An interesting episode of Supernatural last night. The main question posed is one that seems to come up on all the shows I watch, somehow.

Can we change our future? Our past? Is the timeline immutable? If you see your future, is it possible to change the past, or are you stuck because you’ve seen it, so whatever you do to avoid it will end up just changing the details but not the end result?

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that the five-years-in-the-future zombie-ish apocalyptic reality doesn’t have to happen. First off, the angels as we’ve seen them have not been exactly honest with Sam and Dean up to this point, and I wouldn’t put it past them to show Dean a reality that could, but doesn’t have to happen.

Second, would Eric Kripke really have embarked upon a five-year journey like this and, in the end, let the Devil and his minions win?

Of course, one of the things I’ve liked about Supernatural is that it doesn’t always deliver the nice, happy ending (thinking right now of Season 4’s “Jump the Shark,” when it turns out the Winchester brothers actually did have another brother, but he was killed by the ghouls pretending to be that brother and his mother). So does that mean the world will survive the apocalypse?

I like not knowing. Makes it more interesting to watch.

OK, so back to last night.

First off, I see that Kripke/McG subscribe to the super-fast zombie model, a la 28 Days Later, as opposed to the slow, shuffling zombies of the Romero oeuvre. OK, certainly made for a more suspenseful scene there toward the beginning when Dean was trying to escape. Nice save (also a bit 28 Days-ish) by the military, though Dean had as much of a chance to be killed as the infected.

So then we have the issue of the Dean duo. Dean knows himself pretty well and wasn’t going to make it easy for himself to get free. So, of course, when Dean does get free, he pretty much goes out and about and freaks the crap out of a bunch of people, except for the no-longer-angelic Casteil who immediately sees that this is a former Dean.

Dean’s become hard. Harder than he already was. I suppose five years of fighting against the apocalypse when the angels and God have abandoned the planet and Lucifer has taken control of your only brother does that to a guy.

And speaking of, Jared Padalecki did one heckuva job channeling his dark side in playing the white-clad (interesting choice – reminds me of Lost, actually) Lucifer. Once again, Kripke shows the issue of black and white and evil and good isn’t quite as simple as it seems.

Of course, the fact that Lucifer infected humanity with some sort of zombiefying virus kind of makes him evil, but what of his point about the evil that men do? It’s all very philosophical, frankly. Fortunately, it doesn’t give me as much of a headache as Lost does. Or Fringe, even.

So in the end, we have the Winchester brothers together again. Does the simple fact that Sam & Dean are together change the future we saw? Will this prevent Sam from letting Lucifer in, or will it happen now anyway because he will believe he can control Lucifer?

Whatever the end result, the brothers are together again. No good ever comes of their being apart, because the demons and ghouls and other bad creatures just take advantage of that.

The world – the one on Supernatural, at least – needs the Winchester brothers together.