Supernatural aired a very important episode on January 30, called “As Time Goes By.” In it we learned that Sam and Dean have more of a legacy than they thought and that it wasn’t just the Campbell side of the family that was involved with the supernatural world.
WARNING: Major spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen episode 8.12 “As Time Goes By”
After a screening of the episode earlier this week, executive producer Robert Singer talked about the implications of what Sam and Dean discovered about their heritage, and the room of secrets.
The boys will have a new home base. Asked about the super-secret room that they now have the key to, Singer said, “The reveal of that place is a really stunning set. It’s full of mysteries. It will become kind of a home base for the boys. We’re really excited about it. After 8 years of never having a home base, this will be home base for quite some time and I think you guys will really dig the set, it’s really cool.”
The new place will have a lot of information in it for the Winchesters. Asked about what Sam and Dean will find in the new place, Singer said, “The Men of Letters; if you took dad’s journal and you multiplied that by a hundred, [that’s what you’d get there]. It’s got every source of information that would be interesting to the boys.”
Singer continued, “The Men of Letters are all gone. The last surviving one was the old guy in the home and he’s no more. Bit of a spoiler alert: when they go in there, it’s pristine, like it’s been hermetically sealed. Everything is just as it was, it’s perfectly neat and the only sign that someone had to get out of there in a hurry was a chess game that was uncompleted and an ash tray full of cigarettes.”
But they won’t be sharing the secrets any time soon. Asked if the boys will share this knowledge with the rest of the hunter community, Singer said, “I think that’s on a need-to-know basis. I don’t think they’re going to have a hunter convention in there and welcome everybody in to go have at it. That’s really not their style. [But] I would be surprised if Garth didn’t show up and probably break an expensive globe.”
The new set will be used a lot and will be a place for “bromance”. Singer talked more about the new home base set, saying, “[Sam and Dean will] go to great pains to keep that hidden. Also it’s kind of impenetrable. We’ve had places before, we had Rufus’s cabin. They need a place, not just so we have a set to shoot on, but that the boys need a place to decompress and have their bromance moments. The other sets we’ve had have been not the biggest. When you see this set you realize they have lots of room to move around and there’s lots of really cool things in there. Adam came up with this idea and we latched onto it immediately. It’s a very expensive set so we’re going to [keep] using it.”
Sam and Dean will see the new home base differently. How will the boys react to their new home? “Of course when they get in there Sam is totally immersed in the place and Dean just happy to have his own room. He’s put posters up. He says to Sam, ‘If you want to do this geek stuff that’s fine with me, but I’m just digging this.'” Singer revealed.
Singer continued, talking more about the boys’ different personalities and how it will affect the way they see their new home, “If you boil it down to its simplest: Sam is more the brains and Dean is more the brawn. Sam makes a speech in an episode, I can’t remember if it’s aired or not, and says ‘you’re the greatest hunter I’ve ever seen, you’re better than dad’ and that’s Dean. He’s probably much more internal than Sam, in a way. When they get into these emotional areas, the catalyst is more Sam. Those are the characters that we developed. Dean loves the information if he can act on it. ‘So great, what do we need? A scimitar from the first century to chop off the guy’s head? Great, let’s go do it.’ That’s Dean.”
The room of secrets will play into the Tablet storyline. Asked to discuss how the new mythology will work with the current storyline this season, Singer said, “This all plays into the Tablet business. If, for instance, Crowley got his hands on the Angel Tablet and could decipher it; that would be a bad thing. The information that is contained in this Men of Letters bunker, if it fell into the wrongs hands would be a powerful weapon against the boys so it has to remain a secret and guarded closely. As we go down the line into the rest of this year, and hopefully next year, dramatic turns will take place, because this is an important place.”
The idea of the Men of Letters is a new one, and will open up new stories starting with the next episode. When asked if they had been thinking of telling the story of the Winchester side of the family for a long while, Singer said, “Up until the time that Adam came up with this notion, we hadn’t really explored that side of the family; grandpa Winchester. But we thought the idea of harkening back to what Cupid said about how it was all ordained and a ‘top priority’ – it was just a nice closing of that circle for us and again sort of gives us this new home base that is chock full of information and will certainly lead to other stories. You’ll see that open up next week, it’s cool.”
They cast Henry Winchester to be a contrast to the boys. Asked about selecting Gil McKinney to play the role of Henry, Singer said, “He came in and read and we thought he was the right guy for the job. We weren’t really [looking for physical similarities] as it was sort of a generation removed. We were just looking for the best actor and a guy that we thought would work well with the boys. Also that there was a contrast: this was a guy who was more elegant and more learned and more educated, and our boys are more rough-hewn. So when he says ‘hunter’, he’s so appalled at that notion, but then came around at the end. So we were actually looking for more of a contrast, than a familial sameness.”
What do you think now that you’ve heard more about the Men of Letters, the new home base for the boys and this whole idea of their legacy? Does it change any of the opinions you had after watching the latest episode? Are you excited by this new element to the mythology of Supernatural?
Supernatural airs on Wednesday nights at 9pm on CW.
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(Image courtesy of CW)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
