Fans of “Supernatural” will have a couple of weeks to prepare themselves for this sight: irreverent, classic-rock-loving demon hunter Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) wearing a suit and tie, working as a middle manager at a corporation, listening to NPR and drinking lattes.

As if that’s not enough—horror of horrors!—he won’t even be driving his beloved 1967 Chevrolet Impala in the March 26 episode. Without giving away the surprise, let’s just say he’ll have a more energy-conscious set of wheels.

And what’s this about his brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) working as a tech-support nerd at the same firm?

“It’s like you tuned in to ‘Supernatural’ and you kind of got ‘The Office,’” said Sera Gamble, “Supernatural” supervising producer, in a recent phone interview.

The comedic outing will come after two more serious episodes on Thursday and March 19, which will touch on the show’s ongoing story about an epic battle between heaven and hell, in which Dean and Sam have become major players. (To see four clips from Thursday’s “Supernatural” episode, “Death Takes a Holiday,” look here.)

“It’s this tonal whiplash that we’ve become comfortable doing,” Gamble said. “We’ll leave them bleeding and half-dead in a hospital, and the next week they’re fine, and they’re doing something funny. It’s this way of giving you a minute to take a breath before the next run of heavy episodes.”

There are indeed some momentous episodes coming up this spring for this consistently entertaining CW show, which has sustained ratings growth even as it as upped the ante this year for the Winchester brothers. The guys are not merely killing demons and hunting other freaky creatures. Dean is the special charge of a mysterious and powerful angel known as Castiel (Misha Collins), who pulled him out of hell at the start of the fourth season.

“The angels’ plan for Dean will be revealed this season,” Gamble said. But don’t fear Castiel going away: The show has been renewed for a fifth year, and guest star Collins has been upped to series-regular status for Season 5.

“Being wrapped up with what’s going on with Sam and Dean is really dangerous for an angel like Castiel,” Gamble said. “He is getting to like Dean quite a bit. Dean is a terrible influence on an angel, I think, because everything about Dean’s way of looking at the world is antithetical to being an angel, which is all about obedience and following the party line and doing what you’re told without question.”

Sam, on the other hand, has been exploring special powers that he has, but angels have told him to ignore them and his brother has implored him not to use them. Could this conflict lead to a Winchester  versus Winchester showdown before the season is over?

“As to where exactly Sam and Dean’s relationship is headed, I have to say, tune in and find out,” Gamble said. “But it’s true that their relationship has been fraying and has been different since Dean got out of hell. They spent that time apart. Sam was … was suicidal. Dean was in hell. They were very changed. … And a lot of this season has been about the ways in which they can’t connect anymore.”

“Their relationship is not as simple as it used to be,” Gamble added. “When an audience member says, ‘I’ve been watching it since Season 1 and I just really miss the way they used to be together,’ so do Sam and Dean.”

What may be most impressive about the show’s ambitious fourth season is that it has both retained its sardonic sense of humor and taken on epic themes of good and evil without getting too complicated for casual fans to follow.

“We have this kind of philosophy that it’s more satisfying to answer the majority of questions as we go along, instead of dangling things in front of the audience indefinitely,” said Gamble.

As far as the spiritual themes go, she added, “if you find the sweet spot where you can tell stories like that that don’t feel preachy and feel like they are organically coming from your characters, that’s something I think people want to watch. I know I do.”

Below is a transcript of my interview with Gamble. Be aware that she discusses, in general terms, elements of what we’ll be seeing later this season. She also mentions some characters we will see again before the season ends.

If you don’t want to read the whole interview, I’ve compiled a bullet-point list of things that are coming up in the final third of Season 4. The full transcript is after that.

Quick list:

• There are “elements of mythology that are woven into the next two episodes,” said Gable, who added that the episodes are “not quite” a two-parter, but there are story threads that tie the them together.
• If you want to know what kind of car Dean’s driving in the March 26 episode, “It’s a Terrible Life,” that tidbit is below in the transcript. By the way, Gamble praised the work of guest star Kurt Fuller, the ubiquitous TV character actor who plays Dean’s boss in the episode.
• Fans who’ve been wanting more Sam-centered episodes will get their wish. “There’s a lot of really intense Sam stuff coming. Fans should be careful what they wish for. The Sam stuff — it’s not the sweet Sam from Stanford. I think Sam is going through the hardest stuff of his entire life.”
• An episode later in the season will give viewers more information about the history of Castiel. “We talk about the character in the writers room, and we decided it was kind of time to go there, and ask some of the big questions about where his story comes from,” Gamble said.
• Fans shouldn’t worry too much about an upcoming episode titled “Jump the Shark,” which may (or may not) introduce a third Winchester brother. “We are aware of the fact that introducing new family members in an advanced season of a show is an idea that …has a lot of pitfalls. And then having that person tag along in the back of the Impala is probably something the fans wouldn’t respond to positively,” Gamble said. “I just hope the fans have a little faith in [creator] Eric [Kripke] about that. … It’s a good episode. But it’s not the episode that’s going to alter the formula of ‘Supernatural’ forever.”
• We’ll see Lilith before the season is over, and not necessarily as a child.
• We’ll find out more about Ruby and how she fits into what’s going on with Sam. We’ll also see Pamela the psychic, Tessa the Reaper and, of course, Bobby.
• We’ll see the Winchesters’ mother again before the season’s done, although Gamble wouldn’t give any details about the appearance of Mary (Samantha Smith).
• As for Dean, “we will come to know the full extent of the angel’s plan for Dean, the clockwork of everything that’s been happening since Dean was pulled from Hell.”
• As for a sixth season, Gamble had no idea if that could happen. “Everyone is talking about it as if it’s five years. I don’t really know. It’s sort of a question for people wearing suits and ties.”

What’s below is an edited and slightly condensed transcript of my interview with Gamble.

I solicited some questions on my site, and one thing that came up was that some fans really want to see more Sam story lines.

There’s so much Sam coming. There’s more Dean coming, there’s more Sam coming, and Sam and Dean’s stories are coming together. They’re doing that thing where [the two stories] are moving inexorably together. But there is a lot of Sam coming.

I guess there are some fans who feel like there are story lines that got dropped — Sam and the investigations of who he is and all the family stuff. So there’s more of all that coming?

Definitely. I wouldn’t say that the story lines had been dropped. I would say, in the first part of the season, there was a lot about Dean coming out of Hell and the introduction of the angels, which was a very shiny thing and it involved a lot of explaining. And because of that, it felt more Dean-heavy. But by the middle of the season, we started to sort of move toward Sam.

There’s a lot of really intense Sam stuff coming. Fans should be careful what they wish for. The Sam stuff — it’s not the sweet Sam from Stanford. I think Sam is going through the hardest stuff of his entire life.

I understand when some people watch a show, they sort of latch on to a character and they sort of relate to that character and want to follow that [person]. I never really look at it that way. Every time I break an episode, I go, ‘What’s the Sam story, what’s the Dean story, and  then what’s the story of their relationship in this episode?” The relationship of Sam and Dean is always kind of the third character. And that’s how we approach every episode.

Can you talk a bit about the first couple of episodes that air when the show returns?

There’s elements of mythology that are woven into the next two episodes quite a bit. We’ll be seeing demons and we’ll be seeing angels. Tessa the Reaper will be making a return, which is interesting because she will bring with her a worldview of this angel-demon warfare situation that is quite different.

The episodes are not exactly a two-parter, but there are threads in that story that carry though. Episode 17 I wrote is a [more comedic one]. We tend to do these incredibly heavy episodes, and then the next week, there’s an alcoholic teddy bear. It’s this tonal whiplash that we’ve become comfortable doing. I hope it works, I feel it works. But we’ll leave them, bleeding and half dead in a hospital, and the next week they’re fine, and they’re doing something funny. It’s this way of kind of giving you a minute to take a breath, before the next run of heavy episodes.

[In Episode 17], Dean is wearing a suit and tie and driving a Prius and he appears to be a sales manager at a big company, and Sam appears to be a tech-support guy at that company, and they don’t know each other. They have these whole lives that appear different, they  have different names, and it’s like, what’s going on? Are they in a parallel universe? It’s like you tuned in to “Supernatural” and you kind of got “The Office.”

It kind of explores what would have happened if they would have ended up in a [different] life. I don’t want to say too much, but the boys [were really funny]. And it’s kind of interesting see what happens when you set them up as characters who are not brothers. You get to see them meet for the same time.

Does Dean still love the rock?

Not so much. NPR. He’s managing a whole floor of this huge building. He’s concerned with this bailout. He’s drinking organic soy milk lattes.

I never thought I would hear the words “Dean” and “organic” in the same sentence.

I think it’s even better that — I think it’s rice milk. It’s beyond even soy milk [laughs]. Then there’s Sam, who’s answering all these terrible phone calls from people who can’t get their printers to work.

I haven’t written a truly funny episode on the show in a long time. I tend to write the ones where they’re, like, crying and bleeding. And crying. They’re really tragic, but this one was really fun.

As for the rest of the season, will we be seeing Castiel again?

Castiel has turned out to be a really important to the story and he’s returning. [The CW confirmed that Misha Collins is a series regular for Season 5.]

Being wrapped up with what’s going on with Sam and Dean is really dangerous for an angel like Castiel. He is getting to like Dean quite a bit. Dean is a terrible influence on an angel, I think. Because everything about Dean’s way of looking at the world is completely antithetical to being an angel, which is all about obedience and following the party line and doing what you’re told without question. And there’s a certain sort of stoicism to Castiel that is the opposite of the Winchesters. The more he gets in with the Winchesters, the more he’s in danger of getting trouble in terms of his job.

There is an episode coming up later in the season where we’re actually going to get into his back story a little bit. We talk about the character in the writers room, and we decided it was kind of time to go there, and ask some of the big questions about where his story comes from.

Well, he certainly has been a hit with fans. Were you nervous about bringing him into the show?

No, I wasn’t. I saw five minutes of dailies from our season premiere, and I said, “That guy is going to be the biggest thing since Sam and Dean.” [Creator and executive producer] Eric [Kripke] and Bob [executive producer Robert Singer] were like, “Well, he’s really good, but …” And I was like, “No, you don’t understand. Within an hour of this airing there are going to be little avatars of him and there are going to be fans sites about him.” And they’re like, “You think?” “Yes, I’m positive.”

First of all, he has this rock-star entrance. And there’s chemistry between him and the boys. And there’s a way that his character is positioned that is both ominous and helpful. He doesn’t quite threaten the relationship between the brothers, which is always the danger zone for characters we introduce. He’s male, which is helpful. And he’s played by Misha, who is very talented.

Was it always the plan to have the show go in this direction of a battle between heaven and hell? Was that always where it was going to go?

In terms of the story line about breaking the seals and unleashing the apocalypse?

Yeah, and to me it also seems to be following the show to its logical ends — that if there is evil, there must be good, and if there is good, then where does God fit in, all that stuff.

I think from a plot perspective there’s always been a rough plan to do this. There’s always been a rough plan to head toward the apocalypse and the threat of Lucifer rising. In terms of angels, that’s always something we had in our pockets.

The idea that there is good to balance out the evil, that’s something we talk a lot about. But I think we’ve very consciously avoided saying definitively that the angels are good. They say that they serve God, though none of the ones we’ve met have actually seen him. So we leave room to be pretty agnostic about it.

They are often at odds with our characters. And Sam and Dean are the two characters we know to be good. This season Sam has fallen into some stuff that is pretty questionable. So, you kind of have Dean [laughs]. Who, aside from sleeping around quite a bit [laughs]… What you basically have are [demon] hunters, they are people who are trying to do good and there is this evil everywhere. And the closest that we have to a pole that would be considered moral and good are hunters, and then angels are meant to be ambivalent and to make you feel ambiguous and make you ask uncomfortable questions.

We’re definitely poking at Judeo-Christian mythology without completely leaning into it. Because if we completely went there, I think we’d be pretty blasphemous actually. We’re drawing on it without completely going there.

Will we learn more about what Dean’s mission is?

The angels’ plan for Dean will be revealed this season. We will come to know the full extent of the angel’s plan for Dean, the clockwork of everything that’s been happening since Dean was pulled from Hell. All of that is contained in Season 4. We didn’t know there was going to be a Season 5 until last week. So we had to [plan] the season not knowing if we were going to have to end the series or not. So we’re answering a lot of questions, certainly about Dean and the angels now.

Also, we have this kind of philosophy, that it’s more satisfying to answer the majority of questions as we go along, instead of dangling things in front of the audience indefinitely.  We try to do that because we don’t want to get people completely frustrated all the time. And if your friend has been telling you to see the show and you haven’t gone back and watched the DVDs, you can pick up the backstory pretty easily. The mythology is pretty clear and we’ve kept it as simple as we can, actually.

The artfulness that goes into the episodes [in later seasons], it’s like a love letter to our most hardcore fans. If you watch the episodes, they are basically understandable if you’ve been watching the whole time or not, but at this point I try to throw in a few in-jokes or a few little things that are specifically for the fans who have been watching consistently. Definitely ["It's a Terrible Life"] has a lot of that.

Were you nervous about the reaction to Sam and Dean’s relationship going in this difficult direction? I mean, I’m reading things like, “Sam and Dean will go to war!” First of all, can you say if that’s true, and second, is it hard to take the relationship in that direction?

As to where exactly Sam and Dean’s relationship is headed, I have to kind of say, tune in and find out.

But it’s true that their relationship has been fraying and has been different since Dean got out of Hell. They spent that time apart. Sam was with Ruby, he was suicidal. Dean was in Hell. They were very changed. They got back together and it wasn’t quite the same. And a lot of this season has been about the ways in which they can’t connect any more.

We’re conscious of that. And we’re not scared of it. We’re writing stories about it. We’re writing stories about, what happens when the person you connected the most with, that you relied on, the relationship that was always solid — what do you do when that’s changed and you can’t get back to where you were before? I think that’s incredibly frustrating for both the brothers.

I know that there are viewers who are like, “I’m so glad we’re finally going there.” And I know there are viewers who are like, “Don’t do that. I miss when they were connecting and close.” Both perspectives are valid. But this was the plan and we’re cool with it.

It’s true that our show has expanded in width and also in depth. Their relationship is not as simple as it used to be. When an audience member says, “I’ve been watching it since Season 1 and I just really miss the way they used to be together,” so do Sam and Dean. They’re kind of living in the same experience the brothers are.

Will the fifth season continue to play out stories from this season or will it be very different? I know you don’t know specifics yet, but are you already thinking in general terms about where the show would go after Season 4?

I will say that we have never pulled our punches. Pretty much every year, we have been in danger of cancellation. There’s always been [thoughts such as these from fans] — “They won’t really kill Dad, they won’t really kill Dean.” We have plans in place and the thing we’re not going to do is take this season and divide it among 44 episodes instead of 22.

We have a plan for how to do this year and then [a plan for] next year. We started to talk about it, and then Eric and I looked at each other and said, “I’m taking a couple weeks off.” [laughs] We’re really excited about it, it seems like it will be a really fun year.

I can’t really say anything about Season 5, except that there’s a very liberating feeling about the fact that there’s a five year plan for the show and we’re in year 5. And we’re not so beholden to the idea of generating episodes for ever and ever and ever. Feeling like you’re feeling a story with an end is very comforting and it makes you feel like every episode counts.

Could there be a sixth year?

Everyone is talking about it as if it’s five years. I don’t really know. It’s sort of a question for people wearing suits and ties.

Could you talk about the “third Winchester brother” episode? Should fans be nervous about that?

The fact that [Episode 19] is called “Jump the Shark” … I feel like if people are still stressing out [despite that title], they’re going to keep stressing out no matter what we tell them.

We are aware of the fact that introducing new family members in an advanced season of a show is a crazy-bad idea, or an idea that has a lot of pitfalls. And then having that person tag along in the back of the Impala is probably something the fans wouldn’t respond to positively [laughs]. I just hope the fans have a little faith in Eric about that. The script was really good. It’s a good episode. But it’s not the episode that’s going to alter the formula of “Supernatural” forever.

The “Supernatural” fans are obviously passionate and very committed. Does fan reaction or possible fan reaction come up when you are talking about stories? Does it ever preclude or change anything you might do on the show?

We very much respect the fans’ perspective. You’re making the show for your fans. But you can’t be breaking a story or figuring out a story and thinking exclusively of about your audience while you’re doing it. It’s a sure way to tangle yourself up and block yourself. You have to move forward serving the story first.

We knew that some people were going to be excited about the story [of the brothers growing apart] and some people are going to be strongly averse to some of the decisions we were making. But we knew that all of us in the room felt like this was a really rich area to go to. The ways the story made us feel ambivalent were good. They’re worried about the characters in a good way, and that’s kind of how we felt. It felt dangerous in a way that excited us.

We’re a group of writers who want to take risks. We didn’t want to go into Season 4 and be like, “We don’t want to do that, [because] it scares us.” If it scared us, we wanted to go there and explore it, trusting that the audience was going to trust us.

And we’re just glad that they show up and that they have been supporting us and coming along for the ride. If people weren’t talking and discussing it, then I would be really worried.

It seems like the show got a different reception in the press this year. Why do you think that was?

I don’t know what happened this year. I kind of think maybe it was the angel thing. We did get a lot more coverage in the mainstream press.

Religion plays such an important role in our culture and it’s a role that I think Americans feel strange about. The political process was so front and center this year and the separation of church and state is something that people could talk about all day and all night.

There’s something about talking about issues of faith and issues of God, and “Is there a destiny?” If you find the sweet spot where you can tell stories like that that don’t feel preachy and feel like they are organically coming from your characters, that’s something I think people want to watch. I know I do.

Who will be back before the season is out, will we see more characters we know from the past?

Pamela the psychic is back. There will be a sighting of Sam and Dean’s mother in some form. We’ve seen her in flashbacks, we’ve seen her as an 18-year-old. I don’t want to say too much about the form in which we see her, but I know that rumors are already out there that Samantha Smith [the actress who plays Mary Winchester] is coming back, so I’ll just say that she’s making an appearance. And Jim Beaver is back as Bobby, of course.

Do you want to bring Jeffrey Dean Morgan back at some point if you can?

His massive success is not making it any easier to get him on the show. It’s always something we want to do, we have ideas. I think it’s purely a matter of how busy he is and whether we can make the schedule work [at some point in the future].

Is Ruby part of the last stretch of episodes?

She pops in. We’ll be seeing her again.

Some fans asked, “Why does Sam trust her?” Will we see more of that?

We’ll see more of that.  There’s more to tell about her relationship with Sam.

Will Lilith be back, and in what form?

We will be seeing Lilith. She’s trying to break the seals and she’s been really good at hiding but she won’t be able to hide forever, because she has to be involved in trying to make the seal-breaking happen and the boys are trying to get to her. We’ll see her before the end of the season.

As a little girl or in another form?

We have put her in various bodies and she could pop up in the body of a full grown woman as well. She does at one point.

Source: featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com