Jensen Ackles wears a MTM Black Patriot

In the embrace, Dean Winchester's arm comes around his brother and a black watch rides on his wrist, dark case on a dark strap. Jensen Ackles played Dean across fifteen seasons of Supernatural, 327 episodes, which made it the longest-running American live-action fantasy series. The whole thing ran on two brothers, a 1967 Chevy Impala, and a family trade of hunting the things most people do not believe in. Dean was the older one, the mechanic and the wisecracker, who treated classic rock as a moral position and carried a grief he would not talk about.

MTM lists Ackles wearing its Black Patriot on the show, and for once the product placement suits the man. The watch is built to be beaten on: a 44mm case in black DLC-coated steel, a sapphire crystal over a carbon-fiber dial, a Miyota quartz chronograph inside, water resistant to 200 meters. The hands glow with Super-LumiNova, not the tritium tubes MTM screws into its dive watches. It costs a little over a thousand dollars. Dean lives out of a car trunk packed with weapons and rock salt, and this is a watch you could wear through a salt-and-burn and never think about again.

MTM sells the line as Special Ops kit, the blacked-out case and the dive-rated seal pitched at soldiers and divers. Dean fights ghosts and demons, which no amount of water resistance touches. The part of the watch that earns its place is the plain one: it tells him the time on the long drive between one haunted town and the next. On a show about the dead refusing to stay dead, the watch is one of the few things that is exactly what it claims to be, a real chronograph you can still buy.