff. More than just narrating John and Mary’s backstory, Dean Winchester is actually investigating how his parents met, riding his Impala and cracking the case from an unknown location. The Winchesters has promised an eventual answer to where Dean is located, but given his death in Supernatural season 15, Ackles’ character is likely knocking around Heaven during The Winchesters, using the afterlife’s detachment from time and space to examine what happened to his parents.
Rather than glancing over his own parents’ lives – a story Dean knows all too well – the dead Dean Winchester could be more inclined to look at how John and Mary fared in other worlds. Dean might be especially interested in the version of John he already knows survived until the end – the John who founded HunterCorp. Dean learned about this prosperous variant of his dad through the hipster Sam and Dean who traveled between universes in Supernatural season 15. After his death, Dean may have given into curiosity and peeked at how HunterCorp John’s early life differed, wondering how his alternate self ended up a wealthy, non-flannel-wearing hunter.
The Winchesters‘ big secret may be that it documents Dean Winchester in Heaven, figuring out how his father suffered so badly when Alternate Dean’s dad enjoyed renown and fortune. Not only would this explain every single canon problem in The Winchesters, it means the longer the Supernatural spinoff progresses, the closer Drake Rodger’s version of John will come to dreaming up the idea for HunterCorp. Intriguingly, the fate of HunterCorp John remains open-ended, with Supernatural merely revealing he got separated from his sons while crossing universes. There door is, therefore, open for an older John Winchester variant to feature in The Winchesters.
