Supernatural boss reveals original ending: Roadhouse reunions, Kansas performance

When Supernatural ended, the Winchester brothers found peace. After dying on the job, Dean (Jensen Ackles) got to experience Jack's heaven, which naturally involved beer, Baby, and classic rock. Sam (Jared Padalecki) then lived out the rest of his human life as a husband and father before eventually reuniting with his older brother in heaven.

But even as that ending aired, fans knew it was a little different from the original plan. Filming during the COVID-19 pandemic changed a few things. As co-showrunner Andrew Dabb previously told EW, "We did a rewrite once we knew what our COVID rules were going to be for episodes 19 and 20, and it changed some things, it did. Particularly in episode 20, there were things planned that just aren't feasible anymore."

And now, we know precisely what was supposed to go down in the first draft of that finale. Production designer Jerry Wanek put together a book for the cast and crew, complete with pages and pages of the various sets they built for the long-running series. For that book, Dabb wrote about one of the final sets constructed, which they ultimately didn't get to use: the inside of Harvelle's.

Dabb writes that "Dean was always going to end up in Heaven, and we were always going to see Sam's life in fast-forward, but those final moments were supposed to take place somewhere else. When Bob Singer and I sat down to talk about season 15, and our inevitable end, we came up with something that felt like a fitting version of Sam and Dean's Heaven: all the people the boys had met along the way (or, at least, those we could convince to fly to Vancouver) crowded into a re-built Roadhouse, as the band Kansas played our (official unofficial) theme song: 'Carry on Wayward Son.'"

That led to the building of the set in the photo, but as Dabb goes on to say, "when we opened back up in August, getting that many people in an enclosed space, much less traveling some of our favorites from LA and making them quarantine two weeks for what would be a half day's work, just wasn't realistic. Even Kansas, always game, didn't feel like they could make that trip, which we completely understood. And so that Supernatural ending … ended. I love what we have now, Dean in the car on the open road, but I have to admit that I sometimes think about our original idea — all of Sam and Dean's family and friends, and one of the greatest rock bands ever on a masterpiece of a set, and I miss is … even though it never really existed.

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