There isn’t anything that could surprise Sam and Dean Winchester. They’ve been believing in — and fighting — the impossible since they were kids. Heck, they’ve even become the impossible. But when they have to face the Darkness in Supernatural season 11, it’s less about surprising more and more about stumping them.

When the show began, the Winchesters had their father’s journal to guide them. Then they had Bobby. And now, they have the Men of Letters library. But what do you do when the Men of Letters library can’t help you? Well, if you’re Sam, you read it over and over again.

“Luckily the Men of Letters library didn’t get destroyed by the Stynes at the end of season 10 so Sam still will look into the books,” Jared Padalecki said. “For many seasons all we had was dad’s journal and we read it front to back and upside down and all around but we still would refer to it. It’s like a movie that you want 30 times and you keep getting more information each time, so Sam goes back to the books that he does have to try and seek out any sort of help he can.”

Yet, even Sam recognizes that the Darkness is unlike anything they’ve ever faced before. “We’ve had the yellow-eyed demon, we’ve had Lilith, we’ve had Leviathans and we’ve had everything in between and so this Darkness – it’s so grand,” Padalecki said. “We’ve had this false sense of security in seasons past — we knew some backstory and some info. We had a little bit to work with. But the Darkness, it’s so daunting and it’s so vast. The word itself implies that it’s going to be cloudy and tough to try to break into. It’s one of those situations where, proverbially and literally and supernaturally, it’s the perfect name.”

Jensen Ackles added: “It predates the Bible so there’s really nothing that they can go back and research as far as how to handle or deal or fix or control whatever it is that this is and so I think that they’re kind of hands in the air at this point.”

But the Winchesters don’t quit. (Seriously, you can kill them and they still won’t quit.) Now it’s just a matter of how they keep moving forward without answers. “They’re going to have to turn a lot to angels and the demons because they’re the only ones that have ever heard of this thing,” Ackles said. “Because of that, that’s going to involve a lot of Castiel and a lot more of Crowley and all of their people and it should be interesting.”

But until they find answers, the brothers aren’t just going to sit by and spend their days eating bacon cheeseburgers and drinking beer (even though Dean would probably love that). “Because we don’t know what to do, the brothers are not just going to sit idle and wait for somebody to tell them what to do,” Ackles said. “They’re going to go out and they’re at least going to try to help people. We start out by saying, ‘Listen, because we don’t know what to do, let’s just continue doing what we do best and that is saving people and hunting things. There’s still monsters out there. There’s still things happening.’ So with that said, they’re going to keep trying to save people and keep hunting things. They’re going to keep finding cases, keep hunting lore until they have to face or know how to face what it is that they released.”

The best part of this news? They’re doing all of this as a team. “They have a common mission a common goal and they’re back on the same team without having to worry about if one another is going to die or go dark or go soulless or start drinking blood or whatever it is,” Ackles said.

Thank … Chuck?

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