Dean Winchester

Who is Dean when the series begins?

The elder of two brothers raised to hunt. Their mother, Mary, was killed by the demon Azazel when Dean was four, and their father, John, answered by learning everything he could about the things that kill people and teaching his sons to kill them first. Dean was handed the job of looking after Sam from childhood, and the series never lets him put it down. When the story opens he is 26, already a seasoned hunter, and his first move is to ask his brother, away at college, to help look for their missing father.

That opening sets the terms for fifteen seasons. Dean is the soldier of the two, loyal to his father's methods, quick with a joke and a gun, and inclined to see the world in black and white where Sam sees shades of grey. Under the swagger the show keeps finding the same fear, that he is worth only what he can do for his family. Nearly every great choice he makes, from the deal that costs him his soul to the bargains he strikes with angels and demons, is a choice to protect Sam at his own expense.

Why does the Impala matter so much to him?

Because it is the closest thing the Winchesters have to a home. The black 1967 Chevrolet Impala was their father's car and became Dean's on his eighteenth birthday, and the brothers live out of it for most of the series, its trunk fitted out as an armoury for every kind of monster. Dean calls it Baby, guards it almost as fiercely as he guards his family, and rebuilds it with his own hands after it is all but destroyed at the end of the first season.

The car also carries the show's sense of continuity. It is there in the opening minutes of the very first episode, a whole episode of season 11 is told from its point of view, and after Dean's death it passes to Sam, who keeps it into old age. Few objects in television have been asked to hold so much of one family's history, and the series uses it to say, without a word of dialogue, that these men never had anywhere else to go.

What did Hell and the Mark of Cain do to him?

They turned him into the thing he hunts, twice. At the end of season 2 Dean trades his soul to a crossroads demon to bring Sam back from the dead, and at the end of season 3 the debt falls due and hellhounds drag him to Hell. There he eventually agrees to torture other souls to escape his own torment, until the angel Castiel pulls him out at the start of season 4. The show treats that memory as a wound that never closes: what haunts him is less what was done to him than that he came to enjoy the work.

The Mark of Cain repeats the pattern. In season 9 Dean takes the Mark from Cain himself, at Crowley's urging, so that he can use the First Blade against the Knight of Hell Abaddon; he kills her, but the Mark feeds on rage, and when he is killed while wearing it he comes back as a demon. Sam cures him in season 10, and the Mark only comes off at the end of that season, at the price of releasing the Darkness on the world.

Why is he Michael's vessel, and what did he do with it?

Because of his blood. The Winchester and Campbell families share a line that runs back to Cain and Abel, and that makes Dean the archangel Michael's true vessel, as Sam is Lucifer's. In season 5 he comes close to saying yes, until Sam's faith in him sends him looking for another way. Years later, in season 13, he does say yes, to a Michael from another world, for the strength to kill Lucifer, and he does kill him; then the archangel takes over his body and leaves in it. The arc is the show's plainest statement of what Dean fears most: losing control of himself to someone else's war.

Why does his story end the way it does?

Dean dies in the final episode on an ordinary hunt, killed by a vampire. After a season spent defying God himself, the show chose to end its hero on the job rather than in a cosmic battle, and that choice says what the series thought it was about all along: the family trade of protecting strangers from monsters, kept up to the very last day. Sam lives on, keeps the car, raises a son he names Dean and dies an old man, and the brothers meet again in Heaven. For a hunter, a death in the line of work was the most honest ending the story could give him.