SUPERNATURAL: Sera Gamble and Robert Singer on Season 7’s Premiere and What’s to Come

[Warning: if you haven’t seen the season 7 premiere of SUPERNATURAL, turn away now. The following post includes spoilers on key elements of the hour and you won’t want to have it ruined.]

What did you guys think of the SUPERNATURAL season premiere?

We got a whole new side of Castiel, a couple of familiar faces popped back up again and where should we even start on the crazy ending?

To better make sense of what went down, SUPERNATURAL executive producers Sera Gamble and Robert Singer sat down with reporters to discuss the insane premiere…

So, um, Cas sure got a bit bloody in the name of righting some wrongs. (How many SUPERNATURAL fans are going to keep Castiel’s vengeance in mind next time they use the word “God”?!) Did he truly think he was doing the right thing?

“I think he totally bought into what he was doing at the end of last year,” Singer said. “I don’t think, at least in his mind — [series creator] Eric [Kripke] used to say, ‘Every villain is a hero of his own story’ — he totally believed in what he was doing and and believed it was the right thing. There’s a certain amount of ego and hubris there that was probably misplaced. I don’t think he counted on what happened to him. There’s sort of that life lesson there, ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ and I think that’s what we were going for.”

But was Cas ever really God?

“I don’t think we ever wanted anybody to be God because that seems like a heavy burden for an actor, so it was OK for him to think he was God, but he wasn’t really God,” Singer said. “We never really talked about [if] we would have God as a regular character. That would be way too presumptuous of us.”

“Having a totally, all-powerful enemy every episode is a little bit problematic,” Gamble added. “Giving somebody a lot of power and having it be a big issue for them almost at once was really attractive to us. This seemed like a fun way into the next set of problems for the boys.”

And the next set of problems includes those pesky Leviathans who have forcibly taken over Cas’ body.

“We’ll develop what the Leviathans mean this season,” Gamble said. “They certainly don’t want to go home. We open the idea of Purgatory and the idea that they were monsters there and that that’s an awful place and Hell’s an awful place. Heaven frankly sounds kind of boring to me. When you think about it, our place, Earth, is sort of this Eden, slightly corrupted but full of possibilities certainly. It seems like everybody wants to be here. There’s a lot of directions that we can take that and we’ve been having a lot of fun with that…Their personalities will become clear in the next few episodes. I think that sense that they’re having fun and that they’re not here to hail fire and brimstone on the world and just be mustache-twirling evil, I think that 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, yeah…They’re smart. In fact, smarter I think. It’s part of the problem.”

How about their proclamation that Castiel is dead? Should these guys really be trusted? Gamble was a bit more coy about the MIA angel.

“You should never take anyone for their word that anyone’s dead, especially when they’re trying to get you out of their way,” she teased. “You certainly should not just ring the final bell on seeing Cas or Misha [Collins (Castiel)] — just ’cause you don’t know what episode he’ll show up in next.”

Something that will be dealt with immediately? Sam’s rapidly increasing hallucinations.

“What’s happening isn’t anything he can hide for very long,” Gamble notes. “It comes out pretty quickly that he is dealing with this awful wall-breaking hallucinatory situation, which escalates really, really dramatically in the next episode, which Ben Edlund wrote. It becomes something that Dean is trying to deal with and Bobby is trying to deal with. It was an interesting thing to throw at him — every now and then a hunter will come into their sphere who has been hunting for so long that they’ve gone crazy. Ben wrote a couple lines in the episode about how it’s one thing to get hexed or possessed but it’s another thing to just lose your marbles. The episode discusses how this is Sam kind of facing that moment as a hunter. He’s just been through so much he might be losing his marbles for good, and there’s no amulet he can wear for that. He can try Prozac maybe or something very strong, but that doesn’t sound so good to him. It’s just this very intersection between the real world of what happens when someone is in an awful job for a long time and the supernatural, which was interesting to us.”

“You saw at the end there…the pinnacle of the absolute worst stuff that happened to him was in The Box,” Gamble continued. “That’s the stuff that comes up first and most intensely, the idea that he escaped from something really awful — or did he? Now his mind is playing this really awful trick on him. I think Lucifer is probably the wost thing he’s been up against, just that close quarters psychological torture. So that’s the thing that comes up the biggest in the first few episodes.”

Which, yes, that means Mark Pellegrino (Lucifer) will be returning to the show for at least one more episode.

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Was the SUPERNATURAL premiere all you hoped it would be?

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