Supernatural is going back in time … again!

As Supernatural fans know, the show has used flashbacks many times in its 15-season run, but it has been a bit since young Sam and Dean graced the small screen. More specifically, it’s been four years since the show last did a flashback episode with season 11 containing “Just My Imagination,” which included a flashback to a young Sam and Dean, and “The Devil in the Details,” which featured the return of Colin Ford as a teenage Sam. (Season 14’s “Absence” technically had flashbacks, but they all include adult Sam and Dean.)

Image zoom Colin Bentley/The CW

But when the writers sat down to think about the final season, they found themselves discussing what they’d like to include. “It’s like, ‘What are the types of episodes that we enjoy that makes the show good but also speaks to the characters?'” co-showrunner Andrew Dabb says of the question they asked themselves. And that’s when flashbacks came into play. “For a long time, pretty much every season we would do a story that would flash back to a young Sam and Dean story,” Dabb says. “So this year we’re doing one of those, which we haven’t done for a long, long time.”

There’s no word yet on when the flashback episode will air or which period of the Winchesters’ lives it will flash back to, but stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki previously told EW about the flashbacks they’d like to see. “I would love to see more of what the boys were doing when they couldn’t necessarily go on a hunt but they really wanted to,” Ackles said in 2018. “Maybe sometimes they’d stow away with dad and he wouldn’t know it and they would get into some trouble. I think there’s a lot of story to be told there.”

Padalecki added, “I would love to see the month after Mary gets burned on the ceiling. I would love to see the story of how John figured out that his wife and the mother of his two kids was involved in hunting.”

Supernatural returns Thursday, Jan. 16 at 8 p.m. ET on The CW.