General Season 7 Spoilers:

You can share your thoughts about the Spoilers HERE.

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TV Guide Comic Convention Special ScansComic-Con First Look CW Clip
E!Online on Set: Part 01Part 02Part 03
MTV 10 On Top Video 01MTV 10 On Top Sat. VideoSera Gamble: TV To Bing About
Set Visit 10/04/2011 Videos:
Examiner.comGive My RemoteEW

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Robert Singer on Season 8 Plan:

‘SUPERNATURAL’: LESS ANGST NEXT SEASON?

Before you get in a tizzy, there’s no official word on an eighth season of Supernatural. But since I’m a positive thinker by nature, when I got a chance to chat with executive producer Bob Singer last week, I asked what his vision would be for the next season if the show was lucky enough to nail one down. The answer, he said, will obviously be largely influenced by where we leave off this season. “I think you’ll see coming up that Sam’s Lucifer problem certainly lessens,” he said. “That carried a lot water this year. Jared really had the brunt of the emotional story. And I think going into next year — and, God, we haven’t talked about this — but just in my opinion, I think we’d be well served to get back to where this whole thing started — as we used to say, saving people and killing things.”

Much of the show’s current season has been centered — with only small deviations — on the leviathan storyline that was introduced at the beginning of the season. Along the way, that storyline has given birth to smaller emotional arcs for the characters, particularly with regards to Sam’s broken noodle and a string of heart-wrenching deaths. “[I’d like to] make it a good, kinda wild western yarn and try to leave the angst behind,” Singer said. “I mean, there’s always going to be angst on this show, but I think we’ve kinda wrung it out a lot this year. So we might lighten it up a tad next year.”

And what of word on the chances of another season? Singer said that while “indications are that we will get picked up…we kind of leave options for ourselves [story-wise]. It would be nice if we heard sooner than later.”
Source: EW

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Sera Gamble Interview:

Misha is set for 3 episodes as of now. Is there a character arc resolution, or is there the possibility for him to return if the show was to get picked up for an eighth season?
SG: I hope it feels like a character arc, but it’s a little bit of both. There’s resolution and there’s also…we’ve left it enough open-ended that there will hopefully be the possibility of seeing Misha again in season 8.

Fair enough. Moving on to the season-long arc, what can you say about the Leviathans’ role in the rest of the season?
SG: Sam and Dean will be following some specific leads. And as they get closer and as the heat turns up, it becomes about — obviously the stakes are very high for them, and they’re continually dogged by this frustration by how alone they feel in this. They really have lost so much of their support system that they relied on, even more than they knew over the past few seasons — notably Castiel and Bobby. And so I think every time they make a little bit of an advance, it’s bittersweet for them. And every time they’re stuck, they’re extra frustrated because they would have called Bobby. Emotionally, I think that’s very much underneath the thrust of the upcoming episodes in terms of the Leviathans.

At this point, besides each other, what do they have left to lose? As you noted, they’ve lost Bobby, they’ve lost Castiel, they’ve lost their father and countless amounts of allies, so does that change the stakes of the writing?
SG: Oh, we manage to dig up other stuff for them to lose, don’t you worry! We always manage to find stuff to throw at them.
Source: Givemyremote

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Misha Collins Interview:

With this “new” version of Cas, are you still going to provide some comic relief?
Yup! I’m going to give you a big spoiler that I haven’t told anyone. This might be sort of ruining the build-up to the season finale, but Cas does a full-on fart joke in the second episode I was in. The producers are going to kill me—I’m going to get a call later from the CW!

They’ll probably just kill you again and then bring you back…again. Are you allowed to say if your three episodes are consecutive or spread out throughout the rest of the season?
I don’t know what I’m allowed to say, but I’ll just say it anyways: They are not necessarily consecutive.
Source: E!Online

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Sera Gamble Interview:

On the subject of Bobby, Gamble didn’t want to confirm nor deny whether we’d see him in physical form again before the end of the season. Instead, she shared that his presence would continue to be felt, and it would become a source of some soul-searching for both brothers.

“Sam and Dean do get to the point where they have to ask the question ‘Is this the way hunters end up grieving?’” She said. “We had a conversation in the writer’s room about what happens when you lose someone really, really close to you– a parent, a sibling, something like that. Something that’s really common is for people to feel like they see them everywhere, and if you were a hunter, and your stock and trade were to bring ghosts down on a weekly basis, maybe the way that would manifest for you was to feel these ghost vibes. So Sam and Dean may have to ask themselves that: ‘Can he really be here or is it just the way we’re grieving?’”

For the record, though, Gamble says earlier scenes where the beer disappeared and Dean didn’t remember drinking it were purposely instilled to put the thought in the boys’ (and the audience’s) minds that Bobby could still be around. They really lost their whole support system, and like anyone who lost a loved one, they may be a bit reluctant to let go. They certainly have a tougher task facing the Leviathans without help from someone like Bobby.
Source: Examiner.com

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Can both of you discuss your character arcs at this point in the season, up until what you’re filming now [episode 20]?
Padalecki:
Sam, after being kind of ruined by Misha, has been seeing — or by Castiel, I guess … Freudian slip! [Laughs.]
Ackles: And Misha.
Padalecki: And Misha … No, Sam’s been seeing Lucifer and trying to get himself on track and he kind of re-confronts the reason he ended up in this place in the first place. So Sam has a big breakdown, then once again, in Winchester form, has to kind of come crawling back out. And obviously, it’s not like I get a chance to go off to rehab for 18 months and take care of myself, because Leviathans and Dick Roman are still out there. So it’s kind of straight back into the game, you know … put a brace on and get back on the field. So that’s kind of where Sam is right now, trying to get back in the game. It feels like he’s been distracted all season long by his own issues, but now that we think he’s kind of clean of them, he wants to put his full momentum forward with the task at hand.

And for Dean?
Ackles:
Well, recently, I think some of the episodes that have aired have kind of gotten back to an earlier formula of “Supernatural,” which has been refreshing and nice to kind of get back to those week-to-week monster hunts — though obviously, there’s a sub-lining storyline that we’re still staying true to. As far as Dean goes, obviously he’s dealing with his brother, who is not well, no matter how much of a front he puts on, and [Dean] knows that. And so you pair that with the fact that he’s just lost his second father essentially and he lost a very, very close and valued ally in the beginning of the season. He’s wobbling himself, but there is so much going on right now storyline-wise that I don’t think it’s necessarily … he’s not looking at himself. He’s just trying to make sense of everything that’s going on around him. He’s trying to be strong for his brother. He’s trying to be strong for himself in order to kind of keep moving. At a certain point, there’s going to be breaking point with him. I don’t know when that is, but I assume that it’s inevitable simply because you can’t pent that much up and not have it released at some point. It’s coming to a head and it’d be interesting to see how it breaks.

[Sera Gamble Interview]

Next week’s episode is the return of Castiel, but I hear that he comes back not knowing who he is. How does that affect the dynamic between him and Dean and Sam?
I’ve been trying to answer these questions by saying as little as possible, so be merciful! [Laughs.] The best way to say it is that Dean never thought he would see that face again. So, it’s completely shocking to him to see him and obviously everything kind of unfolds from there. We kind of have an arc in mind for all of this that will kind of take place between this and episode 23. I can’t say very much, but it’ll all make perfect sense when you see it — promise.

The last three episodes are going to feature a teenage prophet of sorts. Is that going to be a similar situation to Chuck (Rob Benedict), or a new spin on the idea?
We expound on the idea. We needed a prophet-like element in that story. As we were talking about it, we just realized that our show’s take on prophets was just really fun and cool and we wanted to introduce a character who is different from Chuck. But what prophets seem to have in common is that becoming a prophet is just the crappiest luck; you don’t choose it, it doesn’t do anything good for you. In the case of Kevin, the prophet that we will meet in episode 21 — which is being directed by Ben Edlund — he’s just a really dedicated high school student. He doesn’t want to get involved in anything. He doesn’t believe in any of this. Because of a series of events, he kind of becomes “activated” as a prophet. So now there’s hunters and there’s demons and there’s angels and all these things in this world. He’s like, “I just want to get a good score on my SATs!”

Neither of the brothers is playing at 100 percent right now; Sam’s going to have his meltdown in episode 17 and then, as Jared put it, kind of strap on a brace and limp back out, and Dean’s obviously pretty wrecked with drinking and grief. So where are they mentally in the last batch of episodes?
Well, the thing that makes Sam and Dean “Sam and Dean” is that though they are sometimes the walking wounded, they always manage to strap a gun on and face the enemy. If neither of them are at 100 percent, then they’ll figure out how to be 100 percent together. That’s kind of something that they come to in this season, especially because they lose so many other people. I think that the relationship between the two of them is really strong this season. They don’t get to rely on Bobby. They don’t get to rely on Cas. They don’t even get to drive in the Impala. Neither of them is doing perfect, but at least they have each other.

Are we going to see a return of Crowley (Mark Sheppard) and more of a resurgence in demons, since you mentioned that Kevin is going to be tangled up in this world of demons and angels and so forth?
Yeah, we’re going to have a nice mix of different kinds of creatures weighing in. Crowley manages to insert himself into everything, generally speaking. You’ll also see Meg [Rachel Miner] before the end of the season as well.

Have you already started plotting Season 8 and what kind of theme you might be looking at?
Well, we do have a cliffhanger at the end of this season. Several seeds are planted in the last few episodes, especially in episode 23, that could bear fruit in Season 8. We’ve definitely juggled a few things around. We’re hoping to hear something about a pickup, I don’t know. Is Mercury in retrograde right now? I don’t want to say anything that could jinx it. I’ve become like a believer in all religions all at once. I just line up all the talismans and start to believe in everything when we talk about that stuff. [Laughs.]
Source: HuffPost TV

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PalestineUSA: Anything with Supernatural!
Oh, you thought that one guy, a serial killer, who was in love with the demon that possessed him was all kinds of creepy? How about a twentysomething woman who still thinks she’s a tween because she’s been possessed for over 10 years? Our only question: Is she obsessed with two hot boys on a cult-hit supernatural show? Stranger things have happened…
Source: E!Online

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Jared and Jensen — and a few fans — have a theory about the whole season, or the last two, being a dream, so that you could bring back characters like Cas and Bobby and Chuck again. What’s your take on that?
Sera Gamble: Jared and Jensen have that theory? [Laughs]. Just my personal taste, but I always feel kind of let down by shows and stories where you get all invested in the stakes of things and then they go “never mind.” No, no, it’s really happening. But the good news about “Supernatural” is that death is extraordinarily permeable on our show. So, that’s the way that we can sort of bring back versions of characters, including Sam and Dean who have died several times. Dean’s died like 1,000 times!

Death is clearly not any kind of roadblock in “Supernatural,” so do you see a place for Castiel [Misha Collins] in Season 8 if you’re renewed?
We have left the door open for him. We don’t strike him with lightning. Also, by the way, if we did, I’m not sure how much difference that would make. But we don’t have a pickup; what we do have is just a really positive relationship with Misha. Misha is a busy and [an] in-demand actor, but we’ll see how things go.
Source: HuffPost TV

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I was on set last week and Jensen mentioned that strange things have been happening to Dean recently, kind of instances of lucky coincidences or other outside assistance. Can you expand on that and what it might mean?
Sera Gamble: Yeah. One of the most important things that’s happened to really both of them, but in this case Dean, is that he’s grieving he loss of Bobby. Whenever something a little bit odd happens, he starts to kind of wonder if Bobby is still around. What they come to kind of realize between Sam and Dean is that what’s happening is not really much different than the grieving process that would happen to any of us — whether or not we believed in the supernatural, whether or not we had experienced even one-tenth of what Sam and Dean have experienced. The difference is just maybe if you or I were grieving a really profound loss. we would start seeing them everywhere. But if Sam and Dean are grieving a loss they start to feel these synchronicities as “did that page move, that beer disappear?” They start pulling out their EMF meter because that’s the way they live and that’s the way they kind of see and process the world. So, that’s one way that we’ve been exploring their grief process.
Source: HuffPost TV

 

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“The Leviathan story is definitely going to come to a pretty dramatic head by the end of the season. I think, coming up, we have a pretty good mix of some fun, lighter toned stuff– definitely [“Out with the Old”] has a lot of fun in it and episode eighteen [“Party On, Garth”] with the drunken shenanigans is fun, but you know, it’s all fun and games until Sam ends up in an insane asylum! And as usual for us, we kind of intersperse these close-ended episodes with the boys uncovering more about the Leviathans and trying to make some incremental progress with their larger case, if you will”.

Gamble promised we will see a lot more of Lucifer before the season’s end, and she also admitted that residual effects from Sam’s time with him, regardless of how much time he spends in that psych ward, may never fully dissipate. And in turn, that those effects are bound to stick with Dean, as well, in his own guilt and sadness over how things have turned out.

“They always have a good side order of messed up!” Gamble laughed about the Winchesters both. “But I think at their core Sam and Dean are tremendous hunters who can kind of get their crap together and buckle on their weapons and go do what needs to be done…They go through everything you can imagine, and at the end of the day they’ll still go out and save us.”
Source: Examiner.com

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Frank: Is Supernatural definitely coming back next year?
While both Padalecki and Jensen Ackles are contracted through season eight, the CW has yet to make a decision about the fate of Supernatural…or anything other show for that matter. “We are considering everything for next year. We have made no determinations on any of our shows,” CW Boss Mark Pedowitz tells us. “I’m very happy with how Supernatural has done this year, in terms of ratings and production.” He also says if they have more “juice” in them, he could see it going on for “many, many years.” Our guess? It’s coming back.
Source: E!Online

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TCA 2012 Related Interviews

She clarifies that Dean hasn’t given up on finding some peace in what’s happened. “Frank won some grudging respect from Dean with that piece of advice about being professional and about trying to move forward. They’re not going to keep trudging on and just work because they have nothing else to do. Dean desperately wants to move on and to try to find reasons and meaning, to try and do right by Bobby’s memory,” Gamble says. “It’s important to him, and it’s important to him to be there for Sam, but we’ve thrown something incredibly difficult at him. He’s trying to take Frank’s advice, and if you’ve ever been given a piece of advice like that when you’re in grief, it’s not easy.”

Gamble tells us that Sam’s found a compulsive, careful way to stay on track, but “that apple cart will be upset in an upcoming episode. We have some episodes coming up that continue to spin out what’s going on inside Sam’s head. We revisit what’s been happening in terms of his maintenance of his ongoing hallucination problem, which is a day-to-day thing that he’s been managing. He doesn’t have a permanent solution right now, he has a maintenance solution. That can’t last.”

With Lisa behind him, Dean’s a single man again — and we’ll see him have an, er, romantic encounter with “The Vampire Diaries” star Sara Canning in an episode coming up soon. Gamble says that she’s not sure if a less temporary love interest will ever be brought into the show again. “I don’t know. My honest answer is that I don’t know. There’s no lasting love interests for them in Season 7,” she says. “They don’t have time, they’re busy, and they are in no emotional state for any kind of conventional love interest.”

With Bobby and Castiel out of the picture, at least for the time being, we’ll be seeing a few other characters come in to repopulate the Winchesters’ world — not that they’ll compare to Bobby and Castiel, of course. Frank will be back, as will Garth (D.J. Qualls), the nerdy hunter who drove Dean up the wall while Sam was lovesick with Becky.

“I think it’s business as usual in that you will meet hunters and you’ll meet people who come and go. You’ll meet a woman who is sort of a helper to hunters. Her name is Nora Havelock, who Sam and Dean knew many years ago. She’s introduced in an episode that’s about revisiting a case they worked a few years ago.
Source: Zap2it

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TVLINE | You ended the fall finale with the Reaper posing a pretty big question to Bobby. But then with last week’s episode, you didn’t address that question. Why did you decide to go in that direction?
In Episode 11 and in episodes to come, we wove in oblique references to that. What we want to do is keep the audience in the same grief space as Sam and Dean, who miss Bobby and start to question whether what they’re seeing is evidence that he might be a spirit or whether they’re just going through that normal grieving process where you think you see your loved one everywhere. Anyone who has gone through that knows that happens sometimes. And even when you are the world’s foremost supernatural investigators, that could happen to you.
TVLINE | Was the empty beer bottle one reference to that? Like, maybe ghost Bobby drank it?
Yes, that was definitely meant to tingle everybody’s “spidey sense” and make you wonder, “Is this one of those just lapse moments for them or does it mean something more?” It’s definitely meant to be evocative.
TVLINE | Will we at some point get an answer as to what Bobby chose?
We’re not going to leave you totally dangling forever. We would never let an actor as good as Jim Beaver go forever and ever. We fully intend to see him again in some way. I can’t give away everything, but I can say at the very least, we could do something like flashbacks to earlier in their lives, or bring him in in some other way.
Source: TVLine

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“Jim will be back, in one form or another, this season,” Singer says. “That’s probably as much as I’m going to say. The killing of Bobby was part of an overall idea this year of isolating the boys. It started with losing Castiel, then we went into a real, constant bonding with Bobby. We really built their relationship with Bobby this season, and then we ripped that away from them. We put them in a place they’ve really never been before, where they have no life supports, no lifelines, and no backups. They’re facing this huge monolithic evil, but they’re reduced to two lonely cowboys.”

Singer tells us that the death of Bobby has been planned since the season began. “I think we did it in a way that the audience accepted,” he says. “We really wanted to send Jim off that way, with a tear in everybody’s eye. It was dangerous, but we like to go where the story takes us, and that’s where the story took us.”

Speaking of closure, Singer tells us that there is a cliffhanger ending planned for this season, whether or not The CW gives the show an early pickup for Season 8. “We like to be optimistic about the pickup,” he says, “So we’re going to write another cliffhanger ending, I think, and then just see what happens.”
Source: Zap2it

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IGN TV: Sam and Dean have gone through so much, but Bobby was, in a lot of ways, their life line. Continuing forward, I would assume this loss will continue to be a huge weight on them?
Robert Singer: It’s a weight they’re going to carry for a number of episodes and that was kind of the idea of doing that to Bobby. Cutting that life line, they really were sort of out there alone. At the beginning of the year, that’s really what we were aiming for – to isolate them and see how they behave with no real life line and probably the biggest adversary they’ve faced in seven years. That was kind of our plan.

IGN: We left Bobby with a major question, as he was at death’s door. At what point will we find out the answer to that question?
Singer: We’ll find out soon. And yeah, Bobby will be back. In what form, that I’m not gonna give you!

IGN: Nothing has been said for certain, but it sounds like chances are pretty good for the show to be back for another season. As you near work on the finale, are you laying groundwork for what might come next?
Singer: Our plan is to leave it with a cliffhanger, which is what we’ve done pretty much every year. Unless they tell us different, that’s what we’ll do. And if we’re not coming back, hopefully they’ll tell us in time that we can give you a whiz-bang ending. But I think the plan is that it’ll be back.
Source: IGN

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Jared is going to have a little time off in March.

Zap2it: Sam and Dean, at least, seem to be back on track with their relationship. They trust each other again. You and Jensen have both said that you prefer that to the episodes where they’re keeping major secrets.
Padalecki: Personally, we’re close friends, great friends, and professionally, we’ve learned how to tell this story through the eyes of our characters, and Sam and Dean are the most important people in each others’ lives. When they’re on good terms, it’s — I don’t want to say it’s comfortable, because it’s hard work, but it’s more comfortable than trying to tell stories you don’t know how to tell. We know how to tell the story of Sam and Dean against the world, and we know the fans are receptive to it, so hopefully it’ll continue to play out that way.
Source: Zap2it

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‘SUPERNATURAL’: THE TRUTH ABOUT BOBBY
Nothing is more disheartening to a fan than the death of a longtime character. For Supernatural fans, the death of Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver) was a blow. But as many people have pointed out, it ultimately lacked the finality of, say, the death of the boys’ father — whose body was ceremoniously burned after death, signaling an unlikely return. And showrunner Sera Gamble indicates that there may very well be some sort of life after death for Bobby.

“In a matter of speaking, that was sort of like a cliffhanger or a question coming out of episode 10,” Gamble says. “That was the offer put to him by the reaper. ‘Come with me and be done, or stay here and be a ghost and face the consequences.’ So one of the questions we are left with is, ‘Did Bobby move on or didn’t he?’ The great thing about the show is none of these options preclude seeing Jim Beaver again at some point down the line. We can always flash back to an earlier time in their lives, we can send them to Heaven at some point, or we can say that he made the morally ambiguous decision and became a ghost and we can explore those consequences.”

While Beaver has already booked an upcoming multi-episode arc on Justified — hinting that we might not see him on Supernatural for a while — an insider tells me reports of his indefinite goodbye are “misleading.”

But for the time being, Gamble added, ” We really want to play with expectations for a while and explore what’s going on with Sam and Dean in their grieving process, [complete with] emotional fallout. But they must be wondering the same thing we are: ‘Did he move on? Is he still with us?’ I think grieving for them is not that much different than grieving for the fans.”
Source: EW

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Question: When are we going to see the Impala again on Supernatural? It just doesn’t seem right to have Dean separated from his baby for this long! —Laura
Ausiello: The two shall be reunited! “You will eventually see the Impala again,” exec producer Sera Gamble confirms. “He could never leave [her] forever! It breaks everyone’s heart, including ours. That’s one of the biggest loses of the season is that Dean can’t drive her.”

Question: Will the Chuck prophet/novelist character be coming back to Supernatural? I find myself still curious as to who he really is. —Sharon
Ausiello: The short answer is probably not. The long answer, care of Ms. Gamble, is, “If were a fan, I’d feel pretty satisfied by the way that Eric [Kripke] wrote Chuck’s last chapter. I would feel really good about that episode. We don’t currently have anything else for him to do, but I would certainly never say never. If somebody walked into the writers room tomorrow with a fantastic idea for an episode that needed him, we would do it immediately.”
Source: TVLine

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AOL Interview With Sera Gamble:

In this week’s episode, we see Dean self-medicating with alcohol more than ever before — even while working a case, which used to be a major Winchester no-no. Are we heading towards a Very Special Episode, ‘Supernatural’ style?
[Laughs] We don’t do Very Special Episodes of ‘Supernatural’ like that, no. The guys are pretty rough and tumble, but I don’t think we teach the boys difficult lessons about their lifestyles in that kind of ’80s sitcom way.

Short of therapy, if he’s questioning his identity as a hunter and as Sam’s brother, how do you foresee him getting back on solid ground?
Well, it’s a struggle for him. I think, especially beginning with what happened with Castiel, he’s been forced to question his place in a new way. And then seeing how his brother is dealing with everything so differently than he is … I think we’re the only show in television where both of our lead characters have gone to hell! [laughs] Now that Sam has recovered all of his memory, he’s struggling, but in a way that’s different than Dean did. And Dean is not always taking it well. So, it’s something that we explore in various ways in the coming episodes. I mean, we’re conscious that there’s something in the core of Dean’s character that’s kind of snarky and fun, and we didn’t want to lose that — I mean, he’s “Dean” about it, if you will. But he’s struggling with a lot of different things coming up.

The season 7 synopsis mentioned a secret that Dean is keeping that could tear the brothers apart. Is Dean keeping two secrets, or is the Amy revelation the one that you meant at the time?
Right now, the way that the Amy thing is playing out, yeah, I would say that that’s a pretty big secret in the first part of the season. We certainly are going to throw new and interesting stuff at you further down the line this season, but we have different flavors coming up. I wouldn’t call this the emotional arc of the entirety of season seven. It’s a story that came up in this episode as we were working in the room that ended up kind of taking on an emotional life between the brothers.

It’s clear in this week’s episode that Castiel is still on Dean’s mind and he’s definitely still on the fans’ minds; is there any new information you can offer about his return?
I can’t tell you anything solid about it. I don’t have any solid information about when you would see him back. I can just say that I will tell you as soon as I have something to tell you!

This week (episode 7.05), we see that there’s actually a pretty effective way of incapacitating a Leviathan; is that going to come into play again later in the season, or are they going to have to find another way of taking them out?
You know, it’s not every day that you get to have a thousand year old witch walk into your motel room and happen to save you. And characters like the witches they ran into in episode five are not helpful — they’re not there to help Sam and Dean, they’re not particularly interested in fighting Leviathans. It was temporary luck for Sam and Dean and Bobby that they basically get a window of a few days in which, as they say, “the guy lost his spinach” before he gets back to full power. And during that time, they can kind of experiment on him. But it’s not like they have a witch on speed dial.

Sam actually seems to be coping pretty well in episodes four and five, but I’m assuming that’s not going to last too long?
I mean, he’s evolving. In terms of what’s going on in his head, it’s something that he kind of incorporates into his day, having to deal with it. But we’re dealing with the second half of the season now. I’m in the room with Ben Edlund right now — in fact, I just walked out of it to come and take this call. We are talking about Lucifer, we’re talking about, hopefully if he’s available, seeing Mark Pellegrino again, although he’s a very busy man. But even if we had decided that that problem would be over, Mark was just too good in that episode! He was just so entertaining to watch, and he just brought such an interesting take to those scenes. But we have all along kind of had a plan for how we would reintroduce that issue for Sam.

Can you talk about the second half of the season at all, since you’re in the midst of plotting it out?
Sam gets beaten up by clowns. It’s really bad. [laughs] There’s some fun ones, we have a good mix of fun and serious, but in this batch we’ve been especially fond of a script in which Sam’s worst nightmare comes true: he is beaten up by angry clowns.
Source: AOL

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SET VISIT REPORTS – 10/04/2011

Fortunately, the brothers’ relationship is once again solid. Jared pointed out that Sam and Dean had started out so alone on the show.

But don’t thing that “back to basics” means we’re going to lose character development. Jared said that the characters have grown over the last six years and we won’t be losing any of that, but having the boys with fewer allies to rely on allows the show to give them “a cleaner slate to catapult other stories”.

For the next few episodes, the boys are definitely working together to solve their problems. Without other support, Jared said “we’re back to relying on each other”. But we know they’re going to be encountering problems. The authorities will start to get on their tails, so this will mean some problems with the boys staying in the same place at the same time. Jared said ?“they’re on to us, so we kind of have to split up, but obviously keep each other as partners”.

As for the Winchesters’ struggles – of which there are always many – Jared said that Sam will still be dealing with “his demons”, while Jensen joked “Dean is still pissed off about being short”. But seriously, Dean will have to keep a very close eye on his brother because of Sam’s current problems.

Jensen explained that Dean’s storyline will be focusing on a lot of what he’s been going through over the past six years: his inner struggle. He constantly has to deal with “the guilt, the lifestyle in general and the fact that he feels like he might let his brother down and he just can’t protect people like he used to be able to. It’s like the ‘weight of the world’ kind of thing”. Throw the leviathans into the mix and Dean is wracked with guilt: “He feels responsible that he couldn’t get to Cas in time to save him. There’s a lot of guilt, which plays into the whole trial thing [in episode 4]”.

“Sam finds himself once again on awkward footing” Jared said. “He’s dealing with the Hell wall and all of his memories and seeing Lucifer. It’s unfortunate because Sam and Dean have always been there for each other, but this is a kind of burden for Sam to bear alone. He’s not on the kind of solid footing where he can even accept help from his brother yet. It leaves a void for Dean because usually he’s saying ‘well, [my purpose is] taking care of my brother’, but now he’s going wacky on me’. But at least they want to take care of each other again.”

As for Castiel’s fate, Jared and Jensen reiterated what we all know. Even if you see a body on Supernatural, it doesn’t mean that character is gone, and we certainly haven’t seen Cas’ dead body. Jensen said “they’re always going to leave everything open. And even if they’ve shut the door, as much as they can visually, that door can always be kicked back open”.

Jared said that Misha is excited to remain a part of the show however he can and the writers and fans in particular have grown to love him. “He’s always welcome back and I’m sure it’s not the last we’ve seen of him”.
Source: TV Over Mind

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Jared: “For whatever reason, we’re having to go off on the run and cut communications in such a way because now, finally, after a hundred something episodes, the law enforcement is really on our tracks now. So we can’t always be on the phone; we can’t always be on the internet; we can’t always be keeping ourselves logged into the world– even to other friends. Obviously you’ve seen what happened to Cas, and we’ll see more and more than Sam and Dean really have to cut out a lot of other things– from the car to this, to that, to the other thing.”

As series star Jensen Ackles elaborated, “Season seven is Supernatural stripped down. It’s the acoustic [version]!…They’ve taken a lot of the tools of our trade that we’ve come to rely on over the years, and they’ve kind of stripped those away from us, so we’re kind of having to get back to the basics. We’re relying on each other; we’re relying on our smarts, our wits just to make it through, and it’s cool. I like it. It’s definitely reminiscent of the first season, which was when we fell in love with the show and a lot of the people watching fell in love with it.”

And just in case you’re wondering: that big secret of Dean’s that was teased oh, so long ago? It has nothing to do with him being put on trial, Ackles says. They are about to shoot the ninth episode of the season, and he admitted he couldn’t say a word about what said secret was. “You know why? I don’t know,” he laughed. “Because they tease me just as much as they tease you!”
VIDEO

Source: Examiner.com

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Q: Are we going to see the brothers working together more this season?
Padalecki: So far, it seems like it.
Ackles: [Season] 6 was a big split.
Padalecki: The first ten episodes…
Ackles: Yeah. The first half of the season, it was Dean and Sam completely separated.
Padalecki: Not understanding each other.
Ackles: But we’re definitely back in the saddle again.
Padalecki: I guess the flip side of the coin of not having the Bobbys and the Castiels, because we’re out on our own so much…
Ackles: Back to relying on each other.
Padalecki: We’re back to relying on each other. Whether we’ve had a demon on our side like Ruby, which obviously ended up being not on our side… But we’ve always had someone right there to count on, and now the boys are having to go… They’re on to us, so we kind of have to split up, but obviously keep each other as partners.
Ackles: And obviously Sam is having to deal with – for lack of a better term – his demons, with the wall falling down and the whole hell stuff that you actually saw in last week’s episode with Lucifer.
Padalecki: And Dean still being pissed off about not being as tall as Sam.
Ackles: Yes. Dean still being pissed off about being short. No, he’s obviously still got to keep a close eye, a close watch on his brother, because of that. But it’s good to get them kind of back working together again, given the six seasons that we spent with these guys and the ups and downs and the valleys and the mountain peaks that we’ve seen with the storylines and the characters themselves. So it’s nice to have them kind of getting back to the basics.

Q: The rule of thumb is if you don’t see a body, don’t count anyone dead. With Castiel, we got a coat. What do you think are the chances of him popping up at some point?
Ackles: Well, even if you see a body on the show, I don’t really think…
Padalecki: Yeah, I was gonna say!
Ackles: They’re always going to leave everything open. Even if they shut the door, as much as they can, visually… that door can always be kicked back open.
Padalecki: Yeah, I know Misha is excited about remaining a part [of the show], however he can. Obviously our writers and our fan following have grown to love him.. [Smirks] For whatever reason, I don’t know! But he’s always welcome back. And I’m sure it’s not the last we’ve seen of him.
Source: IGN

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As if it wasn’t bad enough that Sam and Dean seem incapable of destroying the monsters, the creatures are now out to destroy the boys’ anonymity.
“The Leviathan are trying to weed us out,” explains Jensen Ackles, “and they’ve come up with different scenarios, different schemes to do so. One of them is getting the cops basically put on our trail and really making us like America’s Most Wanted, which doesn’t help us because as soon as [the Leviathan] know that we are being locked up or being detained in some facility, we’re….” “Sitting ducks,” Padalecki finishes.
o evade being outed and in turn captured, Dean and Sam will have to cut out the things – and people – they’ve come to depend on for hunting. “We can’t always be on the phone,” says Padalecki. “We can’t always be on the Internet. We can’t always be keeping ourselves logged into the world and even to other friends. … Sam and Dean are really going to have to go with each other [and] cut out a lot of other things, from the car to this or that.”
That Butch and Sundance quality lends itself to a “stripped down” feel to the season. “It’s the acoustic season,” Ackles jokes. But in all seriousness, it’s back to basics with the boys just “relying on each other, our wits and our street smarts just to make it through,” he continues. “It’s reminiscent of the first season, which was the season that I know we fell in love with the show.”
Source: TVLine

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The Season 7 synopsis said something like, “Dean struggles under the weight of a secret that threatens to tear them apart.” Does that relate to the trial, or is it something separate?
JA: That’s something separate.
Can you tease anything about it?
JA: [vehemently shakes his head] You know why? Because I don’t know. They tease me just as much as they tease you!
[Note: There is another secret that Ackles does know about that is touched upon in this week’s episode, but expect that to be resolved fairly quickly.]

How do the cops catch on to you guys?
JP: How do they not? I think that’s the more accurate question!
JA: Well, Leviathans are trying to weed us out, essentially. So they’ve come up with different scenarios, different schemes to do so. One of them is getting the cops basically put on our trail and really making us America’s Most Wanted, which doesn’t help us. Because as soon as they know that we are locked up or that we’re being detained in some facility, then we’re sitting ducks.

Given the emotional scene that you guys had in the warehouse last episode, is there going to be any tension between the brothers as Dean doubts Sam’s ability to keep himself grounded in reality?
JA: I don’t think that there’s necessarily a lack of trust, I think it’s more just keeping an eye out and wanting to be there in case he does slip and fall, and trying to be the supporter that he can be without coddling him, so to speak.
JP: Also, with all the ups and downs Sam’s been through, I think he’s more concerned now with trying to get his footing again as opposed to calling Dean out, unless it’s something that’s very important … I think Sam, first things first, has to fix himself before he can fix somebody else.
JA: In this episode that we’re filming right now [Season 7, Episode 8], Dean basically is saying, “Look, you’re an adult, I know that you can take care of yourself. You don’t need me.” He’s coming to that realization, which is tough for him because he’s always looked out for his little brother. But there is a shift change in the season and Dean understands that he can’t babysit him all the time; Sam is his own man and he’s dealing with his issues, but at the same time, he’s doing a really good job of dealing with it. So Dean’s got to understand that and give credit, and he does.

A lot of that is internal as opposed to you fighting monsters — can you talk about the challenges of playing that and making sure that comes across?
JP: Well, for better or worse, I think that’s what we both have relied on to make this story work. The great thing about Supernatural is that it’s in the mythological world of science-fiction and demons … but I think it’s on the plate of very real human emotions and caring for family. We’ve become such good friends over the years that it’s very easy to understand what it means to care about somebody and their well-being, especially to put yourself on the line for somebody else and make sure they’re okay. So now we don’t lose that. When season one started out, the boys obviously just clashed heads. Now, I think Jared and Jensen have understood with Sam and Dean like, “hey, we’re going to have to take care of each other first and these monsters and demons things can come and go,” as they do. But it’s more important that we deal with the emotional issues.
JA: Yeah, I mean, it’s always been a story about two brothers. Whatever kind of craziness comes their way I think that the story always hinges on the relationship of these two guys and what they deal with and what they go through on a human level.
Source: AOL

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Supernatural Boss Addresses Castiel Firestorm: Is He Dead or Alive?

In Friday’s action-packed episode of Supernatural, a possessed Castiel got swallowed up by some black hole/hellmouth hybrid, leaving behind nothing but a soggy trench coat. Sam, Dean and Bobby were quick to pronounce their buddy DOA, and now, so is executive producer Sera Gamble.

In the following Q&A, Supe‘s fearless leader confirms that Cas is in fact dead, but she also hints that viewers have not seen the last of his portrayer, fan favorite Misha Collins.

TVLINE | What exactly happened to Castiel in that water? Did his body just dissolve into nothingness?
All of those Leviathans inside of Cas were too much for the vessel, so they stewed him into the water. These are things we have to be somewhat cagey about, but it was too much certainly and it disintegrated under all of these monsters, if you will.

TVLINE | Is it safe to label him as dead? Or did you purposely leave it ambiguous?
Both things are true, actually. We purposely left it ambiguous. In the life of the show, [Sam and Dean] just suffered the death of one of their best friends, something that they are dealing with in a serious and substantial way.

TVLINE | So it’s definitely something that will carry on?
Certainly. Death is a funny thing on Supernatural because we’re a show about life beyond the grave, but this is one of most serious losses that Sam and Dean have had to face in the life of the series.

TVLINE | Is there a chance that Misha could come back not as Cas, but in some other incarnation?
Oh definitely. It has always been our intention to bring back Misha in some form. When we called Misha to let him know that we had this plan for the character, we talked about this on a longer schedule than in these first two episodes. We certainly can’t say too much about where the story is going to go, but we love Misha and want to continue to work with him.

TVLINE | Cas’ exit came pretty early in the episode and was somewhat subdued. Can you talk about the thinking behind that scene?
This is all part of the story that launches the season. So, we didn’t think of [his death] as having more or less impact; we think of all of this as the big kickoff.

TVLINE | This was a pretty intense and cliffhanger-heavy episode for so early in the season. Is this a sign of things to come?
We won’t be doing that to you with mythology every week. [Laughs] On some level that would be fun, but Supernatural is a show that has a mix of mythology and close-ended episodes. We have the same formula that we’ve always had for that. The episode coming up this week is a little bit of both. We keep the mythology threat alive, but there’s also a monster that they’re following that is wrapped up by the end of the episode.

TVLINE | What does Cas’ disappearance mean for Crowley and their deal?
Crowley is a little bit relieved. [Laughs] But just because that player is off the board doesn’t mean that there’s not a board for Crowley to be looking at. He is constantly strategizing and when we see him next, he’s just jumping back into the game and figuring out who he can align himself with and what the best move will be for him.

TVLINE | Does the world of angels still factor into the season, or is that chapter closed?
The epic War in Heaven storyline has pretty much come to an end — at least for now — but individual stories that include angels that are more character-based or more about the impact that the previous wars have had, we have plans for those.
Source: TVLine

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Zap2it spoke with Executive Producer Sera Gamble on Monday to find out whether or not Castiel will be back in Season 7.

“As of now, we hope to continue to work with Misha,” she says. “We have some ideas. Right now, a huge part of the story on the show is Sam and Dean dealing with Castiel’s death and the loss of Castiel.”

We will see some degree of on-screen mourning from the Winchesters. “We had that little moment with the trenchcoat, and I think that’s sort of their eulogizing of him, in a way,” she says. “The repercussions of that loss are felt long beyond Episode 2. There’s so many aspects of this that they have to deal with, in terms of losing their friend and someone that was helpful to them. It’s about seeing the impact that had on our characters.”

Given how close he was to Castiel, it’s no surprise that the loss has the most profound impact on Dean. Fans have written in to Zap2it with concerns about whether Dean’s storyline in Season 7 will focus solely on Sam, but Gamble tells us that Friday’s episode, “The Girl Next Door,” will plant the seeds for Dean’s journey this year.

“What happened with Cas takes a toll on Dean in terms of his ability to trust people and assess situations,” Gamble tells us. “His core instincts as a hunter are called into question. He’s been rocked on a pretty deep level. You pair that with his really grave concerns about his brother’s mental health, which I think are warranted given that he had a gun waved in his face like fifteen seconds ago, and he’s got a long road. A situation will come up on Friday that will test him in what kind of choices that he’s going to make, given the circumstances. It’ll set the ball rolling for his story this season.”

The writers’ decision to remove Castiel from the story — whether as a friendly angel or as a god — has certainly been a controversial one among fans. It wasn’t something that they took lightly in the writers’ room, either. “We talked about the angel storyline as a whole, which was a huge part of Season 4 and 5 and, more off-screen, Season 6,” Gamble says. “Any time we could showcase Castiel was good, and we were really interested in giving that character his turn and evolving that character, because the story that he had been brought in for was finished. On our show, a lot of times, the only way to take a character to the next level is to kill him, frankly.”

With Bobby’s house burned to a crisp, the Winchesters and Bobby find themselves adrift over the first half of the season. “It’s about taking away home base and the feeling that they have of a place they can return to,” Gamble says. “The stuff they’ve relied on they can’t rely on anymore, starting with Castiel. Now the only place they have that’s felt anything like home for most of their lives is gone. Things are getting difficult in new ways for them. It really takes a toll on the three of them.”
Source: Zap2it

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Rebecca: Supernatural please! Something on my favorite Winchester boy.
Which would be…hmm, lemme guess. Sam. No Dean. No Sam. OK, I’ll just give you something related to both. I’m told that Dean will really have something of an identity crisis this season because if he doesn’t take care of his brother Sam, who is he? I’m told he’ll be searching for purpose. Any fans out there who’d like to rent Dean for the day?
Source: E!Online

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What are the Leviathans?
Gamble: We’ll develop what the Leviathans mean this season. They certainly don’t want to go home and we open the idea of Purgatory and the idea that there were monsters there and that it’s an awful place, and Hell’s an awful place, and Heaven frankly sounds kind of boring to me. When you think about it, Earth is sort of this Eden, slightly corrupted, but full off possibilities, and it seems like everybody wants to be here. So there’s a lot of directions we could take [the story] and we’ve been having a lot of fun with that, I must say.

What’s their endgame? (I compared them to The Joker in terms of having fun rather than setting their sights on world domination, which Gamble agreed with.)
Gamble: Like the other bad guys who emerge a little as time goes on, their personalities will become clear in the next few episodes, but I think that sense that they are having fun and they’re not like here to like hail fire and brimstone on the world and just be evil, I think you’re picking up on something that’s right and that we wanted to definitely weave in with these characters. Part of that is that they’re here to have a good time.
Singer: But they’re not chaotic, they’re smart.
Gamble: In fact, smarter, I think, is part of the problem. Yeah.

Should we take them at their word that Castiel is dead?
Gamble: You should never take anyone for their word that anyone is dead, especially when they’re trying to get you out of their way. You certainly should not just ring the final bell on seeing Cas or Misha just because you don’t know what episode he’ll show up in next.

Will the Leviathans take different forms?
Gamble: You’ll have to tune in to find out what we’re going to do there.

Will Mark Pellegrino be back?
Gamble:
Yeah, you’ll see him in the next episode and perhaps …
Singer: Maybe thereafter, maybe.

Is there an overall theme for this season?
Gamble:
We have a few things that we talk about a lot when we’re in the room. A lot of things come up again and again, but one thing that is a through line that we keep seeing is that Sam and Dean now feel like they are kind of part of a small and almost outmoded way of fighting evil and they feel outmatched in a way that they didn’t before. They feel like the world around them has really changed.
Singer: From the beginning, these have always been morality tales, sort of like classic westerns are generally morality tales. I think we’re always telling a morality tale. What make it interesting is our characters aren’t perfect and they’re very flawed and susceptible to temptations of their own, but at the end of the day, right and wrong is kind of really what drives the show.
Source: AOL

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As Gamble pointed out, it’s not exactly possible for Sam to keep his hallucinations quiet for long, and though Dean has never been a fan of Sam’s penchant for secret-keeping, the producers promised that we won’t see a fractured relationship between the brothers this season.

“I think at this point, having gone through so much of the same
stuff, it’s hard — especially for Dean this season — that they’re dealing with it in such different ways. It’s really important to both of them to try and stay together because they don’t have very many people and because they’re clearly better working together and they need each other in so many ways,” Gamble pointed out. “We explore how, over the seven years that we’ve just been watching them, they’ve developed in really different ways and they deal with things in really different ways. They’ve gotten past different things and they’ve held onto different things and there’s a lot of material just from the stuff we’ve all seen them go through on screen.”

Singer agreed, but clarified that they won’t be gluing Sam and Dean together every episode when the narrative demands otherwise. “There’s some episodes where we separate them, not necessarily emotionally, but just kind of the way the story takes you,” he reasoned. “We’re always guided by where the stories take us and if they naturally take us where they all split apart and come together, that’s where we go, or if the idea is one that requires them to be locked at the hip, we do that. But we try to mix it up and let them have their own adventures on some episodes.”

What Else To Expect:

— More time-travel: (Although the boys won’t be flying Angel Air this time around.) “We’re breaking an episode right now that’s pretty cool, where one of the guys ends up stuck in 1944, which is very different then getting stuck in the wild west … it’s a darker time period,” Gamble hinted. “It turns out that a case that they were trying to solve back than is the same as a case that Sam and Dean are trying to solve now. All of the tropes at that time period are really fun; in its own way, it’s as iconic and fun as the western.”

— New allies: As previewed at Comic-Con, we’ll be introduced to Frank, an old acquaintance of Bobby’s who is “a bit off the grid” and “a really difficult guy to deal with.” We’ll also meet Garth, who is “very quirky” according to Gamble. “Dean is stuck in an emergency situation and can’t be with Bobby and can’t be with Sam and needs a hunter and Bobby sends him this guy named Garth, who’s going to be played by DJ Qualls,” she revealed.

– The devil you know: As the previews have indicated, Crowley is back — and the demon is harder to kill than a cockroach. Expect to see more of him, according to Gamble. “Crowley is sort of the ultimate, self-interested character; he always finds a way to bend whatever’s happening to his own best uses,” she said. “I mean, there’s a reason he’s lived this long; there’s a reason he always finds the parachute under his seat. So, as things evolve this season, we’ll see him try and adapt. He’s always fun — we keep throwing stuff at him.”

— More Meg: Singer predicted that Meg (Rachel Miner) would “rear her lovely and evil head again” sometime soon, but didn’t specify any precise plans.
Source: AOL

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Back in Time: Yep, there will be another time travel episode this season, though Gamble revealed it’s by, “A whole new means, actually. It’s not an angel time travel episode. One of the guys ends up stuck in 1944, which is very different than getting stuck in the wild west. It’s a lot darker time period.” Asked if this involves Nazi Germany, Gamble replied, with a smile, “No, although I still want to do Nazi zombies at some point!”

Explaining the story a bit, Gamble said, “It turns out a case that they were trying to solve back then is the same as a case that Sam and Dean are trying to solve now. We’re breaking that right now, but all of the tropes of that time period are a lot of fun. In its own way, it’s as iconic and fun as the western.”
Source: IGN

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2. Thou shalt honor your hunter brother. After previously being separated either physically (Sam doesn’t recommend getting trapped in Hell) or spiritually (Sam doesn’t recommend leaving behind your soul in Hell), the brothers will be more united this season. Ackles said,”Last season was just a nightmare not having that partner in crime. Soulless Sam … it took the character of Sam out of Dean’s life. This season they’re on the same team, they’re headed down the same road together. Due to that aspect of this new God, there is released an evil that the boys have no idea how to handle. … All the tools of the trade that they’ve used over the past six years or all their lives are pretty much useless.”

6. Thou shalt practice self-absorption, especially if you’re a Crossroads demon of Scottish origin. “You’ll see more of Crowley (Mark Sheppard). Crowley is sort of the ultimate, self-interested character,” Gamble said. “He always find a way to bend whatever is happening to his own best uses. As the weather kind of changes, he kind of finds a way to insert himself into the situation. I mean, there’s a reason he’s lived this long, there’s a reason why he always finds the parachute under his seat. As things evolve this season, he’ll try and adapt. He’s always fun so we keep throwing stuff at him.”

7. Thou shalt include frivolous episodes to lighten the demon-fighting mood. Could there be another episode like “The French Mistake” on the horizon? “There are a couple coming up that are quite fun,” said Singer. “I think it’s a pattern we’ve always followed by picking up the thread of what happened last year in those cliff-hangers we sort of threw some of these darker, more mythology-driven episodes. Once we’ve established what the playing field is for this year then we let ourselves go.”

8. Thou shalt introduce new allies because the old ones keep getting killed. “There’s an old acquaintance of Bobby’s named Frank who is a bit off the grid,” said Gamble. “As Sam and Dean get squeezed in an upcoming episode and have to kind of drop out of sight a bit more, he sends them to Frank, and Frank is this really difficult guy to deal with. [At another point,] Dean is stuck in an emergency situation and … Bobby sends him this guy named Garth, who’s going to be played by D.J. Qualls, so he’s very quirky.”

9. Thou shalt play with time travel just so Sam or Dean can play dress-up. Last season the Winchester boys went to the Old West, and this season they’re sticking a little closer to home time-wise. “We’re breaking an episode right now that’s pretty cool where [they time-travel] by a whole new means actually. It’s not an angel time-travel episode. One of the guys ends up stuck in 1944, which is very different from getting stuck in the Wild West. It’s a darker time period. It turns out that a case they were trying to solve back then is the same as the case that Sam and Dean are trying to solve now. The tropes of the time period are really fun. In its own way, it’s iconic and as fun as the Western.”

10. Thou shalt not kill the Impala. At the end of last season, Sam and Dean’s favorite mode of transportation was destroyed (again). “Why does all the evil in the universe hate the Impala so much?” Gamble said. Singer added, “[Dean] will fix it. It’ll be back. Like the show, it’s the car that would not die.”
Source: TV Guide

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Going forward in the season, after the first few episodes, the tone and focus will shift a bit. There will be resolution to Sam’s situation in one way, only to have a new door to a whole other set of issues opened. And that, of course, will introduce a whole new big bad.

“Sam and Dean kind of feel like they are part of a small…way of fighting evil. They feel kind of outmatched in the way the world around them as moved,” Gamble admitted. “We introduced the idea of purgatory and the monsters there. That’s an awful place, and hell’s an awful place, and heaven, frankly, sounds kind of boring to me. But when you think about it, our place– Earth– is sort of this Eden. Slightly corrupted but full of possibilities, certainly, and it seems like everyone wants to be here, so there’s a lot of direction we can go in with that.”

And one such direction is playing with alternate realities and places in time, not just Sam’s skewed reality. Sadly, there are no plans as of yet to go back to the wild, wild, west, but Gamble broke the news to LA TV Insider Examiner that the show will visit an equally exciting, though extremely different point in history.

“We’re breaking an episode right now that’s pretty cool where there’s a whole new means [of time travel],” Gamble said, noting that angels would not be involved in “zapping” the boys back. “One of the guys gets stuck in 1944, which is very different from being out west! It’s a much darker time period. It turns out the case they were trying to solve back then is the same type of case that Sam and Dean are trying to solve right now.”

Gamble promised this particular time travel episode would be just as “iconic and fun” as “Frontierland,” but she also expressed interest in another idea we just know would become a classic episode if the show actually finds time to tackle it: “I still want to do Nazi zombies at some point!”
Source: Examiner.com

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Return of the King (of Hell): In last season’s finale, Castiel let Crowley (Mark Sheppard) escape because he had “plans” for him, and he doesn’t waste time retrieving the former crossroads demon in Friday’s premiere. But unlike Castiel, Gamble said we’ll see more of Crowley throughout the season: “He figures how to insert himself—there’s a reason he’s lived this long…As things evolve this season, we’ll see him try to adapt,” she said. “He’s always fun, so we keep throwing stuff at him.” (We thought Castiel was pretty fun too. Just sayin’.)

Be My Guest: The casting of Buffy stars James Marsters and Charisma Carpenter as a married couple is not a coincidence, showrunner Gamble confirmed. SPN “worked really hard” to get the genre-specific stars on board, she said, which “speaks really directly to our fan base—our casting directors really understand the people who watch the show.” Also guesting is quirky actor DJ Qualls, who plays an “off-the-grid” old acquaintance of Bobby’s who helps out when Dean is “stuck in an emergency situation.” (“It’s really awesome when you write a DJ Qualls type and you get DJ Qualls,” Sera enthused.) Jo (Alona Tal) makes her return in episode four, which also features “flashbacks to an episode she was in years ago,” said Singer, adding, “I was just blown away by what she did.”
Source: E!Online

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THE LEVIATHANS ARE HERE! | The new Big Baddies in Dean and Sam’s rear-view mirror are older than man and angels. But did you know that the biblical beasts like to party? “That sense that they’re having fun and not here to hail fire and brimstone on the world and just be mustache-twirling evil is right,” says Gamble, adding, “They’re here to have a good time.” But she points out that they’re also “smarter,” so what’s their master plan? That remains unclear, but “they certainly don’t want to go home” to purgatory. “When you think about it, our place, Earth, is sort of this Eden – slightly corrupted, but full of possibilities,” she explains. “It seems like everybody wants to be here, and there’s a lot of directions we can take that.”

FACES NEW AND FAMILIAR | Don’t discount the resourceful Crowley just because he was banished by Cas. “Crowley is the ultimate, self-interested character,” explains Gamble. “He always finds a way to bend whatever is happening to his own best uses.” As the tides of power shift in the new season, “He figures out how to insert himself in the situation,” she continues. “There’s a reason he’s lived this long. … So as things evolve this season, we’ll see him try and adapt.” Dean and Sam, meanwhile, will have to rely on some new friends for help. For example, viewers will meet a difficult, off-the-grid acquaintance of Bobby’s who the boys are forced to seek help from when they “have to drop out of sight a bit more,” teases Gamble.

BEST OF THE REST | One of the boys will be time-traveling again — back to 1944! — but it won’t be via angel power this time. “It turns out a case that they were trying to solve back then is the same as a case that Sam and Dean are trying to solve now,” describes Gamble. Relatedly, one of the things on Gamble’s wish list, but not in this episode? Nazi zombies! Also look out for a new, symbolic title card. “It’s just monstery and disgusting and connects to purgatory,” says Gamble of the new image. “There’s a B-movie horror vibe to that of just grossness coming at you from your screen.”
Source: TVLine

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“Dean will have lots of issues this year that he’s going to have to deal with,” co-executive producer Bob Singer teased during a special screening and Q&A event for the show here in Los Angeles.

“During the first thirteen episodes [of season seven], I think he will probably carry a rockier journey in an odd way in terms of how he feels emotionally and how he deals with things. He’s on a real rollercoaster. Jensen has plenty to do!”
Source: Examiner.com

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From Jim Beaver:

On Bobby’s arc this season (and rumors of his house being destroyed): “I’ve done five of the first six episodes. There are changes involving Bobby’s house, but not necessarily [destruction]. I was in Bobby’s house set a couple of days ago, as a matter of fact. One thing I’ve learned, in life as well as on ‘Supernatural,’ is that whatever you expect, it’ll be different.”

On a potential love interest: “Bobby has a very nice time in episode 6, a better time than he’s had in the previous episodes he’s been in. I won’t go so far as to commit to what it was, but I think the fans will love it — I liked it a lot!”

On comparisons between season seven and ‘Butch and Sundance’: “The real ‘Butch Cassidy’ connection is that in that movie, they kept looking back at the bad guys chasing them going ‘who are those guys?’ and there’s a lot of that, because Sam and Dean and Bobby are faced with something they’ve never seen before and their usual tools and tricks and weapons don’t work so well. We picked up this show in season one with the boys knowing what they were after and what they were dealing with; now they’re learning all over again. But we’re fairly innovative fellas, so we find new ways and new things.”

On Castiel’s link to the new big bad: “Everything Cas did toward the end of the season is going to pay off in very specific ways with this new villainy. The big bad comes directly from what Cas was doing.”
Source: AOL

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Jensen Ackles Previews Supernatural Season 7

TV Guide Magazine: Congratulations. Your little show is about to start its seventh season. Can you believe it?
Jensen Ackles: No, I can’t. It was unbelievable we made Season 5, then 6, now we’re doing 7 and they’re already looking into the future of 8, so I’m just like, “What?” It’s not gonna be, “Sam, get me the salt and the gun.” It’s gonna be, “Sam, throw me my walker!”

TV Guide Magazine: Where does Season 7 start?
Ackles: It’s a direct pick-up from where we left off [in May]. Castiel [Misha Collins] looks at Sam and Dean and tells them that they’re essentially ants in the scheme of things. Now that he’s God, he has no need for them and to stay out of his way… When they track Cas down, they realize that when he took in all those monsters souls from purgatory, there were much older things that got into him as well. There’s a new, basically unknown, enemy in the world. It’s something that the guys have never dealt with.

TV Guide Magazine: That doesn’t sound good.
Ackles: No. [laughs] We’re going to start taking things away from Sam and Dean that they’ve relied on in their hunter life. There’s no lore to help them out and no book to tell them what to do. Bobby [Jim Beaver] throws his hands in the air. At one point they might even have to stash the Impala, because it’s too recognizable. The lead problem this year, is that all their little tricks that they’ve used to exist, credit card fraud and gambling, those are ways for this evil to track them down. It poses a bit of a challenge for the boys. They throw everything they can at Sam and Dean and they have to wriggle their way out.

TVGuide Magazine: We know Crowley [Mark A. Sheppard] is back. What’s the King of Hell up to?
Ackles: He’s been hiding from Cas, who was his partner. There is a little “I’ll help you if you help me” going on.

TVGuide Magazine: Who else is back?
Ackles: Death [Julian Richings] is in the season opener. He’s the one that gives Sam and Dean the information they need about Cas and the new evil that will loom over the guys for the first half of the season. There’s more than one. They could be anywhere. They don’t only want to kill the brothers, they want to take over the planet.

TV Guide Magazine: So the boys have to save the world again?
Ackles: Yes, they’re essentially going to have to save the world again.

TV Guide Magazine: Isn’t Sam still struggling with the breakdown of the wall in his brain that kept away his memories from Hell?
Ackles: Definitely. He’s getting these flashbacks from Hell now that the wall that Death built is crumbling. There are visions and hauntings. It’s almost like he has to overcome a drug problem. Dean and Bobby are very concerned because he checks out every now and then.

TV Guide Magazine: Now that Dean is single again, will he go back to being catnip for the ladies?
Ackles: Well, in one episode I do walk into a bar and hit on a waitress and say how it’s been a long time! I don’t know that there’s going to be a lot of room for that. [Laughs]

TV Guide Magazine: You’re directing your second episode. When will it air and was it easier this time around?
Ackles: It will air third [October 7] It was much more challenging than last year. There was a lot of story going on. And flashbacks. [This time] it’s a one-off. Sam takes off on his own. He catches a case that he’s familiar with back from 1998. He was left home to do research while Dad and Dean were off hunting creatures, and he wound up running into the creatures himself. He had to make a very tough decision when he meets a girl and he’s smitten. Now he’s tracking her as a grown up. We have a really cool guest star playing her — Jewel Staite, who I’ve known since she was on Firefly.

TV Guide Magazine.com: We hear the hunter Jo [Alona Tal] is returning, despite her death back in Season 5.
Ackles: She’s brought back as kind of a materialized blast from the past when Dean is put on trial by an ancient Egyptian god who calls a few witnesses to the stand. It’s a heartwarming scene between the two of them.
Source: TV Guide

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EW Misha Video Interview

Misha Collins misses ‘the old Cas’ on Supernatural
Those CW-ers are tough nuts to crack. But you can bet we tried when we snagged Supernatural‘s resident God pro tem, Misha Collins, on the red carpet for the CBS/CW/Showtime soiree last night in Los Angeles.
What Collins did reveal was that fans will likely have mixed reactions to the former angel as he conducts “clean up in aisle Earth,” but will ultimately find themselves interested. “It’ll be a love-hate relationship, but all good relationships are.”
But what did Collins think of this new side of his character? Watch the video below for the answer!

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Supernatural is not heading into its final season — at least not if new CW president Mark Pedowitz has anything to say about it.
“It is not intended to be the last season,” the exec told reporters at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in Beverly Hills on Thursday. “We’ll see how the ratings go. We hope it keeps going. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
What’s the key to the show’s longevity? “It’s about the love of two brothers and two really good-looking guys,” Pedowitz offered. “And I think that transcends the supernatural [element].”
Source: TVLine

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Jared Padalecki talks ‘Supernatural’ season 7 and how Friday rivals ‘Fringe’ and ‘Grimm’ can ‘bring it.’

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So, Sam and Dean (Jensen Ackles) are kind of up a creek this season.
JARED PADALECKI: They are. We’ve done so very much on this show and put Sam and Dean in so many strange positions, and now here we are in season 7 and we’re going, “Well, what can possibly happen to them now.” But what’s been wonderful and a real blessing from the character’s perspective over the last few years is that we’ve accumulated these friends and this angel who can get us out of tight spots and all these little home bases that have really been a boon for our hunting business, so to speak. And now we’re gradually losing touch with all of these. Hunters are being killed off, we lost this angel on our shoulders. So now we see the boys in a position that they’ve been in before, but usually they’ve had more artillery at their disposal.

Being that Castiel was so close to them, how are they dealing with his new power? And how concerned are they with him being so powerful — even though they have no idea how to deal with it?
Well, it’s very intense. We certainly don’t take it lightly. One of the writers mentioned how power corrupts, and we see Castiel with absolute power. We don’t take it lightly what he can do. So we try to go full steam. Sam and Dean sort of don’t half ass things. If they see something they don’t like the go full steam ahead.

But that must be hard to do with Sam’s wall being crumbled. How is he dealing with that?

Sam and Dean don’t know what could possibly go wrong now. One of the things that has really remained a constant with Sam at least is that he’s tried to remain strong. Sometimes there’s a downfall, like when he had the demon blood thing going on. He’s always thought he was doing the right thing, and he remained very headstrong. But now, with Sam’s wall coming down, we see this guy who has always been strong who kind of now is just losing it. He doesn’t know if he can trust himself and he has such self doubt that it’s crippling. It’s difficult on Dean; it’s difficult on Bobby because he can’t be a help to them if he can’t be a help to himself. At least in the past, he’s always been able to go in guns blazing and provide some sort of help. But now, with Sam’s not sure who he is and where he is, it’s like Dean and Bobby have to take care of me as well.

You’re breaking my heart here…
[Laughs] We certainly also have a few laughs, too. Usually, from what I can extrapolate from past seasons, we usually kind of get the storyline up and going for the show and then throw in some fun ones around midseason. [Usually, it’s] right around when everybody is going, “Man, I don’t know if I can deal with another dark and dying and death [episode].” Here, at the beginning, we’re definitely setting up this new route that we’re taking. And there is no lack of laughs. Dean’s always got this tongue-in-cheek humor, and Sam’s got his reaction to this guy that I call my brother. So we’ll have a good time in the end, but we don’t have a super goofy one yet. But I was thinking about that the other day. It’s great to be part of a fun, crazy sci-fi show that’s dark and deals with mythology and then we do something where we play ourselves. It’s nice for the fans. They appreciate being a part of it and laughing with us.

At this point and time, we’re not doing American Idol numbers where 30 million people watch every week and it’s a no-brainer that [they’ll] go forever. We have this core group of followers who are a part of it and enjoying being a part of it. So it’s nice to have that confidence in our viewership that we can do something like that and not jump the shark. Actually, we’ve had an episode called “Jump the Shark.”

Now, this might sound silly, and it is. But I get this question more than anything, so let’s just put it out there. What’s going on with Sam’s hair this season?
[Laughs…for a good while]Well, it’s probably more similar to season 6 than season 1. It’s taken on a life of it’s own. I think one day my hair and the Impala are going to have re-negotiations for season 7. But I guess we pick up season 7 where season 6 left off. So it’s most similar to that. I get a lot of people who liked my hair in season 1. I think, literally, we’ve had times in the past 6 or 7 years when I’m like, “Man, I want to cut my hair really short.” Or Jensen’s like, “I really want to grow my hair out. It gets cold here.” And I suppose they won’t let us because that’s just who Sam and Dean are. One’s longer-haired and one’s short-haired. And now that Sam’s older, they definitely style it more than let it be floppy and frumpy. I think back in season 1, I was just this 23-year-old kid but I was also 6? 4”. I had the body of a man but a face of a boy, and they wanted me to be more a boy than a man. So they gave me the original Bieber look. Maybe Bieber stole it from me — the whole hair-in-the-eyes, “I think I’m too sexy” attitude. But now I’m adult Sam ‘do.

Lastly, Supernatural has a bit of competition on Friday night. Along with Fringe, NBC’s Grimm, which is in a similar wheelhouse, is also starting up. What do you make of this? How is Supernatural going to fare?

Maybe I should be worried about it, but I take it as a compliment. A lot of these supernatural shows come and go. And I do watch Fringe and Josh [Jackson] is a buddy. I guess you can say, bring it. We’ve been on seven years. Good luck catching up. [Laughs] But I’ll take it as a compliment. When Supernatural came out, there were a lot of procedurals and you were either a doctor or a cop or lawyer, otherwise the show didn’t stay on TV. And then we came around, and I don’t want to say we were trailblazers, but we found our niche. And, like I said, we’re not getting 100 million viewers every week, but we have some people who are passionate and passionate about the genre.
Source: EW

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Season Seven Description – CW Update

The thrilling and terrifying journey of the Winchester Brothers continues with the seventh season of “Supernatural” on The CW.

Twenty-six years ago, Sam Winchester (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) lost their mother to a mysterious and demonic supernatural force. Subsequently, their father John (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, “Watchmen”) raised them to be soldiers. He taught them about the paranormal evil that lives in the dark corners and on the back roads of America…and he taught them how to kill it.

Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) have battled every kind of supernatural threat. After dozens of bloody adventures, they finally closed in on their dark destiny: with the help of their friends, father-figure Bobby (Jim Beaver, “Deadwood”) and fallen angel Castiel (Misha Collins, “24”), they managed to avert the Apocalypse. But the victory came at terrible cost: Sam sacrificed himself, to be imprisoned in Hell alongside Lucifer. Devastated, Dean retired to civilian life-and was shocked when, a year later, a mysteriously resurrected Sam appeared at his door. Back in the hunt, the brothers faced increasingly strange, deadly creatures, ultimately fighting their way to the original monster-the Mother Of All. And Dean discovered the shocking, dangerous truth about Sam: he’d returned from Hell-but without his soul, leaving him calculating and untrustworthy. In a risky move, Dean restored Sam’s soul, but at great cost. Sam was flooded with horrific memories of Hell, memories that threatened to overtake him, even kill him. Meanwhile, Civil War in Heaven raged on. Castiel, determined not to lose, made the reckless choice to open a door to Purgatory, repository for all monster souls. His gambit: harness the power of those souls by absorbing them. Ignoring Sam and Dean’s warnings, Castiel made a deal with the King of Hell to find that door.

Now, despite Sam and Dean’s efforts to stop him, Castiel has succeeded in his plan. His power is God-like, and Sam and Dean have no idea how to stop him. But even Castiel doesn’t truly understand the magnitude of what’s inside him — or how dangerous he really is.

Season seven finds Dean and Sam reeling from the loss of their friend. Sam’s violent memories of Hell threaten to overtake him, threatening not just his life, but his brother’s as well. Meanwhile, Dean struggles under the weight of a secret that threatens to tear them apart. And even as the brothers traverse the backroads of America, hunting things that go bump in the night, something is coming for them. They are about to face an enemy more canny and adaptable than any they’ve ever fought. As the landscape around them becomes increasingly treacherous, the tools they’ve come to rely upon will be stripped away. Our heroes, like so many outlaws before them, will find themselves utterly outmatched and outgunned, with no one to rely on but each other.

From Warner Bros. Television in association with Wonderland Sound and Vision, with executive producers McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The O.C.”), Robert Singer (“Midnight Caller”), Sera Gamble and Phil Sgriccia.
Source: The CW

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EW has learned exclusively that James Patrick Stewart, who CW frequents know as Naomi’s dad on 90210, will be appearing in the sixth episode of Supernatural this season as a new baddie named Richard Roman. Showrunner Sera Gamble explains: “Richard is a very canny, charming, well-connected new adversary. When we first meet him, Crowley has sought him out specifically to join forces with him to pursue common interests. Put it this way: Crowley doesn’t bring a muffin basket to just anyone.”

Stewart, whose other credits include All My Children and CSI, is set to appear in one episode so far. Supernatural season 7 premieres Sept. 23.
Source: Inside TV

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We spoke with Collins at the Television Critics Association party on Wednesday night, and he helped to shed some light on Castiel’s current point of view. “I’ll spoil this right now for you — he does start the season as both a wrathful and vengeful god,” Collins says. “But he’s also righteous, in his own mind. He thinks that he’s doing the right thing.”

In the Season 6 finale, Castiel brought down the “wall” in Sam’s (Jared Padalecki) mind that protected him from his memories of hell, destroying Sam’s mental health in a way that’s unfathomable to any other human. When he did it, though, Castiel promised that he’d ultimately save Sam from the trauma. Don’t hold your breath for Castiel to make good on that promise, though. “No, he wants Sam to suffer for a while,” Collins says. “Sam’s basically f***ed.”

Castiel’s treatment of Sam isn’t going to fly with Dean, and though Collins tells us that there’s always hope that the relationship can be repaired, we shouldn’t expect an easy fix. The former friends won’t come to a resolution in Collins’ first two episodes, and should he return later, there’s no telling whether amends will be made. “There’s as big a rift as you can possibly imagine between the two characters,” he says. “Honestly, I don’t know where it’s going to go.”
Source: Zap2it

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Misha: “It was a long time coming,” he tells us. “[I have] a little mixed feelings about it. It’s exciting to have other prospects now and it’s fun to do other roles, so I’m looking forward to doing some other stuff. I will miss the old crew up on Supernatural in Vancouver.”

As of now, Collins would only confirm that Castiel will appear in the first two episodes of season seven opposite the Winchester brothers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles). However, fans looking forward to seeing Castiel’s unexpected (and refreshing) brand of humor (“hey assbutt!”) should prepare themselves for some changes.

“The character is not providing that comic relief anymore, which I think is fine. I think that sort of ran its course,” Collins says. “It’s one of the things that’s great about the show. They don’t rest on their laurels. Just because something is working, doesn’t mean they keep doing it. They like to change it up and try something new and it doesn’t get stale and that’s cool.”

Collins continues, “I’m not playing the fish out of water sidekick anymore. That element is gone. The show is not going to be funny anymore. Period.”

While Collins wouldn’t divulge too much about Castiel’s role (or ultimate goal) this season, he teases, “he’s God and he’s trying to rectify the wrongs in the world and having a difficult time doing it and meeting with both external and internal obstacles.”

Could one of those obstacles be his friendship with Dean? Of Cas’ relationship with Dean, Collins would only say it’s “definitely a changed and diminished dynamic.” Take from that what you will.

So how has the transition from loyal sidekick to being big and bad worked out for Collins? “It’s a different position to be in. I was always supporting them. We were always fighting on the same side and now we’re definitely at loggerheads. It’s a totally different dynamic.”
Source: E!Online

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This bit comes from Misha Collins, the unangelic former-angel-turned-God, who explained to a roundtable of reporters that he has hope for Castiel’s redemption this season — even though he has yet to read of anything promising in the scripts so far. “Having lived with him for the last three years, Cas definitely has a soft spot in my heart,” he said. “I have an affection for the character, and I would like to see him redeemed somehow. I hope that happens for Cas. I don’t know how much — or if that’s going to happen. But I hope so. Because I kind of like the guy.” Um, so do we. (I think…) But Cas’ “drunk with power” persona won’t get a great reception from those other guys we happen to like on the show, Collins said.

“[Sam and Dean] are being kind of a pain in the ass, honestly. They need to be whipped into shape a little bit, in my humble opinion,” he said, with a hint of humor in his voice. “It’s hard to talk about without ruining it for you. But I sort of start the season off letting sleeping dogs lie with them because they are completely powerless and ineffectual against me. Of course, they end up being a thorn in my side — as they always tend to do.”

As for the body count in the first three scripts (1, 2, and 4 are the ones he’s received so far) Collins says it’s high. “Definitely in the thousands; I don’t think in the millions, but I could be wrong… but it’s definitely not at or near zero.” Who’s joining me Sept. 23?
Source: EW

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Question: It’s really looking like Cas is going to be killed off in Episode 2 of Supernatural. Can you give us any hope at all that he’ll survive beyond that? —Tabitha
Ausiello: Nope, and neither can his portrayer Misha Collins. “I would love to tell you [but] I’m not going to,” he told TVLine over the weekend at Comic-Con. “I don’t like to give away secrets… You might see me a lot next year. If you have a poster of me on your wall, you’ll see me daily. But how much I’ll be on Supernatural is a secret. And I actually don’t know. That makes it easier to not tell you.” When we do see Cas, he will be “drunk with power,” reveals Collins. “He’s trying to do what he thinks a God should be doing on Earth and in Heaven, which is fairly righteous and wrathful. Rectifying the world’s problems. I think he’s making, in many respects, the world a better place. But there’s a fair amount of smiting going on too. You take the good with the bad.”

Question: Any Supernatural spoilers? Please? —Nic
Ausiello: Look for Sam and Dean’s already difficult lives to get even tougher. After years of skirting the law, the boys are “starting to be found,” Jared Padalecki teased at Comic-Con, which means the Winchesters are “losing a lot of our aces in the hole.” Adds executive producer Ben Edlund, “We’ve been saying that they do things a certain way. Their techniques, their methods – they know what they’re doing. They know their job. They have their support networks. Those things in their lives are going to challenged.” Insert the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid feel showrunner Sera Gamble teased to us back in May, and, “They’re going to find themselves, in a sense, running from lots of guns,” continues Edlund. “The stuff they face this season, it’s massive.” But Edlund believes there’s still room for laughs. “There’s a natural absurdity to being on the air for seven seasons and the number of times they’ve died,” he says. “There’s a quality that’s going to lend itself to a little more ambient comedy this year.”
Source: TVLine

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Comic Convention Spoilers:

As for creatures, Gamble says there will be some “ghost stories coming up soon.”
“We’ll also have shapeshifting creatures, angels, demons,” she adds. “We always pull a couple of variations out of our pocket with some new creatures we will reveal over the course of some episodes.”
Executive producer Ben Edlund says they also have a creature we haven’t seen before.
“It’s a Japanese folkloric creature,” he adds.
Edlund also adds that Sam has a lot of stuff to sort through too.
“Sam has three of himself in his own head – that’s some crazy s**t,” says Edlund. “He’s going to be grappling with his own sanity, so we have lots of stuff to play.”
Most importantly, Edlund says they’ve created a very “self-contained” challenge in Season 7 to keep everything fresh and new.
“Everyone working on SUPERNATURAL is earnest and clever and wants to make it as good as they can,” says Edlund. “And the pieces we’re using for Season 7 are consistent with an overall myth. It fits into the larger story that we will tell more about later. You’ll learn more about purgatory and how all these things work as a mythic whole, while still pursuing the story. I’m surprised we kept as much coherence as we have.”
Source: Assignmentx.com

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Season 7 will pick up seconds after the last season, and the first crop of episodes will focus on Castiel having fun with his new God powers, his pride and the consequences of it.

After Season 5 didn’t end the show, Edlund said they are very conscious of an endgame for the series should further seasons prove to be the last, but they always leave room open for it to continue. “The fact that the story never ends is interesting. The Winchesters’ curse is that it will never be over for them.”

They are introducing a new hunter character this year – one of Bobby’s old friends who is a conspiracy junky who thinks the government is behind everything supernatural. Dean and Sam pay him a visit and end up getting caught in one of his house traps.

The big bad of the season will be revealed in the second episode, and the character of Sheriff Mills will be roped in to deal with it.

Also when asked if the Ghostfacers would ever return, Sera Gamble said they are having a hard time working them in, but they will definitely be back.
Source: Dread Central

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Sera says Jo is coming back. This is news to the cast. She says its a perfect example of someone who dies on the show that comes back. Sheriff Mills is returning. Death will be back. There are a few more in the works but she doesn’t want to talk about that until the deals close.
Source: Comic Book Movie

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Ben Edlund will direct again, even though he has admitted that his last experience terrified him a bit. As usual, he promises some lighter fare in season seven. Despite season six starting off in an extremely dark place– so much so that the tone really felt like a different show at times– they were able to turn it around for a bit in the middle of the season. Season seven will have elements of both, as usual, especially thanks to the new writers Ben Acker and Ben Blacker, who are known for the hilarious Thrilling Adventure show at the Largo here in Los Angeles. And Edlund joked that he would want to see the guys on a spaceship, dealing with other worldly beings. So we expect there to be some references and/or on-sreen jokes about such, even though we don’t think the show would ever actually go there.

Ackles will also get some more Emmy-worthy work, as Dean spends a lot of time looking inward this season. His soul-searching brings about questions of why he really does this line of work, most probably because he is still mourning the loss of Lisa and Ben. Jared Padalecki isn’t off the hook for deep, emotional work, either, though. Sam is not in the clear with regards to the wall in his head, after all, and he will experience a break that brings to light a lot of problems that can’t necessarily be fixed. Remembering hell is one thing but not being able to tell if he is currently still there, if he is in a dream state, or if he is back to work with his brother is a whole other one! Both brothers will be tested a lot as hunters, therefore, not just from external forces like the things they fight but from their own selves this time around, too. But perhaps this second-guessing is because of their lack of power, hmm? The Winchesters won’t be on top of their game in season seven…because the game has changed drastically.

Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Isn’t the unknown the scariest thing about a show like Supernatural? It is to us! But in season seven, we will get right to the meat, right away. The season premiere picks up “right” where the season six finale left off, but Castiel will not the big bad as episodes unfold. In fact, Beaver confirmed that the new, true big bad of the year will emerge in episode two. And we expect he/she/it to be unlike anything we’ve ever seen.
Source: Examiner.com

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Will we get to see more of Sam’s missing year? Padalecki: “Without saying too much, yes. There’s a lot that Sam has seen but now he can see again, now that the wall has fallen. I’m excited about playing Sam who doesn’t know which reality he’s in. Now we get to play with Sam’s healing. The Winchester brothers always react to things we’ve courage, and what’s excited me so far about season seven is that Sam feels way out of his league. What can scare the Winchester boys?
Source: Digital Spy

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Jared Padalecki
He’s read the first 4 episodes (scripts) of the season and they’re filming the 2nd (the season premiere) and he’s really pleased where Sam’s character is going. The season is picking back up with a run and he’s working hard.
There will be a big bad this season. They’ll have to deal with that, and it’s not Castiel or Crowley.
“Sam and Dean are going Thelma and Louise, I mean Butch and Sundance. We’re off on our own again.”
They are continuing with monsters of the week.
Jensen directing him was great. “We’re kind of directing each other anyway.” It was like they were rehearsing a scene. They were cool with each other and Jensen is so easy to work with.

Ben Edlund
Castiel’s story starts with him stabilizing his God complex, but he wouldn’t go into too many details. “The first episode of the next season is almost the 23rd episode of last season. It’s another crescendo. We can’t really talk because it’s other big set of shoes dropping. There’s like 8 shoes dropping in that one.”
Sam and Dean are going to have a very tough year. They have to learn new tricks and evolve. “This season is about challenging them as hunters. Previous seasons have often been about challenging them as brothers as humans.” They’re going to have some professional difficulties.
What sort of strange ideas this time? He’s thinking about putting them on the spaceship this year. He’s not sure how to make it work. He was thinking it through though as he was talking to us.
The season is going to be depressing. It’s a depressing show. It just won’t be noir, which is very dark and not very uplifting. “I think Supernatural is about catharsis and vicarious torment.”
We had a break in the questioning, so I mentioned how on our site we’ve been championing an zombie alligator. “Well think about, no I’ll do it!” Then he says there are days he’ll be happy to do whatever. Then he mentioned that it would be cool to do some taxidermy.

Sera Gamble
In the premiere, Castiel is pissed at God for not being there and he has to deal with what to do with this unlimited power.
“He will start to see what that means, the wall being down.” “We’re not to let him off scot free of course and it becomes a pretty interesting story line. What’s wrong with Sam’s head? Something that Dean points out when it starts to happen, this is like not being attacked by a witch or something this is a true break in Sam’s psyche and maybe it’s something that cannot be fixed.”
Dean has a lot to deal with in the early part of the season. He’s suffered a great amount of loss. Dean is going to do some serious soul searching in the beginning of the season. It’s going to be really hard for him. He’s going to keep asking himself why he keeps doing what he does.
Dean really takes the loss of Castiel’s friendship hard. “They don’t have a lot of friends of Facebook.”
There will be a new character introduced that is an old friend of Bobby’s and knows about the whole Supernatural thing but he’s more of a conspiracy theorist. He watches too much of X-Files. He thinks the government created shapeshifters. Sam and Dean end up getting caught in a booby-trap in his house.
Recurring characters. Jo will be back. Colin Ford is returning as Sam in the episode Jensen is directed. Jensen is actually in this episode more than the last one he directed. The premise is in the past, John and Dean dropped Sam off at the motel to go school and then kept calling him for research and information.
How are the new writers affecting the new season? They’re bringing a fresh perspective that’s non-redundant, and they have plenty of great new ideas.

Jim Beaver

He doesn’t know how many episodes Bobby is in this season, but Bobby is in the first 3 episodes.
He couldn’t talk much about Castiel’s relationship with Bobby without giving away too much. They all were really trying to be secretive about the first episode.
Sheriff Mills is coming back. She’s coming back from an episode, maybe two.
The new big bad is really going to show it’s face in the second episode and Sheriff Mills will be involved with that. She’ll come to Bobby for help.
A lot of things that Sam, Dean and Bobby have counted on as hunters are going to get reshuffled. A lot of what they counted on in the past isn’t going to work the same way. They’re going to have to figure out new things.
Source: Winchester Family Business

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As we saw in the Season 6 finale, Castiel (Misha Collins) brought down the wall in Sam’s head that protected him from his memories of hell. We saw him stagger to save his brother, but the memories will continue to plague him. “We pick up right where we left off,” Padalecki says. “I think not only the audience but the actors would’ve been really upset to just pick up three months later like ‘Glad that cleared up!’ so we pick up immediately. Sam has figuratively seen the worst he’s going to see. So now it’s up to Sam to acknowledge that and move forward.”

Once again, Padalecki finds himself comparing Sam’s situation to that of a recovering addict. “We almost saw a touch of it with the demon blood. [He’s] like a recovering addict, saying ‘I know I’ve got a problem, and it’s still messing with me. I still get this urge sometimes to do this or do that, but I see it now I realize it now.'”

Sam’s relationship with his brother Dean (Jensen Ackles) is as strong as its ever been. While in the past Sam has hidden certain truths from his brother, he’s being honest about the realities of his predicament this time. “Dean, obviously, is going ‘Um, you alright man? You’re kind of passing out on us; you’re talking to yourself,’ so Dean’s a little freaked out by it,” Padalecki explains. Sam acknowledges the problem. “Sam’s feeling is ‘Look, I get it. I get that you’re afraid, I can see why, but I’m dealing with… my issue. I have this problem, I understand it, it’s not going to go away, I’m not just going to say ‘No I’m healed.’ Sam had a tendency to say ‘No, I’m better, look,’ and smile. ‘Let’s have a beer.’ But now Sam’s saying ‘No, I’m not okay but I’m dealing with it.'”

This season presents a new acting challenge for Padalecki. “Soulless Sam, I don’t want to say it was easy,” he says, “But I had something that I could tell myself. I was just trying to think absolutely no emotion, pure reason. He thought that there was no attachment, there was no nothing. This year, I’m yet to see how it’s going to manifest itself. If they’ve done it in the writers’ room I haven’t seen the script yet. So I as an actor don’t yet know how it’s going to turn out, so that’s difficult to logistically play.”

As always, Sam is doing his best to stay strong in the face of his challenges. When Season 7 opens, we’ll see a Sam who is “tortured but refusing to let himself be tortured. As always, the Winchesters are bearing their burdens with honor and with courage.” We’ll see Dean become increasingly worried about his brother. “Sam says ‘Look, I know that seemed weird, but I’m on it, I’ve got it, I’m the only one that can save myself,'” Padalecki explains.
Source: Zap2it

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Jensen: The first order business for Dean and Sam is to get Castiel back, but he doesn’t know if it’ll ever happen.
Source: Digital Spy Jensen Ackles Video Interview

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The first episode picks up seconds after the season ended and Jim Beaver says the season is “scarier” than usual in some ways. “There’s a certain sense of futility that’s come over us in the first episode,” Beaver told press. “We did a scene just on Friday where one of the guys was saying ‘Well, I can’t do anything about this. So I’m just going to do what I can do, and work on some seemingly smaller things.’”
Sam and Dean are up a creek. “The Supernatural world is changing this season and they’re going to be facing the world a little less powerful than they have been in the past. The odds are stacked against them in ways they haven’t been before. They are more like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” Collins said.
Sam and Dean…broke? “We’ve talked about this for years. Sam and Dean have always had the same car. How are we not in FBI databases? How do we not have people after us? How do they not have pictures? So we start to play with that this year and say Sam and Dean are starting to be found,” Padalecki said. “Now, what are they going to do about all these credit cards? How are they going to get money? People are on to their ploys. And on that note, also, we see that Castiel at the end of season 6, isn’t a friend anymore. So we can’t say, ‘Hey, Cas, we need some help.”
Sam and Dean in space? “There’s got to be a way we can get them on a spaceship in one episode,” EP Ben Edlund pondered. “We’ve got a lot of people who could do it. There’re gods and tricksters. There’s any number of ways we could do it. And they can have little uniforms.”
– Ever wonder why there are ninja stars in the Impala’s trunk that the boys have never used? So did one fan at the panel, who asked if they’d ever be used. “Ben just pitched a ninja story!” Gamble said. “They could use the ninja stars to fight the Jefferson Starships!” Jensen Ackles joked.
Source: EW

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Castiel as God
Ben Edlund said that Castiel is still the new God and “his story is about stabilizing this God complex” and the “ramifications of what he’s done”. Ben also said that the season 7 premiere is almost like episode 23 of season 6, since the premiere follows so closely from the last episode, especially concerning what’s happening with Castiel. The season premiere will pick up seconds after the end of last season.
Castiel’s is a story of “absolute power” Edlund said, as well as one of pride. Edlund imagines that “redemption will be part of it”, although perhaps his path to redemption will be slightly tarnished.
Showrunner Sera Gamble wrote the premiere and she said the writers had a really great time discussing what each of them would do if they were God. Castiel has declared himself God, he’s “really pissed at his dad who never came home”, and the writers are having fun coming up with ideas of what Castiel would do with unlimited power. Jim Beaver said that what happens to Castiel is “so different from what the audience may expect”, but couldn’t elaborate any more.
The Season-Long Arc
Supernatural will be getting a new “big bag” in season 7. Some of you might think that Castiel turns out to be a big bad, but it was sort of hinted that the big bad wouldn’t necessarily be Castiel, although he will certainly be causing problems. Jared said that Sam and Dean will be off on their own in season 7, on the road and on the run. The focus of the season will be back on the brothers.
Monsters of the week will again feature in season 7, but it seems like the big bad will be introduced very early on in the season – in episode 2, according to Beaver – and this new villain will also be a focus.
Beaver hinted that there will be “interesting geographical and infrastructure shifts in the show, so a lot of things that Sam, Dean and Bobby have counted on are going to get reshuffled.” Could it mean that something might happen to Bobby’s house and the boys lose their base of operations?
The Winchesters will have a very tough year in season 7. The writers will be taking away all of the old tricks and resources the brothers relied on for six seasons and now they’ll be “challenged as hunters” as Edlund said and will “have professional difficulties”.
Sam’s Struggles
Jared reminded us that Sam once again got left in a mess at the end of season 6. He has only read the first four episodes of the season, but Sam is in for some meaty stuff in season 7. We pick up at a run with everything concerning Sam.
Gamble said that we will start to see how Sam is really affected by the wall breaking in his head. The writers were really specific about what would happen to Sam if the wall broke. Both Castiel and Death warned of terrible repercussions of the wall coming down. Sam won’t be let off scott free and what’s wrong with him will be a major storyline. What happens to Sam will be “a true break in someone’s psyche and maybe this is something that can never be fixed”. It will be a problem the boys haven’t faced before.
At the Nerd HQ panel with Jared later on in the day, he actually said that Sam would be very confused about what reality he is in – and even what year it is – as he suffers the effects of the broken wall.
Dean’s Problems
Dean will be dealing with a lot in the first part of the season. Not only will the brothers be worrying about each other, but Dean suffered a lot of loss in season 6. Gamble said “we find him in a place where he has a lot of soul searching to do and he has to ask himself why he does what he does in the face of what’s happened to him and all the things he and his brother have seen….we’ve brought him to a point where he has to ask himself why he’s a hunter, I think”.
Dean in particular will feel a profound betrayal about Castiel and his actions at the end of season 6. Sam may be more willing to cut Cas some breaks, but Dean truly feels that Castiel is lost to them, Gamble explained.
New and Returning Characters
I brought up the fact that so many characters have died on Supernatural, particularly in season 6, and wondered whether Sam and Dean would pick up a few new allies in season 7. Edlund said that the boys will definitely be meeting some new allies this year. As he jokingly put it “we need to repopulate so that we can kill more people”. They’ve already talked in the writers’ room about some new characters that the boys can relate to.
In particular, Gamble mentioned an old friend of Bobby’s that we will meet who is a bit of a conspiracy theorist. “A typical statement for him would be ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, there are shapeshifters, but the government created them’.” Sam and Dean will seek him out for help and will actually get caught in a booby trap in his house.
They confirmed the Twitter story that Alona Tal will be returning as Jo Harvelle in season 7, although we’re not really sure how she’ll return.
In addition, Kim Rhodes is returning as Sheriff Mills in an upcoming episode. By coincidence, Sherrif Mills will become involved with the season’s big bad and will ask for Bobby’s help. Beaver thinks she’ll “be around somewhat.”
On a side note, Jim Beaver said that Bobby will be in the first three episodes of season 7 and will likely be in as many episodes as he was last season.
A Return to Heaven
We’ve only really seen Heaven in two episodes, but you should expect to see to see it again in season 7 as we’ll be taking another trip there. We don’t know too many details yet about it because it’s early days, but Edlund said “there are visits to heaven already planned to tell various parts of the story. And I imagine that further into the season we’ll probably play more into it.”
Potential Future Storylines
Last year Edlund and the others told us that we would see fairies in a future episode, but there was no definitive storyline or monster of the week that Edlund could tell us about this time. However, Edlund told us that he really hopes he can get Sam and Dean on a spaceship this year, but we’ll have to see if that comes to pass. We also chatted with him about a potential music episode (which he still hopes to do, even though it nearly killed Joss Whedon), as well as a potential animated or partially animated episode (which they’re trying to figure out how to do).
The End of the Series
Edlund says they have a general idea of how to end the series now that Kripke’s original five season ending was told, although plans can always change, as well as the length of time it takes to get there in case the season 7 is not the last.
Source: TVOverMind

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As Jared Padalecki observed, there have been a lot of questions over the years about how the Winchesters say ahead the of the law, how they keep using fake credit cards without getting caught, and how they’re not on FBI databases. And that will all come to a head this season — they will be on the run like never before. He joked that they’ll be like Thelma and Louise — or maybe Butch and Sundance.
And they don’t have the resources and loopholes they used to have at their disposal. Sam is off the demon blood for good, and they can no longer call on the angel Castiel to get them out of a jam. Their only resources are their own wits and their determination.

And meanwhile, star Jensen Ackles said, the brothers will be up against a huge evil that is not in any lore. Sam, Dean and Bobby will be having a harder time than ever figuring out what to do about this unknowable, unstoppable evil force. (And it sounds like Bobby will be doing a lot more traveling with the boys and be a lot more present in several episodes, judging from Jim Beaver’s comments.)
Source
: Io9.com

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Gamble talked to THR about how they plan to make things more difficult for Sam, Dean and Bobby: “We really want to give them the sense that there’s no way they can win, and the best way to do that is take away everything that they’re comfortable with. There may come time in this season when they have to pack the Impala up for a day. We’ve been discussing that. We really want to get Dean in the heart.” Actor Jim Beaver also told THR, “An awful lot that the characters have come to count on is going to be cut out from under them.”
Source: Hollywood Reporter

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Jared: “I got chills on my arm. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten that,” he says. “There were parts where reading the script I was almost watching the show.” He gives a full-body shudder for effect. “We’ve seen these guys bear their burdens and wear their fear with courage and with stoicism, and just flash through it, and that’s honorable, that’s how people get through their day, hopefully, but here we see Sam scared. Truly terrified. For somebody who’s seen what he’s seen to really be losing it, it kind of gives me chills.”
Producer Ben Edlund says that while the writers always try to increase the horror aspect of the show, it’s becoming more difficult. This season, as the “Supernatural” team does their best to scare us, we may also find that the tone of the show becomes simultaneously lighter.
“We’ll turn up the scary but in doing so it’s naturally — and this is something that we’re all actually worried about — it’s going to evolve somewhat into almost a B-movie thing,” he says. “Seven seasons of these characters going through all this stuff, at this point — it’s not camp, but you know, it’s going to be a little funnier, because how many times have they died? How many times have they been to hell, both? They’ve been through so much that I think this show will evolve and grow. It’s going to be scarier and in a weird way lighter, because they’ve been through so many different pitfalls and valleys and shadows of many deaths. It’ll be scary and fun. We’re going to turn all the dials up and see what happens. Hopefully the machine doesn’t explode.”
For Sam, specifically, the terror comes from within. Castiel (Misha Collins) brought down the protective wall in Sam’s head that protects him from his memories of hell, and now Padalecki finds himself faced with the unique challenge of depicting a man who has endured over 100 years of unimaginable torture. It doesn’t exactly make acting easy, because it’s… well, unimaginable. He tells us that it helps to focus on the specifics of Sam’s time in hell — detailed forms of torture that he’s discussed with executive producer Sera Gamble.
“I’m still figuring it out. It’s difficult to understand,” he says. “When you tell somebody ‘6 million people died between the years, blah blah blah,’ you’re kind of like, ‘Whoa,’ but you can’t grasp it. If you then say, ‘One person had every nail pulled out and his nose cut off, and salt poured in’ … thinking about specifics, that’s where you can go.”
As the “Supernatural” cast and crew do often, Padalecki recalls Kim Manners, director and executive producer who passed away in 2009. “There are things I’ve talked about with Sera that might have happened or did happen in the cage, so I try to put myself there, as opposed to just thinking about lots of bad stuff, I try to think about the minutiae, to use a Kim Manners word,” he says. “The minutiae. Not like, hey, you love this person, but hey, when this person has a booger sticking out, you pick it. The specifics.”
Only Jared Padalecki would use an example like that to describe his character’s experience in hell. He laughs. “That’s probably a really terrible way to answer that. ‘So, I think about the boogers. I’d pull your booger out for you.’ That should be the quote. ‘How do you think about hell? I pull the booger out.'”
Source: Zap2it

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“His wall just broke,” Gamble said when asked about Sam. “He managed to pull it together to help his brother at the lab and try and stop Cas, but we will start to see what that really means, that the wall is down. We were pretty specific about the repercussions of the wall coming down. We’re not gonna let him off scott-free, of course, and this becomes a pretty major storyline. What’s wrong with Sam’s head? This is a true break in Sam’s psyche and perhaps something that can never be fixed. It’s something that the boys have never faced before, it’s an interesting problem to look at and figure out how to work into the season.”

Dean just feels like Cas is completely lost to them,” Gamble said. “Sam is more likely to try and give someone another chance, in this instance, but for Dean this just comes from a place of despair that he’s lost this person, ’cause he doesn’t have that many people! They don’t have a lot of friends on Facebook.”

The season’s about challenging them as hunters. Previous seasons have been about challenging them as brothers or as humans or as men, and in this one, they’re going to have professional difficulties because the world is going to try and eat them.”
Source
: AOL

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Jared Padalecki: But yes, Sam and Dean, we get to see Sam and Dean… we call it our bread and butter, I mean, not egotistically, but just because that’s what we started off, that’s the very… going back to fundamentals and the basics of Supernatural is Sam and Dean. Our Sam and Dean. This Sam and Dean. The fundamental of Supernatural is the Sam and Dean combination. And so we go back to the boys on their own, essentially. We don’t have Dad, we don’t have Cas, we don’t have demon blood giving us power. We’re losing a lot of our little aces in the hole.

And so it’s nice. We get to see the boys kind of doing what they used to do. And it’s not the same old — like, obviously, we’re not Sam and Dean season 1, we’re Sam and Dean season 7, and so we’re not gonna lose the past that we had, or the knowledge that we had and the wisdom and the pain, but we’re going to move forward whenever we can. It’s not obviously going to stop the Winchesters.

What can you say about the brothers’ relationship this season? Is it stronger, or are we going to see more fractures there?
Jared Padalecki: Well, both. It is stronger. Other than when Sam was soulless, the relationship continues to get stronger and stronger because they have more of a past, and these guys realize… I mean, if we’re to talk Supernatural as if it were real, they both sacrificed a heck of a lot for each other. In the scope of the show, from going to Hell to going soulless to… we’ve both gone to Hell, we’ve both done a lot of things we didn’t want to do, so that’s made the brothers stronger.

But I think they both worry about each other a little bit. It’s like, “I trust you, I love you, you’re my brother, but… my guard’s up, not because I think you’re up to some evil purpose, but because I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

And we’ve seen all these manifestations come out, and Dean’s like, “Are you all right?” “Yeah!” Okay, all of a sudden, I’ll stab you in the back. And so, the boys are older, wiser, and stronger, but there is the obvious fracture, of now, like Death said, that once the wall comes down, then Sam’s gonna change, and Sam has changed. So Sam has all these memories that he really shouldn’t have. It kind of puts Sam in a different place sometimes, and Dean’s worried about his brother, not necessarily worried that he’s going to go off the hook and go nuts and start killing everybody, but he doesn’t know how it’s going to manifest itself.

Do you know yet?
Jared Padalecki: I don’t. We don’t. I think that’s probably going to be… classically Supernatural kind of does the first 11-episode arc and then, after the Christmas cliffhanger, because of timing issues, we kind of finish it up this season. So we don’t know. I don’t. Ben [Edlund] and Sera [Gamble] might. I only know the first four episodes, I’m sorry, in which we’re starting to explore that. But we’re gonna delve our teeth into that, or sink our teeth into that, before we explode.

It’s like peppered through the season?

Jared Padalecki: Yeah, yeah. So we’re kind of peppering in. It’s… it exists in every episode but we haven’t yet confronted it. The boys are still kind of dancing around each other, going, “I know you think I’m a freak.” “Hey, I don’t think you are. I’m just worried.” We’re still kind of… it’ll culminate. Sh*t’ll hit the fan, proverbially. Maybe, maybe — honestly, who knows? It’s Supernatural! So they might do it.
Source: Buddy TV

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Sera Gamble:
Even after everything that happened, Dean and Sam relationship is stronger than never.
Source:
cliqueclacktv Comic Convention Press Room

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The main attraction for most fans are of course are the Winchester brothers. Throughout the years, each brother has already died several times and both have gone from hell and back, as in literal hell where actual demons lived. I asked producer, Gamble, if this is going to strain the relationship between Sam and Dean.
“In certain ways it’s a strain but as usual Dean is worried about Sam. Sam is worried about Dean,” Gamble answered. “These are dynamics that are as old as Supernatural and will probably never go away. But it’s not our plan to have this be a wedge that’s driven between the brothers on a ‘Ruby-like’ level.” She is referring, of course, to when a demon named Ruby had tried to drive the brothers apart and got Sam addicted to drinking demon’s blood.
Source: LA Weekly

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“You will meet an old friend of Bobby’s who helps him from time to time. He is hip to the supernatural, but he’s kind of a bit of a conspiracy theorist about it. Like he’s watched way too much X-Files. So a typical statement for him would be, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are shapeshifters, but you know the government created them.’ He has sort of his own take on things. Sam and Dean go to seek help from him, and end up caught in a booby trap in his house, ‘cause he doesn’t trust anyone. He’s a little off his rocker.” – Gamble
Source: TV.com

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It’s no surprise that Sam and Dean’s journey was supposed to end at Season 5’s apocalyptic battle with Lucifer. Since then fans have been anxious to know if the show’s creators have a new endgame in mind should further seasons prove to be the last. “There was every chance that Season 6 would be the last season when we started it,” Edlund observes, “so you run two possible endgames. You just have to feel it out. We have a general shape of an end, but it can kind of float forward and we can put more stuff in front of it. But those things might change to. We had a real plan through Eric up to 5 and it’s almost like the lesson of life is ‘plans don’t work.’ [laughs]”

“I think there’s something thematically sound in the way that the story does not end, oddly enough,” continues Edlund, “These guys cannot die. They’ve died so many times. Their torment is not terminable and there’s something interesting about that.” Nevertheless, he drops a tiny bombshell regarding Season 8: “At the end of this season, we’re already discussing how it can dovetail into a piece that ends.”

And as easy as it would be to bust Lucifer out of his cage for The Apocalypse 2.0, the cast and crew of “Supernatural” stand firm on taking the show down uncharted territory.

“We told that story,” says Padalecki, “Short of going ‘He’s back again! That damn Lucifer keeps getting us!’ we have to go somewhere else. We have to continue going in another direction. So our bread and butter has been the monster-of-the-week cause that’s what we originally set out to do.”

“There are visits to Heaven already planned to tell various parts of the story, and I imagine further in the season we will play more with it,” says Edlund, “Now we have various provinces to play with: We have Heaven, we have Hell, Purgatory we’ve carved out. We have the veil, which is where ghosts live. We have Earth itself. Technically, we have the fairy dimension, which I’m not sure how that wires in fully, but I’m working on it. And alternate timelines. We have a lot of territory to play with so all those things we’re going to use all the way through. We’re gonna milk it!”

“We’re not even close to running out of steam,” Gamble adds. “I’m really proud of the work that’s happening this season. I think it’s fresh and non-redundant, and I think it’ll be fun.”
Source: Dread Central

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Jim Beaver: Sam, Dean and Bobby relationship will be stronger this season.
Source: Buzz Focus

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Jensen: “And so I think Dean is kinda keeping a watchful eye out for his brother. Not in an, are you going to turn on me, but in an, I don’t wanna let you fall. So you know it’s that brother supporting a brother thing. And I think that’s a big part of this show. And I’m glad we’re back to that this year.”
Source: SynergisticVideos

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TV Guide Comic Convention Special – Sera Gamble Interview Transcript:

Alice Jester, from Winchester Family Business got her TV Guide Comic Convention Special Issue and wrote down the spoilery interview with Sera Gamble.

New Spoilery Sera Gamble Interview – Comic Con Special TV Guide Edition

Burning Questions

What’s next for Castiel, and what dangers will the Winchesters face in Season 7?
By Ileane Rudolph

Are we finished with the arc about Sam’s memories of Hell?

No. Sam heroically got it together to help his brother in the finale. He spent a lot of credit just to be vertical in that final scene (when he tried to rescue Dean from Castiel). He’ll pay a really big price for that in the beginning of season 7.

Now that Misha Collins is no longer a series regular, how much will we see Castiel?

I can’t say exactly how much he’ll be around without giving away a lot. We will see him in more than just the first episode. There’s never been a character we’ve loved as much as Castiel or an actor loved as much as Misha. With the exception of Jared and Jensen, Supernatural has a long history of weaving characters in and out of the story.

What does that mean for Castiel’s story line?

I can’t give away too much about it, but I can say that we plan to pick up very, very soon after where we left off and explain exactly what the transformation was for Cas, what he plans to do with the angels in Heaven and to Sam, Dean and Bobby, and to Crowley. The whole nine yards.

That doesn’t sound good.

What we’re saying is that Cas is not evil. He’s transformed. That might not be good, but that’s not mustache-twirling evil either.

Balthazar and Crowley have added great wit to the show. Is Balthazar truly dead? Will Crowley be back?

 

Cas really stabbed Balthazar with an angel knife, so he really killed him. But this is Supernatural. We often find ways to explore characters again in the future, and we really like Balthazar. And yeah, we will see Crowley again.

Will goings-on in Heaven be a plot line this season?

We did the Apocalypse [in season 5], then we did the post-Apocalyptic civil war [in season 6]. Those were huge celestial stories. We’re interested in what happens on Earth in Season 7.

Will Sam and Dean be on the run a lot?

They will be. We have new creatures in story for the boys. We’ll bring back some favorites and bring in some new ones. There’s an earth full of monsters and demons and evil spirits. There’s always another bad thing for Sam and Dean to kill.

Like what?

Good old-gashioned monsters that eat people. I was just pitched a story with a new creature that does nasty things to people. We’ll also have ghosts and a story with psychics and mediums.

Now that Dean has wiped the memories of ex-girlfriend Lisa and her son Ben – who had given him his once chance at living in a normal family situation – does that kill all chances for the boys to find true love and happiness?

It wasn’t what I call a high point for Dean. I don’t think it’s a statement about the rest of their lives necessarily, but it certainly is a statement about where they are today.

You’ve killed off or at best exiled anyone that the Winchesters have cared about, other than Bobby. The show’s been pretty depressing lately. Any chance for some fun and happiness next season?

 

There’s always been measure of darkness in the show. This season, there is a fun story line that’s emerging. There’s almost a tongue-in-cheek satirical quality to some of the story lines and mythology. We definitely felt that after all the twists and turns of Season 6, we wanted to have some fun. We’re all emo, but we’re ready for that.

Does that mean some fresh blood or favorite faces from the past?

You will see some faces from the past – alive or dead. We also have some new recurring characters in mind.

Any women?

Some of them are not gender-determined, actually. [Laughs]. I guess that tell you that they are not love interests.

Will Sam and Dean’s half-brother Adam return? He seems to have been left languishing in Hell.

We have a couple of ideas. People ask me about him all the time and I promise that we haven’t forgotten about him.

And finally, what’s the prognosis for the wrecked Impala?

Well, the last time we saw it, it was upside down! But it would have to be in a million pieces not to have Dean put it back together again!

Thanks to Alice Jester

************************************************************************************

Question: Is there anything new on Supernatural? —Elena
Ausiello: You do not want to miss this season’s second episode. Trust me.

Question: So, Alona Tal certainly seems to be indicating on Twitter that we’ll be seeing some form of Jo again in Season 7 of Supernatural (relevant tweets pictured here). I don’t suppose you could scrounge up some details for us desperate fans? —Kat
Ausiello: The only detail I got is that she will, in fact, be back. Does that help?

Source: TVLine

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THR: Season 7, Sam faces a foe unlike anything before. What can you tease?
Padalecki: I’ve seen the episode that Jensen Ackles is directing, which is the first one we’re shooting and I’ve seen the season opener. We have to go big or go home and Supernatural has a tendency to go big and badder and this season the foe will be bigger than Armageddon, bigger than the apocalypse, bigger than Lucifer and bigger than God. Although I don’t know what that could possibly be, but I’m looking forward to finding out. If it could be Boba Fett, I’m quitting the role of Sam and playing Boba Fett! (Laughs.)

Source: Hollywood Reporter

************************************************************************************

Thanks to Leilana and Debbie we got the info from Jared’s Meet and Greet at New Jersey Convention that Supernatural Season 7 will have 23 episodes instead of the usual 22.

The extra episode will be a Season Finale Partner.

Read the original Post/Source:

“At the semi-private Q&A, Jared said that they want to do 23 episodes this year and end on a two-parter.”

************************************************************************************

Supernatural Season 7 Premiere Date: September 23, 2011.
Source: TV By The Numbers

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From New Jersey Convention:

emydean:
Jared said season 7 is going to be scary again because the wall fell.

NancyRosee
SPOILER: Jared said that you will see what Sam saw in hell.

rooseveltritz
“season seven will be scary. it won’t just be just a dorky angel in a trench coat.” #NJCon

Jacen736
Jared says this season is “scary again” & Sam is being flooded w/ memories #Supernatural #njcon

There’s also this. (Lere, my first thought was for you, lol)

embot333
The Impala is getting a triumphant return this season! #NJCon

tehjessicarae
Jared said if the Impala survived season 1 it can survive season 6. Dean will be working on it. #njcon

RachInMaFace
To Jared – ‘Will we see changes in Sam due to hell?’ ‘Yes, this season is scaring me.’ #njcon

tehjessicarae
We will see some of what Sam saw in hell and what he did there. #njcon

************************************************************************************

Another Casting/Character spoiler, from New Jersey Convention:

@Jacen736
Rick Worthy says he thinks the Alpha will be back in season 7 #Supernatural #njcon

Rick plays the Alpha!Vampire.

************************************************************************************

Tthe actress who plays the Sheriff Jody Mills, Kim Rhodes said during her Panel at the New Jersey convention that she’ll be back at some point on Season 7.
Source

************************************************************************************

I can only assume that with Cas declaring himself the new God, that The Almighty Himself has cocked an eyebrow and turned his mouth in a frown. With Cas’ revelation, I can only assume that next season we see the emergence of *the* one and only God to teach Cas what’s what. Is there any rumor or talk that God Himself will make an appearance next season on Supernatural?  If so, potential actors (I think Ian McShane would fit the show’s version of the Lord)? — John
I’m almost sure this question will come up when the show heads to Comic-Con this month, and until then, the show is staying mum on details about the new season. But the same can’t be said for Alona Tal, who cryptically tweeted yesterday of her return to the show next season for an undetermined amount of episodes. (My guess? One.) As you’ll recall, Tal played Jo Harvelle until the character’s untimely death in season 5, and apparently she’s set for a return. When that’ll happen isn’t set in stone, but considering the show is filming episode 4 first (to give director Jensen Ackles more prep time), it probably won’t happen until episode 5 or later.
Source

************************************************************************************

EXCLUSIVE: ‘Supernatural’ Star Misha Collins Talks Castiel’s Role in Season 7

The CW’s ‘Supernatural’ has spent six years defying audience expectations and gleefully leaving us on the edge of our seats with every season finale, but last season’s climactic close proved to be one of the most shocking yet.

Fan-favorite character Castiel (Misha Collins) pulled a dirty double cross in the last few episodes, revealing an unholy alliance with the demon Crowley for dominion over purgatory … and let’s just say that the finale didn’t leave Cas and the Winchesters on the best of terms.

I recently had the privilege of traveling to Haiti with Collins and his charity, Random Acts, for a life-changing voluntary excursion (we’ll have an in-depth feature on the trip next week), but during our wide-ranging interview, I couldn’t resist slipping in a couple of questions about his status next season, and his response to the outpouring of fan support for his character.

There’s not much new information here, but proceed with caution, there are mild spoilers ahead.

When news broke of Collins’ change from series regular to recurring guest star for Season 7, many fans took to the web to make their outrage known, with responses ranging from writing letters to the showrunners and The CW (as well as creating a book of “Letters to Castiel” given to the actor at a recent convention, which Collins called “very sweet”) to filling message boards and comment sections with their opinions.

Those pleas didn’t fall on deaf ears, according to Collins. “I haven’t been keeping my finger on the pulse of [fan] campaigns, but I have gotten word from Warner Bros. that they were inundated with questions … or something,” he wryly confirmed. “I don’t really know what they were inundated with … maybe it was just a flood; it could have been a flood in Burbank.”

While we wouldn’t put it past ‘Supernatural’ fans to devise a deluge of biblical proportions, we’re hoping that the panic is premature.

Here’s what Collins could tell us for sure: “I am not going to be a series regular on ‘Supernatural’ next year. I don’t really know what my role on the show is going to be. I know that I’m going to be in the first two episodes at this point, but I don’t know beyond that what the season holds for me.”

Although Collins hadn’t yet read the script for the second episode at the time of our interview, he did express hope for “some redemption” for the beloved character. And since the original plan was for Castiel to die in season six before the producers revised their position, we’re cautiously optimistic that there’s a chance for Castiel to receive an arc worthy of the character Collins and the writers have created, when all is said and done.

In a recent interview with TV Line, executive producer Sera Gamble seemed to echo that sentiment. “We love Misha. We love and adore the character of Castiel,” she insisted. “His character developed to this extent and went in this unexpected direction because we were so inspired by him.”

Regardless of how often Castiel will appear in Season 7, Collins was emphatic in his admiration for ‘Supernatural’ and the team behind it, and it’s clear that there are no hard feelings over the progression of his storyline, with the actor reiterating that it’s “the best work environment I’ve ever had.”

In addition to spurring fans to speak out on the direction of ‘Supernatural’, Collins’ inspirational nature was also instrumental in the creation of Random Acts, a charitable organization dedicated to “changing the world, one random act of kindness at a time.”

Thanks to Collins and the Random Acts team, ‘Supernatural’ fans have so far raised more than $171,000 to fund charitable initiatives in Haiti, Japan and across the globe, and sent 22 volunteers to Jacmel earlier this month to help aid in the construction of a multipurpose community center and sustainable fish farm, to feed, shelter and educate Haiti’s homeless and disadvantaged children.
Source

************************************************************************************

Guy Norman Bee (“Asylum”, “Family Matters” and “Frontierland”) will Direct an episode. He’ll start preparing the directing shoot on June 27 and shooting starts on July 6.

Guy will also direct the episodes 7.09 and 7.21 of the season.

Details in his Twitter:

@stephfredricks That’s normal for a series-new blood yr to yr- 2 writers from last season created “Ringer!”-I’m doing 1 plus 3 eps of SPN

@deangirl1 I think it’s #721… def. One of the last for the season!

@tessa811222 ep. 3, 9&21

@SammWinchester Monday 6/27 should be the 1st day of prep for S7-1st day of shooting should be 7/6-I think you all know who the director is!

@SammyWsGirlSPN It may not AIR first but will be shot first so he can prep without distraction (acting!) I’m slated for 3,9 & 21 -Can’t wait.

************************************************************************************

Supernatural Season 7 will start filming on July 6 2011 and is set to end on March 21, 2012.
Source: Spoiler-tv

However, according to info from Nashville Convention, Jensen Ackles will have an early start. He’ll head to Vancouver on June 25th to prepare himself to direct his second episode. It’ll be he second episode to be aired.

Tibit from J2 panel yesterday… Jensen heads back to Vancouver on June 25th to start his episode he’s directing. #Nashcon
Source: DudeUfuglySPN

************************************************************************************

Question: Can you please interview Misha Collins about his reduced Supernatural role next season? My life may depend on it. —Marcia
Ausiello: We tried, but the dude’s not talking. Perhaps he wants to lay low until the storm passes — assuming it does, in fact, pass. “We have passionate fans,” acknowledges exec producer Sera Gamble. “We have fans that have strong opinions about a lot of things that happen on the show. People ask if me I’m going to get worried about fan backlash [in the wake of Collins’ demotion]. We just want to tell a good story and not be redundant and bring you interesting stories that are fresh. Going into Season 7, we have a new, interesting story that we want to tell to you. That’s what’s front of mind right now.”


Question:
Now that Misha Collins is not longer a regular on Supernatural, any chance Jim Beaver will get a much-deserved promotion? —Joel
Ausiello: Doesn’t sound like it. “We have a fantastic relationship with Jim,” says Gamble. “We bring him in as the story demands it. He’s basically a fixture on the show as necessary.”
Source: TVLine

************************************************************************************

Question: Will we ever see Adam again on Supernatural? There could be Smurf paraphernalia in it for you. —Donna
Ausiello: Showrunner Sera Gamble puts the chances of an Adam comeback at a “very strong maybe.” Gimme my presents!

Source: TVline

************************************************************************************

TVline: Supernatural Spoiler: Season 7 Theme Revealed

After taking a dark and twisty turn during its noir-esque sixth season, Supernatural will tip its 10-gallon hat to another film genre in Season 7.

“We had everyone on the writing staff watch Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” executive producer Sera Gamble tells TVLine. “[Executive producer] Bob [Singer], [series creator] Eric [Kripke] and I were really hungry to capture some of that cowboy, outlaw spirit for Sam and Dean [next season].”

But who are the Winchesters running from? A recent press release from The CW reveals that Sam and Dean “will find themselves…up against a new foe unlike anything they’ve ever fought.” After what happened to Castiel in the May 20 season finale, we had to ask Gamble if the newly minted God is the Winchesters’ new foe. (Of course, the decision to take his portrayer, Misha Collins, off contract suggests Gamble may have other plans.)

“I would consider Cas, in the last few minutes of the finale, to have been transformed,” is all Gamble would say. The boss lady was more reassuring about Cas’ chances for redemption. “We try to be realistic about the fact that people on this show do cross lines that can’t be uncrossed,” she says. “But we examine those things in terms of Sam and Dean. They have a tremendous capacity to move forward. We always look for the chance to have redemption.”

Source: Tvline.


************************************************************************************

The CW Season 7 Description:

9:00-10:00 P.M. “SUPERNATURAL”

Returning for its seventh season, this haunting series follows Sam and Dean Winchester, two brothers bound by tragedy and blood to the one thing that runs through both their veins ? hunting monsters. This past season, Dean and Sam faced insurmountable obstacles: Sam returned from Hell without his soul, and Dean risked everything to get it back for him. The power struggle between good and evil raged on, with the new King of Hell, Crowley, ultimately emerging as their adversary. Shockingly, Crowley had made a secret deal with Sam and Dean’s closest friend, the angel Castiel, who is now a desperate freedom fighter on the losing side of a post-Apocalyptic civil war in Heaven; together, the uneasy allies sought to open a door to Purgatory, where a great untapped well of souls lie waiting to be used as the ultimate form of military power. Sam and Dean reeled from the betrayal by their friend — and raced to stop the angel and demon before they opened that dangerous, otherworldly door. Now, in season seven, the Winchesters will find themselves in an increasingly sinister, changing landscape, up against a new foe unlike anything they’ve ever fought. They’ll find their old tricks, weapons and hiding places all rendered useless. All they’ll have is each other. And the certainty that, like the last of the cowboy outlaws, whatever they face, they’re not going down without a fight. The series stars Jared Padalecki as Sam Winchester, Jensen Ackles as Dean Winchester and Misha Collins as Castiel. SUPERNATURAL is from Warner Bros. Television in association with Wonderland Sound and Vision, with executive producers McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The O.C.”), Robert Singer (“Midnight Caller”), Sera Gamble and Phil Sgriccia.

Source: TV By The Numbers

************************************************************************************

About Misha being a Series Regular, though… It wasn’t true:

Supernatural Exclusive: Misha Collins Won’t Be a Series Regular for Season 7

Brace yourself, Supernatural fans (as if Friday night’s finale didn’t already rob you of most every breath): Though his alter ego now is a bigger force than ever to be reckoned with, Misha Collins will not be returning to the CW series as a regular next season, TVLine has learned.

After making a rock star entrance in Season 4, Castiel quickly became a fan favorite, but the Winchesters’ angel ally has gone from heavenly to sinister this season. In Friday night’s finale, he opened the door to purgatory –- inside himself! –- and became a soul-powered God. And nobody was going to get in his way. Not Raphael, not Crowley, not even the Winchesters, whom he gave the ultimate choice in the show’s final minutes: allegiance, or death.

So why the decision to not bring back Collins as a series regular, just when Cas seems to be at his most… almighty?

“When it comes to Supernatural, our philosophy is that everyone moves in and out and weaves in and out of the story, obviously with the exception of Sam and Dean,” executive producer Sera Gamble tells TVLine. “We love Misha. We love and adore the character of Castiel. His character developed to this extent and went in this unexpected direction because we were so inspired by him.”

The season finale cliffhanger “is a very pivotal moment in Cas’ development,” Gamble adds, describing the character as “transformed.” “Basically, that’s what we’ll be exploring next season, so there’s just a big change.”

A change so big it calls for less of a focus on Cas and the goings-on in heaven? While there will be angel stories in Season 7, “they will probably be more self-enclosed,” reveals Gamble.

“[In Season 6], we consciously kept some of this angel civil war off camera because we are interested in what happens on Earth,” she explains. “We are interested in what happens in the purview of the boys. We feel that in terms of what we can accomplish, the scope of the show, our storyline is best accomplished where the Impala can go.”

Collins is expected to return for the Season 7 opener, but how much of a presence he will have on the show beyond that, if any, is a mystery Gamble can’t delve into “without giving away a lot about the premiere,” she says.

Two other names familiar to Supernatural fans however will be back – creator Eric Kripke and executive producer Ben Edlund. Gamble assures us that despite being left off a CW press release touting next season, Kripke and Edlund are hard at work on the seventh cycle. “Their titles have changed,” she explains. “There are a lot of technical and contractual reasons that people’s titles change that don’t necessarily reflect their level of involvement or commitment to the show. … They’ve been in the [writers] room with me every day this week.”
Source: TVline

************************************************************************************

A tweet-conversation between a new writer and the actor Jim Beaver seems to indicate that Bobby is safe to appear on Season 7:

Jim Beaver
Picked up some stuff at the Supernatural office & saw Kripke, Sera, Singer, Ben (& 2 new Bens) & the other writers already back working on season 7 scripts. Very happy to see them all.

Ben Blacker:

@jumblejim It happened! Great to see you today. I look forward to making your life hell this season. #NotActuallyHellAgain

Jim Beaver:

@BenBlacker Please do! What is it now, 35 Bens writing for the show? I lose count.

************************************************************************************

At the Asylum Convention (May 14-15), Jensen revealed that he’s set to direct again (episode 7.02). Season 7 starts filming on July 6th.

One of the tweets that mentioned this:
@millionsbyname
#Asylum6 Jensen directing another ep next season, s7 starts filming July 6

Episode Schedule

Thu, Oct 10 15.01 - Back and to the Future - Season Premiere
Thu, Oc 17 15.02 - Raising Hell
Thu, Oct 24 15.03 - The Rupture
Thu, Nov 7 15.04 - Atomic Monsters
Thu, Nov 14 15.05 - Proverbs 17:3
Thu, Nov 21 15.06 - Golden Time
Thu, Dec 05 15.07 - Last Call
Thu, Dec 12 15.08 - Our Father, Who Aren’t In Heaven
Thu, Jan 16 2020 15.09 - The Trap
Thu, Jan 23 2020 15.10 - The Heroes' Journey
Thu, Jan 30 2020 15.11 - The Gamblers
Mon, March 16 2020 15.12 - Galaxy Brain
Mon, March 23 2020 15.13 - Destiny's Child
Thu, Oct 08 2020 15.14 - Last Holiday
Thu, Oct 15 2020 15.15 - Gimme Shelter
Thu, Oct 22 2020 15.16 - Drag Me Away (From You)
Thu, Oct 29 2020 15.17 - Unity
Thu, Nov 05 2020 15.18 - Despair
Thu, Nov 12 2020 15.19 - Inherit the Earth
Thu, Nov 19 2020 15.20 - Carry On - Series Finale

* This Schedule might change as new info come.

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