E' iniziata il 4 ottobre la quarta stagione di Supernatural.. facciamo il punto della situazione... attenti ..SPOILER!
SUPERNATURAL History? Not Yet
By A.C. FERRANTE
As season-enders go, the two-part “All Hell Breaks Loose” certainly sent the last season of SUPERNATURAL out with a bang. The Winchester brothers, Sam and Dean (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles), discovered that their quest to vanquish demons and other supernatural entities has been part of a much bigger plan. This resulted in Sam’s death, only for him to be resurrected by Dean, who offered a demon his own soul in exchange for Sam to live again. The price: He has one year to live. In addition, the brothers opened up a portal to hell, which unleashed over 200 demons that will serve as the focus of season three, which begins this Thursday, October 4 on the CW.
“We start with a very broad canvas and cherry-pick our way down to what will be good for the year,” says executive producer and occasional director Robert Singer. “The mythology arc [continues from] the end of last year, when the Devil’s Gate opened and all these demons escaped, and the war has begun. But it’s not like a World War III that’s going to get into the papers. It’s more of a covert, ‘they’re among us’ battle. It’s really analogous to the war we’re supposed to be fighting right now, which is against terrorism. That’s the focus this year. We’ll probably do five or six of those mythology episodes.”
Having this broad canvas is a good thing, according to the producer. The stand-alone “creature of the week” approach of the previous two seasons has certainly run the gamut of the familiar monsters and ghosts viewers are accustomed to, though Singer notes that they still haven’t run out of big ideas. “We certainly have enough for another 22,” he says. “What we have exhausted are the better-known urban legends. That well has probably run dry, but there is a wealth of stuff out there.
“We’re doing an episode on fairy tales—the real Grimm stories, not the watered-down Disney versions,” he continues. “We’re doing one about changelings; that’s our second episode. I’m looking forward to that. And we have an evil Santa for a Christmas show, who comes down chimneys and kills your parents.”
On the human side, while the core of the show will remain Sam and Dean, the series will open up a bit to include two new female hunter characters. “One is named Ruby [BLACK CHRISTMAS and WHEN A STRANGER CALLS’ Katie Cassidy], and early on in the season, you learn something about her that is surprising,” Singer says. “She’s hardcore, with her own agenda. The other is Bella [Lauren Cohan]. She’s not really a hunter. She’s more of a mercenary—that would be the best description. She’s not inhibited by any morality. There are objects that are worth money on the open market, and she’ll steal, connive and do anything to get them. She doesn’t think about right or wrong, or war or demons. She only thinks in terms of herself.”
Whereas in the past, Sam and Dean were the only regulars with the supporting characters popping up now and again, Singer notes that Cassidy and Cohan are both contract players scheduled to appear in about 12 episodes apiece. “They’ll play in different episodes, and there will be times where they will be in the same ones,” Singer explains. “They do have different agendas. We went to great pains to not make them another two hunters going on adventures with the boys. They’re really, in many ways, adversarial to our heroes, more so than with them.”
Making return appearances from previous seasons are Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver), hunter Gordon Walker (Sterling K. Brown), who wants Sam dead, and FBI agent Henricksen (Charles Malik Whitfield), who’s on their trail. “We’re happy with this little universe we’ve created,” says Singer. Of course, the obvious question is: Will the brothers’ dad John Winchester (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) be back, his own death notwithstanding. “He escaped hell, so sure,” Singer adds with a smile.
The blood quotient for this broadcast series is also an inevitable topic, and Singer says the balance the creative team struck in previous years will continue. “One thing we have found out, especially on our television budget, is that a lot of what you don’t see is as scary as what you do,” he notes. “Having said that, we push the envelope and let the network pull us back. We don’t pull ourselves back. We don’t censor ourselves all that much.”
In particular, Singer points to the vampire episode “Bloodlust” that he directed last year, in which a saw cuts off a guy’s head. “I couldn’t show the saw going into the neck, so what I did was splatter his face,” the producer explains. “In many ways, what the audience conjures up in their minds is more graphic. I shot that from afar in a very wide shot. I felt that was more elegant, to tell you the truth.”
That holds true to his general outlook on the series as it heads into its third season, and Singer believes the show stands apart from both typical horror television and even the horror features currently playing theaters. “We don’t think of ourselves as a slasher movie,” he says. “We want it to be more cool and [get a reaction of] ‘Oh wow, what was that?’ The result in many ways is scarier than the actual thing. You leave it to your imagination of what happened.”
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