In the second half of BuddyTV’s exclusive interview with Supernatural writer Sera Gamble, we asked her about the show’s future, and she delivered. Aside from discussing upcoming episodes, Gamble also addressed fan concerns about Sam’s role in season 4, explaining that it’s because the angels “appear at times to be so much more connected to Dean.”
Gamble also described her favorite writing experience on Supernatural and offered a preview of several upcoming episodes, including one that features Dean, a soy latte, and a Prius. Trust me when I tell you it’s not what you think. Continue reading for a transcript and to listen to the full interview.
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We asked all the fans at BuddyTV to submit any questions they had and a lot of them seemed to be a little concerned with Sam and his storylines. They think he’s being overshadowed by Dean. So I’m wondering if in the second half, is there going to be a focus on Sam?
That’s interesting. I find the whole polarization that happens, where a viewer might attach to one character over the other, to be interesting. I often get asked the question, which of the characters I like better. And it is so impossible for me to separate them. You know when I’m sitting down to break an episode of the story, I think of them as a unit or as sort of two cogs that work together. And I think we really see them that way, we see them as two components of a greater story at all times. So, that said, I think especially because the angels have been such a flashy and successful new element of the storyline, and they appear at times to be so much more connected to Dean–that might kind of magnify his light in season four a little bit.
I personally have written a lot of stuff for Sam this season. It’s hard for me to put myself in this mindset because I’ve written so much material for Sam lately. But I guess the best way that I can answer that question is to say that there is a serious arc for Sam in the second half of the season. And we have an endpoint that we’re headed towards. And it’s serious. It’s fairly substantial and it’s something that we’ve built into the first half. Now, we had to deal with Dean coming out of hell in the first several episodes, that’s true. So, you know, there’s a shift.
Not to go on about this too long, but I also think one thing that is interesting is the two characters really deal with stuff differently. I think Sam’s kind of way of dealing with stuff it turns out, he becomes more and more internal and he talks less about stuff as time goes on. He becomes more and more of a guy about it, the older he gets and the more he sees. It’s interesting to write him that way because he says less, but I don’t consider that to be the same thing as disappearing from the script. I think, especially if you watch Jared’s performance, I think it’s interesting to see how much he’s saying in the scenes where ostensibly the focus might be on another character who’s saying more. There’s a Sam story going on as well.
Do you have a favorite episode that you’ve written?
That’s a good question. There’s a lot of episodes that I’m fond of. I guess I look at all of the episodes and I see stuff I would do different in retrospect, of course. But there’s an episode way back in season 2 that I think I will always look back really fondly on, it’s “Crossroad Blues.” That was really one of my favorite writing experiences just because I got to listen to this music that was the real music of Robert Johnson when I was writing the episode and I got to write a real historical character into the show. And introduce so much of the mythology of Crossroads Demon that ended up being so vital to the mythology. It was a long time ago, that episode. I hold that one near and dear to my heart. And we have posters of Robert Johnson around the office.
We’ve seen the first 10 and you said you were on number 19, so I’m not if you remember back to 11 or 12 or the one’s we’re about to see.
I do! I can tease them for you. We have a haunted house kind of episode coming up that has a twist to it. I can’t reveal the twist, except to say that it squicks me out, probably more than almost any twist that we’ve had– it’s just so squicky to me. We’re doing an episode that flashes back to Sam and Dean in high school, which is pretty interesting. We’re doing an episode coming up with magicians. Magicians of like the card trick, sleight-of-hand kind, not the wizard kind.
And that’s the much ballyhooed “Criss Angel is a Douche Bag” episode, I believe.
Yes! I can’t believe that that title actually stayed on the episode. A lot of episode titles have remained that began as jokes, and then continued and continued and continued and are now the title of the episodes. And I’m proud of us for that. And I’m especially proud of Eric and Julie Siege, because that’s her episode. But yeah, we have that episode coming up and there will be more with the angels. There will be some development there.
I just wrote an episode that I had such a good time writing because it was a chance for me to have a little bit of a departure. I’ve written some pretty heavy episodes, asking Jensen and Jared to really dig deep and emote a lot and think about the times that their dogs and cats died, because there’s a lot of death in those episodes, and this is a much lighter, more case-driven episode. I guess I can just say that it opens on Dean drinking an organic soy-milk latte and driving a Prius…and seeming perfectly happy about it.
I hope that it turns out well, I know that I had a really really good time writing it. I mean, it sounds comedic and there are certainly some comedic elements to it, but it wasn’t written just for laughs, it was written with something more serious in mind as well. But I had such a good time writing an episode that didn’t have any like, “And your mother was killed by demons… And your father abandoned you…And you hang out with demons too much.” It was just very much about the relationship between the brothers and this completely insane case that they are on.
If I seem a little bit out of it, I mean even stringing a complete sentence together is a little bit challenging for me at this point in the day, because I’ve spent the past couple of weeks, at least a week and a half, working with one of the other writers on their episode in which Sam and Dean discover a book series entitled Supernatural about the adventures of two demon hunters called Sam and Dean.
Is this going to be another “Hollywood Babylon,” ultra-meta episode?
Listen, “Hollywood Babylon” does not begin to be meta compared to what I did. We might actually win the award for the most meta episode in the history of television. It is at once the most self-referential thing I’ve ever had to think about and then actually it’s also a really relevant episode to the season. We weren’t going to do it unless we could seriously justify it in terms of what was going on with the rest of the season. I think that we’ve had some really successful comedic episodes, Ben Edlund for example, I think is a brilliant creative mind in that way. And we also have this very quickly moving train in terms of our mythology at this point in the season, so whatever we do has to serve both things at this point. And that episode, luckily does. But oh my god, I feel like I’ve been in a hall of mirrors.
-Interview conducted by John Kubicek
(Image courtesy of SeraGamble.com)
Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
