INTRODUCTION

The CW television network's long-running series Supernatural (2005–) follows Dean Winchester and his younger brother Sam as they drive around the continental United States enacting the series’ credo: “saving people, hunting things: the family business.” In its early seasons, the series balanced episodic encounters with monsters from various cultural traditions against its ongoing investigation of the brothers’ formative trauma: who, or what, immolated their mother in baby Sam's nursery, over twenty years ago? As Supernatural became more serialized, demons emerged as the Winchesters’ chief adversaries and drivers of a larger plot: to release Lucifer from his infernal prison so that he and the Four Horsemen can lead the demons of Hell into war against the angels of Heaven, who have struggled to maintain control of the universe in the absence of God. With humanity caught in the crossfire, the stakes of the Winchesters’ imperative to save people, and the magnitude of the things they hunt, achieve cosmic proportions.

Given Supernatural's appropriation of Christian mythology in fashioning this apocalyptic scenario, one important character is absent: Jesus. Instead, the angels have identified another mortal savior on earth: Dean Winchester. The angel Zachariah informs Dean that his destiny, as the scion of a divinely orchestrated lineage, is to serve as the earthly vessel for the archangel Michael in his single combat against a similarly embodied Lucifer. Despite admitting that Dean will experience excruciating bodily suffering and his mind will be destroyed, the angels expect that, like Jesus, Dean will consent in exchange for greater goods: universal salvation and cosmic stability. The logic of this narrative, and of the Christian worldview that suffuses the cultural matrix inhabited by the series’ audience, assumes that Dean will say “yes.” Yet he refuses to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, determined to beat the devil on his own terms. Dean thus treads the path of another ancient salvific figure: Heracles, the greatest hero of the classical tradition.

Such tension within Supernatural's apocalyptic scenario, between Heaven's expectation of submission and Dean's insistence on agency, resurrects an ancient ideological conflict embodied by Jesus and Heracles, heroes with structurally similar biographical narratives representing different systems of belief.