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Q: Supernatural was famously only supposed to last five seasons, but now it’s coming back for a sixth. Good or bad idea? — Laura, Oakland, CA

The Oracle Speaks:

What’s the network’s take on the show’s the sixth season?

Sera Gamble

“We looked at Supernatural last year, and creatively, I think it had its strongest season ever,” says Dawn Ostroff, the President of Entertainment at the CW. “We also saw that the ratings went up, and Eric Kripke, who has been a fantastic creator/executive producer of the show, felt that the show really should go on, that he still had more stories to tell. And Sera Gamble, who has been a number two on the show for a while, was eager to kind of step up and take on the role of executive producer. While Eric is still involved on a day-to-day basis, Sera is really running the show.”

Some of what Ostroff says is, of course, is nonsense. While some of the individual episodes last season were terrific, the season-long arc was very disappointing, and the finale was outright-bad.

And since it resulted in a pretty whimper-like conclusion to creator Eric Kripke’s much-heralded “five-year plan” for the series, it makes me question how just seamless or well-thought-out that plan ever really was.

But I still love the show, and given that its ratings (and its prime timeslot right after The Vampire Diaries) landed it a sixth season, I think it’s probably a good idea that Kripke isn’t at the helm. That gives us as good a shot as any that it’ll be an effective reboot, which the show kinda needs.

And let’s face it: Kripke has been complaining in interviews for years now how overwhelming the job of the day-to-day running of a show was. It’s clear the man has serious burn-out.

So what will the sixth season hold?

Ostoff says, “When they came in and pitched us ideas for the season, we were really excited about the direction that they wanted to go in, a bit of a throwback going back to the first season, a bit of a switch in the characters where Sam is a little bit more like Dean and Dean is going to be a little bit more like Sam. But they had some innovative ways to approach the season. We all thought it probably will be maybe even stronger than last year.”

I’m not sure what any of that means, but I’m mildly intrigued.

Q: This new Teen Wolf MTV series. Is it really based on the old Michael J. Fox movie? How closely? — Michael, Gig Harbor, WA

The Oracle Speaks:

As chance would have it, we wrote an article about this exact topic earlier this week.

The Oracle has seen the pilot (which is pretty good) and heard from the producers. How much is it based on the 1985 movie? Very, very loosely — like, it’s using the same title. It’s not a silly comedy, but is instead much more serious, focusing more on the werewolves and the action and the romance.

Almost like … oh, what’s that obscure little teen vampire project that you never ever hear anything about? Oh, right: Twilight.

Can’t you just imagine the Teen Wolf pitch meeting? Someone came to them and said, “We think you should do a TV remake of the old movie Teen Wolf, and we–”

And MTV said, “Done! Greenlit! How fast can we get it made?”

Posey (left), Haynes

After the success of Twilight, and the fact that The Vampire Diaries is now the CW’s most successful show, I guess MTV would be crazy not to give Teen Wolf a whirl (as much as that pains me to say, passionate hater of sequels and “reboots” that I am).

I’ll also give the show credit for one thing: Tyler Posey, who plays the werewolf in question, is actually a teenager (he’s 18). What a concept!

No word on what his abs look like.

And in an example of a weird coincidence or extremely unimaginative casting, Colton Haynes, who currently plays a werewolf on The Gates, also stars in Teen Wolf. Haynes is playing the school bully (although he’s not a werewolf, at least not in the pilot).

Q: What can we expect for the final season of Smallville? –Timothy, Newark, NJ

The Oracle Speaks:

The big villain of the year is Darkseid, and returning characters include Brainiac, Supergirl, and Hawkman.

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• The Television Critics Association meetings are in Los Angeles this week, with all the networks showing off their shiny new shows to critics. In the genre field, the news has been a bit dismal to this point, but The CW today held a Supernatural panel. It’s a lot of monsters this year, and the connections of monsters to Heaven, which they swear will make sense. I’m really interested in what they were saying about the faerie episode, because I’m unclear on how they could be worried about offending little people, unless we define “faerie” very differently.

• Things I was unaware of until recently: 1)My checking account balance; 2) Jones Pure Cane Soda Berry Lemonade; 3) and Sinbad the Fifth Voyage. I’m not sure I saw voyages 1-4, but I’ve been busy. The effects in this teaser look really cheesy, but it has Sir Patrick Stewart, so how bad could it be?

• Here’s the deal on Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch – I don’t understand the deal on Sucker Punch. Are they insane, is this VR, is it fantasy (I saw a dragon), what’s going on? Or is it just an excuse to get hot young girls in their underwear for fancy fight sequences?

• British character actor Charles Dance has been cast a the powerful Tywinn Lannister in HBO’s Game of Thrones series. I’m trying to place him in my distant memory of the books, but as I recall, he’s not a nice person.

• The SyFy remake of Being Human, about a vampire, a ghost and a werewolf trying to live a normal life, has begun filming in Montreal. This amuses me for several reasons. First, the American remake is being made in Canada. That the nearly pitch-perfect series is being remade at all. Then there’s this interview with the original cast at Comic-Con, where Russell Tovey seems quite determine to be the only werewolf in our lives.

• So the principle behind Guillermo del Toro’s Haunted Mansion movie is something called the Hatbox Ghost. If you’re not sure what that is, don’t worry, you’re not alone. It was pulled from the ride almost immediately after it went online because they couldn’t make it work. There are cults around the legendary Hatbox Ghost. I have to wonder if you can center a movie on a mere piece of the ride that was a failure anyway.

• Ursula Le Guin is notoriously protective of her stories, and has in the past regretted anyone giving their interpretation of them. But a film student wrote her a handwritten letter asking permission to turn one of her short stories into a movie, and she’s granted permission. The film was made for only £12,000 and recycles props from Thunderbirds. The old ways are sometimes the best.

• Red Riding Hood, starring Amanda Seyfried, is going to be a fantasy dream, reuniting fans of Harry Potter with Gary Oldman (Sirius Black), Julie Christie (Madame Rosemerta), plus Twilight’s Billy Burke (Charlie Swan), and a host of other fantasy favorites. You really need to go look at the costumes though – the purple velvet is priceless!

• Tangled (teaser poster above) is Disney trying to strike a balance between the speed and cost effectiveness of CGI while retaining that Disney animation look. Here’s how they went about it.

Three Torches (Out of Five)

Full disclosure: I’m not a huge fan of “novelizations” — usually quickly-done novels based on popular movies or TV shows.

That said, while they’ve never gotten much respect in critical or literary worlds, novelizations have their place in the greater world, especially among uber-fans of whatever show or movie is being novelized.

A new Supernatural novelization, Supernatural: The Unholy Cause, will probably satisfy these fans — but I can’t imagine it will get them too excited either.

The book is set at some point in Season 5 — Sam has released Lucifer from his prison, but the Apocalypse hasn’t yet officially started.

The boys visit a Civil War reenactment where the “reenacting” is frightening real: people are dying, in a way much like soldiers really did in a battle over a hundred years earlier. It turns out there are ancient artifacts at work here, and a group of demons who are up to no good. The brothers, of course, must put a stop to it all.

In a way, novelizations are a bit of a “cheat,” because the characterizations — which are among the most difficult part of any novel — are all firmly preestablished. But there’s a danger there too: the author of the novelization must effectively capture characters that fans love and know very, very well.

Here author Joe Schreiber does a fine job. Dean really sounds like Dean, Sam sounds like Sam, and Castiel is there for (sometimes very funny) comic relief. (Sam and Dean present themselves as “Agents Townes and Van Zandt.”)

But it must be said: we don’t really learn anything new about any of them. (Part of me suspects this must be required, that when authors sign novelization contracts, they must agree to follow a list of very specific conditions.)

And the story itself? It passable, and it does read like an episode of the series, although a pretty by-the-numbers one. I did like the appearance of one of the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas, now, naturally, an evil artifact.

Bottom line? If you’re a die-hard Supernatural fan, desperate for a “forgotten” stand-alone episode of the show, you could probably do worse.

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• It’s James Franco in the Planet of the Apes prequel. Oddly, he’s not playing an ape, despite the fact that he’s already halfway there with the scruffy facial hair.

• 30 Days director Morgan Spurlock is teaming up with some guy named Joss Whedon (and also Stan Lee) to do a documentary about Comic-Con. But honestly, what is there to say? So what if they drew 125,000 participants last year and invented the notion of the modern “fan” convention?

• Have you guys heard of Blood Oath? Yeah, me neither. Apparently it’s a pretty successful vampire-secret-agent novel, and it’s just been optioned for a film. Because you know what there’s not enough of? Vampire movies and TV.

• While we’re on the subject of recently-optioned movies, a short called Cup of Tears has been making the rounds, and the rights have just been snatched up by Universal. I don’t really know what it’s about, but the imagery is so up my alley with its majestic Japanese landscapes and abundance of samurai swords.

• So Sean Astin is returning to the role of Samwise Gamgee. Don’t get too excited: it’s for a video game.

• After next season, Smallville is no more — at least according to Tom Welling.

• I am so mad! I’m in the New York Public Library at least once a week, but I wasn’t lucky enough to go on the day when the Ghostbusters came a-callin’. Ah, well. Maybe next time.

• What’s happening on the next season of Supernatural? Here’s the tease:

Season six will be a season of mystery and shadow. Heaven and Hell have been left in complete disarray since the apocalyptic events of season five. And now, monsters, angels and demons roam across a lawless and chaotic landscape. And so Dean Winchester, who has retired from hunting and sworn never to return, finds himself being pulled back into his old life - pulled back by none other than Sam Winchester, who has escaped from Hell. The two reunite to beat back the rising tide of creatures and demon-spawn, but they quickly realize that neither are who they used to be, their relationship isn’t what it used to be, and that nothing is what it seems.

• This is kinda cool. A graphic designer has created a poster with the outline of every animated Disney character, each in its estimated size. Click on it to see its full, impressive length.

• And oh yeah, there was something about Megan Fox being dumped from Transformers 3, but honestly, does anyone care?

Four and a half Torches (Out of Five)

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the “Swan Song” episode of Supernatural.

I liked the episode, but I confess: I really wasn’t crazy about this season.

As an individual episode, it was fine. It had a nice opening, connecting things back to both Chuck (the prophet-author of the Supernatural novels/chronicles) and Dean’s Chevy Impala.

I liked the set-up where Sam says, “I let [Lucifer] out. I gotta put him back in.” And I liked that Dean finally seems to truly trust him again. (But hadn’t we’d already covered all this several times in previous episodes? Did we need to waste time in the all-important finale to go over it again?)

I thought Jared Padalecki had some nice acting moments, playing both Sam and Lucifer using him as a vessel, and the scene where he and/or Lucifer kill all his childhood enemies was absolutely chilling/fantastic.

(Watching Bobby and Castiel get killed, meanwhile, was not fun at all. I love both those characters, and that was really difficult to see, their deaths so casually done.)

The show also played fair in that they promised early on that Sam would voluntarily choose to become Lucifer’s vessel — and sure enough, he did. (But didn’t they prophecize the same thing about Dean voluntarily becoming Michael’s vessel? It’s a pet peeve of mine where a show establishes that prophecies are “real” and unbreakable — but then simply has them not come true with no real explanation why.)

Finally, I liked the ambiguous ending, even if it was also sort of a cheat, both plot-wise and thematically. How nice: maybe God isn’t dead after all. That does contradict quite a bit of what we learned this year, but hey, maybe it’s time the show lightened up a bit on its patented darkness/cynicism. This might have been the last episode of the series, after all.

But all in all, it was a fairly underwhelming conclusion to a season that did, after all, promise the Apocalypse. And as I’ve worried in these last few episode reviews, this action here wasn’t really connected to all, or even most, of the episodes of the season. It’s like they set up this terrific, riveting storyline at the beginning of the season, then went away for twelve episodes, only to come back and say, “Oh, right, we have to finish the story now, don’t we?”

When Lucifer mentioned how he never lies, it reminded me how much I liked that character at the beginning of the season, how the so-called “Prince of Lies” never does lie: he tells people the absolute truth (and that’s how he charms them, but also why they hate him).

But this also reminded me how little we’ve seen of the character this season, how he was pretty much wasted.

In past years, when a season of Supernatural was over, I was up half the night, buzzing about how brilliant and chilling and perfectly realized the finale was.

I wish I felt that way this year, but instead, I guess I’ll just go to bed.

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the “Two Minutes to Midnight” episode of Supernatural.

Okay, this week was quite a bit better than last week. I liked the twist that they didn’t have to kill Death to get his ring — that Death has been seething over the fact that Lucifer has magically bound him to the Apocalypse, and has been just waiting for Dean to catch up with him, so he could help Sam and Dean get Lucifer back into his prison.

I also like that the season is shaping up to be a test of Sam’s ultimate “mettle”: his ability to stand up to Lucifer. This is really important, since the whole reason why Lucifer is free is because of Sam’s weakness all last season.

It also doesn’t hurt that this season has, in large part, been about Dean learning to trust Sam again. Being able to stand up to Lucifer — infused with demon blood, no less — would pretty much bring the scales back to even, wouldn’t it?

But I confess: I’m still not feeling the urgency. It’s the penultimate episode — next week is the season finale — and I wish I could say I was sitting on the edge of my seat, and I’m just not.

It’s a real contrast compared to, well, every other season of this show.

Which is kind of weird, because the stakes this season are even higher than they’ve been in the past. This isn’t just the opening of a gate to hell: this is the frickin’ Apocalypse.

Yes, I get that Sam and Dean have been through all this before so, of course, there’s going to be a sense of “been there, done that,” a sense of world-weariness in everything they do.

But come on: Sam could die here. If that’s not enough to freak Dean (and me, the audience) out, what is?

Did it feel like it was “two minutes to midnight” to you (the title of the ep)? It didn’t to me. I felt like I was watching one of those shows, a Charmed or a Ghost Whisperer, where you pretty much know everything’s that’s going to happen next, and you also know that everything’s going to be just fine in the end.

That is so not how this show has been in the past.

As I said last week, there’s still this sense that they’re just sort of running out the clock on the season. Maybe next week will prove me wrong and show me how these episodes all tie seamlessly together. I honestly really hope so.

The episode did have at least one major highlight: the scene where Bobby admits that he bartered his soul to Crowley, and Sam wants to know if Bobby kissed him (since a kiss is usually required to seal the deal on these things), was laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Bobby: Why’d you have to take a photo?

Crowley: Why’d you use tongue?

Also nice was when Sam and Dean are having one of their patented heart-to-hearts, and Crowley quips: “Annnnnd … scene.” That made me laugh — very meta.

And I did ultimately like the “My Dinner With Andre Death” scene, even if it didn’t have quite the punch of Sam and Dean’s previous conversations with deities.

Onward and upward! Next week, all is revealed.

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

In the 2008 Supernatural episode “Ghostfacers,” Sam and Dean encounter a group of hapless ghost investigators seeking to create their own reality show called Ghostfacers.

Now The CW has finally gotten around to giving them their own show (of sorts), in a series of ten short webisodes called — yes — Ghostfacers.

Truthfully, I wasn’t impressed by the first webisode or two. It seemed like just the latest of a zillion “fratboy”-type humor projects. You know the type I mean: pathetic loser-guys lust after women who turn out to be (a) complete bimbos or (b) geniuses who proceed to show them up at every turn.

Nothing wrong with this type of humor, of course — it’s just been done before. A lot. From Family Guy to the movies of Judd Apatow, sometimes it seems like this is the only kind of comedy there is anymore.

Even worse, most of the Ghostfacer jokes struck me as only mildly funny.

What I didn’t expect from Ghostfacers is that they’d actually take their “ghost” storyline seriously.

The webseries’ season has one overall “story arc”: the Ghostfacers are investigating the long-ago death of a starlet (played by Nip/Tuck’s “Kimber” Kelly Carlson) in an abandoned movie theater. And as with Supernatural itself, Ghostfacers mixes outright comedy with some genuine thrills.

This part of the show is very well-done; I found it a lot more successful than the comedy. They’ve only released five of the ten episodes, but I’m looking forward to seeing the rest.

If, like me, you’re not too impressed with the first couple of episodes, stick with it: it’s gets better.

WATCH GHOSTFACERS HERE

Three Torches (Out of Five)

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the “The Devil You Know” episode of Supernatural.

I’ve had this sinking feeling all year long that the producers didn’t have a handle on their season-long story arc, that they had only a vague idea where they were going and, as a result, have resorted to pulling individual episodes out of their ass.

Either that, or they simply hadn’t come up with enough story, not for a whole 22-episode season, and they’ve had to resort to padding.

Sure, some of the individual episodes have been good or even great. But the season story-arc isn’t moving forward nearly fast enough. Sometimes, like this week, it’s felt like it hasn’t moved at all.

In this, the third to last episode of the season, all the pieces of the puzzle should have been established, and Sam and Dean should be starting to put them together.

Instead, we’re still getting new pieces — and, at least so far, I’m getting the distinct impression that most of the pieces they’ve given us up until now aren’t going to be relevant to the story.

The title of the episode is “The Devil You Know,” and, in fact, we get the return of two demons that Sam and Dean know: Brady, a character from Sam’s (pre-show) past,  and Crowley, a character returning from earlier in the season.

We also get a lot more talk, talk, talk. I knew I wouldn’t like this episode when Crowley found them, and knew everything they’d said and done since we saw him ten episodes ago, because he’d hidden a medallion in their car.

WTF? If such an all-powerful medallion existed, wouldn’t Sam and Dean at least know about it? Wouldn’t they have searched for it in their car? What’s in all those books Sam’s always reading anyway? They’re up against Lucifer, for God’s sake.

This was a pure plot cheat.

And worse than the fact that we’re still getting new pieces to the puzzle, the pieces are simply being handed to Sam and Dean; they’re not actually earning them.

Last week, Sam and Dean were simply handed, out of the blue, from Gabriel the solution to Lucifer’s defeat: collect the four rings of the horsemen of the Apocalypse and use them to lock Lucifer into a “prison.”

This week, Crowley pops up to help them find Death (or so he says).

Both these developments make Sam and Dean look passive. What would they have done if these two demons hadn’t shown up? Just wait around for another demon to show up?

Then we also have Sam acting out of character, with Sam impulsively locking Dean in the bathroom to kill Brady, not only putting their plan at risk, but also violating the trust that he had finally – finally — started building up again with Dean.

Fortunately, Dean was acting out of character too, immediately forgiving Sam. Did Dean forget about, well, the entire last season of betrayal?

And I’ve lost track of how many times we’ve seen a demon torment Sam with the “You’re just like me!” speech.

This show is sooooo spinning its wheels.

Maybe they can still pull this off. Maybe everything that’s happened so far will all come magically together in the last two episodes. If I’m wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it.

But alas, I don’t think I’ll have to.

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