The Winchesters Showrunner Talks Exploring Mary’s “Heart Space” (Exclusive)

As The CW’s Supernatural prequel, The Winchesters, continues, viewers are taken even further into the love story between Mary Campbell and John Winchester, the couple that will eventually become the parents of everyone’s favorite monster hunting brothers, Sam and Dean. But part of telling that story is digging into the individual stories of these characters and their experiences and this week’s episode, “You’re Lost Little Girl” does that for Mary (Meg Donnelly). As the series continues Mary’s search for her father, this episode digs a bit more into some of what Mary is feeling and series showrunner Robbie Thompson says that it was really important for the show to dig into what he called Mary’s “heart space” this week.

Warning: spoilers for this week’s episode of The Winchesters, “You’re Lost Little Girl”, below.

In the episode, Mary and the rest of the group find themselves dealing with the Bori Baba, a monster who lures in its victims — generally children — with the return of something they’ve lost only to drag them into his sack where he tortures them and eats them alive. Mary’s neighbor, Carrie, is taken by the Bori Baba and when her brother is also taken, Mary gets herself taken as well. It’s later revealed that in order to escape the Bori Baba, all one has to do is let go of the lost or missing thing which both children readily do, but Mary finds herself holding on because the thing she’s dealing with is the idea of what comes after she finds her father and leaves hunting for good.  Speaking with ComicBook.com, Thompson said that it was really important this episode to dig into how Mary is both thinking and feeling considering this aspect of her life now.

“I do think that this episode in particular, we really wanted to drill down a little bit more on Mary’s headspace and more importantly, her heart space,” Thompson said. “This is somebody who was born and raised hunting and has, for good reason, decided she wants to leave this life, but what does that really look like? And that was one of the things that, early on in the development of this, I got the most excited about because we knew that from the mothership, but what was the decision tree that led to that? What were the emotions behind that? What was it like when she first decided? What was it like when she told her parents?”

He continued, “All of that stuff felt like we could really sink our teeth into, and I just have to give credit where it’s due, I think Meg has just done a phenomenal job. It’s a hard thing to depict someone whose walls are up. I think this is such a great job she does in this episode of really letting us in and into that head and heart space and I couldn’t ask for a better partner. She’s fantastic.”

What is The Winchesters about?

According to the series’ official description, “Before Sam and Dean, there was John and Mary. Told from the perspective of Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), The Winchesters is the epic, untold love story of how John met Mary and how they put it all on the line not only to save their love, but the entire world.” The series is set to dive into the couple’s origin story and will be narrated by Dean.

Who stars in The Winchesters?

The Winchesters stars Drake Rodger as John Winchester, Meg Donnelly as Mary Campbell, Bianca Kajilich as Millie Winchester, Demetria McKinney as Ada Monroe, Nida Khurshid as Latika Desai, and Jojo Fleites as Carlos Cervantez. It was also recently announced that Bridget Regan, who may be best known to The CW audiences for her appearance as Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy on Batwoman, had been cast as Rockin’ Roxy, a character described as a “honey-voiced pirate radio DJ” who has taken over the airwaves in Lawrence, Kansas to “broadcast a wicked new sound. Not surprisingly, being the world of Supernatural and all, Roxy’s listeners aren’t all of the human variety.”

The Winchesters airs Tuesdays at 8/7c on The CW.