SUPERNATURAL: Ben Edlund Teases ‘Everybody Hates Hitler’

Sam and Dean have their hands full with Nazis and golems in this Wednesday’s SUPERNATURAL…which means only Ben Edlund could be responsible for whatever shenanigans the boys get into.

Edlund spoke with reporters on a conference call earlier today to tease what’s to come…

The new set was almost too elaborate to build.

The idea of the Men of Letters headquarters was broached in last week’s “As Time Goes By,” but it was up to Edlund to actually script what this place would look like.

“It will stand as a set for some time, I hope,” he said. “It’s really, really, wonderful looking. Adam Glass brought the Men of Letters into his episode, and it was the opportunity to give them a very cool and atmosphere rich space for them to be in. And Jerry Wanek did a fabulous job of making it real — or as real as movies get…it’s really beautiful.”

But while Edlund had a lot of ideas about what he wanted to see in this new set, his imagination proved to be a little bit too much for a realistic set design.

“That was one of the challenges was writing the language of the set, because…I was so excited to do it, I had to actually limit myself,” he admitted. “It started out unproducable, but then we scaled it back because at one point, I had it constructed as an echo of the axis mundi and it was a mini-universe underground that had all these spiral staircases and unproducable elements…this is just gorgeous. I don’t mean to [downplay it], I just made something unshootable and unbuildable [in the original script. And then Jerry made something incredible because we brought it back to a certain thing when I redescribed it and it’s beautiful.”

Sam is really excited about their new homebase.

As SUPERNATURAL executive producer Robert Singer previously teased, one brother is a little more excited about their new “home.”

“The way they get to the case is…Sam’s really excited they’re in this place and he’s really jazzed about the library there and the wealth of information and everything that comes from inheriting the Men of Letters’ headquarters,” Edlund said. “Dean is a little less geeked out in that regard and points out that all the information terminates in 1958, so how it relates to the present day is a mystery to him in a sense, but the case stems from what they learn from going over the files…and connecting what is relevant today gets a hit and draws them in to the case they wouldn’t otherwise pursue. So ultimately the story stems from their inheritance of the Men of Letters.”

Golems and…Hilter?!

Speaking of the case, the press release for the episode teased that “Sam and Dean are attacked by a Golem” and also dropped the phrase ” Nazi necromancers,” so clearly a little more context was needed there.

“We needed a counterforce for the Judah initiative and historically, [Thule Society] fit perfectly,” Edlund said. “They did exist and they were wildly occult and Dietrich Eckart, these guys, they actually did fund the early days of the Nazi party and kind of had some weird interactions with an early Hitler. So it laid itself in really nicely — the full society was thrown into the mix…[when I was] reminded they existed. It then followed the plot where they were heading [and] necromancy seemed like the right arm of magic to pursue.”

As for the golem that attacks the Winchesters, it seems there will be some lighter moments coming out of that.

“It’s this natural comedy team with a giant golem with an old-school sense of purpose and a young Jewish man, but not an orthodox Jewish person,” Edlund teased. “[The man] was supposed to be a rabbi by the rules of the awakened golem, but he’s far from it. It lends itself to some of my favorite kind of writing. And the boys dealing with this new comedy team gets to be comedic themselves. There’s a good bit of that. And even in exploring the new home, there’s a comedy potential for that.”

And when viewers see the golem, he’ll look awfully human…something that almost didn’t happen.

“Early on, one of the ideas of how to present the golem — for me in my mind, one of the possibilities was it would lean in the direction of…HEAVENLY CREATURES, Peter Jackson’s movie of young girls that murdered their mothers,” Edlund explained. “In it, they make these clay figurines and they have this fantasy sequence where they’re both in love with Orson Wells. It’s based on a true story, it’s an excellent movie. And they go in a fantasy sequence where they go into this village where everyone is clay. And there’s this incredible moment where you see this clay Orson Wells just yelling at people. That was the kind of, ‘Oh, we’re doing [this thought originally],’ but actually, as is often true in the case of SUPERNATURAL, the Occam’s razor of time and money tends to help us in terms of grounding things in a way. I think it would have been less funny if it was actually clay. It’s much funnier — and less in a way profound because in order to justify the fact that he looks like a dude, I started to consider him to be made of the clay of Adam, which makes great sense — as if you were to make a figure out of clay, but the co-opted breath of life from God, somehow the clay is transformed from the clay of a riverbed somewhere…to actual flesh. So a lot comes from the limits. That’s generally the case and that’s what happened here.”

–

SUPERNATURAL airs Wednesdays at 9 PM on The CW.

Follow @GiveMeMyRemote and @marisaroffman on Twitter for the latest TV news. Connect with other TV fans on GIVE ME MY REMOTE’s official Facebook page.

And to be the first to see our exclusive videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel at youtube.com/givememyremotetv