The CW series Supernatural is back with new episodes, and Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) are locked up in an underground, government-run detention facility in the middle of nowhere, after being arrested for the attempted assassination of the President of the United States, who was actually being inhabited by Lucifer, at the time. Determined to find her sons, Mary (Samantha Smith) and Castiel (Misha Collins) turn to an unlikely source for assistance.
During an exclusive phone interview with Collider, executive producer Andrew Dabb (who also wrote the first episode back, entitled “First Blood”) talked about how this version of Lucifer evolved, this new challenge for Sam and Dean, how things will have changed when they get back out in the world, the focus on the British Men of Letters, telling stories in the 12th season of a show, and keeping the core of the show what it’s always been. Be aware that there are some spoilers discussed.
Collider: You certainly left things in a very interesting place, with the mid-season finale. Sam and Dean were accused of attempting to kill the President, and Lucifer impregnated someone with Satan’s spawn.
ANDREW DABB: We’re basically very low-key. We’re basically like This is Us.
Yes, this is a show with all of the family feels! So, why did that seem like the right place to leave things, and how do you feel that sets things up for where you’re picking back up?
DABB: When we came into this season, we had inherited a lot of big moving pieces, the biggest of which is Lucifer. We knew that we were going to introduce the British Men of Letters, but for the first half of our season, the real hard-charging thing was Lucifer. So, it really was important to us to put him away for a little while – maybe permanently – and doing so creates an opportunity for the British Men of Letters to grow. Also, we’ve had a lot of success, in the past, with these small resets, like setting Sam and Dean away for six months, and then picking up and seeing how the world has changed. Because of the way last season ended, we couldn’t really do that, going into this season. In the mid-season, Sam and Dean get grabbed and about six weeks pass, and in those six weeks, certain things change, both for our guys, psychologically, and for the world at large and for some of our bigger supporting characters, like Cas and Mary. So, when Sam and Dean walk back into that world, it has changed a little bit. It was an opportunity for us to do a little soft reset to take a breath, and then charge into the second half of our season.
The Lucifer we’ve seen this season is a bit different from what we’ve seen before. He seems pretty content with wreaking havoc and jumping from one famous person to another. What led to that approach, and was there a process for deciding who he would jump to next, throughout the season?
DABB: Yeah, what happened was Lucifer, since we met him, has wanted this one thing, which is a reckoning with God. It was a busted father-son relationship. And last season, he got that, but he didn’t get the closure he needed. I don’t know that he had a specific agenda. He just wanted a face-to-face and he wanted answers, but as we learned in Episode 7, the answers he got were not great. They didn’t fulfill him in the way he believed he wanted to be fulfilled. The big theme of this season is, once you get power, what do you do with it? If you look at someone like Rowena, she wants the power to solve every problem, and then she just watches God and the Darkness – the most powerful creatures in the universe – and they’re still having these petty squabbles. Power doesn’t solve problems. Lucifer’s problem was not solved by this conversation with God, and then God left. So, you’re dealing with a Lucifer that’s in a little bit of a nihilistic phase. He basically decides, “You know what? Fuck it! I don’t want to rule Hell. I don’t want to rule Heaven. I don’t want to rule the world.” It’s not that he likes humans, by any stretch of the imagination, but he doesn’t want to wipe them all out because he doesn’t want to work that hard. So then, it became about, if you’re Lucifer and you’re jumping from body to body, and then you land in the body of a rock star by accident, you realize that it’s fun because people obey you in a way that you’ve never really had before. He’s had demons obey him, but that’s a different thing. Even when they obey you, they’re always out for themselves. The devotion he gets from humans is much more “pure.” It helps him understand why God liked these sentient monkeys so much. And if you’re a powerful human, you are essentially God to certain people. So, once he realized that, he wanted to go to someone more powerful, which led him to a businessman, an archbishop, and then ultimately the most powerful person, which is the President of the United States. Once we identified that psychology, we had to lay it out in a way that made sense, but that was also fun. That was the journey for the first half of the season.
I read that the writers’ room wasn’t necessarily immediately on board with the idea of Lucifer jumping into the President. Why was that an important path, and did you have to do any convincing to get everyone on board?
DABB: Whenever something like that gets floated, it’s good that someone is like, “Wait, what?!” I’ve been in plenty of meetings on Supernatural where someone is like, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to send Sam and Dean back to the Old West,” and you’re like, “Wait, what?!” Or they’re like, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to send Sam and Dean to a world where they’re Jared and Jensen, acting on a show called Supernatural,” and you’re like, “Wait, what?!” Sometimes the best ideas, and a lot of the worst ideas, come from that. That encourages you to talk it out and find the path you want to go down, that could be fun. Once we internally decided that it was going to work for us and that it would be an interesting thing to do, the network and the studio were both extremely on board. The great thing about being on a 12-year show is that you have a ton of trust, and we have a ton of trust from our partners at Warner Bros. and The CW, so they were on board. It’s the discussion that happens, all the time and with every idea. Very rarely does an idea come through where you’re like, “Oh, that’s a slam dunk, definitely!” For us, when we did the math on the President thing, we knew what it was doing for us. We understand that it’s a big, “What the fuck?!” moment, but we actually like that about it and we were convinced that it wasn’t going to fundamentally change the show. We’re not becoming The West Wing. It was a really fun episode that was the climax of a storyline, and there will definitely be some ripple effects from it, going forward, but it wasn’t fundamentally changing the show. As long as the fundamental supernatural of Supernatural doesn’t change, we always feel like we’re in a good position, even if we take wild swings, once in awhile.
What do you feel the British Men of Letters have really added to this season, and what can we expect from the working relationship we’ll see between Mick Davies and Mr. Ketch?
DABB: In the first half of the season, we introduced the British Men of Letters at the beginning, and then they came back at the end, a little bit. They haven’t been as dynamic as they will be, going forward. The first half of the season was very Lucifer focused, and the second half of the season will be very British Men of Letters focused. As Sam and Dean get to know them, and as we, the audience, get to know them, what we wanted to lean hard into is that it’s not a monolithic organization. This is an organization of individuals with individual points of view. Toni Bevell, who we met early on, had a negative view of American Hunters and Sam and Dean. Mick Davies, who’s running things now, doesn’t. I think he’s wary, to an extent, but he wants to make things work. Mr. Ketch really doesn’t care. He’s a blunt instrument, in a lot of ways. If you tell him to go somewhere and kill something, he’ll do it. He happily killed Magda, in Episode 4, because he was told to, and he happily helped Sam and Dean because he was told to. At this point, he doesn’t have an agenda toward our guys. But as he gets to know our guys a little bit better, and our guys get to know him a little bit better, that could change.
Sam and Dean have gotten out of a lot of situations. How much more challenging is it for them to find a way out of an underground government-run detention facility, in the middle of nowhere?
DABB: It takes them away from a lot of their standard stuff, and the biggest thing it takes them away from is each other. Sam and Dean are put in separate cells. They’re not allowed to communicate, plot and plan. They don’t have access to Castiel. They don’t have access to the outside world. The doors close and they’re locked in. It’s really about our guys finding a way to get out of that. It’s challenging, but obviously our guys will be up to the challenge. More than that, it’s less about the escape and it’s more about the fall-out. When Sam and Dean walk back into this world, they’ll have been gone for six weeks and things have changed. To get out of this situation, they may have had to call in certain favors that they never wanted to, and there will be fall-out from that, as well. It’s never about, are Sam and Dean gonna kill the monster because Sam and Dean always kill the monster. It’s more about, in killing the monster, what did the guys learn about themselves and how will it affect their world? In this case, being away for six weeks, they’re coming back to a world that hasn’t flipped a 180, but it has changed. And the other characters, specifically Castiel and Mary, have undergone their own stuff.
When you’re 12 seasons into a show with no sign of stopping soon, does it get more and more challenging not to inadvertently repeat a story?
DABB: We certainly have script supervisors and day to day people on staff for that. We have five layers of people that hopefully catch that stuff, but sometimes we don’t. We’ve certainly let things slip through, in the past, just because of the quantity of episodes that we’ve done. It’s an old writer’s thing, but there are only 12 types of stories. So really, once you get passed Episode 12 of any show, you’re repeating a story, in one way or another. The question is, how are you approaching it, and is it an interesting approach? Just to give you an example, Supernatural has always been about family. It’s been about Sam and Dean together. It’s been about Sam and Dean and dad. It’s been about Sam and Dean and Castiel. It’s been about Sam and Dean and whatever ad hoc family they’ve put together, over the years, in Bobby, Ellen, Jo, and everybody like that. This season, with Mary, we’re exploring a very similar story. It’s Sam and Dean and family, but we’re exploring that from a much different point of view. That’s the important thing. In a 12th-year show, you shouldn’t be like, “We’re gonna reinvent the wheel.” I don’t think that ever works. This show works because this show is ultimately Sam and Dean in a car, killing monsters and being heroes. We never want to move away from that. But we do want to detour, every now and then, because we have 23 episodes and we want to take some fun swings. Ultimately, that’s the core of the show, and none of us have any interest in that not being the core of the show.
Supernatural airs on Thursday nights on The CW.
