Staying In

"Fairies? Seriously? Bring it!"

Updated 10/27/10 – The CW has a released an official description for the episode, titled “Clap Your Hands If You Believe,” airing Nov. 19: “While Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) are investigating a UFO sighting, Dean is abducted from a crop circle.  However, when he awakens, he discovers he isn’t dealing with aliens, but fairies!  Unfortunately, only Dean can see the fairy that keeps attacking him which makes tracing and stopping them difficult.”

Back before the premiere of Supernatural‘s fifth season, I presented a list of my top 5 episodes written by Ben Edlund. Since that post, Edlund wrote two more fantastic episodes I wish I could have included – “Abandon All Hope” and “The End.” I actually may just need to create a whole new list because Edlund revealed at the show’s Comic-Con panel last Sunday that he’s working on an episode about fairies that is “rich with absurdity.” Edlund and creator Eric Kripke revealed more details about the episode in the press room prior to the panel, all of which have me convinced it’s a lock to become one of my favorite Ben Edlund episodes. And they’ll be no mistaking this episode as anybody else’s other than Ben Edlund’s.

It’s “absurd and nuts and very Edlundian and not what you expect and not Tinkerbell,” said Kripke, not that Tinkerbell won’t be involved somehow.

“I see a moment perhaps where the boys have to fight a tiny pinprick of light that ultimately is Tinkerbell,” Edlund said during the panel.

Back in the press room, Kripke described the episode as “really violent and in a way that we think people will write us letters. We think it’s a really politically incorrect point of view on fairies and leprechauns and goblins.”

“It’s going to be a very delicate tightrope to not deeply offend little people,” Edlund added before laughing. He seemed so tickled by his own wild imagination, he broke out into laughter several times during our conversation. Thankfully, the show seems to be taking advantage of Edlund’s extremely, bizarrely creative mind once again by letting him run free with this episode.

“We decided it was time for Ben to get away from the mythology and write a very, very Ben episode,” said Kripke, who’s excited for the episode, even though other people might think he and Edlund are a little nuts.

“I’m thrilled by it because it’s so bananas!” he exclaimed. “When we pitched it to [executive producer] Bob Singer, he looked at us like we were tripping balls. And I think we were.”

But Kripke and Edlund aren’t just pulling this episode out of thin air (or their tripping balls-addled brains). Edlund confessed that he was obsessed with gnomes and fairies as a child. And like all of the show’s episodes, this one will be based on real, dark fairy lore.

“Fairy lore is binary. It’s got the good guys who live in your house and then it’s got the bad ones,” said Edlund. “It deals with things like kelpings and cobalts and goblins and the dark. They will take your child and drag them away. That’s the fairies we’re going to use. It’s rich with darkness. Fairies did this thing for a lot of folklore of being the bogeyman and the monsters.”

Later, when I jokingly asked when Bad Horse – Edlund’s creation for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog – would be appearing on the show, Edlund said, “There might be in essence a cameo for Bad Horse in the fairy one. There are so many bad horses in fairy lore. Never get on a horse in Wales because, man, they will just take you right into the ocean and drown you. They’re obsessed with drowning people. I hadn’t thought of it, but that’s a good question for me to steal now.”

I’ll be waiting for my residual checks.