Molly's Afterlife

The 16th episode of Supernatural's second season, titled Roadkill, builds to a quiet scene where Sam and Dean Winchester show the ghost of a woman named Molly her living former husband, who survived the car crash that killed her years before.  Molly has in fact been a ghost for the entire episode without realizing this.  She is one of the many spirits of the human dead the Winchesters encounter whom they release from their attachment to this world.  To fully break a recurring cycle of pain her spirit is unknowingly involved in, the brothers attempt to convince her to let go of this world in favor of whatever the next state of being is, with Sam saying they think she will move on.  "But you don't know where," she says.  She ultimately does move on—to an unknown condition.  In such a simple scene, the show grapples with some of the most vital and urgent existential aspects of conscious life.

It appears to be commonly assumed that if one was in an afterlife, one would know.  It would not have to be the case that someone would know they have died.  They would in truth still be alive at least on a mental level in order to have any kind of afterlife (consciousness is inherently immaterial, after all, so it is already supernatural in the strictest sense).  Or, if they are genuinely dead, they are no longer conscious and hence are incapable of reflecting on anything.  True death entails total mental nonexistence.  Even now, one cannot know if one is not living in some kind of afterlife already, as opposed to the fact that one currently exists.  Just because one is in an afterlife does not mean that any of the major epistemological restrictions one has in this life, such as inability to know the external world as it is beyond perceptions and to know if memories of past events are accurate, would be removed.

Sam and Dean, as irrational as they are leading up to this point of the series (especially Dean!), do not even pretend that they have transcended such epistemological limitations, not even to comfort Molly.  Speaking honestly, the brothers admit they do not know what happens to spirits next, which parallels how the living cannot know what will happen when they die (or even if they will die).  As non-rationalists, they are incapable of knowing anything unless they first become proper rationalists, but not even a wholly rationalistic person can know anything about whether there really is an afterlife more than what is possible in light of consistency with logical axioms and what is likely in light of miscellaneous evidences.  Whether I fear it, hate it, or revel in it, I cannot know if there is an afterlife until I die, though this might still be unknowable then for the aforementioned reason.  I cannot necessarily know I am in an afterlife even if my mind does not die with my body.  I certainly cannot know anything if my consciousness no longer exists (even if only for a temporary period as with the Biblical state of Sheol before the resurrection).

There is no logical guarantee that Molly has not simply ceased to exist, or, far, far worse, that she has not transitioned to some plane where she will suffer eternal torture.  She cannot know beforehand, and neither can Sam and Dean.  Yet she does "let go" of her emotional attachment to this world as she appears to one way or another leave this plane of mental existence.  How perfectly this aligns with what we can know about whether there is an afterlife or which possible kind it is.  All one can know under human limitations are objective logical facts about what is possible or evidentially likely, not whether there is an afterlife, if there is an afterlife for everyone, and exactly which kind one would get.  What afterlife there would be according to a particular logically possible worldview can be known, not whether that is the true afterlife.

The early episodes of Supernatural before the one with Molly only hint at what extended afterlives are like for those who do not hold onto the world, with these people often becoming malevolent spirits who must be confronted for the sake of the living.  The closest thing to "confirmation" of any afterlife besides this, up to the end of the second season, is hearsay from demons speaking about someone suffering in hell after dying.  Roadkill is the first episode where a character deliberates out loud about something pertinent to the show and to all of us, yet at the same time unknowable.  Not everyone might realize it, for there are many non-rationalists, but we each are in Molly's position within this very life.  Is there a continuation of conscious existence with or without a body after biological death?  If so, does it last forever?  Are we already experiencing it?  Will it be blissful or agonizing?

Molly is already a ghost, phenomenologically alive despite her biological death.  Otherwise, her epistemological standing is the same as that of any being with my limitations.  The episode does not change how Supernatural flirts with very idiotic misconceptions of the Christian afterlife (an immediate afterlife rather than soul sleep before an eventual resurrection, seemingly eternal torture for the wicked, human spirits haunting the world, etc.).  I have written about this extensively; as obvious as the Bible's real doctrines are on the matter, they differ sharply from the popular versions of heaven and hell with all of their inherent logical and Biblical errors, which are treated as what Christianity entails in everything from typical sermons to conversations to popular culture, Supernatural included.  But Roadkill does acknowledge crucial truths about the nature of conscious existence that are of great significance to literally everyone, like it or not.  Only a rationalist can know what is possible and impossible, knowable and unknowable, but everyone stands potentially a moment away from either soul oblivion or an afterlife, whether permenent or temporary in either case.  What awaits us, we cannot know.