TV Spoilers & Speculation Corner: 5/18/11

This week, we have spoilers for Supernatural and new pilots:

Don’t forget that we’re looking for TV reviewers, specifically for the CW’s new pilot, Secret Circle and FOX’s Terra Nova. V and The Event have been canceled, but we are still looking for a replacement for our The Vampire Diaries reviewer. If you want to review something for us, please check out our previous announcement and drop us a line. Silvia has started reviewing Game of Thrones. We also have possible reviewers for Falling Skies and Grimm.

And our Supernatural-meets-Lovecraft contest continues. You have until May 27 to get your entries in.

Supernatural (Friday nights, 9pm, CW)
By Paula R. Stiles

Despite there being a major convention over the weekend (Asylum 6: The Final Chapter in Birmingham, England), the combination of there being no Supernatural last Friday, the guests being cagey about spoilers for the season finale on Friday, and the writers’ having barely started writing for season seven combined for a relatively quiet week in spoilers. But we’ve still got some.

First, there’s a new horror webseries called “Divine” being produced this summer by some of the crew of the show, with Misha Collins producing and costarring. You can find the trailer here.

Next, we’ve got an extended promo for 6.21/6/22 that aired during the Smallville finale, a writer’s intro (with clips) for 6.21, and a clip for 6.22.

In the extended promo, we see a bit more than in the short version. For example, the demon holding Lisa has red eyes (So, he’s a CRD). We see Dean throwing an angel sword (So, it was a sword in the photos) from behind at Raphael, who catches it without looking. Raphael and Crowley appear to be trying to open the door to Purgatory in Crowley’s cellar lab with a nasty-looking sigil. We also see Dean get tossed from a height onto a table with what looks like a Black Mass set up. And we see Sam going around what looks like the overturned Impala (in a puddle) toward the building that gets blown up by angel light. Finally, we get a couple of more snippets of dialogue, with Dean apparently telling Castiel, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, like opening a door to Monsterville” and Castiel telling someone to “flee or you will die”.

In the 6.21 intro, we see Lisa and Matt (Panou) sitting in her living room when demons kick down her door (What happened to salt lines, Lisa, hmm?). Then Ben calls Dean from upstairs and is talking to him about Matt getting killed when he gets kidnapped trying to go out the window. He has interrupted a conversation in which Bobby has told the boys Castiel didn’t just visit Dean the night before (Of course not. God forbid Sera Gamble, who wrote this one, let any character have anything but self-serving and sociopathic motives, especially regarding Dean. Unless it wasn’t Castiel. Check out who has the spell in those photos). He came to steal a book. It seems somebody has opened the door to Purgatory in the past – H.P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft fans can now officially freak out) and so, there’s a book by one of “the New York Campbells” containing the spell. Dean doesn’t know who Lovecraft is, which I find difficult to believe.

For those wondering how the show could possibly manage Lovecraftian cosmic horror on their budget, it’s spelled N-y-a-r-l-a-t-h-o-t-e-p.

In the 6.22 clip, it’s mainly Sam running down a street from some police. At one point, he’s hiding down an alley from Castle Storage. That sound familiar? It should. It’s where John’s storage locker is and where Dean found out he was the Michael Sword. Sam runs into a bar, where he convinces the young woman there (played by Erica Serra, who plays Jo in Eureka. Yes, I recognized her right away. Yes, I am that big of a nerd) not to hit him with a baseball bat or throw him out to the cops. Then he admits that he has total amnesia. Is this all inside his head? We don’t know.

The convention had Jared Padalecki, Jensen Ackles, Mark Sheppard, Fred Lehne, Cindy Sampson, Brock Kelly, Richard Speight Jr., and Jason Mann. In a surprising turn of events, Ackles didn’t spill anything for 6.22 (though he did say that he might do a commentary for “Weekend at Bobby’s” and – one of only two real season-seven spoilers this week – that he would be directing 7.02). Though he did talk about his vacation in Scotland, working on Dark Angel, how much he enjoyed filming season four (because it was “challenging”), and how much he didn’t love the Sambot plot. I suspect we have him to thank as much as any of the fans for that storyline going away. Whatever works.

Mark Sheppard, who is usually much cagier, was more forthcoming. He said that by the end of the season finale, we’d know everything we wanted to know about season six, teased that perhaps Crowley isn’t a demon (We’ve never seen his eyes turn red…or black. I’m guessing if he isn’t a demon, he might be a fairy), and refused to answer a question about why Crowley would give Bobby back his legs if he’s a bad guy. He also refused to discuss why Crowley has Lucifer’s trident symbol everywhere in Hell.

Misha Collins confirmed he’s in 6.22, which we already kind of knew, but it is further info.

Padalecki said that “God would definitely make sense or be important in the finale.”

Jim Beaver mentioned that the writers are already working on season seven scripts. Apparently, there are two new writers named “Ben”.

Current scheduling rumours are that last-minute-renewed Nikita might be paired up with Supernatural on Fridays, probably with Nikita at 8pm and Supernatural at 9pm (Don’t expect the CW to start giving an extra hour of ratings to the show now…or expect a gory, 9pm watershed show to work at 8pm).

On a side note, Dean/Castiel are handily winning rounds against more…ahem…heterosexual couples on a SpoilerTV poll for TV romantic pairings, and certain sections of the fandom are getting riled up over it. I think it’s all pretty amusing and frankly, it’s making me root for those crazy kids. Go Destiel.

It’s really hard to gauge how the finale will pan out. We know there will be a big cliffhanger. Several sources have claimed that all of the season’s mysteries will be “solved” by the end of 6.22. I think it’s a dead cert that the door to Purgatory will open because this show is all about worst-case scenarios in season finales. Beyond that…it’s really hard to tell.

I will say this – most of the storylines from season six have been wrapped up at this point. Maybe it wasn’t neat and maybe it wasn’t all satisfactory (coughtheCampbellscoughAlphascoughEvecoughcough), but we’ve mostly gotten answers. However, a few storylines remain and at least two of them are not small. First, there’s the neat-and-bloody-linear Sam Drywall plot. We already know that this will come to a head in 6.22 with the wall falling and there are hints it will be wrapped up by the end of the episode. That leaves another major thing. Well…it’s a cloud of things, but they are all related. That is Dean’s status as an MOTW and, specifically, his connection to Fairie. Remember the fairies? The creepy folk who “marked” Dean for life and tried to kidnap him? Repeatedly? Yeah, they’ve been strangely absent for half of a season. Where are they? Could it be Crowley’s one of them? And what about that connection Dean has to them? More to the point, if it’s once a monster, always a monster (as implied with poor Lenore the Veggie Vamp’s sad story), isn’t Dean still one? So, what happens to him once the door to Monsterville opens wide? Come on, writers, don’t pass up an obvious plot complication like that.

So, I’m going to guess that we get either an ensemble effort from Team Free Will along the lines of “All Hell Breaks Loose, Part 2″, another Sammy Deus ex Machina like “Swan Song”, or a big old twist. And the only real big old twist left…is Dean’s connection to Purgatory. Which has been assiduously ignored. In past seasons, a plot point being assiduously ignored usually meant that the writers had forgotten about it and never intended to revisit it, ever. In this season, with its distinct lack of balance between anvils of foreshadowing and none at all, I think we need to pay attention to the elephant in the room that everyone’s ignoring. I mean, hey, we’re getting Lovecraft, so maybe we’ll finally get a big twist with Dean that can’t be explained away in next season’s finale with “Oh, we just meant you were a meatsuit.”

Amazon is listing some new books about the show: TV Goes to Hell: An Unofficial Road Map of Supernatural by editors Stacey Abbot and David Lavery, due out October 1 (more sociobabble, yaaaay); The Mythology of Supernatural: The Signs and Symbols Behind the Popular Show by Nathan Robert Brown, out August 2; Supernatural: Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting by David Reed, out September 6; and the season six companion is due out September 27.

Late edit: I found a copy of the latest Supernatural tie-in novel, One Year Gone, in my local bookbarn a few hours ago: In his missing year between seasons five and six, Dean finds a lead on the Necronomicon (Lovecraft’s most famous invented book in his stories) and takes Lisa and Ben on a “vacation” to Salem, Massachusetts to find it. He wants to use it to raise Lucifer and rescue Sam. There, he tangles with some witches who have bad blood with the Campbells and want to raise a demon named “Belial” who knows Dean. There’s not a lot of Sam in it and his sections mostly consist of Sambot and Samuel being as useless and obstructionist as they are in the show. I’m not sure how much of all of this is a referencing of what we’ll see this week, but the book is heavily spoilery at least up through 6.10 and it does appear to be intentionally timed to come out right after the Lovecraftcentric season finale. It is decidedly Mythos and Dean is very much a half-mad Lovecraftian protag, with there being a lot of Lisa and Ben.  The book’s official publication date is May 24, but the local bookbarn often gets this stuff a week early. It includes a forward written by Eric Kripke, in which he talks about the author (Rebecca Dessertine) being his personal assistant and knowing the universe as well as any of the showrunners.

No ratings for Supernatural this week, as it was preempted for Smallville‘s two-hour series finale and will air as a two-hour season finale this Friday. Smallville ended well, achieving 3.389 million, 2.0 in HH and a 1.5/5 in A18-49 in its last half hour (Everybody wanted to see the suit, I guess), averaging out to 3.022 million, 1.8 in HH and 1.3/5 in A18-49 over the full two hours.

We’ll be back next week with more spoilers. Stay tuned and check out our reviews of Game of Thrones, The Event and Supernatural.