As for how John returns in the episode, Jensen Ackles says, “Dean is faced with essentially a genie in a bottle, and this is what he would truly wish for if his heart could speak.”
Thanks to an altered reality, the Winchesters will also come face-to-face with Kurt Fuller’s Zachariah and a different (though familiar) version of Castiel. “He’s back to his soldier mentality,” Misha Collins says of Castiel.
