WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Season 15, Episode 9 of Supernatural, "The Trap."
Permanently wounded by the Equalizer gun and haunted by sleep-depriving visions of he and Dean murdering each other over and over again, the first half of Supernatural's final season has been a rough one for Sam Winchester. Now, in the midseason premiere, the younger Winchester brother's misfortune takes an even worse turn, as God/Chuck utterly destroys him -- inside and out.
In order to rid himself of the mystical wound that he and Sam share, Chuck kidnaps both Sam and Eileen, his hunter girlfriend, and seeks to break whatever hold it has on them both. This involves two levels of torture for Sam -- first physical, and then psychological. Brandishing a scalpel, Chuck prepares to literally dig out the thing he thinks is "festering" inside Sam, preventing the mark from healing. Spotting the powerful being's surprising hesitancy, Sam observes that Chuck can't get his hands dirty. "You just like to watch."
Unfortunately, Chuck agrees with him. So, he uses Eileen like a surgical puppet to do the job for him, only making the ordeal more excruciating for Sam as he has to endure both the pain of feeling a sharp implement digging around in his shoulder and see the anguished face of the woman he cares deeply for being forced to do it. To make things worse, Chuck casually twangs away on a guitar while the gruesome scene plays out; as cold and callous as Lucifer always described him to be. (#LuciferWasRight?)
Eventually, Sam points out -- through gritted teeth -- that this is going nowhere, and it'll take more than an aggravated shoulder wound to break a hunter as experienced as him. This gets Chuck's devious mind racing. He realizes Sam's "defiance" is something even harder to crack: hope. "You still think you're the hero of this story, that you can win." He admits that while Sam and Dean could win, they don't want to. Then, he shows Sam why.
Using a time-hopping pocket watch, Chuck allows Sam to cycle through a future in which he and Dean manage to beat him -- and it's hardly a happy one. Without the Lord's divine presence, it seems, monsters will run amok on Earth. The hunting community dwindles; Sam and Dean watch their allies die or quit on them and then suffer a fate worse than death: succumbing to vampire bites and slain in a bloody fight between them, Sheriff Jody Mills and Bobby Singer.
Sam is dumbfounded by this dark truth, which Chuck cements by asking if he can ever live with himself knowing that victory will only bring about the deaths of himself, Dean and everyone they love. Dean and Castiel burst onto the scene to rescue him and Eileen, brandishing an orb created with a spell that the archangel Michael assured them would ensnare God. Dean rolls the orb to Sam and tells him to use it... but it's too late. As Sam hesitates to act, it becomes painfully clear that Chuck has done enough to drain Sam of all hope that their plan is the right thing to do.
He falls to his knees, dropping the orb. Chuck picks it up, crushes it to dust, and then lets out a sigh of contentment as the Equalizer wound -- with the relinquishment of Sam's hope -- finally heals. Dean, however, hasn't let go of his, telling Chuck that they know, thanks to Sam's visions, that he's holding out on killing them so that his preferred Cain and Abel scenario can play out instead. (Chuck really needs to get some new material.)
This is when Chuck drops another awful truth on them. Those visions of Sam and Dean killing each other that Sam was receiving through his Equalizer link to Chuck weren't drafts of Chuck's future plans. They're his memories of other Sams and Deans in alternate realities that have killed each other already. "They didn't think they'd do it either," he gloats. "But they did. And you will too."
The episode ends with one final sucker punch for Sam as a distraught Eileen chooses to leave the bunker for good -- unable to handle the cosmic events that are unfolding around her. Not only have the Winchesters just lost their best shot at neutering the villainous diety and their insight into his mind, but Sam has also just suffered two huge personal losses: the woman he loves, and the belief to keep fighting.
Airing Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET/PT on The CW, the final season of Supernatural stars Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, Misha Collins and Alexander Calvert.