“We had a lot of ideas in both short and long term. I remember that, at the end of the second season, we had hoped to put Andi to work at the DMV with Gladys. We love Gladys. Christine Willes is just so much fun, and we thought she and Andi had such a great way of sparring with each other that that could have been great.”
As for Sam and the question of who his father really was, this one’s a doozy: “If you remember, Dad wasn’t dead. And there was a whole reason why he wasn’t dead. Basically, the whole premise that never actually had the chance to come out was the idea that Dad was a demon, who made a deal with the Devil. He fell in love with Sam’s mom and wanted to marry her. So the deal was, fine, you’re not a demon anymore. He was never fully human, either, which is why you can’t kill him. So, in the pilot, when he said he was really sick and made a deal with the Devil, he wasn’t 100% lying nor 100% telling the truth. And this is the reason why Sam is special: Sam is part human, part demon.”
Boom.
“Sam was led to believe he was the Devil’s son, but that wasn’t true. That’s not the reason Sam had powers — the powers came from his father. His father was really his father. And part of his deal was that he was never really allowed to tell Sam the truth, and that’s the reason why he says to him ‘there’s more to this than I can tell you.’ And part of what we tried to get out of all of this was that Sam really is special. That’s the reason why, at the end of the last season, Steve comes to him and says Sam is caught between good and evil. What we hoped to get out of the third season was what part did Sam have to play? Sam’s whole existence, and the reason the Devil was paying so much attention to him and hanging out with him so much was because there was a reason: Sam was half-human and half-demon, and the Devil was really worried that this kid was going to be his downfall. If you look at what the Devil is doing throughout the series, he’s trying to tempt Sam to be bad. And he’s trying to tempt him to embrace this, that what you’re doing isn’t so bad. The whole point was that if he can turn Sam bad, the Sam isn’t a threat anymore.”
This really puts everything into perspective, and at the same time makes me slap my forehead and say “of course!” This is why Sam is doing what equates to a good deed for humankind, while at the same time doing the work of evil. If he can enjoy this power and embrace it, the the Devil wins. The reveal of who/what Sam’s dad really is, they tell me, is what was written on those burned pages.
Getting off the subject of that burning secret (no pun intended), I asked if there was ever a thought to bring in a God character to the show. “We talked a little about bringing the Archangel Michael in, but no, I actually think I never wanted to see God. And there was discussion of whether or not we wanted to see Hell, and what that would be like. And it wouldn’t be like … we never really settled on anything. What would it be like? It’s not all fire and brimstone or whatever … and what is Limbo like? There’s a lot that we mused about that, if we had the time, we probably would have done. How do you do Hell in a way that fits into our world and in a way that you’d never think of.”
For me, the first thing that comes to mind is an office building. While I had them here, I had to ask them about one of my old theories of the show, that Sock was more that he appeared. Maybe an angel, whether he knew it or not?
“Tyler Labine had this whole storyline worked out that he and Ricky Gonzalez were like archangels. But we had never intended for that, so I don’t think so. I really think it was OK that they were really just good friends helping out their buddy. There’s something very virtuous about how those three would have done anything for each other. I almost like it better that they weren’t divine, that they weren’t anything other than human that maybe had a higher purpose, but they were just human.”
As I said to them, that really did fit into the story much better than my silly theory: these guys are what connects Sam to the “real” world, to humankind. This is how, in the end, he’d have that decision to make.
“Other than where we knew where we were headed, and we knew of the secrets of who Sam really was and what the Devil was doing, we sort of left that open. And we did that because, I find that kind of paralyzing to have too much worked out ahead of you. It would have been a happy ending — he would have gotten the girl and he would have gotten out of his deal with the devil, and we would have found a way to get there.”
That’s where most of the talk of Reaper ended, and where I got into some talk about working with Joss Whedon and Dollhouse, the jump to comic books as a continuing storytelling medium for TV shows, the online-only revolution and a little on their new show, Cutthroat. Stay tuned for all of that soon!
