Sam and Dean aren't brothers, Supernatural executive creator Eric
Kripke says to producer Sera Gamble as he walks out of the press
interview session at Comic-Con. "He's kidding," she says. And he probably,
actually is making a joke about that, the same way he admits he twisted
the description of a character in the first few episodes of
Supernatural's fourth season into "Sam's love interest"... "to kind of
screw with [the fans]."
There were a few other ideas tossed out by the
actors and producers at Comic-Con that are fake-outs as well - no, the
theme for season four will not be "pornography", as Kripke pretended to
claim, and the boys will probably not do an episode as cowboys wearing
ass-less chaps, as Jensen Ackles jokingly requested.
What fans - and hopefully new viewers - will see will be dark, and will take the show's "myth-arc" into new directions as they explore the Winchesters' family background. There's going to be a "Back to the Future-style" episode featuring the boys' parents when they met, which Supernatural producer Sera Gamble describes as harrowing, but beautiful. Mitch Pileggi (Skinner on The X-Files) will play Mary's father. All ties to their family have been cut by this point in the series, and they are, Gamble notes, "hungry for any link to their past."
Also back this year is Niki Aycox, who played demon-possessed Meg Masters in season one, but Supernatural producer Sera Gamble did not divulge who she'll be playing. The producers also said that anyone can come back in the Supernatural-verse, and they'd love to have Jeffrey Dean Morgan return, but he's busy with projects like Watchmen, coming to movie theaters next March. They aren't planning to bring back Gordon or Bela at this point, but they are still hoping to work out a crossover with Smallville someday - not in the first half of this season though.
Kripke promises that the upcoming season will be filled with mystery as there are a lot of unanswered questions, and viewers will be taken slowly through the process of solving those mysteries. In the Supernatural-verse, time in Hell moves in dog-years, so "four months of topside time is God knows how many years downstairs."
Dean's "spent some time in The Bad Place..." and "the worst possible thing happened to Sam - he lost his brother." Season four is going to show us what happens after that, according to Gamble. The writers are thrilled, and having a wonderful time exploring what happens when one of the characters "hits rock bottom."
Once Dean has come back from Hell, and Sam's had four months on his own, Kripke promises that they now have "secrets from each other" as they haven't been with each other the way they had been in the years beforehand.
During the Supernatural panel on Sunday, the Ghostfacers from the eponymous episode in season three burst on stage for a clever bit where they stayed in character and talked to the cast as if they were there under aliases. Kripke said he hopes to create a webisode or mobile-phone-distributed series where the Ghostfacers go to real haunted houses. Kripke described their reactions as, "Sure, Eric..." in a very hesitant tone, but he hopes to see it go somewhere.
Actors AJ Buckley, Travis Wester and Brittany Ishibashi talked about the fun each of them had in filming Supernatural. They're fans of the genre, the show, and the cast -- and they've been thrilled by the response from fans who come up to them in grocery stores - and outside hotels - and mimic the Ghostfacers hand movements.
"We love the passion of our fans," Kripke noted, complimenting the intelligence and obsessiveness of a large portion of the Supernatural fan base. He loves "how seriously they take it and how immersed they are in the world." He believes the show would no longer be on the air absent the fandom's dedication, which was out in force at the panel on Sunday morning at Comic-Con. Two thousand fans made it into the room, and hundreds more were outside the door, unable to get in.
What they saw inside that room was what Gamble describes as a glimpse "into the boys at the top of their game." She says their acting in the season four episodes filmed so far is top notch, and the myth-arc developing throughout the upcoming season is "awesome."
"What you don't see is scarier than what you do, anyway."
Supernatural is lucky, Kripke thinks, because the standards and practices at the CW hasn't restrained their storylines, although they have asked for cuts of a half second or so on gory aspects like decapitated heads, and there have been debates on how wet intestines can be. However, they are a "tv show on a tv show budget", and scenes like the final shots of season three, which featured Dean in hell, took weeks of CG and were budget-draining. The idea was to sell the infinite enormity of torture with millions of miles of chains. In season four, we won't see "Fade In: Hell", but we will see glimpses of Dean's experiences there.
Jared Padalecki said, "It's very, very exciting as an actor to explore a new side of Sam that I always wanted to explore," referring to Sam's possession in the middle of season two. "Oooh, that was kind of fun. I like that. Let's get back to it."
It certainly looks like they are!
Season four of Supernatural debuts on September 18 at 9 p.m. ET on The CW.
Check out some images from the Comic-Con Panel and a video talking about the "ass-less chaps" below!
