Whispers, Spoilers & Speculation Corner: 06/09/17


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Sci-fi Spoilerpalooza
By Heather S. Vina

Sad news for fans of Netflix’s Sense 8/: the show will not be renewed for a third season. So, no news on what happens with the cluster after that cliffhanger in season two!

TV Line has up a list of premiere dates for CBS’ line up.

12 Monkeys: The official trailer is out for season four.

American Gods: The Hollywood Reporter has up an interview with Gillian Anderson on her role as Media.

Arrow: At the Heroes and Villains Fan Fest in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago, Katie Cassidy revealed some details about her new character, Black Siren’s, familial relationships.

Doctor Who: The final ratings are in for “Extremis.” The show received an official rating of 5.53 million viewers, making it the 20th-most-watched program for the week. “The Pyramid At the End of the World” received an Audience Appreciation figure of 82. It’s been confirmed that Rachel Talalay will be directing the Christmas episode. She previously directed the final two episodes of both seasons eight and nine, including the highly acclaimed “Heaven Sent.” As for the next Doctor, Radio Times is now claiming that actors Luke Treadaway (Fortitude) and Sacha Dhawan (An Adventure in Space and Time) are in the running.

The Flash: The show’s villain for next season has been officially revealed as Clifford DeVoe AKA The Thinker, aka “Not a Speedster.”

Game of Thrones: Pop Culture TV has some details on some scenes for season seven. EW has up an interview with HBO programming president Casey Bloys on the programming for the show and its potential prequel.

Jessica Jones: The Marvel Studios Twitter account (unofficial) has some set photos of filming for season two.

Preacher: There’s a new promo out for season two.

Supergirl: The show has cast actress Odette Annable as villain and “world killer” Reign.


Supernatural (Thursday nights, 8pm, CW)
By Paula R. Stiles

Check out my Patreon page. Help me keep this column going, pay Heather, and start doing Supernatural reviews again.

The big news of the week is that the CW’s fall schedule is out and Supernatural season 13 will start on October 12.

The repeats of season 12 continued this week with 12.05 and 12.06, and will be back next week with 12.07 and 12.08.

This fall, the show will remain at 8pm on Thursdays. Its lead-out will be Arrow.

For those following the repeats or otherwise trying to catch up, here is the Season 12 line-up (23 episodes): “Keep Calm and Carry On” (12.01) official photos and press release; “Mamma Mia” (12.02) synopsis and photos; “The Foundry” (12.03) synopsis, official photos, sneak peek, and promo; “American Nightmare” (12.04) synopsis, official photos and promo; “The One You’ve Been Waiting For” (12.05) synopsis, promo and set photos; “Celebrating the Life of Asa Fox” (12.06) synopsis, photos and promo; “Rock Never Dies” (12.07) synopsis, photos and promo; “LOTUS” (12.08) synopsis, photos and promo; “First Blood” (12.09) synopsis, photos, promo and sneak peek, as well as an extended promo; “Lily Sunder Has Some Regrets” (12.10) (this is the one with Alicia Witt) synopsis, photos and promo, and sneak peek; “Regarding Dean” (12.11) tech survey card, synopsis, set photo, promo and official photos; “Stuck in the Middle (With You)” (12.12) tech survey card, synopsis, preliminary photo (this one’s directed by Richard Speight Jr.), and official photos and promo; “Family Feud” (12.13) synopsis; “The Raid” (12.14) tech survey card, synopsis, and promo and official photos; “Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell” (12.15) tech survey card, synopsis, official photos and promo; “Ladies Drink Free” (12.16) tech survey card, synopsis, photos, sneak peeks, and promo; “The British Invasion” (12.17) synopsis, photos, mini-doc, promo and tech survey card; “The Memory Remains” (12.18) tech survey card, synopsis, photos, promo, sneak peek, and title; “The Future” (12.19) tech survey card and partial title card, showing the director is Amanda Tapping, and the writers are Robert Berens and Meredith Glynn, and synopsis and promo, sneak peek, and photos; “Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes” (12.20) tech survey card, showing Richard Speight Jr. returning to direct and synopsis; “There’s Something About Mary” (12.21) synopsis, photos and promo, tech survey card, and directed by John Showalter; and “Who We Are” (12.22) and “All Along the Watchtower” (12.23 – season finale) synopsis, photos and promo, tech survey card, and directed by Robert Singer and written by Andrew Dabb.

Still not much other news this week aside from Mark Sheppard continuing to burn bridges about why he left the show. He claimed that the writers got bored with the character and that current showrunner Andrew Dabb had been looking to kill off Crowley for a while. Sheppard was mainly annoyed by how crappy a job it was and that half of his death scene got cut. He also said his co-stars weren’t at fault and that even though he didn’t think Crowley should have had a mother, he loved working with Ruth Connell. He said he wasn’t sure if she’s coming back, but he definitely isn’t.

I’ve moved my Official live recaps to this site and simul-recapping at Wayward Friends, with reviews to follow. I’m working on the review for the season finale now.

Ratings for the repeats of 12.03 (“The Foundry”) and 12.04 (“American Nightmare”) “were even” at 0.2/1 and 0.75 million.

In DVR+7 ratings, the show rose in the season finale from 0.6 to 1.0 and 1.697 to 2.603 million.


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12 thoughts on “Whispers, Spoilers & Speculation Corner: 06/09/17”

  1. I really love Rick Springfield as Lucifer.
    Wow. Some extraordinary fangirl hate in the episode.
    Dean’s LA rant whilst driving was magic.
    The Presidential episode sucked.

  2. They are really overdoing unnecessary flashbacks this season. Dabb must be a fan.
    I can’t be bothered to learn titles because I care so little about these episodes.
    Sam was so badly written this season. I almost feel sorry for the stans who were sure Sam would get his power.s back. NYET! Sam is not important in this current mytharc iteration except as something Dean must rescue or a dummy that doesn’t listen to Dean or so ridiculously a sympathetic listener that it seems like a parody.
    Mary and Dean are getting the Apocalypse mytharc as Mary!Lucifer and Dean!Michael. They have set it up. Sam will play a powerless Crowley in the foursome. Even if Crowley exists in the altaverse as a double or as a resulted Crowley it won’t be the same.

  3. Berens was gold under Carver. Hell “wrote” Reichenbach under Carver. I think Carver rewrote Reichenbach and rewrote a helluva lot on everyone’should scripts.

    I agree. Why didn’t they just take over the bunker. They really didn’t even need the American hunters who were completely self taught.

  4. It’s too bad that the overall plot sucked so badly, because there were a number of individual episodes I enjoyed. I don’t usually worry too much about plot holes etc unless they get too obvious , but the ones this season were pretty egregious.

    On rewatch I am much less bothered by Dean not leading the charge against the BMOL in 12.22. One of the signs of a really good leader is knowing when to step back and let others take charge, and he had a different agenda. He’d have been horribly conflicted if he felt he had to do that while not knowing Mary’s fate. And the experience was undoubtedly good for Sam.

    I was much less bothered than you, Castiel’s Cat, about the reset to their season 1 personae. In some ways, they were showing their baseline personalities, but they were distinctly more mature than in seasons 1&2. Sam has lost a lot of the toxic anger and is more willing to take responsibility for his actions. And Dean, well, he would never have been able to come clean about his feelings as he did with Mary, when he was a younger man. It’s true he seems a little old for some of his extracurricular activities, but he did seem to be enjoying himself and it’s not really harming anyone. He needs to find his fun where he can. I just wish they didn’t have so many “Dean is stupid or useless” moments because that is not who the character is.

    As for Crowley and Rowena, I will miss them . Rowena was irrepressible, like an extremely twisted Anne Shirley. And Dean will undoubtedly grieve Crowley’s passing. (And can you imagine John’s reaction to that if he were still with us?)

    1. I can live with some plotholes, but I find insulting the audience’s intelligence tiresome and I could almost feel the showrunners’ contempt for the audience seeping through too many of the scripts. I also don’t like stereotyping entire groups of people. The Nazis at least had their reasons for being unrepentently evil, but the LoL were just awful. And there wasn’t any reason for them to be except that the writing was so poor and tone-deaf.

      It’s like, when I watched Wonder Woman on Tuesday, I was really pleased that the scriptwriter(s) and director had done their homework on Ancient Greece, Amazons and WWI, at least enough to give you a flavor that was different from other time periods. And Supernatural has also managed this in the past (albeit not with the Amazons). But not this season.

      I was okay with Dean not leading the charge in 12.22. Hell, Sam had to do *something* in the episode and the attack on the LoL Quonset Hut was merely very difficult, whereas deprogramming Mary looked like an impossible job. It made sense for Dean to do it, since he is arguably the most skilled shaman on the show (even more so than Toni the Twat, who mostly seemed to use dream-walking to mess with people’s minds rather than heal them). Also, Dean and Mary are closer and more alike, just as John spent more time worrying about/fighting with Sam than really interacting with Dean very much. He chose to put her first and was more likely to get through to her. Even if he hadn’t been injured, it would have made sense (though, as it turned out, the most dangerous of the LoL came calling, anyway).

      I look at Dean as the King or Alpha of the Hunters, so it makes sense he’s going to have to learn to delegate from time to time, even if he does continue to lead from the front most times. I wish the show had explored the Hunter hierarchy more this season (as it Dabb kept promising, but didn’t do) because it would have been interesting to see how Dean and Sam fit into the Hunter world. But aside from some teasing here and there, they didn’t bother to develop that.

      I’m hoping Rowena isn’t really dead. That was too many deaths in the season finale, especially on top of the carnage the previous episode.

        1. Jeremy Carver. I do not have twitter.
          Dabb sucks.
          Although I do think he did telegraph that we were heading to an Apocalypse again very well all season.

          Rebekah, I didn’t hate the character resets. I found them jarring. Enjoying more on rematch.

          Snow, I thought episode 5 was Everybody Hates Hitler. You have another title listed???

          Dean had to rescue Mary. And yes he is the experienced dream walker. He was also set up in conflict with both Toni and Letch via previous interactions. Likewise Mary had to be the one to kill Letch and choose to save Dean. The excellent acting overcame the writing.

          I get that they wanted to show that the ragtag loosely (barely) knit hunter community could come together and do anything when it counted. But man was it boring especially when we saw the BMOL facility under seige earlier this season and hunters were the only thing that saved the effete British. Boring. Also wouldn’t Jody et al. Be a bit freaked over summarily killing humans.

          Dabb never puts in the realistic touches to his world building. Wtf

          And poor Sam had to get some action in.

          1. It’s okay. You can list your preferences here. The poll has expired, anyway (Twitter only allows you to have one up for one week).

            “The One You’ve Been Waiting For” is the Hitler episode. “Everybody Hates Hitler” is from season eight.

            As far as Dean and Mary and the LoL, Dean and Mary basically had the final confrontation with the remaining LoL that actually mattered, while Sam, Jody and a bunch of redshirt Hunters mopped up the LoL redshirts. Basically, Sam and Jody got stuck with taking out that storyline trash on that one. But as you say, Sam had to do something.

            Emotionally speaking (as I said before the episode came out), the A story was Dean and Mary vs Twat and Retch (though I’m still salty that Toni died offscreen and Walt didn’t die at all). And I agree that it had to be Mary who took out Retch and saved Dean. Retch had some really inappropriate ideas about his relationship with Mary and her adult son (I’d include Sam here, too, but I don’t think he was even on Retch’s radar). Mary had to be the one to put him down.

            The LoL really, really should have invaded, locked down and made the Bunker their base in the season premiere. That was some truly dumb writing that undercut them right from the start (though Toni and her kitten heels in the season 11 finale didn’t help).

            Since all the emotion was with the Dean and Mary storyline (okay, it was fun to see Henchbitchstress taken out, too), it makes sense that the raid on the LoL Quonset Hut fell flat emotionally. And I agree that it was very strange how Sam and Jody went straight to “Killing humans is okay” with no transition.

            That wasn’t Dabb who wrote the ep, btw. That was Berens.

          2. I don’t think the BMOL were the legends in their own minds that they thought they were. Now Ketch was a killer who liked killing, a specialist in that. The rest, well what’s-his-name forgot to duck when Eileen fired The Colt. I ‘never’ got why Mick just didn’t say that Dagon deflected a bullet and that hit what’s-his-name (First in his Class!) That was the ‘truth’ if not the ‘literal truth’ to me.

      1. I second you on Rowena. She was just twisted enough to be a doubtful ally BUT sometimes she came thru (as in the Regarding Dean episode).

        I recently watched an American Heroes Channel (used to be The Military Channel) show about Hitler and his drug use and his doctor feelgood and he was quite the addict by the time he was the HITLER of WW2. Addicts act in various unpredictable ways and there was a report that he would have ungovernable rages but also be quite silly sometimes (about his dogs for instance). What he had was a cadre of people who believed his message and believed in HIM and then when he exhibited addict behavior they just did not notice (kind of like the way people don’t notice when somebody has small strokes or something and their behavior gradually changes). The crew blamed Doctor Feelgood instead and were always trying to badmouth him to Hitler. Like I said before, due to the drug addiction it appeared understandable to me. And I am starting to rate episodes again by FIGHT SCENES. Like the two-on-two in the Hitler episode or Dean and Ketch in the penultimate. (THAT was a great fight — I wished Dean would’ve killed him though, by jumping towards the gun that he had stored under the table — I hope it was there anyway).

    2. Those are interesting points about the “early season reset” and that Sam has lost his ‘toxic anger’ and Dean is less interested in being ‘so cool.’ (I don’t know how to explain the change in Dean any better than that. He isn’t so intent on ‘proving’ himself now.) I personally always find Sam’s ’empathy’ to feel ‘fake’ because from the beginning (now maybe this is the ‘toxic anger’) I remember in Wendigo (2nd episode when they were actually dealing with ‘saving people’ he spoke to them with empathy and then bitched about guarding the civvies. I never got the feeling that Sam was doing more than skillfully ‘imitating’ empathy — he said he never fit in at school and somebody here I think mentioned he later told Dean that he was ‘always’ out of it at Stanford, that because it was all a lie he could never ‘be’ truly one of the group of friends, all a fake. So from the beginning I got Dean as the one with ‘true’ empathy and a ‘true’ mission of protection while Sam was the one who could ‘project’ better to ‘fit in’ during investigations.)

  5. Missed Everybody Hates Hitler because I forgot that the show was on (I hate Dabb and blame him). It was a cute idea… horribly executed of course. Obvious comparisons between Tbule/Nazi and British MOL. The special familial blood being required for possession reminds us that WinchesterCampbell bloodlines were designed to hold Michael/Lucifer respectively. Female used to revive evil entity mirrors Mary being used by Lucifer eventually.
    Yes I know he has new and improved Nick however possessing Mary is a personal blow against the Winchesters and,both Mary and Lucifer are stranded in bizarro Apocalypse.

    This concept of vengeance posession was emphasized in the next episode, as well as family drama, “good” versus “bad” mommies; however for me the episode did a good job showing the loose family of outsiders that comprise American hunters and their fond comrade of course all of this is in sharp contrast trust to the BMOL.

    Obvious hint at kill or be killed organizational structure of BMOL because we are meant to contrast American hunters to them. The idea that killing one’s comrades is,bad is hammered home.

    So as much as I think the writing has been mired by cheesiness or potholes and the abrupt reset of many of the characters’ personae to season 1, I do think that Dabb did pretty well with subtext and anvil dropping.

    Oh…. and the Foundry, the psychic episode and Asa episode hammer in Mary/Lucifer with repeated dialogue references to she is possessed and the Hitler episode of course has the female character’s blood needed to resurrect him. Was the Words with Friends Lucifer reference in Hitler as well.

    I have never thought that this ship sailed and with Lucifer and Mary trapped in an Apocalypse u overseeing together with Lucifer desperate for revenge (presumably) I think it will happen WHICH MEANS DEAN!Michael will happen. They are out of options.

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