20 years later, and our love for Supernatural is still going strong. There’s nothing quite like the adventures of Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), and revisiting the show’s earliest horror-fueled seasons often leads to new questions that the rest of the long-running series either forgot about entirely or simply failed to answer. One such question: who is Sam and Dean’s unnamed uncle? Did you even know that the Winchesters had an uncle? Unless you’ve recently found yourself revisiting the show’s second season, this fun family fact probably drove right past you…
‘Supernatural’ References Sam and Dean’s Uncle in Season 2
Early in the show’s run, Sam and Dean were plagued by guilt, the former due to the death of his girlfriend Jessica (Adrianne Palicki) and the latter because of the sacrifice of their father, John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). And that’s not even counting the death of their mother, Mary Winchester (Samantha Smith), back when the boys were just children. With so much tragedy in their family life, it’s easy to just remember the highlights and forget the rest, but if you listen closely, we learn something quite interesting about their extended family in Season 2’s “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things.”
While driving to Greenville, Illinois to pay respects to their mother’s headstone, Dean notes that it was put up by some uncle — a man they never even met. Of course, the way Dean says it, there’s been some debate on whether he’s saying “her uncle” (as in Mary’s uncle) or “our uncle” (as in Mary’s brother), though the captioning on Netflix uses the latter. Nevertheless, the point remains that there’s some other relative out there that Supernatural doesn’t address again.
When Dean time-travels to the past in Season 4, meeting a younger version of his mother, we hear absolutely nothing about Mary’s uncle or brother. If we’re going based on the Netflix captioning, then Mary should have a sibling out there. Yet, “In the Beginning” not only makes no reference to another Campbell beyond Mary’s father, Samuel (Mitch Pileggi), and mother, Deanna (Allison Hossack), but there’s no physical evidence in their home that such a person ever existed. This is even true of the Campbell family in the alternate universe story The Winchesters, which reminds us that neither John (Drake Rodger) nor Mary (Meg Donnelly) had siblings of any sort. When the extended Campbell family is more properly introduced in Season 6 of the original show, the new Campbells are considered distant relatives, as if this comment from Season 2 had been long forgotten. But there is one source that speaks more directly to this mysterious uncle…
The ‘Supernatural: Origins’ Comic Book Introduced Jacob Campbell
There is one piece of Supernatural media that expands on this mysterious uncle further. The WildStorm comic book prequel Supernatural: Origins was released during the show’s second season and followed John Winchester as he engaged with the paranormal just after his wife’s murder. It’s a great comic book that gives us some greater context into how John found himself getting into hunting in the first place. But it also reveals something about Sam and Dean’s uncle, a man named Jacob Campbell. Here, Jacob is established as Mary’s older brother who watched over her almost like a father when their parents died. Although he attempts to take custody of Sam and Dean, John convinces him to help him search for Mary’s killer, ultimately resulting in Jacob being mauled to death by a hellhound.
This would explain why Sam and Dean never got to know their uncle, and why John likely never spoke about him. But despite that, the six-issue comic book is no longer considered canon, making this a strange continuity error that Supernatural never took the time to resolve. To make matters more complicated, the Alex Irvine tie-in novel John Winchester’s Journal also refers to a Jacob Campbell, though here he’s presented as Mary’s uncle from Illinois rather than her brother. Because neither tie-in story is technically canon to the show itself, fans can take this throwaway line by Dean to mean whatever they want, but one thing remains clear no matter if Jacob Campbell is Mary’s brother or uncle: the Winchesters had another relative out there that they never knew.
Source: collider.com