Post 1 of Ben Edlund commentary from SPN Then and Now podcast, 4/15/2024
On The End as a sign on the road to the haunted house:
"In the case of The End, I believe it came from a node that I was fumbling around with and that was because it was early in a season that was heading for an apocalypse and heading for this incredible stuff and I had this — the desire to put a sign up in front of the road that goes down to the haunted house that had a skull on it that said “It’s really scary down there, you don’t know how scary it can get” — just some kind of drumbeat base note of how heavy we were intending to go. So without giving away anything that was gonig to be part of the key mechanics of the end of the season. So that was a bit of a balancing act."
On Dean as a PH test of horror levels:
"In a sense Dean was the PH test or the strip reading to level of pain, horror, and change we were threatening. Jensen…he’s talked to me about that briefly, how much…how difficult that was. He did such an amazing job, he really was two people with the same shape, two totally different guys with the same five o’clock shadow."
Future Dean, scar tissue, and Zachariah’s propaganda tools:
"It was about the amount of experience that Dean had and he had been to the war, sorry, future Dean, had an amount of experience with this thing that present Dean was fearing and that was a distance or a difference in character that was depicted in scar tissue, basically, and regret, a tremendous amount of regret, because the sort of fulcrum of the universe had shifted and he couldn’t call out to angels anymore so he was…at least whatever this version of Dean was felt tremendous humility. Well, and when you look at it, it’s almost sort of charitable of us all, including me, I see it as its own universe that has its own reality but it’s also a perfectly tuned propaganda tool from Zachariah to have Dean do what he wants. It’s almost on the nose, like, come on."