I've been giving a lot of thought as to how Dean will be saved from Hell (I am assuming he will be saved eventually otherwise, I think the fans will desert in hoards). What strikes me is the effects of the strike on the show. Kripke said that the strike forced them to drop all the storylines except for Dean's deal so I think we have to look at what they decided to present as thier last three episodes to get an idea of how Sam can get Dean out. What did each of the four final episodes present that could be used to resolve the situation?

No Rest for the Wicked is obvious. It culminates the deal and has Dean rejecting Sam using any powers to save him. It was a straightforward episode. It is implied that Sam can save Dean using his powers, but that does not happen.

Ghostfacers is probably an outlier. I was 90% completed before the strike and simply was an easy episode to get up and running. It may have nothing to do with the deal per se, but it did reinforce one part of the mythology that we have seen before, the fact that ghosts can take out other ghosts simply by their own actions. This was shown in the Pilot, in Home, in Red Sky at Morning, and here. I'm not sure that this will play into the deal, but it is an established part of the mythology arc and I think that it will be important somewhere down the road.

Long Distance Call is next up and I had a hard time finding much that could be used in regards to rescuing Dean. The MOTW actually did provide and escape clause of sorts, if the MOTW ate Dean's soul I don't think it would have been available to go to Hell. It just would have been dead, but the writers didn't really state this and it probably didn't relate to the deal as such. This episode mainly showed Dean's desparation and belief in John and Sam's total lack of belief in John. So was this just a character episode that didn't give them much on the deal? Then I remember the cute part. The tour of Edison's museum and the spirit phone. Thee was the tour guide talking about the spirit phone that could reach "the dead". So maybe this wasn't quite the throw away it looked like, maybe it was the whole point of the episode. Maybe it is a way for Sam to contact Dean while he is in Hell and will help in locating and rescuing Dean.

Then comes Time is on Our Side. This wraps up a lot of this season. We get the story on Bela (and it play into the mythology in some intersting ways, that I inted to save for another post). It fingers Lilith as the demon holding the contract. Both play somewhat into Dean's deal. But what about Doc Benton? Why this MOTW. Yes, it partly shows that Sam is willing to consider increasingly greay options and that Dean is rejecting them. But it also establishes that there are scientific options to be explored, something I don't think either boy had thought about during this year. Sam made it quite clear that Benton's immortality was not black magic, required no human sacrifice and the original process was not outside the moral of Sam and Dean. To keep it going forever required selling their souls, but the original formula did not. Then there is how science works. Theories, formulas, etc. do not spring up fully formed. There is experimentation and tweaking to get what you want. Doc Benton was seeking absolute immortality, but along the way he would have had to have found methods that repaired bodies, but did not allow immortality, so they were rejected by the doctor as failures. For example one formula healed the body, but if it was dead there was no way to animate it, so by Benton's scale it was a failure. Another formula brings the body back and allows sentience to return, but the revived body is still killable and/or can die by natural means, failure by Benton's criteria. The thing is all these intermediate steps would serve Sam in getting Dean back. He doesn't have to use Benton's final formula, just whatever will repair and preserve Dean's body long enough to get Dean's soul out of Hell and find a way to insert it back in a normal mortal body. The act that the journal still exists is supportive of this I think.

For the record, every year I come up with theories as to how things will be resolved and I am NEVER right. But I do think that considering the fact that the writers only had four episodes to leave all the clues to how to resolve this, that the choice of MOTW and B stories have to somehow play into the final resolution of saving Dean.