The Winchesters Showrunner on John Dealing With His Past in “You’re Lost Little Girl” (Exclusive)

While The CW’s Supernatural prequel, The Winchesters, tells the love story of Sam and Dean’s parents, John and Mary, the series is also very much about how both of them as individuals with each episode exploring a little bit more of their own experiences and histories as that love story grows and the work to save the world in the process. In the case of John (Drake Rodger), that means dealing with his life now that he’s home from Vietnam with this week’s episode in particular digging a little deeper into what that looks like for him — especially when it comes to past relationships. Now, The Winchesters showrunner Robbie Thompson is opening up about how John is dealing with his past, as well as character he says we haven’t seen the last of.

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

The episode sees the team dealing with a missing child — specifically Mary’s young neighbor, who disappeared under mysterious circumstances that later turn out to be the monster, Bori Baba. When John and Mary show up at the scene, it turns out that one of the cops is someone John knows, Betty (Andrea Londo). It is revealed in the episode that Betty is his ex, and, in the end, she gives him back his engagement ring that he gave her before going to Vietnam and with the pair agreeing to be friends. Thompson told us that we’ll be seeing more of Betty as the series explores who John is and who he was before he came back home.

“When we talked a lot about John coming home from Vietnam, one of the things that first came to our minds here, ‘What did he leave behind?’ There’s this amazing book, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien that I had read in working on the pilot back in the day and we just talked a lot about who was back home. He had a life and what was that life,” Thompson said. “But he’s obviously come back a different person and he’s obviously stepped into a world where he is stepping into a legacy he didn’t even know about and that’s largely when we started talking about that, where this character Betty came from and I think, for John, he’s trying to do what he has done his whole life, which is find where his place in the world is.”

He continued, “The trauma of losing his dad spun him out and it spun him out in ways that we’re going to unpack through the course of the first handful of episodes and led him to some dark places, but there were bright spots as well and relationships that he had. But he has to figure out now where he wants to take his life and so it was, for us, a way of playing that history but also introducing the world of Lawrence, Kansas and fleshing that world out as well for John to realize that there’s a present life here, too, which is embodied in many ways by Betty, who’s a character we have not seen the last of.”

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.