In terms of Dean’s mindset in season 8, Ackles says, “You’ve also got to remember that Dean has just spent, basically, a year in the trenches. He was off at war.”
We’ve seen hints of Dean struggling to reorient himself, including a scene where he is overwhelmed by the number of choices in a vending machine, which Ackles compares to “the movie The Hurt Locker when Jeremy Renner’s character is back stateside and he’s like standing in a cereal aisle with a wall of choices of cereal, and he’s standing there going ‘This is not normal.’
“Because what was normal to him was mortar sounds and gunfire and being in the trenches and having to wake up every day wondering if you’re going to live to go to sleep that night,” Ackles says. “Dean has just basically come back from essentially, that. He was at war in Purgatory.”
