TV Spoilers & Speculation Corner: 02/08/12

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This week, we have spoilers for Once Upon a Time and Supernatural:

Once Upon a Time (Sunday nights, 8pm, ABC)
By Heather S. Vina

The big news from last week is that Barbara Hershey has been cast as the Evil Queen’s mother, another Evil character. Yay, more Evil characters! ‘Cause we don’t have enough of those running around already, winning over Good all of the time.

Mega Buzz cleared up that it is a guest-starring role this season, with potential appearances next season:

“Loving Once Upon a Time, especially the Evil Queen. What’s coming up for her? – David”
“NATALIE: Who’s more evil than the Evil Queen? Her elegant, yet imposing mother, of course, AKA the woman who taught Regina everything. Chills. (This just in: Academy Award nominee Barbara Hershey has booked a multi-episode arc as the matriarch of the most evil family in fairy tale world. The Black Swan actress has the potential to return in Season 2, should the series be renewed.)”

TV Guide print had an interview with Emilie de Ravin about her upcoming episode, “Skin Deep.” A reader at SpoilerTV summarized it here (http://www.spoilertv.com/2012/02/once-upon-time-episode-112-skin-deep.html).

Kristin at E!online had a little bit up for this week’s chat (Warning, a spoiler for Grimm is in there, too!):

“EnterpriseJim: Got Grimm? Once Upon a Time?”
“You’ll get both and you will like it. We just chatted up Amy Acker, who reunited with her Angel EP for her role as Grimm‘s monster of the week this Friday. “I love him to death so I was so excited to get the phone call,” the sweet-as-Fred actress told us today about David Greenwalt. “When I read the script and saw I got to play such a fun, crazy, different character, it was just an added bonus.” Acker’s also coming up on Once Upon a Time, in which she’s playing “the complete opposite” of her Grimm character: Grumpy’s girlfriend! “I’m hitting all the fairy tales,” she joked. Wow. Grumpy is seriously batting out of his league. Way to go, little man.”

ABC announced that Jane Espenson will be having a Twitter event for February 12′s episode.

TVLine announced that Noah Bean has been cast as the “stable boy” character: “He’ll play a handsome stable boy in Fairytale Land who tends to horses at the royal manor. He’s a young romantic who believes that love can make anything possible, even breaking through the barriers of his social station.” Sounds like he will be the Evil Queen’s love interest.

And, in more casting news, according to EW, Roger Daltry has been cast as the voice of the Caterpillar in an Alice In Wonderland-themed episode! The episode is the previously announced “Hat Trick”. This was my mom’s favourite fairy tale, so I hope they do this one right!

ABC announced their February Sweeps Programming and here are their bits about Once:

“ONCE UPON A TIME – ‘Skin Deep’ – After Mr. Gold’s house is robbed, Emma keeps a close eye on him when it looks like he wants to track down the criminal and dole out some vigilante justice as payback, and Valentine’s Day finds Mary Margaret, Ruby and Ashley (Jessy Schram, Falling Skies) having a girls’ night out. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, Belle (Emilie de Ravin, Lost) agrees to a fateful deal to give up her freedom in order to save her town from the horrors of the Ogre war, on Once Upon a Time, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 12 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET). Emilie de Ravin (Lost) guest stars as Belle and Jessy Schram (Falling Skies) guest stars as Cinderella/Ashley.”

“ONCE UPON A TIME – ‘What Happened to Frederick’ – With their love for each other growing stronger, David finally agrees to tell Kathryn about his relationship with Mary Margaret and put an end to his loveless marriage. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was, while runaway groom Prince Charming searches for Snow White, he agrees to aid Abigail on a dangerous mission to recover something precious that was lost to her, on Once Upon a Time, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 19 (8:00-9:00 p.m., ET). Alan Dale (Lost) guest stars as King George.”

The show will be preempted on February 26 for the Oscars.

And finally, there was this little thing called the “Big Bowl?” “Super Circle?” Oh, wait, “Super Bowl” this past Sunday and, therefore, no new episode. Sadly, it took my friend telling me Saturday night, when we were talking, before I realised that there wouldn’t be one, LOL! I’m not a football person. So, no ratings this week. The show will be back next week with “Skin Deep”.

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

Rachel Miner’s appearance at Vancouver Airport last week was no coincidence. A Meg reappearance has been confirmed. Since they’ve been filming 7.17 this past week, we can fairly reasonably assume that’s the episode she’s up there for. In addition, Misha Collins tweeted a photo of himself, sitting on a hospital bed in what looks like white orderly gear. Fan speculation is currently running high whether it’s a genuine set photo or Collins messing with the fans. Could be both. He’s efficient that way. Fan speculation is also already turning kinky as to whether Meg might be playing nurse to an amnesiac Castiel. See what you started, show?

If 7.17 ends up with Dean pulling an Elwood P. Dowd on Sam and Castiel, I will laugh so hard.

A full array of official photos is up for this week’s episode, as are a promo, a clip (which came out over the weekend. How early!) and an early look with Robert Singer (You can find the Canadian promo and Singer preview for 7.13 from last week here). The promo is clown-heavy and the clip is a payphone conversation between Dean and Frank (“I am the Eggman!”) about how things aren’t going so far on the Leviathan hunt.

Initially, the photos were rather blah, showing only Sam being threatened by (and shooting at) some seedy-looking clowns inside a nondescript warehouse. Yeah…who decided it was smart to let Sam go around armed with guns, again? Anyway, the newer photos show Sam looking anxious in a suit, a closeup of Dean looking grim, and two action shots of bird-dog Dean chasing a freaked-out guy named “Cliff” (Dagan Nish) in a yellow lion suit. I can already see that last scene will not get old on repeated viewings.

Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles had a joint video interview come out last Friday. Padalecki also had a print interview from TV Line. In it, he talks about the possibility of season eight (It’s high and he is signed up for it if it happens – and no, he does not say, or even imply, that it’s the last one), Sam’s hallucinations (and Mark Pellegrino’s return), and the fact that Dean will go all out for revenge later in the season. One interesting thing is that Padalecki hedges on whether or not Sam will eventually see “Bobby” (or whatever Dean thinks he’s seeing) and says Sam thinks Dean is seeing things because he’s drinking too much. So, basically, Sam is cracking up and assuming that Dean is cracking up, too. Good times.

Some have complained that this interview makes the rest of the season sound very Samcentric, however, this is Padalecki talking about Sam’s role in it. So, for example, he talks a lot about Sam’s motivations in last week’s episode, even though we ended up seeing little of that onscreen and the episode itself is Deancentric. Also, if he is in less of the latter part of the season, he may simply know less about what is going on in it.

In the video interview, a very sleepy-looking Ackles talks about filming 7.12 (which perks him up). When asked what other time he’d like to time-travel back to, he says (in a faux-Scottish accent) “Medieval times!” Then he admits that it would be too expensive (Actually, it could be doable, if they went with a realistic portrayal rather than fantasy King Arthur or that Pillars of the Earth nonsense), but he wouldn’t mind going to the future (again).

Padalecki would like to go back to the early 40s because people were more united back then. In reality, people were so divided that the U.S. didn’t enter the war for two years, until U.S. soil was bombed at Pearl Harbor, and many European Jews were turned away for asylum because many in the U.S. were both xenophobic and antisemitic. And then there were other fun things like the Japanese internment camps, paranoia and security about spies, and rationing. On the other hand, I can see his point. If you talk to people who lived through and fought in WWII, there is a sense of solidarity there, of vastly different people temporarily working together and knuckling down to what needed to be done.

Later, both Ackles and Padalecki try to explain the premise behind “The Slice Girls”. It’s a bit of a struggle.

There was also another convention in Nashville, Tennessee this past weekend. Some spoilers came out of it, though they were rather vague, about Castiel’s return, the return of the Impala (which has undergone an overhaul in real life), and a bit that Sam will have facial hair at some point in the relatively near future.

There’s a non-spoilery spoiler from Ask Kristin this week about Castiel, which is basically taken from Misha Collins’ panel at the Nashville convention, about how he won’t come back in the raincoat. If the photo Collins tweeted is any indication, we now know why.

Finally, this week’s ratings for “The Slice Girls” are up to 0.8/2 and 1.72 million (It’s often said that the ratings for a current episode reflect the opinion of the previous episode). The show was also upgraded to a sure thing for renewal on the Renew/Cancel Index on TV by the Numbers, mainly because it was second only to The Vampire Diaries in a week full of CW original broadcasts and has been in the top tier of the network all season. This does not mean that the show is absolutely guaranteed to be renewed (That won’t be known until the network makes renewal announcements), but the sure things on the Renew/Cancel Indices tend to be pretty accurate. In addition, DVR+7 ratings for the new year have been as high as usual. They went from 0.8 to 1.2 for 7.11 and 0.7 to 1.1 for 7.12.

So, speculation: There are several mysteries going on here, not unlike last season. Unlike last season, however, we know for a fact there’s a mytharc and what it is (the Leviathans), at least for now, and we have a pretty good idea of what’s a character arc and what’s connected to the mytharcs. That’s an improvement on the incoherent mess that was last season’s throughline at this point.

Things I don’t care about in the least: Sam’s hellpain. I didn’t care when it was the Sambot plot. I don’t care now. The endless harping on it has not made me love it one whit more. In fact, I find the lack of mystery in that area quite irritating. Not helping is that it’s unrealistic, inconsistent and not terribly respectful to the subject matter. But then, how can it be when the writers don’t have a clue about the difference between basic psychological concepts like PTSD, psychosis, delusions, and hallucinations?

The general approach to insanity this season, however, is rather interesting and growing more so, while being carefully hidden underneath the frequent references to Sam’s hellpain. For example, Frank, Dean’s Bobby replacement, is genuinely psychotic. He appears to be suffering from some form of paranoid schizophrenia, or as close as this show is able to take it. Sam’s not really delusional – at least, not yet. He knows his hallucinations of Lucifer aren’t real. But Frank has completely bought into his own conspiracy-ridden worldview and is quite delusional. That he has real enemies is not a shock. Delusional beliefs are generally built out of the furniture of a person’s life and not whole cloth.

This is important because, while Sam has a fairly good handle on his own hallucinations (so far) and does not buy into Frank’s delusional universe, Dean increasingly does. We see Dean being sucked more and more into Frank’s worldview, becoming, himself, further isolated and more paranoid (not entirely unlike Sam with Ruby about this time in season four, actually). As if he needed any more of that. Even scarier, Dean is drinking so heavily that, when he keeps seeing more and more things that seem out of place (an empty beer bottle, moved papers, sleeping 36 hours), both Sam and Frank think the booze and the grief are making him imagine things. Dude, when the two other inmates in the asylum are saying, “What’re you – nuts?” something’s wrong. When Sam gets removed from this equation by his own breakdown in 7.17, especially if his temporary replacement will be a whacked-out Castiel, where, exactly, will that leave Dean?

I’ve noticed that people are finally moving off assuming that these “visitations” Dean’s having have to be Bobby and admitting that we really don’t who or what did those things, or why (We only know they’re intentional foreshadowing of something). It could be Bobby. It could well be Castiel from behind the scenes. It could be someone – or something else. And Dean could be losing his mind. He is not a reliable narrator. Sure, he seems convinced it’s Bobby’s ghost and it seems to make sense, but there’s a reason why that would be lame. This is a horror show. Since when has it ever turned out that well with the supernatural? When has there never been a nasty twist when Dean has chosen to believe in something apparently good? When has the other shoe never dropped?

Dean wants to believe Bobby’s ghost is watching over him. He also wants to believe his brother is getting better and that his monster daughter could be talked down from trying to kill him. And look how that’s been turning out.

We’ll be back next week with more spoilers. Stay tuned and check out our reviews of Game of Thrones, Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Event, Once Upon a Time, and Supernatural.