#were predetermined but because we made them to be. Like how clone^2 said 'i choose to be brothers' and how danny and jason said

[incarnateirony]

First of all I love your meta. Second I still can't believe Dabb really said "pathways". My question is different though. I know it's old and we should focus more on the new as time goes on but I still don't understand what gives it away that what Zachariah showed to Sam and Dean is how future would be and not him toying with them. Is it 'cause he's not powerful enough for that?

Well, for 1, Zachariah outright says it, but of course there’s always room for unreliable narrarator.

For 2, there’s other elements that actually betray this like Zach actually not touching anything IN the alternate future he doesn’t belong in, but point 3 and its very long answer will actually cover some of those, as the creatives themselves explained that. (Episode written by Ben Edlund)

For 3, Ben Edlund himself says it. Now, as I know recently I’m being followed around by a bunch of goblins that want to challenge everything I say I will disclaimer, I just spent like 15 minutes searching for the quote, but seeing as it’s ten years old now, I’m struggling doing so -- I did find some very close adjacent ones below that fulfill the same purpose. I do know I reblogged it at one point in the past, because this has been enough of a point of contention it put me on the “out”s with some meta authors, as it was a discussion that some people just “can’t deal” with it being an alternate timeline/reality and choose to see it another way (ie Zach’s just fucking with them), and then along comes someone with the Edlund quote that literally says, no, this is not just some made up world by Zachariah, it’s an actual alternate timeline.

So while I can’t find that EXACT quote, in particular, I did find this one:

Kripke: –Future Dean was lying and manipulating him and we showed it to Bob—and this is, by the way, a perfect uh, model, or—

Edlund: We had crawled up our own asses, we had lit a campfire, and we were having s’mores.

Kripke: –a perfect picture of why Bob Singer is so invaluable to Supernatural. Which is, like, we show him the draft and he reads it and goes, like, “What the hell is this?!” And we’re like, “It’s cyclical! Time is cyclical!” And he’s just like, “What? What’s wrong with you? I don’t even understand what the hell any of this is! Just shut up!”

Edlund: And remember, we would come into his office and draw pictures of it—

Kripke: Yeah, yeah, we literally—

Edlund: “No, no, Bob, look! It’s a circle with a line through it and these two dashes!”

Kripke: We were drawing him a diagram of the nature of time travel in Bob’s office and he looks—he just gives us this wonderful dry look like “You’ll be drawing that for the audience?”

Edlund: Yeah, I know, right. (laughs)

Kripke: That look is called the Quiet Stop It. And then we like, “All right”, and we just knew. And it was very late, we were, like, already in prep.

Edlund: Yeah.

Kripke: We pulled that whole notion. And that was like a big through-line. That was probably like six or seven pages of the script, which when you’re that late in the game is a lot.

Edlund: Yes. But though–

Kripke: –to pull and rethink. And by the way, so mu—glad we did it.

Edlund: Much better, yeah. And it really just moved to an alternate universe model, much better. And also, there were like two pages of dialogue of Dean just going—

Kripke: Explaining it.

Edlund: “Let me again try and” –not explaining, reiterating with different metaphors to try and create a picture.

Kripke: “Time is a bus. I got off the bus. Then I got back on.”

Edlund: (laughs)

Kripke: So, yeah, that’s the process.

This actually comes from the DVD commentary, and they go on starting that the episode was originally called “Clone Wars” and had no intention of future/alternate anything, before they basically went bananas with the idea and started coming unglued about time travel.

They literally went so far as to try to draft several minutes of script explaining time travel and, instead of making it a single linear circle of time while Robert Singer looked at them like lunatics for spewing cosmic theories (boy howdy mood), they went with an alternate universe model, which still in some essence does involve time travel, but it’s basically more quantum theory of branches making infinite universes/possibilities, so at X point you chose different and thus Z event happened instead down the line, but in another universe at X point you chose a different thing so Y happened instead.

*jazz hands*

There IS also this article/interview quote with Edlund:

Another big picture aspect that comes into question with Edlund’s episode The End is whether angels can really travel into the future, or whether Zachariah was just messing with Dean’s head, Gabriel-style. “Yes, they can, but that’s a four-hour answer,” Edlund declares. “I don’t have the math to support it, either. But in my mind—and that’s all we’re dealing with right now—I think that the future is not predetermined, it’s non-constant, and the angels can travel to any number of possible futures. Predetermining something is a state of mind; it is not the law of the universe, so if you believe anything about the future, it will most likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is true in human nature. If I think I’m going to lose the game, I’ll lose the game. If I think I’m going to win, there’s a good chance that I’ll win.

“Free will is like a viral experiment that God left on the desk and then he left, and the angels are like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It’s messing stuff up. Satan got too close to it and he’s got a free will issue. It’s a weird thing, so when Zach took Dean into the future, I believe they just went into one possible future. The future will roughly happen this way if Dean self-prophesizes this future, because it’s hinged on his choice. Zach had no impact when he went into that future, which is a pretty important detail about the underlying physics of it—he can witness a potential future, but he can’t change it or live there. It’s not a home for the people from the past; it’s a projection of what might happen. You can take a human like Dean, put him there, have him experience all this crap, get a punch in the face and get rolled down a hill, and then get brought back to the present, but that future will never be because Dean has been changed by the trip. We’re just talking about possible futures.”

(“Inside the Mind of Ben Edlund”, Supernatural Magazine #19, Sept 2010, pp 56-57.)

Edlund, who wrote the episode, pretty resoundingly calls it a future that Zachariah had no impact on. Kripke has no particular statement to *directly verify* the same but spends the entire commentary talking about how they were gridding out time travel like lunatics getting side eyed by everyone in the office and pretty resoundingly calls it “the future” not “the other world” or “the fake world” or whatever.

Also side but like 4. This fulfills 15.09's similar intent narratively with Chuck, just different delivery as the current was building that future instead of future events undecided. Sam changed it then and there.

Honestly I wish I had the two minute scene of Dean deliriously trying to explain time and all kinds of shit drawing a crazy circle with lines and dashes because that would just be my avatar/banner/whatever forevermore what a MOOD.

Time travel actually requires greater power in SPN than just making up illusions, far as I’ve gathered. Almost anyone can Create A Space. Castiel eventually lost his time travel ability but held a same mood: when he sent Dean back in time, Cas couldn’t change anything. He could be witness to it, but he just drilled in that “Destiny Can’t Be Changed.” The end moral is that we can in fact change our current to change our future, which is basically the point of S5 (and... most of Supernatural) as a whole, but the angels retain the same mechanics pretty well-throughout on this.

That is to say though, that according to this model, there IS still a future out there written somewhere that Dean had to bury Cas in a Malak Box, got overwhelmed by depression, literally gave up, turned into a monster and killed everyone he loved with Sam until he too died. But Not This Sam, Not This Dean.