Here’s a nice treat for all you “Supernatural” fans out there: an excerpt from the Official Season 5 companion, which hits bookstores today! If you’re waiting for it to get shipped to your house, why not take a gander at this sample to get you all revved up?
In the excerpt, called “Intensifying Supernatural”, head writer Eric Kripke talks about what it was like setting the stage for the series’ most intense season yet (if you call bringing the Apocalypse to TV “intense” – I sure do).
“In season five we found ourselves at the climax of a five-year storyline, and the show
became much more challenging to produce,” explains creator Eric Kripke. “I almost
dare say we bit off more than we could chew, but you gotta give us credit for trying
to take big bites. It’s one thing when you’re in season one to say, ‘Yeah, this sucker’s
going to end with the Apocalypse!’ It’s another thing entirely to actually have to
find a way to mount and execute a twenty-two episode Apocalypse on our time and
budget. But I think we did the absolute best we could have given our situation. I’m
really pleased with how the story of the mythology wraps up — we had some great
episodes this season.”
One of the hardest parts of creating the Apocalypse for TV was coming up with
suitable stories to do it justice. “This year was far and away the hardest year of
Supernatural for me,” Kripke states. He spent even more time than usual in the
writers’ room trying to break the story and answer difficult questions like, “‘What is
God’s motivation? What is the Devil’s motivation? What are the Horsemen like, and
what do they want? Exactly what does this Apocalypse look like and how do we give
it the appropriate scope while still being able to produce it for a budget?’ It was such
an incredibly difficult year figuring all that stuff out,” he says. “This was a year where
breaking the story in many ways felt like being in a quarry breaking rocks, where
you’re just slowly but surely plodding through and making progress step by step.”
Fortunately, there were no rocks left unbroken, and in the end, Kripke says, “I think
it played out exactly the way we were counting on it to. I just wish we’d had more
money to do it with [an] epic scope. Our Apocalypse had a very specific focus on
details and phenomenon — this small thing happened here and this small event
happened there — and I would’ve liked to have had more episodes like ‘The End’,
in which it was like the doors were blown off. ‘The End’ was a huge episode, and it
really made it feel like the world was coming to an end, but the production challenge
was pretty significant, and you can’t sustain that over twenty-two episodes. You can’t
have twenty-two episodes with people running around flailing their arms, saying, ‘It’s
the end of the world!’ So we had to adopt this notion, which I think worked, that
says, ‘Well, who’s to say the Apocalypse isn’t going on right now all around us?
Who’s to say that swine flu and hurricanes and floods and earthquakes and massive
oil spills off the coast of the United States aren’t the signs of the Apocalypse right
now?’” After all, a world in which people are going to their jobs and going about their
lives while there’s a secret war going on is how it’s always been on Supernatural.
Ultimately, Kripke’s very happy with the way the five-year arc ended. “It was fun and
gratifying for it to end the way I really always wanted it to,” he says. “I always loved
the idea that you have this very epic, highfalutin prophecy about chosen ones and
end times, and then you have this blue-collar guy, who’s American and stubborn and
cocky, walk up to it and say, ‘Prophecy is for wussies. Go to Hell!’ and kick it in the
ass; just totally puncture it. I always wanted it to end that way. There’s this massive
prophecy and it just ends with Dean playing Def Leppard and riding the Impala up to
Michael and Lucifer. There they are on the chosen battlefield, and Dean drives onto it
and calls one of them ‘Buttercup’ and he tells the other one that he wants five minutes
to talk with the son-of-a-bitch. Putting a cowboy in the middle of The Lord of the
Rings is something I’ve always really wanted to do, because that stuff is a little self-
important, so you inflate the self- importance of it and then you immediately deflate
it by saying, ‘Yeah, but that crap ain’t American.’ That was the vibe I’ve always been
enamored with and the way I really wanted it to be.
“Now that it’s all said and done in terms of the run of my storyline on Supernatural,
people can see that it was what it always was; it’s the same story it was before there
were angels. There’s humanity and a bunch of supernatural sons-of-bitches that are
screwing with humanity, and humanity will always win. It’s not about prophecy,
it’s not about destiny, it’s about saving the guy next to you in the foxhole. It’s about
simple honesty and the dignity of human nature. All of these highfalutin creatures,
whether they’re angels or demons, can suck it! Right from season one there was a
vibe that it was these two blue-collar guys against the supernatural, and I was very
gratified that after going into all this prophecy I was able to get back to what I thought
the point of the show was.”
One thing Kripke hadn’t planned right from season one though was making God an
actual character on the show. “No,” he agrees, “there was never really a plan for that.
I always knew there was going to be the Devil and that that’s what Sam’s destiny was,
and Sam was going to start the Apocalypse. But I never really thought about the other
side of the coin, and that’s what angels gave us. Then with angels, once it gets bigger,
it just inevitably leads to God.
“Specifically, the notion of God in season five came out of the initial conversations
we had for this season about giving Castiel his own quest and making it feel like
it was an important part of the core mythology. I was a big fan of the comic book
series Preacher, as were a couple of other writers in the room, and it’s always been
tonally one of the influences for Supernatural, and the core story of Preacher is this
guy who is on a quest to find God and basically make Him answer for His sins. We
always liked that idea, so we said, ‘Since it’s the Apocalypse, why not have one of
our characters, Cass, look for God?’ Since God is Castiel’s father, and in season one
Sam and Dean were on a search for their father, it makes sense that in season five it
all comes full circle with another one of our characters searching for their father. So
we said, ‘Okay, let’s make God a character. Let’s go for it.’ I think we were kind of
smitten with the recklessness of it, and we had this attitude of ‘Let’s be as bold and
risky as we can, and if we fall flat on our face, then so be it.’ Which we probably did
once or twice, but no one can accuse us of playing it safe…”
No one could accuse them of taking the easy road, either. “Whenever we were sitting
in the [writers’] room trying to suss out God’s motivation in any particular scene, we
started giggling to ourselves,” Kripke relates, “because we were like, ‘Gossip Girl
does not have this problem! The writers’ room of 90210 is not sitting around debating
the conflicting philosophies of fate versus free will.’” As Heaven’s gardener, Joshua,
says in ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, “You could drive yourself nuts asking questions
like that.” But they did anyway. Kripke continues, “We were asking questions
like, ‘Where does God stand on all of this? Is the universe just one massive test for
humanity?’ I was proud of our little show, that those were the questions we were
asking in the writers’ room, but those are intimidating questions to ask when we’re
just a bunch of TV writers trying to make a horror show. Philosophers have been
wrestling with those concepts for thousands of years and still haven’t come up with a
satisfactory answer, so who are we to try to answer those questions? We just did our
own Supernatural take on it and tried our best to make it entertaining.”
If you haven’t pre-ordered your copy of Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 5, do so right HERE.
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