TV Spoilers & Speculation Corner: 03/28/12

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

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

The promo for the next episode, “The Stable Boy”, is here. So, basically, it seems like the Queen’s evil boils down to something a ten-year-old girl might have done. Okay.

Matt at TVLine had a little tidbit about Rump and his son:

“Once Upon a Time | Many of you have asked if and when we will see Rumpelstiltskin’s son again. Well, that moment comes in Episode 19, titled ‘The Return’. As Robert Carlyle told us of the late-April installment, ‘It goes back to the moment he became Rumplestiltskin – and [his son] can’t handle this person his father [has become]. He wants me to give up the power.’ Alas, that is much easier said than done. (Or as Rumpel would say, ‘Things always come with a priiiice.’) ‘He has to be stabbed through the heart to give away that power, so that can never really happen – but something else does,’ Carlyle teases with a (non-maniacal) laugh, adding his own, ‘Dot, dot, dot….’”

Kristin at E!Online revealed that Sebastian Stan, who played the Mad Hatter last Sunday, will be back for two more episodes this season.

Raphael Sbarge (Archie, Jiminiy Cricket) had an interview with Wet Pain. Not a whole lot of spoilers in his interview, really, at all, but there was this interesting tidbit: “Honestly, we know how many episodes they’ve got to finish. So, I’m saying to you, you’re going to see some exciting, and I think, sort of [a] crescendo of Good facing Evil. And we know who’s on what side. And Operation Cobra and all that is essentially sort of taking place. Prepare for an exciting ride.”

I do hope that this means that Good might get in a few wins there at the end!

The biggest spoiler out right now is a set visit where someone saw a scene being filmed between Ginnifer Goodwin’s Mary and Josh Dallas’ David, set in Storybrooke. You can see the pictures here via SpoilerTV. But the spoiler in them is that Mary and David call each other “Charming” and “Snow” before they kiss! You can find the recap of it here. Now, whether this is them being cute and calling each other this as some kind of nickname, or this is real, I don’t know. But it is interesting.

The only thing is that I can’t imagine the show actually allowing them is retaining their memories of their true identities, if only because this show seems determined to drag out this story an interminable amount of time. So, I really don’t know, but, as I was telling a friend of mine who was excited to read these, take with a grain of salt. It could be a dream. It could be real. But I have doubt that the show will actually allow any memory-gaining to stand.

The ratings are out for this week’s episode. The show went up and received a 2.9/8 in the demos (steady from last week) and 8.820 million viewers (up from last week’s 8.69 million viewers).

Doctor Who (Saturday nights, 9pm, BBC America)
By Heather S. Vina

The big news this week is that the official Season 7 trailer is out! Looks good, although not quite as exciting as the one for season 6. I’m not a huge fan of Westerns, so I’m not really excited by that one and Amy looks a little silly. The Doctor looks fun, as usual, and I enjoyed seeing Ben Browder (Farscape, Stargate SG1) making his appearance! Looking forward to his guest shot. I’m more intrigued by the scenes off-world, especially with the Egyptian girl!

SpoilerTV has up the first official photo of the new Companion, played by Jenna Louise Coleman. Pretty generic and you can’t tell much from it. But you really never can with these pictures; they just shoot them in front of the TARDIS.

There’s also an interview up with her on YouTube. She seems nice, so we will see how she works out. No spoilers out, yet, but she seems excited and the interviewer pointed out that she will be the current Companion for the 50th Anniversary, which I had forgotten about. That’s pretty huge, especially if they do succeed in bringing back some of the old Doctors and/or Companions!

As we reported last week, the Official Twitter account for Doctor Who had an interesting comment from Steven Moffat when Jenna Louise Coleman was announced as the Companion last week, regarding the plans for Amy and Rory:

“Amy & Rory will leave in a final encounter with the Weeping Angels in ep 5. Not everyone gets out alive and I mean it this time.”

We’ll see if he really means it or not!

Steven also came out and debunked any rumours about a possible new Doctor Who spinoff and denied that Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) would be making an appearance in the 50th Anniversary special.

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

Not the boatload of spoilers we got last week, but still some nice ones. First up, of course, we have official photos, a CW promo, a Canadian promo, and a clip for 7.18. I’ve been seriously dubious about this episode, but the official photos finally won me over. The combination of Drunk Dean and sharp objects has that effect on me. Dean with a katana? Yes, please! Can I have some more?

It also looks as though Dean will be the primary aggressor with the sharp objects. Who knows? Dean may even get some impromptu alcohol intervention this week, or at least we may get a very worried conversation between a newly-clear-eyed Sam and Garth (who was not exactly unaware of Dean’s brand of crazy during his last appearance). In addition, Julia Rhodes will be guest-starring in the episode. She is listed on IMDB as “Marie McCann” (Take that with the usual IMDB-sized grain of rocksalt) and was a vampire in “Live Free or Twihard”.

Also, the actress who played Sam’s damsel in distress last week was played by Kacey Rohl.

We got some set photos from 7.22, of a gas station in Surrey (Filming of the episode began yesterday). Jared Padalecki was back on set, though there seem to be rumours about that Mark Sheppard and Misha Collins will be back in this episode to give Padalecki an easier schedule. Dean is wearing a leather jacket a lot like Lee Chambers’ in “Adventures in Babysitting” (but it’s not identical, so I guess we don’t need to do any prayer circles for Lee). He’s also fondling what looks like Bobby’s whiskey flask. Hard to say what he’s doing with it, but if it’s still around, I’d say Dean’s drinking will still be a plot point in 7.22, regardless of whether he’s on the wagon or not. No Impala in the shots. Looks as if the brothers are driving the General Lee that week.

A new interview with Jared Padalecki (which he gave after the Bad Boys panel a few weeks back) hinted that Bobby might return in some form, though this seemed more speculation than a real spoiler. Speaking of Bobby, Jim Michaels insisted in a tweet from the 24th that the odd occurrence of the address book that fell off the table on its own was not caused by Bobby’s ghost. Hmmm. Who do you think it could be?

It’s now being reported on IMDB (again with the grain of rocksalt) that the title for 7.23 has changed to “Survival of the Fittest”.

There were some last-minute spoilers last week for 7.17. Some of them upset people. Then the episode came out and some people got really upset. Ah, well. In one interview, Sera Gamble talked about how much fun it was to set an episode in a mental hospital (but not, apparently, enough fun to actually do research about mental hospitals). In another, Bob Singer said that if they have a season eight, it will be less angsty. We shall see.

Finally, the demo for “Out with the Old” dropped to a 0.6/2 and audiences to 1.63 million. I’ve seen a lot of debate about this and the most likely culprits were the basketball game, the premiere of much-anticipated (by everyone but me, anyway) The Hunger Games, and warm weather (also known as ‘Spring’). Though TV by the Numbers BSed a bit about how the drop couldn’t be due to The Hunger Games because the A18-49 demo was slightly higher rather than lower for the night, and the basketball ratings weren’t that high, Supernatural‘s drop did not translate to high ratings for its competitors, either. Fringe dropped 0.2 to a record 0.9 and the Grimm repeat only got a 0.7. Neither show got above three million in audience (Supernatural‘s 1.63 million wasn’t a record low, anyway). ABC’s Primetime: What Would You Do? went up slightly from a 1.5 last week to a 1.6 this week, but its audience was slightly down.

We can’t say for sure what caused the drop, but the prime suspects are more likely to be sports, the weather and a hit movie premiere than fan rejection of the return of Castiel, or even the fact that this episode was rather widely advertised as Samcentric. While this may have caused some drop-off among some online viewers, that is not likely to have been more than a fraction of the audience, let alone the Nielsen audience. Sure, some more people between the ages of 18 and 49 watched on Friday than usual, but that doesn’t mean they were the same people who watch the usual Friday night fare. It’s very possible that the slight increase was due to a large influx of sports fans who normally shun Friday nights, compensating for a large drop in the usual suspects going out on the town and/or to the movies.

It is even possible that the CW put up a much-anticipated episode with a fair bit of promotion against this perfect storm of factors, in hopes of avoiding a huge ratings collapse, and is thanking its lucky stars that Supernatural still got a 0.6 and Nikita didn’t drop back down to a 0.4 (It got a 0.5). We cannot tell one way or the other because we don’t know what the network’s true expectations were or the full lowdown on the audience makeup. Either way, if this is the first time in the season that Supernatural got a 0.6 in the finals (It got one in the overnights about a month ago), it’s still doing okay. It would probably still be okay if it got more 0.6s this spring. Spring is ugly for TV programming and several CW shows are doing a lot worse.

So, speculation: What is dogging Dean’s steps and helping him with his research? Will it show up this week? Does it mean him good or ill? And will it matter when it’s already turning him a little…odd? I mean, does Dean really need to be turned even further from human society and pick up even more supernatural “friends”? And does it connect at all with the Leviathans? This is easily the most intriguing mystery of the season for me.

It appears that Jared Padalecki will still get time off here or there, but not as a big block. It looks as though he got a work week and two weekends off last week, which is not much, but it’s still a lot more than three days. Hard to say how that will affect Sam’s appearances in the latter part of the season (though 7.21 is likely to be pretty Samlite), especially since the brothers are just about down to each other in terms of human allies. It’s possible that 7.17 was intended to be a big hurrah for Sam, to make up for less coverage later in the season. And it could well be we’ll be seeing more of Dean hanging out with a variety of supernatural creatures. He sure doesn’t seem to play well with humans, anymore.

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, Grimm, and Supernatural.