Originally taken from the Supernatural Magazine, which I’m going to add to the Gallery tomorrow.

Are there any storylines from season three that were lost because of the writers’ strike that have found their way into season four?

Eric Kripke: “We didn’t have time to tell the story about Sam’s powers, and all that had to push into season four. In the original versions we were thinking of before the strike, Sam was going to save Dean, and in typical Supernatural fashion, it was going to cost the boys dearly. But because we didn’t have the time to develop Sam’s powers, there wasn’t really anybody left to save Dean, so Dean had to go to hell.”

Sam was actually going to save Dean?

Eric Kripke: “Yes, we were going to save Dean, maybe even before the season finale, but at the cost that Sam was now this fully operational dark force. Then Sam wants to make an assault on Lilith and he’s working on his powers, and that’s a big problem with Dean. So we get to end up roughly in the same place we were going to end up anyway, it’s just instead of at the end of season three, it’s around episode six of season four. Funnily enough, it’s six episodes in when we were six episodes short in season three. So I think we’re still telling the story at roughly the same pace, but we had to make that adjustment once we realized we weren’t going to have enough time to tell the Sam side of things, and had to hold off until we did have enough time to tell that story properly.”

Interesting to think what they might have used the ‘extra’ space for in S4, if they had been able to end S3 as originally planned.

Thanks to Callisto