#2014:November11Variety

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Variety “‘Supernatural’ at 200: The Road So Far, An Oral History”

(...) Eric Kripke (Creator): For me, the core notion behind “Supernatural” was to make a series about urban legends. I think they’re this incredibly rich mythology about the United States, and no one had really tapped into that, so when I started as a writer, one of the first ideas I ever pitched was an urban legend show.

A couple years later I tried to pitch, basically, a “Scooby Doo” rip off of a bunch of kids travelling in a van dealing with these urban legends. It was an idea that I never let go of and kept throwing there every couple years. Finally I had a deal with Warner Bros. and that incarnation was a reporter. Frankly, it was a rip off of “Nightstalker,” but I really fleshed it out and it had mythology.

I took it to Susan Rovner and Len Goldstein at the studio and they said, “We love the idea of doing a horror show,” which no one was really doing on TV at that time, “but we’re not into the reporter, that feels really tired. So no thanks and let’s get another angle.”

So in this moment, when they were basically passing on my idea, as you often do in these kinds of rooms, you start tap dancing. And I said, “forget the reporter, we should do this show as ‘Route 66,’ two cool guys in a classic car cruising the country, chasing down these urban legends,” and literally right on the spot I said “and they’re brothers,” because it popped in my head. “And they’re dealing with their family stuff and they’re fighting evil.” You just start making it up as you go. They were like, “Brothers, wow, that’s a relationship we haven’t seen on TV before.” And from there, “Supernatural” was born… out of a piece of improvisation.

Peter Roth (President, Warner Bros. Television): Eric [had] been with us since about 2002. Sometime in 2004, he came to us with this idea… this extraordinary road show about these two brothers, in which they would be living all of the great urban and rural myths that [we’re all] exposed to as kids. It was a very commercial idea, emotionally driven, which was what I was most concerned about: who are the characters? Why do I relate to them? Why are they worth my while to watch? And once we cast Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, along with Eric’s great idea, along with the script, along with David Nutter, our director on the pilot, the combination of those factors is what made me so excited and I frankly knew, from the moment I saw this pilot, that it was a winner. There wasn’t a person who I work with who didn’t feel the same way. It was a real strong story of young adult siblings that resonated perfectly with The WB audience.

Kripke: When we were casting, you see a lot of people. We hadn’t found our Sam and Dean. David Nutter suggested Jensen because we knew him from “Smallville.” We met with him to play Sam, and we fell in love with [him]. And then Jared came in, and he was a really great Sam too. Looking back, we were such idiots to not see it… We had two great Sams and no Dean and you think it would be obvious to put one into the other role, but it was not obvious. So we [went] to Peter Roth and we said, “We’re not sure what to do,” and Peter was like, “why don’t you make Jensen Dean?” We all looked at each other like, “we’re idiots, of course.” It’s so difficult to find one actor who is charismatic enough to be a breakout character and to support a show. So to find two of them, where there’s only two leads… I didn’t realize what a miracle it was at the time. It’s a miracle. (...) Jensen Ackles (Dean Winchester): It was just immediate chemistry. There was an ease to it. There was a familiarity to it. Once we got into it with each other, it just fell in place and it came… not easy, but definitely a little easier than my experiences in the past. I think the importance of that bond and that relationship was verbalized by Kripke when he sat us down and said, “this begins and ends with you,” and not only how we relate to each other on screen, but also off screen. There was an importance stamped into [that bond] very early on. (...) Padalecki: (...) It was definitely a huge learning process, not only for myself, learning the character of Sam Winchester, but I think we didn’t have a grasp on what we were doing. The original tag line was monster of the week, like “X-files” meets “The Twilight Zone.” And we had these very famous urban legends about Bloody Mary or the Hookman, but ultimately you’re going to run out of those.

Singer: Eric talked about the five-season plan… I don’t know if he secretly had that in mind and was just not sharing it, but initially Eric wanted campfire stories. And the mythology really started to evolve in the first year. We didn’t exactly know where we wanted to go, and I don’t even think Eric knew exactly where he wanted to go

Kripke: If I’ve said in the past that I had this five year plan from the beginning, I was lying. I always knew what that particular season was going to be; “by midseason I want to be here, by the end of the season I want to be there.” And then I always had a rough sketch what the season after that would be. I will say I knew that the show was going to come down to evil Sam versus good Dean and the fate of the world was going to hang in the balance — that was baked into the pilot. I wanted to build it to something that felt conclusive because I didn’t want these mysteries and mythologies to stretch on forever.

Sera Gamble (writer, executive producer): We were realizing the thing that we most enjoyed when we were watching cuts of the show was the chemistry between the brothers, and that the mythology we were constructing for the season was really a family story about two young men and their father, and this family legacy that they’re trying to deal with. That was the heart of the show, and if we paid attention to how each monster story resonated with the relationship between the brothers, then the show was always really interesting.

Padalecki: It was right around the episode “Faith” where the writers realized this show isn’t just about what kind of monsters we can kill but what the brothers can go through together. And I think luckily we stuck with that theme on through the end [of season one], where we reintroduced our father into the storyline. And we get some sense of what the father is willing to do for the sons and what the sons are willing to do for each other. And so it became this story about sacrifice and loyalty and family and friendship [within] this medium of the supernatural and ghosts and ghouls.

Gamble: It’s not like we sat down to write “Faith” and we said, “we’re going to write the game changer.” We just wanted to find a really human, emotional way into a story about faith healing. We had these different elements of the reapers that we wanted to bring into the show and the phenomena of faith healers in the history of America, and it ended up being a story that was really personal and kind of philosophical… From that point forward, everyone was hungry to do more stories that had an aspect of the personal and the metaphysical. (...) Singer: Eric’s phrase was “smoke them if you got them,” where we would just try to tell the best stories we could and be as provocative as we could. We felt that this had a long-term mythology, so ending with kind of a very dramatic cliffhanger just seemed the right thing for us and that all seemed to work out for us. (...) Padalecki: Season two is the season where we realize dying doesn’t mean you’re dead, beginning with Dean who died — so to speak — in the first episode, and culminating with Sam who died in the last episode. Unlike season one where we were figuring out what this show was about, who these characters were, season two we hit the ground running.

Ackles: The interesting thing that Kripke did with the first several seasons is he flipped character motivations from season to season. With the first season you had Dean as the motivating factor: he was really pushed by his father, dragging Sam along against his will. Then as Dad dies, the whole thing is flipped upside down. Now Dean is like, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” Dad was his motivating factor in life and [after] he lost him, it was a devastating blow and Dean just wanted to hang it up. And Sam was the one who was like, “no, we’re going to go find answers to this. I have to figure out how I play into this,” and Dean went along with him because he couldn’t let his little brother go it alone. (...) Gamble: It was really fun to kill Sam. You don’t very often get to kill the lead character. One of the really fun things about “Supernatural” is that you get to kill whoever you want, and it’s part of the evil genius of Eric Kripke. From pretty early on, he understood the power of doing the unexpected thing to the character the audience thinks is safe. He fought hard, and he was always someone who, in the room, would push us to not get precious with a character, to not try to save someone because we think they’re amazing. If we love them, we’ll bring them back in some other form. Because we had a plan to bring Sam back, we got to write the super-emotional scene with his brother that we knew that Jensen would knock out of the park, and both of them knocked it out of the park. (...) Singer: I think Bela didn’t quite turn out as good of a story driver as we might have wanted, although we loved Lauren — we thought she was terrific in the part. But we started pinning ourselves a little bit in the corner [with her as] Dean’s nemesis, like, “how often can she best Dean without assassinating our lead character?” If she would’ve been on three times a year, I think that character could’ve really served a purpose going forward. Ruby served a better purpose and that pushed the mythology into a different area. But we were a little flummoxed because you say, “what do we do? We can’t have two women just sitting in the back of the car with these guys.”

Gamble: I think Ruby in the long term was a more successful character than Bela, but we all really enjoyed creating Bela in the room, especially Ben Edlund, who wrote some really cool stuff for her. Not every peg will fit in every hole in the show. You don’t get Castiel one hundred percent of the time. If you follow any show for long enough, you’ll notice some places where they corrected the course, and we learned a lot from writing those two characters. I really like a lot of the stuff that we did with Ruby. It’s really cool to have a character that’s played by more than one actor, and it’s such an interesting characterization of a demon. (...) Kripke: I think the truncated season actually ended up helping the mythology. We were a little aimless as we had just lost the Yellow-Eyed Demon, the great big bad, and we hadn’t introduced a new big bad yet. Because we had less episodes, we had to focus quickly on what was really important: Dean’s deal with the demons and the fact that he had a ticking clock and that he was going to get dragged down to hell. (...) Kripke: If you had asked me in season one, were there going to be angels in Supernatural, I would have said “absolutely not, you’re fired.” Up to that point I always felt like I didn’t want any supernatural good guys in the show. If there was any force of good, it was going to be Sam and Dean, and they were going to be overwhelmed and outgunned. And as we were kicking towards the end of season three and we were doing lots of demon stories, I was worried that we were overplaying the demon stuff. But the idea that angels could be dicks and that they didn’t have to be this warm fuzzy helpful force, they could actually be a really interesting antagonist, once I kind of realized that, I said, “I’ve never seen that depiction of angels on television before.” It wasn’t just these two boys versus all these demons; it became Sam and Dean trapped in the middle of this massive war where you had two sides battling, and humanity, represented by the boys, were caught in the middle, so how do they play both sides against the other? It balanced the mythology in a way that I think made it much more satisfying. (...) Kripke: I’m the first to acknowledge that the idea really came from graphic novels. It came from “Preacher”; it came from “Hellblazer,” which has now become “Constantine,” which is why Castiel wears a trench coat. There’s a reason why Castiel looks exactly like Constantine — it’s because I ripped off Constantine. But I had no idea it was going to be a show at the time! It was funny, as I went into the writers’ room at the start of season four, having thought about it I said, “okay guys, this season we’re doing angels.” And they were like, “What? You asshole!” Because there were so many angel stories that were pitched earlier and I would literally shame them out of the room whenever anyone pitched an angel story, and now I’m presenting it as an entire mythology. But it worked out.

Padalecki: I think season four was really the turning point for the show, and really set the new parameters for what the show is still about to this day, most notably with the introduction of Castiel.

Ackles: This was when “Lost” was on the air, “Heroes” was on the air, these giant mega hits. I remember Eric taking issue with “Lost” because they kept asking questions and never really giving answers. He was against that method of storytelling and said, “no, I’m going to ask the question and I’m going to answer it. And maybe the audience doesn’t like the answer, but I’m most certainly not going to string them along just until I come up with some sort of a solution.” That’s one of the reasons why, from season to season, the bar just kept getting raised and the supernatural world kept getting bigger, almost to the point where it was incomprehensible to the Winchesters. I think we really saw that when the introduction of angels came into play, and then it became something far greater than things that go bump in the night… It was a leap of faith. I wouldn’t have had the confidence to do something like that, but I think it panned out. And now we have one of the most loved characters of the series still with us today.

Collins: I was supposed to be on for three episodes, and they said, “Oh, you might do five episodes,” so they added a couple more, and then they added three more after that… Then they signed me up as a series regular and they kept me on for two years, and then they said they were going to kill me and that we would never see me again in season 7. And then they changed their minds again… I was joining the show the beginning of Season 4. I kind of assumed that that was the tail end of the show. I think everybody really thought that the show was going to be over at the end of Season 5 at that point, which was Kripke’s original vision, so it’s very strange to still be here. We are obviously counting ourselves lucky that the show has run so long. (...) Kripke: The movie “Stranger than Fiction” had just come out. And so it started with a really innocent single episode pitch: what happens if Sam and Dean realize that they’re characters in a book; that they find a book that is detailing their entire lives? And then it would give us an opportunity to really poke fun at what we’re doing in “Supernatural,” and that was really fun for me. [Then] somebody said, “well what if he’s a prophet of the lord?” We jumped all over that idea and it really tied into this mythology. It was our first serious meta episode.

And once we introduced him, I thought it was so funny and smart, and you just want to start doing more of it. That’s how I think a lot of the insanity in “Supernatural” emerged. Because we couldn’t repeat ourselves with Chuck: if you’re going to see him again, it better be at a fan convention. Every single time, Bob would say to me, “this is the one where we’ve gone too far.” And then after one of them I responded, “don’t you see? We can never go too far, there is no too far.” (...) Kripke: The thing I remember most about that season was how exhausted I was going through it… I knew I wanted some sort of apocalyptic ending where evil Sam had to fight a good Dean. One of the things that was really hard about that season is, it’s one thing in season four when you’re promising the apocalypse: Is it going to happen, can the boys stop it? It’s a whole different matter when you’re saying in season five, “okay, the apocalypse is happening,” because you still are on a budget. There’s an incredible amount of off-camera, “oh no, there’s been an earthquake!” stuff on the news. It’s really difficult to mount something of that scope. (...) Ackles: To look at the five seasons, to step back and look at that all as one story… it was a massively grand finale and it was like Game Seven of the World Series, and I just don’t know how you can go on from that. I think Eric thought the same thing. He was like, “I’m throwing out my last pitch and I’m taking off into the sunset,” and that’s what he did, but it had become such a hit that the studio and the network were like, “no, guys, you have to keep going.” (...) Gamble: We thought season five would be the last season. But pretty early into [it], Eric came to me and said “signs are pointing toward a season six,” and he was ready to move on and asked me to step in. And he came to me really early because there was a tremendous amount of learning and training and coming behind the curtain to see what he and Bob were doing that had to happen.

There was part of me that was just, lovingly, super pissed at Eric. I was like, “do we have to do this after the apocalypse? We literally burned the story all the way to the apocalypse. We have to start over and find a whole new classification of villains, so what the hell are we going to do?” But we had several months to ponder that. We had a great writers’ room, and everybody put their heads together, and Eric, to his great credit, stayed with the show, and was very active in constructing season six, and was incredibly helpful to me, personally. He was instrumental in figuring out what we were going to do next. It was like a reboot.

Kripke: I read every script. And then once Sera was comfortable in the gig and the studio and network were comfortable, I backed off. And from then I would define my role as a parent who sends their kid off to college. I’m extremely proud. I’m there if they need me… And it was never me running the show alone. It was always me and Bob Singer, and Bob has always been there. So there’s been true continuity. People say “Supernatural” has had different showrunners and it hasn’t. It’s actually always had the same showrunner, he has just had different partners over the last decade. (...) Gamble: The good thing about “Supernatural” is some things always remain the same. It’s always a story of two brothers, always a story about that family. It is always a story about the people who fight the things that go bump in the night, and there is always a structure that has an overarching mythology that gets solved piece by piece over the course of a season. That engine is pretty solid. I think one of the first conversations was just, “so we did heaven and we did hell, and oh, there’s a purgatory.” It started from that simple examination: “What is the mythology that we’ve been mining, and what else is in there that we haven’t talked about yet?”

You’re on a show for years and years, and you watch the actors grow up. Sam did not look like little Sammy was just out of college anymore. He was a grown-ass man; Jensen was a grown-ass man. They were adults, and they were men who had been through a lot, so the stories have to evolve, become more mature. They have to be about the problems that people would have in their adult lives, and that’s really how we were approaching these things. We were looking for problems that were not repeats of the problems they were having when they were 17 or 22. (...) Kripke: Once we were able to pull off “The French Mistake,” and Sam and Dean were actually able to go and become Jared and Jensen making an episode of “Supernatural,” I think Bob saw that there’s no such thing as too far. If you can pull that off and not destroy your show, you can truly do anything.

The season also saw Castiel drifting further away from the Winchesters, as he was unwittingly manipulated by Crowley in his quest to try and prevent a war among the leaderless angels. By the end of the year, after absorbing thousands of monster souls from purgatory, Castiel became corrupted by his newfound power.

Collins: I loved it. If for no other reason than Cas became God at the end of season six, which has always been a fantasy of mine, personally. There’s a very elite cadre of actors that ever get to [do that]. I think it was a great way to make the character a big bad. I was sorry to see myself killed off shortly thereafter in the beginning of season seven, but glad to see myself resurrected a couple episodes later. (...) Singer: We came up with this Leviathan idea: How do a group of monsters who want to take over society go about doing that? And the logical answer for us was, they insert themselves into the fabric of society in powerful ways — that’s what happens with the pharmaceutical companies, it’s what happens with government. It just seemed like an easy place to go and really be able to say something on a week-to-week basis. [We were] changing up what we were to try to make it interesting, and we feel if it’s interesting to us, we hope that it’s interesting for other people… Doing a season that was kind of political with these different monsters that we hadn’t seen before, I thought was pretty bold, and by and large a good season.

Gamble: The price of success is that you have to really be hard on yourself to keep the stakes high in a show like that. How do you keep the stakes high after you’ve faced the demon that kills your mother, angels, the apocalypse? The way that we found our way into that is by keeping it really personal. If it’s about Bobby, it will mean something to the audience, because Bobby means so much to the boys. (...) Ackles:(...) That was a huge blow to both the Winchesters because this was a surrogate father figure who had become their anchor, had become their home, and now they once again lost that pivotal character in their story. And so, once again the rug gets whipped out from underneath them and all they’re left with is each other and they’ve got to keep on going. I think that was a really important season because of not just losing Bobby, but look what it did to the story and the direction that it then sent the boys off in.

Padalecki: I thought season 7 was going to be the last season of “Supernatural,” while we were filming it. We’d gone so big with the Leviathans and it was yet another departure from our normal canon. There were times I thought we strayed a little bit; our big bad of the season was Dick Roman [James Patrick Stewart] and there were times I thought there were one too many dick jokes, every now and then I felt like we were straying off-course, but the fans stuck with us and I think that season we introduced Kevin Tran [Osric Chau] who stayed with us for a while, so we said goodbye to a few characters, we met a few new characters. (...) Jeremy Carver (writer, executive producer): When I came in, it was a pretty open canvas. A lot of things had wrapped up. The biggest issue was that Dean had been popped down to Purgatory, and what do you do with that? But because there wasn’t an ongoing mythology we had to worry about, we could really let our minds roam and I came up with that main idea of [Dean] becoming best friends with a vampire and then saying, “What if Sam, for once in his life did something that ran contrary to what the world at large — and when I say the world at large, I mean the fans at large as well — thought he should do?” For me, that was a really thrilling tack to take, just because it felt like fresh snow. From a story standpoint, it felt like Sera left lots of opportunity.

And then [there] was this idea of, these guys have been together for so long, at a certain point… they need to – I hate to say “mature” because that sounds like they weren’t mature in the past, but… mature in the sense of really exploring what it is to be their own person. And that’s what was really behind Sam not looking for Dean at the beginning of season eight. It wasn’t so much me taking over as it was like, “let’s put these characters in situations that make sense but feel risky for them as characters.” One thing I really wanted to do was to put a different kind of spotlight on these guys. (...) Ackles: One of my most favorite storylines was Dean in Purgatory. If there was one storyline that I wish would’ve dragged out much longer, it would’ve been that one. I would’ve liked to have seen more of what Dean was up against in Purgatory and how he lived and how he existed in that realm and among those things down there and how he was able to survive. And he befriended Benny [Ty Olsson], who I thought was a great character… I was sad to see [him] go when he did.

We’ve lost so many good characters on the show, but that’s one of the reasons why the show is compelling to people, because we do take risks…if there’s a fan favorite character that now could easily be an integral part of the story, we bring them in and then we kill them and it’s shocking. If we can continue not just to entertain people, but to shock them and to make them feel the spectrum of emotion, from joy to loss, then I think we’re doing our job as storytellers. And I think season eight was a good representation of that.

Padalecki: Ultimately, “Supernatural” is really a show about two brothers and their relationship and their struggles and their loyalties and their sacrifices, and so I knew in my heart of hearts that even though season eight started out with Sam having gone off to try and live another normal life with the character of Amelia (Liane Balaban), I figured it was a way to remind both the audience and the cast and crew what the show was about. I thought season seven might’ve gone a little off the reservation, but in a strange way, by steering even further off the reservation and having the brothers not even be involved with each other [at the start of season eight], it really reaffirmed for everybody what the bread and butter of the show is, which, in my opinion is the relationship between the two brothers, so it was a nice rekindling and repartnership of Sam and Dean. (...) Padalecki: My favorite part of season eight was the introduction of the Men of Letters. I was so excited to play this smart character, and I really got a chance to delve into that in season eight. I remember with the introduction of the Men of Letters – like I said, in season seven I thought we were maybe coming to an end, and then I read the episode with the Men of Letters and Henry Winchester played by the wonderful Gil McKinney, and I thought, “holy crap, we can go for another eight years.” And it was nice to have a home again. We had burned Bobby Singer’s home down a season prior, and that was our only standing set on “Supernatural,” and so to have the Men of Letters bunker to refuel and research and gather our bearings as characters and actors was a really welcome addition to the show, and I feel like the Men of Letters storyline has really worked wonders for and breathed new life into the show these past couple seasons. (...) Carver: The notion of Sam being possessed by an angel was originally Bob Singer’s idea. He threw it out there between seasons and said, “what if to save Sam’s life you had to put an angel in him?” It came from the same cloth of, “what if Dean had to rely on a vampire to escape from Purgatory and they became bonded over that?” You have to make do with the friends that are in front of you. Then we started to just flush out the character of Gadreel, who was originally Ezekiel, and that was one of my favorite characters we’ve done over the last couple of years, just because he felt very fleshed out and very empathetic. And Tahmoh was just wonderful because he has this bearing that is manly and unfamiliar all at once. He really dug into that role. If I remember correctly, Jared actually performed as Tahmoh before Tahmoh had even said a word of dialogue. So there was a leap of faith there on the part of Jared, who did a really spectacular job of portraying two characters, and he really embraced it. I was very happy with the way the whole Ezekiel/Gadreel story worked out, and how it all reflected back on the boys and their relationships. (...) Castiel finally became human in season nine — a trajectory that seemed to be a long time coming, after the angel’s powers began to dwindle in season eight.

Collins: That was something that I, as an actor, was looking forward to from the beginning — I kept on hoping that they were going to let Castiel become human for a while, and they finally did, and it was great. I think he had three or four episodes as a human; I wish we’d had a little longer in that realm, because I feel like there was a lot of good material to mine there, but the experience that he had being human made him much more empathetic towards humans, and I think that experience definitely left a lasting impression on him. He, I think, understands some of the subtleties of human interaction a little bit better. He is a little bit more savvy and definitely a lot more empathetic. But being more empathetic also makes him question himself more, have more doubts. He definitely is less cocksure as he moves through life, and he sees the gray areas and both sides of the story a little bit more than he used to.

Dean, meanwhile, became the unwitting recipient of the Mark of Cain, a brand that enables the wearer to wield the First Blade, a powerful weapon – but also saps away their humanity. Dean struggled to control his darker impulses as a result of the Mark, and after dying at the end of the season, found himself resurrected by the power of the Mark and reanimated as a demon, neatly paralleling Sam’s own descent into darkness in earlier seasons.

Carver: In this case, it was [writer and co-executive producer] Robbie Thompson coming up with the idea of Cain [Timothy Omundson]. And I remember him pitching this idea of the Mark of Cain. At the time he pitched it, I remember thinking, “I don’t know exactly where this is going to fit into the overall mythology, but it’s a wonderful thing to plant,” which we do all the time. One of the dirty little secrets of the show is that after we come up with something and it works out really well, we say, “hey, it’s almost like we planned it that way.” Sometimes things are just happy accidents. You try and draw out that roadmap, and then the writers are coming up with all these incredible, creative things. Cain just felt like such a no brainer, to the point where you’re wondering, “why haven’t we had this character in our world before?” We had referenced him before but hadn’t seen him.

But when [Robbie] talked about the Mark of Cain and putting it on Dean, it was something to plant like, “we’re definitely doing this and we’re going to figure out how to make this work as the season goes on,” which is exactly what happened. I’d like to say from the very beginning that we knew [Dean] was going to be a demon, but we didn’t. We had all these ideas of where Dean would go, but sometimes it’s peanut butter and chocolate and it takes a few episodes actually to realize the tools you have right in front of you.

Ackles: If you look back at the majority of series, it really hinges on Sam’s character. That’s the way it was originally intended, that’s the way it serves the story best, but every now and again the spotlight got flipped and turned on Dean, and I think we’re seeing this again with Mark of Cain. That was part of the setup for just very dark and troubled Dean.

Season nine was one of the more difficult seasons that I personally had to deal with, and it was because of not just the weight of the storyline, but because it was so Dean-centric. I was on set pretty much the whole time while everybody else was enjoying their vacation. It was just a lot of weight and a lot of darkness in my world last year, but we got through it and I think it made for some good story and I think it made for a good setup of where we’re going this year… I really enjoyed the twist at the end of last season when we think we lost Dean yet again and lo and behold, an unlikely character comes in and brings him back to life. So I have to give it to Carver on that one, when I read it I was shaking my head with very happy approval, because I knew that was now another massive situation that Sam and Dean are going to have to deal with. And how they [were] going to get out of it, I was anxious to see.

After Dean returned from death as a demon at the end of season nine, Crowley took his newly minted BFF to “howl at the moon,” but their bromance was shortlived – Sam saved his brother and restored Dean’s humanity in the third episode of season ten. So where do the brothers go from here?

Padalecki: Sam, with the help of Castiel, has saved Dean from being a demon and has made good on his promise at the end of season nine where he said he wasn’t gonna let him go, he wasn’t gonna let him die. But Dean is still cursed or possibly forever changed by this Mark of Cain. Sam and Dean don’t really know the repercussions of that just yet; they can’t find Cain; Castiel can’t find any answers; and Crowley’s not helping. We know that the Mark is changing him somehow, Dean doesn’t want it and Sam doesn’t want him to have it, so now they have to go as far as only the Winchesters will go to figure out how to get this Mark of Cain off of Dean before he turns into something that could cause more damage than Sam or Dean have ever seen.

Carver: Dean’s not a demon, but he still has this problem; he’s still got the Mark of Cain. And in the broadest strokes possible, it’s a very, very personal year where our overarching mythology for the season is building in a very methodical, very personal manner. I think a lot of relationships…I’ll even go as far to say a lot of bromances that have sprung up on the show, are going to be tested in ways that I think are going to be very uncomfortable. Each of our characters is going to have to stare into the abyss at some point and say, “who am I?” It’s going to be pretty personal, pretty intense, and pretty surprising as we move down the road.

Thankfully, the 200th episode (airing Nov. 11), is a light-hearted departure: it’s a musical, featuring a score composed by Christopher Lennertz and Jay Gruska, with lyrics by Robbie Thompson, who wrote the episode.

Carver: It’s our love letter to the fans. Many aspects of the fandom are going to see themselves represented in many different ways and in the most loving way possible. It’s an episode that takes a long, loving look at the show, warts and all. And we’re the first to admit our mistakes or our inconsistencies, and I think long-time fans will have a lot of fun seeing where we acknowledge this one big, happy, messy family that we’re all part of.

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