User:Ophois/season4 2

Forward
"This was the only way Supernatural could engage with the subject of angels: a seraphim rife with conspiracy, arrogance, corruption&mdash;the Bible as told by Serpico. They're here to win it all&mdash;for themselves." Ben Edlund, p.6

Expanding Supernatural
"So I'd been very resistant to the idea, but then in between season three and four, I was thinking about the problem of how the demon mythology was getting kind of boring for us. Every time a demon came up as an episode idea [in season three], my co-show runner, Bob Singer, and I always sort of sighed and said, 'Alright, what are we going to do with the demons this time?'" "How can we possibly expand and twist our mythology?...Well, if you're looking at it purely in a yin-yang way, if you're looking at two sides of a coin, angels are the other side of the demon coin. Then one of my first thoughts was of Christopher Walken in The Prophecy&mdash;'Well, youknow, you can do angels where they're not good guys. You can do angels as nominally good in that they're fighting for Heaven, but they're soldiers'. I started thinking about the siting of the first-born and of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was considering all that and I thought, 'Well, you actually could have angels and have them be truly terrifying.' To give credit where credit is due, it's Sera who showed me the poems by Rainer Maria Rilke about how scary angels could be, so in the back of my head there was already this notion that angels in their true forms were such overwhelming powers that they could be really terrifying." Kripke, pp.8-9

"The other thing it did is for the first time it made Dean a coherent and central part of the mythology. We'd always had Sam being the drk side's chosen one, but it never occurred to us to say, 'Well, maybe Dean is the chosen one of the light side!' Now he isn't just a bystander to Sam's mythology, and that provided much more of a story engine." Kripke, p.9

"We knew from the beginning, day one in the [writers'] room, just from thinking about angels and how to characterize them, that they were ultimately going to be the bad guys. And we knew that they were ultimate going to want to bring on the Apocalypse. We also knew that Ruby and Lilith were working in concert to manipulate Sam to go darker and darker and to ultimately kill Lilith, that the final way to bring up the Devil was going to b this suicidal move by Lilith. Because we knew all that, we were really confident and comfortable in having fun with what the build-up to those twists were going to be. We put in lots of misdirection, but when you look back the second time you can see that things don't mean what you thought they meant, but it all adds up. That was another reason season four was so satisfying." Kripke, pp.10-11

"If Castiel had not been as incredibly charismatic and as complicated as he turned out to be, we would've grown tired of that storyline and ended up killing him and blowing the angel storyline off, like we have in the past to other storylines that haven't entirely worked for us. The guy who really deserves the majority of the credit for that is Misha Collins, because he came in and he immediately had such chemistry with Jensen and Jared and was able to hold the screen with them He was just such the total package in terms of giving a really complicated, interesting, charismatic performance, and you just wanted to know more about this character because of him. Ultimately, it through Castiel that we iew the angel mythology&mdash;he's the one that introduced it to us, he's the one who expanded it. Zachariah, Uriel, and Anna fleshed out the mythology, and made it so fun, but the fact is that it all started with Misha's Castiel." Krike, pp.11-12

"We were really adamant babout it not getting out. We published fake casting side for actors because those tend to leak on the internet, we published misleading dialogue that would make people think the episode was heading in a different direction, and we change characters' names." Kripke, p.12

"But we didn't have the money to pay for this second splinter unit any more, so we took [about] nine days to shoot each show, and even that was always tight, and now suddenly we had to shoot each episode in eight days. And instead of the crew working twelve hour days every single day, which is rigorous, fourteen hours became the norm in season four, and sometimes it would go fifteen hours." Kripke, p.14

"It was a season where everything came together. In the previous seasons there's always been an ongoing push-pull between the quality of the mythology and the quality of the stand-alone episodes. In certain seasons the mythology was stronger, and in certain seasons the stand-alones were better, and it never fired on all cylinders until season four, which I thought was our most coherent mythology, as well as our most entertaining run of stand-alone episodes." Kripke, p.17

Lazarus Rising
First ten minutes of premiere is mostly silence, no dialogue. "I was really proud of how much of the story got conveyed without having to say a word. As I was writing the script I didn't set out for it to be this quiet series of moments, but my first draft had these lame exposition lines like, 'I wonder who pulled me from Hell?' and I started removing them because they just weren't necessary. By the time I did all my revisions, all the dialogue was gone, and I got really excited about the potential of that. And [executive producer] Kim Manners picked right up on the possibilities, and his directing just made it a really elegant way to begin the season." Kripke, pp.20-21

"It makes your ears ring, quite literally. We used a steady tone in the center of the range that most people hear, but with more ring and modulation so that it really vibrated. We actually did turn down the volume working on that scene in a couple of places. It's not electronically loud, but it feels like the center of your forehead is going to have a little tear in it." Supervising sound editor Michael Lawshe, p.23

Angels
"The most unique element about angels that isn't in typical lore is the notion that they have to possess. They control a human host in much the same way demons do. The only difference is that angels have to ask permission, and demons don't. That provided us with all sorts of useful morality plays to work through, because the angels are nominally good, but they are putting human victims through this horrific experience just because the humans were devout enough to give their will away. Demons and angels actually have more in common with each other than they do with humanity, so they play by the same rules, in a way." Kripke, p.24

"The existence of non-corporeal entities possessing from both the demonic stripe and the angelic stripe indicates an underlying physical world that we don't know about, which is consistent with the supernatural physics of our universe. Lucifer, who was an angel, goes to Lilith, and using some of his angelic power, which comes from God, he twists her into a demon, so it's like using good for bad. Demons are linked to humanity, but they are different, and their difference comes from angelic intervention, so ultimately demons are a bit of a fusion between human stuff and angel stuff, therefore it makes sense to me that their ability to possess, their ability to become non-corporeal, and all the other things that are not normally !!! the province of humanity, actually stem from the angelic perversion that came from Lucifer." Co-executive producer Ben Edlund, pp.24-25

"You'd think that angels would have a lot of freedom to do the right thing, but they have absolutely no freedom at all. They're soldiers, and they come down and do what they're told. It's not that they don't have any emotions, in the sense that they're robotic or don't react; it's just that they don't care how they're perceived by humans. There's a blind obedience on the side of the angels, where they do what they're told whether they think it's right or not... or whether they feel bad about it or not." Director J. Miller Tobin, p.25

"[Anna] was envious of human emotions. The ability to love, to cry, to have joy, and even to be hurt-all those things that we take for granted, angels don't have because they have to be perfect. Anna was longing for the imperfection of humans." Executive producer Bob Singer, p.25

"Clearly Castiel does things that he doesn't want to do or doesn't enjoy, but he does it because he's an angel, and angels follow their orders from Heaven." Tobin, p.25

Are You There God?
"I tend to go out for a lot of roles that are a little bit off since I don't necessarily play to type, so if it says skinny seventeen-year-old geek, I might go out for that, too." Chris Gauthier, pp.27-28 "So I was a little saddened by [vindictive Ronald], but Phil was really nice. He said they'd really love to have me back, and of course I'd take any opportunity to work with those guys again." Chris Gauthier, p.28

"We wanted to bring back Jessica for that, but she was unavailable. I thought that would be the most surprising and heart-wrenching thing, to have an evil version of Jessica's ghost. But the actress was not available at the time. I even broke a whole version of the episode with Jessica stalking Sam..." Gamble pp.28-29

"My favorite villain is Gordon, and we briefly talked about using him, but we were finally like, 'No, we have to let that poor guy rest now - we've done enough to him." Gamble, p.29

In the Beginning
"Had we not played young Mary right, she would've been a bad Buffy knock-off, but she really made the character her own." Kripke, p.31

"I kind of fell back on another character that I'd played - Horace Pinker in Wes Craven's Shocker - but I put a maniacal spin on it." Pileggi, p.32

"I studied stage combat in college... I am so grateful to them that they let me do all my own stunts." Gumenick, p.31

http://eclipsemagazine.com/television/7481/

http://www.buddytv.com/articles/supernatural/exclusive-interview-with-super-25617.aspx

Use stuff from Azazel page

Metamorphosis
"We try to ground our effects in physics; it's not just an effect that leaps away. We try to create a character with the demon smoke. For Sam's powers, we wanted to take a new direction. Every other time we've seen the smoke it's been a big huge cloud or a long snaky sort of thing, and normally, when the smoke is out, it runs away, so I wanted to contain it. My idea was that we can really sell Sam's power if the demon smoke is helpless - it' not flying, it's not going anywhere. So we started playing with dry ice and went from there." Ivan Haydn pp.34-35

"This episode wasn't pitched as 'Here's a really cool monster, let's use this,' but rather it was pitched as this ordinary guy who was turning into a monster. When it first stared, it was a father and son story where the thing that was compelling the father was that once he accepted what he was going to be, there was a question of was his son also going to turn into a monster? I did an entire draft or two with the father and son. That story just continued to morph and part of the morphing was figuring out the monster..." Story Editor Cathryn Humphris p.36

"We literally combed through every monster she and I had ever heard of and any monster that we hadn't heard of. We had three or four different monsters we were trying to make work, and the rougarou worked for me early on, but it took a bit of convincing with Eric." Humphris p.36

"We wanted to tell a story from the monster's point of view and have him not be evil and keep him sympathetic for as long as we possibly could, then have him pushed into doing evil by the hunters. The core idea that was originally pitched was a story where the monster is the good guy and the hunters are the bad guys, but somewhere in the development it kind of got away from us a little." Kripke, pp.35-36

"Rougarous are one of the least known creatures we've had on the show. Frankly, it always feels a little arbitrary to me to not have a creature with some mythic significance. That's why there's a dialogue in there where Travis says 'rougarou' and Dean says, 'is that made up? That sounds made up!' That's my own dissatisfaction with the creature, because it doesn't have the mythic weight that so many of our other creatures have had." Kripke, p.42

"We knew we wanted this guy who was living an ordinary life who has to grapple with this darkness inside him as a parallel for Sam. If there was actually such a monster in lore where people don't change into this monster until they're in their twenties or thirties, and it's a hereditary thing, there would be movies and books about such a compelling creature. We got as close as we possibly could to something in real lore - and there are real legends about rougarous that have been around for a longer time, but one of the fun things about Supernatural is you get to create your own version of monsters." Humphris p.42

Monster Movie
Filmed at Fantasy Garden World in Richmond, BC. p.38

"When we originally started 'Monster Movie', the bad guy was going to be a mad scientist who was somehow making these creatures, either as tulpas or in some other way. Then Ben said, 'If it's a shapeshifter, and he's taking all these different forms, then he's not a human making these things, he's a monster with self-esteem issues pretending to be these other stronger things,' and that's when the whole idea just snapped together." Kripke, pp.38-39

"When I heard what this episode was about, I raced out to buy a boxed set of a hundred classic horror films for about twenty bucks. They really hit home the notion that in this genre the cheesier the better. You can hold on shots much longer than you normally would. You can use circle and edge wipes as transitions. And you can have Dracula take a full fifteen seconds to reach for the electrocution switch!" Editor Nicole Baer pp.40-41

"It was so much fun to write the music for 'Monster Movie', because I got to write in the style of sixty-seventy years ago. When you go back and look at those movies, the music writing is incredible, but it's become cliche and over the top, so you can't really do it anymore unless you have tongue somewhere in the vicinity of cheek, and we certainly did." Gruska, p.41

"We talked about doing an episode in black and white for years. And we said, 'Well, Supernatural is a monster show, so let's go back to the classic monster movies of the thirties and forties.' We thought, 'Let's pay loving homage and make an episode shot in the Universal tradition to the best of our abilities.' I remember the studio at the time asked, 'Why is this in black and white exactly?' And we said, 'It's a monster movie, and we're going to do the old credits and have the old orchestral score.' ... 'We want the episode to reflect the psyche of the main character. He sees the world as movies, so we want to see the world as he sees it.'" Kripke, p.43

"We put a local makeup effects guy, Geoff Redknap, in the mummy suit, and he was wonderful. He understood the process; that it'd be sweaty, that it'd kinda smell, that he wouldn't get a lot of air, and he wouldn't be able to see well. We had him encased in this plaster body cast and the material heats up as it sets, and he started getting flush and said, 'I might faint...' The plaster was pressing against his neck and his voice box, and he started getting this guttural groan and his eyes glazed over and I was like, 'Get him out, get him out, get him out!' But it all worked out well and it was really cool to go through that with someone who knew the process and knew it didn't really have the potential to harm him." Head makeup effects artist Toby Lindala, p. 41

Yellow Fever
S.E. Hinton, author of The Outsiders and Rumble Fish, visited the set during the filming of "Yellow Fever". "She came up and hung out with us for two days. She's a big fan of the show, so Eric Kripke invited her to Vancouver." Co-executive producer Phil Sgriccia p.44

"It's always fun when Phil Sgriccia's directing because he lets the actors go off [script] and do things. So I was like, 'I'm just going to not walk in and we'll see what Jensen does.' They call action, the music starts, Jensen starts to play the air drums, and they start cueing me, and it's like, 'Jared, go! Jared!' I just stood there and was like, 'Let's watch!' Phil let it go, and sure enough it was funny and crazy. And now it's part of Supernatural history." Padalecki, pp.44-46

"I didn't know that that was going to happen. I happened to know some of the words to the song. The first line is, 'Rising up,' and I was lying down in the seat, so I was like, 'Perfect!' I just rose up in the seat and I knew I'd come into frame, and they kept rolling, so I just kept going." Ackles, p.46

"We didn't know if we'd have the budget for it, so I had to shoot the scene two ways, one without it. When we got in the editing room, we were all howling about this thing that Jensen did and I was thinking we could put it on the website or something. But we didn't have the rights to the song yet. It got to Warner Bros. and everyone fell in love with it. We got some publicity to help out with it, and we found a little extra money here and there." Sgriccia, p.46

"It was difficult to concentrate while editing this episode, not because of content, but because everybody kept coming into the edit bay to watch Jensen sing 'Eye of the Tiger.' Then, just when the demand for that scene began to die down, we received the footage of Jensen screaming uncontrollably at the cat in the locker, and the parade started all over again!" Baer, pp.46-47

"The script called for a limestone quarry, and we were like, 'Where are we going to find a limestone quarry?' I sent out my boys and one of them happened upon this creepy-looking old sawmill. They close down for two weeks every number of years for some kind of maintenance, and it just happened to be the exact two weeks that we were filming our episode, so it was perfect." Locations scout Janet McCairns, p.47

"Kimi nanka umareru mae kara, zutto da yo." "We had a Japanese spirit in 'Yellow Fever', and I mentioned to Eric Kripke that I spoke Japanese a little. So they gave me a fun line, which translated loosely as, "Since before you were born, ya idjit" - after Sam asked me if I really spoke Japanese. Whenever there's foreign language stuff in the show, they find a teacher or other expert in the language to translate the desired words into the proper language and to teach us how to say it. The expert they got to translate Bobby's Japanese line gave it a very formal interpretation, and it came off as a little stiff and harsh. I gave it my own translation, which I hope conveyed the bantering, colloquial aspect of the original English words." Beaver, p.46

It's the Great Pumpkin
Crypt was built on a sound stage "We always try to find a great location we can use, but the nature of crypts with their low ceilings and confined areas doesn't work for our lighting set ups." Locations manager Russ Hamilton, p.51

"They're not as common as you'd think in the United States. We jammed off some European designs for that one." Art director John Marcynuk, p.51

"It was script that Sam puts his hand out and exorcises Samhain, and being the Scottish-Irish mutt that I am, with Samhain being big in Celtic lore, I was like, 'This guy's not going down that easy!' So we pitched the idea of having the actor tethered off with a rope from behind so that Samhain is actually pushing back, fighting against Sam's powers." "Since Samhain has reanimated a dead guy with three bullet holes in him, I said, 'Okay, while he's fighting, let's have him bleed [smoke] from these bullet holes.'" Hayden, p.51

"In one of my first meetings with Eric Kripke, I said, 'Have you ever thought about doing a Halloween episode?' It just seemed like it would be interesting to see kids in innocuous trick-or-treating costumes juxtaposed against some truly evil witches or demons. So Eric did some research and came across a Ray Bradbury story [The Halloween Tree] in which Samhain was a demon. That seized Eric's imagination, and he pitched how we'd get to the roots of Halloween, go all the way back to Celtic time and the lore about when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest." Executive story editor Julie Siege, p.53

Wishful Thinking
"The normal way would be for her and her teddy bear to have tea parties, and he's a nice guy. Then we put it through the Supernatural machine and it comes out the other end all screwed up. The teddy bear comes out and immediately has a crippling existentialist dilemma and begins to drink and sample porn - that's when we knew it was an idea that worked for us." Edlund, p.55

"It was very specific how the teddy bear's voice sounded, too. I didn't want it too cartoony. He had to be distraught... kinda like Eeyore." Edlund, p.55

"We were going to do an animatronic bear, but it was really expensive, so then we were talking with a mascot creator, and he thought a guy in a suit would work. There was another show [in LA] that had used ten of them, and we asked if we could get one brought up here so that we could look at it." Costume designer Diane Widas, p.55

I Know What You Did Last Summer
"Jensen and Jared love to do their own stuff. In !!! 'I Know What You Did Last Summer' they dove out of a church window, and there was no way they weren't going to do that stunt. That was such a dramatic shot. They were a good eighteen feet in the air when they came out that window." Lou Bollo, pp.58-59

"It was really interesting when they blew up that window. And it was challenging in the sense that we couldn't chance hurting them. The glass was candy-glass, a resin that very brittle and light. I could eat it if I wanted to - I could chew it and I wouldn't get cut. But when you put the windows in, the supporting pieces are usually made out of balsa wood, which you can back-cut and it'll break easily, but if it happens to land on its end and a sharp piece is sticking up ad you've got a body coming down, that's not a good thing. What we designed for !!! that particular gag was we had all the pieces that the glass sits in made out of foam. It's a special kind of foam that when it breaks, it doesn't show white, it shows a dark brownish color that kind of looks like wood. It breaks easily, but the key thing about it is when you lay it down and jump on it, it just collapses like dust, so the guys were totally safe doing that." Bollo, pp.59-60

"According to Russ Hamilton, 'The church was a location, but the boys jumping through the window was done in the studio as a set piece.'" p.59

Other actors portraying Ruby... "No, there wasn't any foreshadowing that they were Ruby. There was no likeness of character other than with Genevieve Cortese. For her we used the leather jacket and gave her a tough, no-nonsense look, and that was definitely drawn from our past Ruby." Costume designer Diane Widas, p.60

"They wanted it to be raw and animalistic, to contrast the tenderness and elegance of the Dean and Anna love scene that was to come." editor Nicole Baer, p.61 "Eric was very serious that we not make this into some sort of soft-core porn. It's still in our world, there are still evil-doings going on, so it's much more of a sexual thriller kind of score than a romantic love scene kind of score." Lennertz, p.61

Heaven and Hell
"Everyone wanted this one beautiful, frightened girl, and Julie McNiven blew us away with how likeable, vulnerable, and intelligent she made Anna." Kripke, p.62

"Here's what I really liked about 'Heaven and Hell', this idea that you have a character that these two massive forces want, and therefore the heroes could use her to manipulate these forces against each other while they escape out the back door was a notion I always liked." Kripke, p.62 "I really wrote that episode for the barn scene where all the forces collide, and I was really happy with how that turned out." Kripke, p.63

"It was really challenging because it was a sequence that we needed two days to shoot, and we only had one. Each of the elements takes a certain amount of time to do - you have to choreograph the stunt beats and shoot them in a certain way to make them work, and you need specific shots for the visual effects parts, each of which have to be vetted by visual effects supervisor Ivan Hayden. It's like building an enormously complicated jigsaw puzzle." Director J. Miller Tobin, p.63

"With the visual effects we try to determine what's actually happening. Like, !!! when an angel gets her grace, what is that? In essence, it's like she's being reborn. So we started it in her womb and had this nuclear reactor type of thing that built up, and when it got too big for her body to contain, it blew up." Hayden, pp.63-64

"We tried to make Ruby's torture cell the most vile, disgusting place because it's such a disturbing scene." Production designer Jerry Wanek, p.65 "And I think it was even more obscene that it was a men's restroom that she was tortured in. We set that up out on the Department of Defence Lands. It's just this awful set that would be appropriate in something like the Saw films. The broken tiles, broken sinks, broken toilets... That scene was sufficiently creepy." Art Director John Marcynuk, p. 65

Family Remains
"This episode was inspired by that guy [Joef Fritzl] in Austria who turned out to have a bunch of kids locked in his basement for years and years." Of all the fourth season villains.. "That's the concept that freaked me out the most from the !!! moment I heard it." Gamble, p.68

"The violence and stuff doesn't scare me as much as what could be creeping in the walls. Having that girl living in the walls was more real. It was more disturbing. That's the stuff that gets to me more that the gore." Associate Producer Kristin Cronin, p.68

Another factor that added to the unsettling vibe the episode gave off were the hidden passages in the walls and the concealed basement. "We shot those on stage. We shot in a location to establish the house, and we shot the kitchen there and one other room, but the rest we shot on stage. They were crawling into ducts, crawling into walls, crawling into dumbwaiters, crawling in the basement, so there were a lot of elements, and it takes a lot of foresight to figure out how to get into these pieces. One thing that worked really well was the hole that they find between two floors and Dean has to go down there. Sometime we over-engineer holes that the actors go through for safety, but that one we made tight. It was big enough for a child to go through, but Jensen Ackles couldn't get through it easily, and I think it really made the scene work well - it certainly added to the tension." Art director John Marcynuk, p. 69

Criss Angel is a Douche Bag
"A fun part of what we did was we created, through sound and score, a feel for what each character's life was like. So when we see Jeb Dexter, he's got this big obnoxious rock music playing, and we made his boots really loud and the jingles on his jeans really big." Sound Editor Michael Lawshe, p.71 Jeb Dexter's theme song "was so !!! cheesy... and it was fantastic. Just to be silly, really low and deep in the background, which you can hear if you listen closely, we're going, 'Douche bag, douche bag...' It was hilarious." Lennertz, p.72

Bostwick's character, Jay, was named after a real-life magician who was part of the impetus for the episode. "Eric Kripke had just seen Ricky Jay, whose card technique is like nothing you've ever seen, and it seized Eric's imagination. And then he wanted to do something with older magicians, and what happens when the thing they've devoted their lives to is no longer relevant. If people don't believe what you're doing is worthy, what do you do with yourself? What do you do with you life?" Siege, p.73

"Frankly, I was surprised we didn't get hassled by Standards and Practices or Clearances over the title. I did get a memo from Standards and Practices on that episode, but it said something to the effect of: 'We understand that for the purposes of this episode the use of the phrase douche bag is necessary, we just ask that in future episodes you refrain from using it ever again.'" Siege, p.73

"Julie Siege's script for 'Criss Angel is a Douche Bag', when describing Jeb Dexter's theme song, 'Deviltwist', says, 'If Korn did a song about magic, this would be it.' But composer Christopher Lennertz says the song wound up being a 'mix of Nine Inch Nails and Yanni'." box, p73

After School Special
Ackles is "always up for pulling a gag. I read that gym teacher scene and I immediately started thinking, 'Okay, how can I make that really funny? Bob Singer was there directing the episode beforehand, so I walked over to him and said, 'Hey Bob, what do you think about me just hauling off and pegging one of the kids right in the face?' He laughed out loud, then immediately got Eric Kripke on the phone and was like, 'Put a rewrite in, Jensen's gonna hit a kid in the face with a dodgeball.' Then when we were shooting, the first A.D. asked the kids in the group, 'Jensen wants to peg someone with the ball - do we have any volunteers?' Six kids raised their hands, so when I came out I was like, 'All right, which one of you really wants it?' And this kid was like, 'I do, I do!' Ackles, p.75

That gym, as well as the Home Economics class and cafeteria, was filmed at Vancouver Technical Secondary School, and the rest of the school scenes, including the exterior of Truman High School, were filmed at Templeton High School in Vancouver. "It was an interesting challenge to actually shooting in an operating high school. We'd be doing our shooting and we'd be watching the clocks in the hallway, and when we knew a class break was coming, we'd stop filming and clear the hallways, then a stream of kids would come through like locusts, but they were very respectful. The people at the schools fully endorsed us being there and were happy to help us. They have a very large film program [at Templeton], so some of the kids came and shadowed us on set and picked our brains about the film business. There were even some students in the culinary program that hung out with our caterers for a day, and some of the students were used as extras." Location Manager Russ Hamilton, p.76

"There were certain things in the episode that we very specifically pinpointed for the younger actors to mimic from the main actors so that you saw a visual through-line in the story. One of those things was when Jared was walking down the hallway running his hand through his hair and the camera is circling around him and we got to Colin and we had him do the same thing. We matched that to give the audience that connective tissue of Sam's personality forming as a teenager. The other significant thing was when Young Dean was pacing on the bleachers and he says, 'I'm gonna rip his lungs out.' We had Jensen perform that line as well so that Brock could watch him do it and mimic his facial affectations. The result is what you saw in the episode." Director Adam Kane, p.77

Sex and Violence
"We went into every strip club in town. !!! It was hard to find exactly what we were looking for, and then we found a club called Butter. It's a real strip club, but we made it look quite a bit different." Location scout Janet McCairns, pp.78-78 "We would've loved to have done our own strip club, but we added quite a few little extra features, like reflective glass." Set designer Jerry Wanek, p.79

"When I did 'Sin City' we hired a lot of youngsters to be in this bar which was supposed to be full of depravity, but it wasn't terribly successful because people were coy and shy and reluctant to behave badly in front of the camera. So when I saw that there were strippers in 'Sex and Violence', I was determined to use real dancers so we wouldn't hae those problems, and it worked well." exotic dancers. Director Charles Beeson, p. 79

"Part of why it was always such a challenge to figure out an episode with a succubus or a siren or any woman who kills through sex or love or something like that was that with two male leads it's very obvious very quickly where it's going. I remember breaking that out the first time and it only took me !!! fifteen minutes because it's very clear that the siren is going to become interested in one of the boys. So you need a twist, you need someone that you think is the siren, which we had in Cara, that sleeps with one of the brothers, and the other brother needs to get involved with someone that you don't suspect at all. Obviously the relationship between Sam and Dean is central to our show, but we've been building this rift between Sam and Dean all season, so that led to the idea of having this young male character that sort of idolizes Dean and does all the cool stuff that Sam wouldn't do, and that's Dean's perfect mate. Plus, it was just a really good way to hide the siren." Humphris, pp.79-80

Magic Wishes
"I've made constant efforts to get a wishing fish on Supernatural. It's a fish that grants wishes. I'm not making this up. There's lore about the fisherman who catches a fish and the fish says, 'Throw me back and I'll grant you three wishes.' It's classic. It's weird because the first thing that happened with the wishing fish story is that it turned into 'What Is and What Should Never Be'. The wishing fish pitch for that episode had the fish falling into Dean's lap, and the wish is that all of this never happened. Then this time around the wishing fish, which was going to be a koi carp, turned into the classic notion of the wishing well." Ben Edlund, p.82

Sirens
"We'd been trying to do some version of a succubus or sire since early season one. These romantic, sexual creatures were really difficult to deal with, and we pitched a bunch of ideas for them over the seasons until someone landed on the idea of bringing it into a strip club, which just seemed perfect for our show. I was really excited about our version of the creature, but there was this feeling of being really far away from the siren legend. I worked with Ben Edlund a lot on the break for this episode, and he had this amazing pitch that told the story of how this creature had come from the water and morphed, but we didn't have the budget to do it that way. Once we accept that, we just had a great time with the Supernatural siren." Humphris, p.83

Death Takes a Holiday
In 'Death Takes a Holiday', Alastair is embodied by both Andrew Wheeler and Christopher Heyerdahl. Text, p.84

"How to characterize ghosts is always a challenge. Do ghosts make sounds? Do they breathe?" supervising sound editor Charlie Crutcher, p.86 "The 'ghost rules' were discussed quite a lot, actually. Once Sam and Dean become ghosts, you don't hear any of their footsteps - those were carefully removed by the sound editors." Editor Nicole Baer, p.86

When asked if she thinks Pamela really meant what she said about Bobby when she died, Traci Dinwiddie replies, "Hell, no! She loves Bobby. That's just the way she communicates. She's a smartass and that's why she gets along with these guys, because they're all smartasses." p.86

Whac-A-Mole, p.87

On the Head of a Pin
"Working on [the torture scenes], there were a lot of places I wanted to go, and it's always difficult to go there if you don't have a fellow actor who's willing to take a few chances. I think what we came up with was really interesting and a bit surprising for both of us." Heyerdahl, p.89

"When we were first working on Alastair's death, we were actually taking his head into a CG head and shrinking it to do the year 2009 version of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade thing [where Donovan drinks from the false Holy Grail and ages rapidly, then crumbles to dust[. We did it and the producers liked it, but because they weren't sure what would happen if Sam used his powers to kill Lilith, they didn't want to get locked into something when that script hadn't been written yet. So although we'd done one of the shots, it ended up getting dropped." Visual effects supervisor Ivan Hayden, p.90

"When Uriel gets stabbed, we're inside and you cut outside and there's a matte painting that we did where the light comes exploding out the window. On top of that we'd framed it to allow for a big brick smokestack that crumbled and broke apart as it came down, but it was one of those things that in the end the producers just sort of felt, 'Well, it's a little bit more than we wanted. We love it and think it looks great, but it isn't necessary for the episode.' It'd make that shot be a big production value piece when it's just a footnote in what's happening story-wise. Then !!! you immediately go inside to this high wide shot of the wings painted on the floor, so it didn't hurt at all not to have it." Hayden, pp.90-91

It's a Terrible Life
In those videos, Harry and Ed are somewhat insulting toward the Winchesters, but what do the Ghostfacers really think of Sam and Dean? "There's a lot of respect. Because if you have the balls to step into the world of the supernatural, then high five that guy is what I say." A.J. Buckley, p.92

Jensen Ackles previously worked with Wester on the TV series Mr. Rhodes. "It was the first show I ever did in Hollywood. So Travis and I have a rapport that goes way back. And A.J. and I have been friends for years." Ackles, p.93

Ghostfacers videos, "Those were directed by co-executive producer Phil Sgriccia. He'd done their last episode, so it worked out well for them to do it in LA." Director James Conway, p.93

"That was a real office building in downtown Vancouver. There were some pieces built on stage as well, but the main area of the office was done downtown. It was logistically challenging to park all our trucks in a downtown business area!" Locations manager Russ Hamilton, p.94

The Monster at the End of This Book
"Once we knew that Sam was going to have to slaughter [Lilith], we realized that we needed to start thinking about making Lilith an adult. !!! We just weren't that interested in the scene where Sam murders an eleven-year-old girl... We tend to go far on the show - we delve bravely into baby-eating - but for some reason the on-camera death of an eleven-year-old girl was something that made even us a little weak-kneed. Along with being the eat of children, though, the other part of Lilith's myth is that she's the seducer of men, and Katherine Boecher really brings a sexuality and a menace to the role." Kripke, pp.96-97

"That was probably the one I enjoyed the most. We, the writers, collectively related so closely with Chuck, and we just had such a ball with that character and being able to go as meta as any show has ever gone. There have been very few shows that have actually referenced themselves as an ongoing series and what fans think of that series and what the creator of that series thinks about !! it, so that felt like really fun and fresh ground." Kripke, pp.97-98

"The way the episode came together was serendipitous. Whenever we're looking for story ideas, Eric says, 'Come up with a movie you like and we'll do the Supernatural twist on that.' And so Nancy Weiner came up with, 'What if we do a version of Stranger than Fiction?' As we were talking about what that would look like, Sera Gamble and I both independently and simultaneously came up with this idea that since we're in this season that's all about mythology and prophecy, he's got to be a prophet. That was the thing that really grounded the concept and made it very relevant for the entire mythology." Executive story editor Julie Siege, p.98

"My favorite thing is that Chuck is a composite of all of us and every single one of the writers had a hand in creating him. That made me very happy. Having said that, when I was writing that character, the person I was basing it on was Eric." Siege, p.98

episode won the Best Episode/Television category in the 2009 Portal Awards

"...prophets are mostly just mouthpieces for the divine word. If you tap into any fundamentalist religion now, it'll still have people who claim to be prophets." Siege, p.104

Protection by archangels... "We made that up completely. We needed a way to get Sam out from under Lilith, so we asked ourselves, 'How can we get Castiel to give Dean a nudge and a wink without actually disobeying orders, which were not to interfere? It was just a clever write around to get Sam out of that mess." Siege, p.104

Destiny vs. free will

Jump the Shark
"We titled that with tongue in cheek because if handled badly it's the kind of thing that would make people think we were jumping the shark. But !!! there certainly was a plausible explanation for it, since what the boys thought was their half-brother was really a monster." Executive producer Bob Singer, pp.100-101

"When [Daniel Loflin and I] came up with the idea of a third Winchester brother, we were surprised Eric Kripke went for it. Staff writer Andrew Dabb, p.101

"It wasn't part of the mythology, but it seemed logical with how much time John spent away and what a complicated character he was, and then obviously it'd be really emotional for the boys. So I was sold on it immediately, and in the very next though I said, 'I love it, but he can't live, you know.' And they said, 'Why-? What-? I dont-' and I said, 'Killing him off is the only choice, because otherwise they've got this other brother, and people will worry that he's going to ride in the backseat of the Impala. Then we've jumped the shark. Somewhere in the middle of that someone said, 'We should call the episode 'Jump the Shark'. Everyone's just going to go nuts when they know there's a third Winchester brother.' And sure enough, they did. We leaked that we were doing an episode with another Winchester brother and let photos go out to the various websites, and then we let them all panic. We were laughing because we knew the whole time that he was actually never really their brother. I have to admit, we take sick pleasure in making our audience anxious. We like stirring the pot when we know everything is actually well under control." Kripke, p.101

"We lost our dear friend Kim Manners a month or so before filming this episode, so the motel that the boys stay at is called the Kelsey Manor - 'K.M.' is all over the place, and you can actually see a picture of Kim in there." Phil Sgriccia, p.101

"We thought it was going to be hard casting the brother, but Jake Abel was terrific. It was one of those things where a guy walks in and you go, 'Yep, there you go, that problem's solved.'" Singer, p.102 "We lucked out because he really does look like a combination of Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, and even more important than that, he's a really good actor." Casting director Robert Ulrich, p.102

Costumer designed Diane Widas further enhanced Abel's similarity to the boys by giving Adam's wardrobe "the same kind of color palette, same kind of blue collar feeling as the Winchester brothers." p.102

"It's funny, because when we began the episode, deep into the script, the creatures were going to be wraiths. It really wasn't about who the monster was, it was a story about the brother, so we just picked a monster and said, 'Okay, they're wraiths!' Then we started going through the mythology and breaking down the story and we had these !!! cannibalistic creatures who live in filth, and we had this fun mystery about corpses missing from a graveyard, and we gave the monsters a point of view, because their father was killed by John Winchester even though their father wasn't killing anybody, he was only scavenging off corpses, and that made it a little cloudy from a moral standpoint. Once we started looking at all those details and we knew enough about lore to know that ghouls were graveyard scavengers, we started looking at each other and said, 'Why are we calling them wraiths? They line up almost exactly with the mythology of ghouls!' So we made the switch, and it worked well for the story." Kripke, pp.102-103

"All that was done on stage. We built this fantastic crypt, which Dean enters through another crypt, oddly enough. I thought that looked great. We really pushed the boundaries on that one, and it shows on screen." Art director John Marcynuk, p.103

"Taking on the appearance of dead people is pretty well established, but the idea that they could be the last person they ate - take their memories and all that - was more our Supernatural twist." Loflin, p.105

Use Jake Abel interview

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Mega-Lost-Battlestar-1001608.aspx

http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20270843_3,00.html

http://www.tvguide.com/JumpTheShark/Supernaturals-New-Kid-1003030.aspx?rss=object

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-casting-news-1002550.aspx

http://www.eonline.com/news/99162/supernatural-casts-a-third-brother

http://www.tv.com/news/third-winchester-brother-cast-in-supernatural-12399/

http://www.eonline.com/news/77442/spoiler-chat-guess-who-may-have-a-secret-son

The Rapture
"Not the Keanu Reeves movie, but the actual comic book Hellblazer. I'm a huge fan. I've read every issue, and it was as big an influence on Supernatural as any other single source in terms of a mix of the blue collar and the supernatural." Kripke, p.108

"John Constantine is a Vertigo character, which is part of DC Comics, which is part of Warner Bros., and it didn't seem like they were going to make another Constantine movie, so I thought, 'Wouldn't it be cool to bring John Constantine into the show?' He is, for all intents and purposes, a hunter, so I said, 'Wouldn't it be cool to bring in this character, bring him over from England, and write him the way he was written in the graphic novels?' And the word we got back from the studio was, 'Absolutely not.' They were holding out hope for another movie, so we couldn't get the rights to the character. Then this angel notion came up and I said, 'Alright, if I can't have John Constantine, I'm at least going to dress my angel just like him!' Then I sent all these illustrations of John Constantine up to our costume designer, Diane Widas. So that's where the loosened tie, the trench coat, and all that stuff came from." Kripke, p.108

"We wanted him to look like somebody people would relate to. The trench coat gave him some flow without it being actual angel wings." Widas, p.108

"It was a fairly brief fitting session for that wardrobe, although I actually did fly up to Vancouver just for the fitting, so it obviously wasn't just something that was tossed off at the last minute. I guess Eric had an idea that the character might last a little while, but I certainly didn't. I don't think that the wardrobe department did, either, because they didn't get as many multiples of the clothes as they needed, so they had to do some fancy footwork as the season progressed." Collins, p.108

"We didn't know how big a part of the show Castiel would be. We had multiples, of course, but we never in our wildest dreams figured it would become such an iconic look or that so many things would happen to this poor guy. The full costume has not been an issue, but the ties became a bit of a thing, so we're finding other ties and dyeing them." Widas, p.108

"That suit doesn't get laundered as often as I'd expect it to. I think that's because they're afraid it's going to get too threadbare. When I put it on in the morning, I'll find things like used Kleenexes of mine in the pockets. It's almost got this homeless vibe to it." Collins, p.108

"'He goes to the angels' dry cleaner' is the joke we always make. We don't want to get hung up on the fact that things happen to him and it stays that way. In some instances we've played the damage out for a little bit, but then it disappears if it doesn't make sense for the story." ???, p.109

Switching host,other actor. "That was definitely a fear of mine early on." "I think they just realized that they could get me for cheap enough that they'd keep me on." Collins, p.109

Find Collins interview about costume

When the Levee Breaks
"We gave the demon blood a bit of a personality during that rehab situation. By doing that, one of the things we played up was the intensity of Sam's longing for the blood. We wanted to emphasize this really uncomfortable yearning that Sam had." Lennertz, p.110

"That was the hardest part of the episode for me. I'd seen the panic room on film, but I'd never seen the actual panic room on stage, and I walked on to it and was struck with how small it was. That set was originally built for filming four pages in there, and I ad somewhere around twenty pages to shoot. It's round, and it had no distinguishing qualities." Singer, p.110 "So my challenge was, 'How do I make this interesting? I have to stay in here for twenty pages with mostly just one or two people, and not make it boring.' I gulped when I looked at it, but we came up with an interesting angle, and I thought that Jared really stepped up to the plate and did terrifically." Singer, p.111

"Half the show takes place in the panic room, yet you never get bored because each scene unfolds in a completely different way." Editor Nicole Barer, p.111

Same set from "Are You There God...", smaller. "We had to redesign the set accordingly because we didn't originally figure they would write to fit it. We still had the set, so we didn't have to rebuild the whole thing, and it worked out quite nicely." Art Director John Marcynuk, p.111

"I tried to play her as close to what you would've imagined the real Mary doing as possible. I didn't want it to seem like a completely unrealistic version of Mary coming out of the blue. It would've been too obvious. I played her as closely as possible to normal, but with that little element of a mean streak that you don't usually see in Mary." Samantha Smith, p.112

"Heaven has this super-max prison, where you are put through a terrible, terrible Bible camp and brainwashed back to the side of the angels. So basically, they're pro torture up there. There are torture chambers in Heaven, and they put Castiel in one." Gamble, p.113

"Yeah, I think there's a very large love between Anna and Castiel. I was on stage with Misha Collins at a convention, and we were talking, and we both kind of feel like even though angels don't really have sex in the way humans do, there's something more there than just being co-workers." Julie McNiven, p.113

Lucifer Rising
Kurt Fuller believes "Paradise on Earth for Zachariah would be completely malleable humans serving Heaven." p.114

"Right from Katie Cassidy's first apperearance as Ruby in 'The Magnificent Seven', we always knew she was this double agent who was playing Sam." Kripke, p.116 "That was pretty much our plan all along. That's exactly what we wanted to do. We were grinning because we knew we were holding on to this card, and we'd read online where the fans are discussing and debating whether !!! she's evil or really good or what her true motivations are, and we knew the whole time. So to finally turn over that card in 'Lucifer Rising' was really a lot of fun." Robert Singer, p.116 and 118

"We had the plan to kill Ruby off for so long that we never really deviated. The ending of 'Lucifer Rising' is such a downer, at least one gratifying thing happened, at least one major bad guy is vanquished. Although I have to admit, directing Gen in that final episode and watching the amazing performance she gives in basically her death scene, I found myself thinking more than once, 'Why exactly are we killing off Ruby? Now that she's a bad guy, couldn't she be a really effective villain to bring back in season five?' But by then it was much too late." Kripke, p.118

"[Cortese] started [off] really great, and she got better from there. I think she brought a lot of different colors and vulnerabilities to Ruby that I was really looking for. Once we watched her in a couple of episodes, we said, 'Rather than introduce some entirely new body for Ruby that'll get confusing for the audience and confusing for Sam, why not keep going back to a performance that we're loving?'" Kripke, p.119

"I had a lot of shots designed where I thought I would be on these really tight two-shots, but I quickly realized that I couldn't actually do a tight two-shot where both of their heads are in frame at the same time because the height difference is so great. So on the set, I really had to rethink all those shots. You can put the camera high up and have a profile shot of Jared in the foreground and have the camera tilted down so you can catch Genevieve's face in the background and still get two profile close-ups in the same shot, which ended up being in the episode quite a bit, because that was the shot I went to a lot. It was probably a slightly !!! more dramatic shot anyway. A lot of times when you see Jared and Gen in the same shot, she's standing on some slightly raised platform to help minimize the height difference between them. There was definitely some on-set improvising to make sure we could get both of them in the same close-ups." Kripke, pp.119-120

"We brought Katherine back because we loved her performance. We really liked what she did, and we thought she had such a fascinating look. She's beautiful, but there's something really menacing in her performance as well, and the camera just loves her. Once we were watching her on film, we said, 'We should absolutely bring her back!' Lilith leaves that body at the end of 'The Monster at the End of the Book', but we thought to ourselves, 'Well, off-camera Lilith has the jones for the dental hygienist from Bloomington, Indiana, and possesses her again.' That way we can bring back another familiar face, too, because when you're filming the season finale, the more familiar faces you canbring back from throughout the season, the better." Kripke, p.120

Circular door to Lucifer's cage... "That was all CG. Everything about that element was a visual effects shot. There was about an inch-thick reference circle of blood on the floor for the actors to look at, but once we added the panning and the rolling, we had to replace the whole floor. We left a little bit of blood around Katherine's face so that we had that interaction, as well as for texture and lighting." Hayden, p.121

"I see Lilith, the Yellow-Eyed Demon, and a lot of the characters who play our most powerful roles as a little cult of demonic true believers. Lilith really believes that the purpose of all of their work, the way the universe should be, is for Lucifer to be in control. Ultimately she's a true Satanist." Co-executive producer Ben Edlund

"Our art director, John Marcynuk, designed the beautiful room. We did a lot of research, looked at a lot of European palaces, and we ended up using the Palace of Versailles as our jumping-off point. We just took a color palette and a lot of the molding and we over-scaled everything. We get a lot of compliments on that set, and John pretty much designed it from scratch." Production designer Jerry Wanek

"He just brings that wonderful neuroses to Chuck." "You don't want anything on Supernatural to take itself too seriously, not even a season finale, so just when things are at their most dire and most serious, we pop in and let Chuck provide a little bit of levity, which lets the audience know this isn't the world's most serious thing. Rob's been great for that." Kripke, p.121

"That was one of the biggest scores I've done for an episode in terms of lots of music, and a lot of it was very loud, too. It's probably the most cinematic thing that I did that whole season. Eric told me, 'Don't hold back on anything - the Devil's coming!' It was just louder, more crazy, evil stuff, and I definitely went over the top with it." Lennertz, p.122

"Early on, we established that the voice of an angel is a high, piercing tone with other modulations in it that is definitely not human, not something that people are used to hearing. So how do you combine that with the idea that the floor is splitting open and that Lucifer is coming up through from Hell, and not give everything away at the same time? That one was very challenging because you !! didn't know, and they weren't going to give away whether you're going to see that thing appear in the next frame, so you feel like if you stayed on that shot a little longer we're going to see something come out. How do you build up to a climax at the end of the show and still make sure that people want to hear more? That's really very difficult, but we built it all up to a cacophony, and then all of a sudden it got really quiet, like, 'What happened?' That was a really tricky moment to make work." Supervising sound editor Mike Lawshe, p.122-123

Rather than CG, "The door needed to explode open a half-second before the camera goes through, as if the camera itself blew the door open supernaturally. My direction to Brian Rose, the steady-cam operator, was, 'I want you to run at that real wood door carrying this heavy and expensive piece of equipment in front of your face. Don't worry, the special effects guys will open the door at the right time.'" "It kicks off the show with a bang." Kripke, p.123

WHO IS MIKE? "Mike would let me do my own thing and then he'd give me a little pointer here or there, or come and talk to me a little bit. He really allowed me to do whatever I wanted with the role, which was really cool."

"[Kripke] was extremely specific about exactly what he wanted for each scene. It was interesting having my own ideas of what I wanted to bring to this episode and then coming and having the creator, the person who knows everything about the show, explain what to go with. It was amazing."

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Ruby-Cassidy-1001654.aspx
"Coming onto the show at first, everybody was kind of freaked out," she recalled. "They didn't know about having girls on the show - they love their Sam and Dean, and I understand that."

So why did Cassidy and the CW spooker part ways? At the time, series creator Eric Kripke cited "purely budgetary" reasons. Cassidy herself says, "Warner Bros. wasn't exactly sure what they were going to be doing with my character, and I had the option to stay or leave. When Harper's Island came about, I was really into it, so I asked them to let me go. Luckily, they did."

http://www.tvguide.com/news/Exclusive-Supernatural-Catches-12603.aspx
Hmm, maybe losing one's sibling to the eternal fires of Hades ain't the absolute worst thing in the world? I mean, just look at the sympathy cuddling! Wildfire spitfire Genevieve Cortese has been cast on the CW's Supernatural in the role of Kristy, a small-town waitress who gets romantically involved with Jared Padalecki's Sam sometime after the brooder's brother Dean's death.

Zachariah
http://blog.zap2it.com/frominsidethebox/2010/03/supernatural-kurt-fuller-on-jensen-ackles-jared-padalecki-and-more.html

Kurt Fuller usually doesn't audition for episodic shows. "Because I think I'm so great," he jokes. "But when I watched 'Supernatural' I was impressed. I was like, 'How much money do they spend on this show?' So I did the audition."

Fuller was asked to imagine his character, the smarmy angel Zachariah, as "Morgan Freeman playing God."

"I was so excited, because I usually play a-holes," Fuller joked at the Creation Entertainment Salute to Supernatural event on March 27. "I called my agent and said, 'I'm finally playing a really nice guy!' Zachariah was going to be Barney Fife! Andy Griffith!"

"Then I got the script for my second episode and I wasn't so nice. By the third episode, I was stealing people's lungs and giving them stomach cancer. So I've just decided that apparently I'm incapable playing a nice guy. I turn all my characters bad. I'm the meanest man on TV, but hey... it's a living."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MakYl2tt9eo

Exited to be an angel, good guy.

"I just embraced it and just decided that Zachariah knows what he is doing is the right thing, and he's really doing it all, if people would only understand, he's doing it because he knows what's right."

Compared Zachariah's strategy as breaking a few eggs to make an omelet. "The faster I can make this battle happen, the faster I can bring the forces together, the faster we're gonna break the eggs, and the faster I'm gonna make the omelet." Called him a "genius".

Kurt fuller believes "Paradise on Earth for Zachariah would be completely malleable humans serving Heaven." p. 4;114

"I didn't know I was auditioning to play an angel. They don't give you a lot of information ever, because they don't want it out there, but I was told that it was a Morgan Freeman-type with a lot of equanimity. That's how I played it. He turned out to be more Donald Trump, but at the time I was going for Morgan Freeman." p. 4;144

"My preconceived notions really went more to the stereotypical. Much less gritty. I didn't know there were gonna be bad, horrible angels." You gonna tell me how an angel's supposed to act? No. The script will tell me how this particular angel acts. Besides, this show does not strictly adhere to anything, so I made a decision to really use the script as my 'bible'." p. 4;144

According to Fuller, "Zach's meatsuit was an actuary. He worked for an insurance company and his job was to figure out how much each life was worth in plane crashes. That was his whole job. That's all he did, all day, every day." p. 4;144

"The tragedy of Zacharaih is that he had so many tools at his disposal, so many things he could do, and he just couldn't pull it off. [His death] is sort of satisfying, though, because he's really gone to the dark side and the dark side cannot win, no matter how powerful it is." p. 5;95

"I thought he was just a loser without much backbone, but he had more backbone and was brighter than I had any idea he was going to be. Then instead of that making me respect him more, it makes me despise him more, because he really is in my way. I have tone thing I ave to do. One thing! I have to get Dean to say yes to Michael. If he says yes, I'm moving up a level, getting a big promotion. But this filthy, smelly little thing, this inferior incarnation of life, this human, won't say it, no matter what I do." p. 5;141

Became personal to Zachariah, "So by 'Point of No Return', Zachariah has really cracked. He's fifty-two percent revenge, forty-eight percent still trying to make his plan work." p. 5;141

"Zachariah views himself as a great guy. He views himself as the only one who knows what is really going on. He's the only one who actually has a plan to defeat Lucifer that's going to work. If only people would listen to him!" p. 5;141

"I was actually very upset that he was dying, because it honestly was a part of me that died." p. 5;141

Samuel Campbell
http://www.tvguide.com/news/Supernatural-Scoop-X-Citing-15876.aspx

Speaking at the raucous Supernatural panel at Comic-Con, series creator Eric Kripke offered some scoop for the ravenous audience when pressed about upcoming guests. Pileggi will be appearing in Season 4 as Mary's father - thus, Sam and Dean's pappy!

http://www.tvguide.com/news/X-Files-Mitch-Pileggi-19186.aspx

TVGuide.com: How did the Supernatural opportunity come to you? Was it a case of someone knowing someone who knows you...? Mitch Pileggi: I had worked with [ Supernatural creator] Eric Kripke on another series ( Tarzan) some years ago. He told me he had been looking for something for me to do on the show, but he wanted to wait for the right role. This came up, they called me, and there was no hesitation.

TVGuide.com: You often seem drawn to anthology-type series. Do you feel it's a smarter, more involved genre of television? Pileggi: This show is definitely smart. but honestly, what draws me to any show that I do, these days especially, is if the role is something that is going to challenge me, that is interesting to me, and is something I haven't played before. The main thing that drew me to this was the fact that the people working on it, from the crew and production, are people I worked with on The X-Files. I had a lot of "old family" working on the show. When they sent me a couple episodes, I actually called Eric and said, "Why have I not been watching this show?!" I think it's really good, and the guys on it are wonderful. It's a great cast, great stories, and it looks absolutely wonderful.

Uriel
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Preview-Wisdom-35000.aspx

TVGuide.com: What brings Uriel to the world of Supernatural? Is he there to ostensibly save Halloween? Wisdom: Yes, that's my job, and it's a big one. It's a real sweet role. They've written some really powerful stuff. I like the show.

TVGuide.com: I'm thinking he doesn't get a big ol' hug from Castiel? Wisdom: No, we are kind of a mix between characters from the Addams Family realm and The Odd Couple. [Laughs] We like each other but we aren't real close.

TVGuide.com: They have different approaches to the job, I understand. Wisdom: Uriel basically uses power to get the job done. If that means smiting a whole city, he has to do it.

TVGuide.com: Misha Collins told me that Uriei is a bit "trigger-happy." Wisdom: I wouldn't say trigger-happy, but he's "eager" to carry out God's will.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyPfh_56AeQ&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_stronger_r2-2r-8-HM

The Mythologies of Supernatural: From Heaven to Hell "Uriel is a hitman for God." Kripke

http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/10/supernatural-ca.html “Uriel—he’s more of the smite-now-ask-questions-later school. Castiel has a conscience. Uriel doesn’t,” he noted. The episode asks the question, Collins added, “‘Do the ends justify the means?’”

MC; Yeah. I think so. I’m not going to spoil it for you but [there are two angels in the Oct. 30 episode,] Castiel and Uriel – he’s more of the smite now, ask questions later school. Castiel has a conscience. Uriel doesn’t. So you get to see these angels playing off each other. I think that these angels are at least loosely derived from some Biblical angel stories, and those angels are [very tough]. They just destroy. I picked up Revelations, and they destroy, they destroy, they destroy. There’s no mention of cherubs and harps or any of that.

Anna
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Preview-Angels-66904.aspx

Nothing useful

Ghostfacers
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Buckley-CSINY-Supernatural-1004349.aspx

TVGuide.com: Turning to your side gig: How do the "Ghostfacers" figure into this week's Supernatural, seeing as how Sam and Dean are living these sorts of alternate lives? Buckley: It's because the Ghostfacers are the real deal, the tour guides of the spirit world! [Laughs] No, it actually is really nice how they bring it together. Dean and Sam are sort of lost and when in doubt, who do you call? You lean on Ed and Harry, the two most reliable ghost hunters in all of ghost-hunterdom.

TVGuide.com: Is it up to you to bring Sam and Dean back to reality? Buckley: I wouldn't say it's up to us; we're basically the goofy version of a shaman. We're there for what we think are the right reasons, but Ed and Harry and Sam and Dean never see eye-to-eye.

TVGuide.com: We asked TV's actual Ghost Hunters about you, and they are definitely fans. Buckley: Are they really? Before we shoot Supernatural, we'll watch their shows. [Sci Fi Channel's] Paranormal State and Ghost Hunters are the shows we watch.

TVGuide.com: This episode was written by Sera Gamble, versus Ben Edlund, who penned the Ghostfacers' debut. Did that give it any different a feel, since Sera doesn't usually do Supernatural's lighter episodes? Buckley: The great thing about what [series creator Eric] Kripke allows the Ghostfacers to do is they'll always write a great set-up for us, and then we get to "play." Sera wrote really great stuff for us, and then the director let us add "Ghostfacer flavor" to that, by riffing and improvising. [Co-executive producer] Phil [Sgriccia, who directed the Ghostfacers video within the episode] was crying with laughter so loudly that it ruined the scene. I'm pretty lucky to work on both CSI: NY and Supernatural. Not bad gigs!

Castiel
"When Castiel first appeared on the show, he hadn't been around human beings for thousands of years, so he looked at humans as strange alien beings; he looked at them with scientific curiosity. He was quite different from humans at that early stage. Then, as his arc unfolded, Castiel became more empathetic to humans, more personally connected to them." Collins, p.132

"I didn't know I was going to be on the show for a long time, and in the first script it said that Castiel was trying to communicate with Dean and his voice was blowing out windows, and Dean was having to cover his ears in pain, so I thought the human version of that voice must be something that's very deep and commanding. I created that voice and then had to keep it going for two years. I probably would've made a different choice had I known that it was such a long-lasting character, because it is a bit of a strain, honestly, to have to talk !!! like that all the time." Collins, p.132,134

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-preview-Misha-1003935.aspx

TVGuide.com: What twist in Castiel's storyline has surprised you the most so far? Collins: That he's still alive. That's one. But also seeing the man whom Castiel possessed was both surprising and gratifying and really fun to play. We just finished shooting that episode, and that was cool. It was very different from what I was expecting.

TVGuide.com: "Does Castiel know what happened to Sam and Dean's father after John helped them in the Season 2 finale? If so, will he tell them?" (jzchillin) Collins: I don't think that Castiel does know what happened to their father. He's not omniscient by any stretch of the imagination. There's a lot of stuff that's cropped up this year on the show that has been news to Castiel, so there's no reason for me to believe that he knows what happened to Daddy-O.

TVGuide.com: "Are we going to see Castiel begin to doubt and/or question God's pronouncements, especially vis-à-vis Dean and Sam?" (kchez) First of all, that's an excellent use of "vis-à-vis. Collins: Yes, it was excellent! I wish I could respond with matching stellar vocabulary, but.... "Yes" is the short answer to that question. Definitely.

TVGuide.com: "Do you think Castiel should fall, or he should stay an angel?" (ilda_winchester) Collins: I think it would be more interesting if he fell.

http://www.tvguide.com/news/Supernaturals-Heavenly-Newcomer-19191.aspx

Collins: He knows someone who can have things fixed up if needed, yeah. He's so powerful he doesn't need to worry about flaunting it. He can be very calm and quiet.

TVGuide.com: Speaking of that line he has to toe, are there any "rules" he is bound by, like "Thou Shalt Not Kill," as he helps out the boys? Collins: There is a chain of command, a heavenly chain of command, which I am expected to follow, but I think there's latitude for that to be defied. Other than that, he's actually faced with moral and ethical dilemmas just as a human being would be. So far. He's not bound by hard and fast rules.

TVGuide.com: Do Castiel and Uriel get along? Collins: Not really. No, we are at loggerheads.

TVGuide.com: Do we know why? Is it just old unsettled business? Collins: Well, I think that he's got more of an itchy trigger-finger than I do.

TVGuide.com: There's already speculation that Castiel is not who/what he claims to be, that this is all maybe a giant ruse. Collins: Right. I would love to be able to put that to rest. I'm not positive that I can, but I think that I can. I think he actually is what he portends to be.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyPfh_56AeQ&feature=rec-LGOUT-exp_stronger_r2-2r-8-HM

So in the next few episodes Castiel is gonna start struggling more with the conflict between his internal moral compass and the orders that he's getting from above. And he's just dealing with a pretty big, I think, internal struggle... whether he should obey or shouldn't obey, and what's right and wrong. And I think a lot of what's going on with him is that Dean is starting to rub off on him. He's starting to see Dean operate with a lot of certainty and a lot of decisiveness. And I think frankly that Castiel kind of envies that and is slowly starting to emulate him more and more in his mind. And I think that Castiel is also starting to have the hints of emotion in him, which for an angel are alien feelings. I think that being in close proximity to these human beings is starting to make Castiel feel more and more. It's like the transitive property; they're rubbing off on him somehow. And he's not quite sure what to do with that. And I think it makes him a little bit uncertain and a little bit more fragile, and certainly more interesting to play. I think Castiel and Uriel are going to have a painful breakup. Uriel is operating tape by the letter of heaven's law, and he doesn't have any emotions and he doesn't have any feelings at all. Obviously he doesn't have any feelings for Sam and Dean, and he kinda seems to hate humanity in general.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hced0A8lzT8&feature=relmfu

Castiel is treading a fine line... I'm not the sweetest little cherub of an angel, but I'm not a demon either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCGnDwSok-k&feature=relmfu

Season 5: He's becoming more and more human, or he's spending more and more of his time on the human plane, so he's wrestling with figuring out personal space issues and things like that. Like Castiel gets up really close and makes people feel uncomfortable and things like that, and has to be told to step back.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH7AHa2-nwk&feature=relmfu

[Uriel's] more of the Revelations angel. Uriel doesn't have any problem with smiting and destroying... He just wants to kill everybody.

I don't quite understand how the wardrobe works because I get shot and the clothes are torn by the bullets and a knife goes through them, and then they heal magically. The clothes themselves heal. So I think that angels have some sort of superpower of mending and drycleaning automatically, which is nice.

http://www.buddytv.com/articles/supernatural/exclusive-supernatural-intervi-35645.aspx

-On his relationship with Castiel's trenchcoat over the course of the series: "It went from apathy to enthusiasm to apathy again to dread to apathy again to not even thinking about it at all now."

-On his hopes, however slim, that the writers have something big in store for Castiel's wardrobe: "I do have to admit that every time I pick up a new script, there's a glimmer of excitement in my soul when I hope that this is the episode that Castiel gets a makeover ... I have this feeling that the writers may be waiting for the perfect time to change the trenchcoat. I have this hope."

Other Links
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Questions-Answered-1002240.aspx

I'm sure one or two of those people Dean tortured in Hell weren't demons, but regular folk who had an error in judgment. Will Sam and Dean ever run into any of them? — K. Sera Gamble: We batted around a few versions of that idea, but we've been focusing more on his torturer, Alastair. The pertinent details of Dean's Hell story get told through that relationship. There's more to come in a future episode.

I read the spoilers for Episode 18. Is there any chance you will play the character named Sera? — ckll Gamble: Nope. There is a character named Sera Siege though. There are characters named after everyone on the staff. The episode starts out dizzyingly meta: Sam and Dean discover a book series called Supernatural, about the adventures of two demon-hunting brothers named Sam and Dean. Every detail is spot-on. Obviously, this is deeply alarming to them. Julie Siege wrote the episode, and she was very even-handed, in that she managed to take hilarious jabs at the writers, the fans and the boys. The story eventually twists in an unexpected direction that's more grounded and substantial — it's not just an amusing exercise. But if there was any doubt that we have a sense of humor about ourselves, this ought to clear it up.

What is the difference (besides what I guess you could call their "political" affiliations") between the angels and demons? I ask because their policies seem to be pretty similar: Both sides are into possessing humans; both sides are into destroying large numbers of humans and both sides are willing to do extreme measures with no regard for the suffering of others to achieve their objectives. — MrKWoodmaid Gamble: Their methods are often eerily similar, huh? I find that pretty interesting. One big difference is that demons used to be human. Angels never were. Demons may have lost their humanity, but it could be argued that angels never had it to begin with. But: It's not entirely true that angels have no regard for the suffering of humans. Castiel is clearly troubled by it. Anna was so compelled by humans that she chose to fall. You've got to take angels on a case-by-case basis.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Supernatural-Questions-Answered-1001976.aspx

Are Castiel and Uriel for sure sent by the Big Guy, or could they have their own agenda? Could they be Fallen Angels themselves? Uriel at least seemed not very Angelic when he withheld Anna's Grace. — Gerald Gamble: Our angels aren't "angelic" in the porcelain doll sense. They're warriors, and they behave like it. It can be pretty jarring; it certainly was to Sam and Dean. As for whether or not they were "for sure" sent by God ... it seems to me that on our show, there's been a good rule of thumb so far: Evil is a certainty. But good is not as easy to pin down. It requires a certain amount of faith.

When is Sam going to have a reaction to all that Dean has told him regarding Hell? He says nothing, but the look on his face indicates that there is a lot going on in his head. — staceycj Gamble: I thought Sam had a huge reaction to Dean's confession, actually. Sometimes a situation is so painful that there's really not much that can be said about it. The mature thing to do might be to just be with the suffering person, which is what Sam did. I thought the scene was a good example of how much Sam has grown over the course of the show. That said, there's more story to come connected to what Dean did in Hell. And Sam has a very strong reaction to it — a reaction that has repercussions felt for the rest of the season.

Why was Alastair able to defeat Castiel so easily? Is he working with or against Lilith? — PrincessButtercup Gamble: It's not actually so easy to get the better of an angel like Castiel. Run-of-the-mill demons end up dead or freaked out like the burnt-eyed chick in the diner in "Lazarus Rising." They're outmatched — and, of course, they have no experience fighting angels, because angels have been AWOL for a couple thousand years. But Alastair is exceptionally old and powerful, so he knows a trick or two. Alastair is working with Lilith. Though, for the record, I don't think he cares much about the apocalypse. He'd rather be back in Hell, sticking bamboo shoots under fingernails. He's not a politician. He's a torture artist, and he'd just as soon stick with what he loves. He's only topside because duty calls.

Demons
The Mythologies of Supernatural: From Heaven to Hell

"To prove a point to God, to prove that human souls were basically full of crap and inferior to God and the angels, Lucifer twisted and mutilated a human soul into a demon, and that was Lilith." Kripke

Reapers
Season 4 dvd purgatory