Chapter Text
METATRON: You wrote your autobiography.
CHUCK: Ish. I mean, there are chapters, it's kind of a loose structure, uh, but, I don't know, something's missing. I'm—I'm stuck.
[...]
CHUCK: Okay, so... what do I do?
METATRON: Hold up a mirror and show us who you are. Warts and all. Write for an audience of one... you.
CHUCK: Dance like no one else is watching.
–11x20, “Don’t Call Me Shurley”
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BILLIE: After God made the world, he couldn’t stop. He wanted more. But he needed to create a perfect harmony… a Swiss watch, so this world could keep tick, tick, ticking in his absence. He had no choice but to build himself into the framework. It’s his only weakness.
[...]
BILLIE: I told you, Dean. You and your brother have work to do. This is your destiny. You are the messengers of God’s destruction.
–15x12, “Galaxy Brain”
Saving people, hunting things, the family business. In Supernatural’s manifesto, “family” is by far the biggest keyword that defines the core of its character dynamics. The concept of family initially had a narrow focus solely about the Winchesters’ lives; over time, it expanded to include the importance of chosen and found family. But at its heart, Supernatural was always primarily a story about Sam and Dean Winchester, and their brotherhood… or so the conversation tends to go. At the risk of being accused of blasphemy, it must be said that citing Supernatural's original premise as having been solely “about brothers” isn’t quite accurate, and it never has been. From the very start, the show was centered around parents and children, and the cycles of trauma that are perpetuated when love is tied to expectations, cost, and sacrifice.
The Winchester family origin story is built on these concepts. Mary Campbell and John Winchester are a match made in Heaven–literally, via Cupid–and manipulated by Hell. Mary feels forced into making a deal with the demon Azazel after her parents are killed, and she saves John’s life at the expense of her future son’s safety. It’s an attempt to finally break herself out of the cycle and be free of the toxic hunter culture, because she wants her children to grow up living a life entirely different from the one her parents forced her into; but, by design, the result is the exact opposite. Ten years later because of the deal, baby Sam is given demon blood, and Mary’s death throws John into the hunting life with Sam and Dean in tow by extension. And so, the cycle of trauma and sacrifice between parents and children is orchestrated to continue, all for the sake of a story that can turn Dean and Sam into cosmic chess pieces.
Even though John Winchester’s presence is rarely on screen, it’s felt at every turn and is the catalyst for the show’s plot. Sam and Dean hit the road together in search of their father, and they save people along the way by using their father’s journal as a guide to hunt things. All of the initial interpersonal conflict in the story centers around the brothers’ relationship to their father and how it’s affected their relationship with each other. This is reflected repeatedly in the “monster of the week” case format and the side characters’ storylines too, with the plots mirroring or commentating on the Winchesters’ lives, often with cases that involve parents and children.
As the core plot moves away from the case format and into Heaven vs. Hell and other myth-arc machinations, Mary and John are still frequently mentioned in relation to Sam and Dean–often through villainous taunts and temptations that prey upon the brothers’ trauma. The overarching cosmological plots also center parents and children: the demons (mostly) serve Lucifer, who they see as their father; the angels (partially) serve God, who is the Father. The idea of God/Chuck being disappointing, an absent father, and an apathetic “deadbeat dad” is directly paralleled to John more than once. And one can’t forget Purgatory and Eve, the “mother of all monsters,” tossing another parent dynamic into the cosmological mix.
So while the main story certainly centers on two men who are brothers, what it’s about –the bones of its original premise from season one, and the foundation upon which the story is built—is the fact that they are sons. Through the hard work of dozens of writers over fifteen years, this was only further emphasized as the story expanded and characters grew, and by the end it had been deliberately centralized anew.
Here are two of the show’s consistent primary themes: siblings who struggle with stifling codependency and imbalance; and a cycle of violence between parents and children that’s fueled by the burden of expectations and intergenerational trauma. There are other primary themes in the story, but these are two large ones. Ignoring either gives only a partial picture, and it doesn’t factor in how the two intersect to influence the characters’ dynamics.
That intersection–the summation of these two themes together–is the “Swiss watch” that Billie refers to, as seen in the quote from 15x12 above. Chuck’s Framework™️ is a combination of these two themes. Calling that Framework out in the text—as well as tying it to Chuck as the villain—is a highly effective method the writers used to commentate on the show as a whole.
Those two themes are cited as Chuck’s favorites for a reason, and we're told that they’re embedded in his Creation to act as a reflection of who he is. Intra-narratively, the origin of the world of Supernatural that the characters live in is built on both themes; extra-narratively, so is the show itself.
These themes permeate the story from beginning to end. In the narrative, that’s because Chuck was only able to create the world and his story after doing two very specific, interconnected things: locking away his sister by sacrificing his favorite son.