Well, hello there Charlie! I have notyou
Welcome everyone to episode 10x11's Gripe Review, or as I would have called it - had I been justifiably stoned and drunk - my analysis of Robbie Thompson's hour long self-stimulation through his pet character/author avatar, Charlie.
Let's get something out of the way so any Charlie fans who might be lingering around these dark and dingy areas of the Net turn tail. I hate Charlie. She is my least favorite character in the Supernatural universe by a long mile. If the showrunners made an offer to bring back a packaged deal of Amelia, Cole, Garth, Marie and Becky in exchange for Charlie meeting a horrible painful death I would sign it. That's how much I hate Charlie.
Why do I hate her so much? Simple, she is a Mary Sue.
Now before you tell me the accusation gets thrown around a lot and that Charlie is not a Mary Sue but a representation of a strong woman and the LGBT community(both of which I’m willing to take on and debunk in the comments) read this review. I will attempt to prove that Charlie is indeed a Mary Sue using only her appearance in this episode and this TV Tropes article as my reference: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySueTropes.
Many viewers don't assign Charlie the label presumably because she doesn’t have one of the major traits of a Sue: she isn't the object of affection for any of the main characters. In fact most are quick to site her sexual orientation. What they overlook however is the fact that Charlie doesn't have to be the object of Sam or Dean's sexual interest in order to be the orbital center of their love. Making her far from a possible girlfriend is a sure way to make them shower her with as much focus and affection as possible without risking the wrath of a love-interest allergic fandom.
Another reason why Charlie is nobody’s girlfriend is her creator. Robbie Thompson is a straight guy. Charlie is his gender swapped self-insert. He doesn't dream of dating any of the protagonists like fanfiction writers do, rather he wants to be one of them, or all of them, and outshine them at everything. That's why his creation is a mix of all three protagonists. She has Dean's wit and badassery, Castiel's adorable dorkyness, and Sam's smarts and tendency to attract the dark and the supernatural. She does all of these better than either of them every time she's around, and they feel so impressed they turn into mouthpieces of her praise and validation.
Why did Thompson gender swap his stand-in? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe he was masking who she really was. Maybe he was pressured by the show’s critics for lack of female characters. We must also not forget that, in her first appearance, Charlie actually did have a function on the show as opposed to being just the Poochy of the Supernatural universe. They needed a hacker and it was a time of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (hence the name of the episode.) She was not a bad addition either as many who now oppose her (including me) liked her and her perky attitude back then. It was only after they gave Thompson free rein to keep bringing her back that the milk went sour. First he made her a queen, literally. Granted it was for a silly role playing game but that didn’t stop everyone from worshiping her. Then she came back with heavy tragic-background baggage, just so she’d earn the tormented-hero badge that every author avatar and pet character carries. This is when things started to slide really sideways and Charlie began hitting her Poochy strides.
Now this episode.
“There’s No Place Like Home” or the "Charlie is a Sue" exhibition
1 - Charlie appears and Sam and Dean drop everything for her (including their long established personalities)
It’s an ordinary day in the bunker. Sam is talking to Cas on the phone, Dean is complaining about healthy food. They are researching the MoC. Then Sam stumbles on a video of Charlie beating up a guy. This is the point when the show goes from Supernatural 10x11 To The Charlie Bradbury Show 1x5.
The boys meet the victim, who is cagey about the incident. They find out he was involved in the accident that created Charlie’s sympathy vehicle all those years ago.[1] Upon hearing this Dean loses it and attacks the guy, a man who is wounded and can’t defend himself. This is the same Dean who remained calm and collected through most of his interrogation scene with Matatron last week. He held it together even when Metatron – the guy who had killed him and brought on most of his current grievances - taunted him relentlessly. Yet here he cracks within seconds. Why? Because Charlie is that important to him, and to Sam too since he just stands there looking confused instead of interfering to prevent the possibility of Dean’s Mark causing a tragedy.
In the car, on their way to the next target, Sam finds out Charlie’s real name is not Charlie but Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, and that she’s after every person that somehow was involved in her tragic-past accident. Dean’s reaction to this information is, “Can you blame her?” Allow me to reiterate, Dean’s reaction to someone gone berserk, and on a spree torturing and killing people without a trial is “Can you blame her?”[2]
2 – Meet Anti-Charlie [3]
After the boys warn the next potential victim they stick around and discover Dark Charlie. This is when the writer’s self-indulgence peaks its high. Thompson wants Charlie to be a protagonist, yet at the same time he lusts after an edgy, bad girl attitude for her. So what does he do? Something even fanfiction writers don’t. He makes two copies of her, one good and one evil. That frees him to pander to both sides of his fantasy without risking his favorite's sympathy magnet.
The person who suffers most from this plot twist is Felicia Day. I don’t know much about her outside her role as Charlie but looking at her Wikipedia page, I found out she was more known as a Youtube personality and show host than an actress. It’s reflected in her work on the show because in Charlie, Felicia was pretty much playing herself, and that was probably the only thing that worked well for the character.
Here Thompson tasks her with playing dual roles and she falls short. Felicia is not Jensen, Jared or Misha. She doesn’t have their experience and caliber to perform as multiple personalities, so her Dark Charlie comes out very flat and unconvincing.
3 - But in their universe Dark Charlie is made of awesome
From Good Charlie we find out that Dark Charlie exists because Original Charlie agreed to split herself in two in order for ‘them’ to win the War of Emerald City against Who-Knows-What. Then the exposition takes a mind blowing "My Immortal" turn.
Apparently the reason Dark Charlie is doing bad things is because, like every other character in a self-insert fanfic, she’s obsessed with Good Charlie (the Sue.) But Dark Charlie herself is a Sue, so Good Charlie admires her. According to her, she’s a badass warrior who single handedly won the war in Oz. This could be they only time in TV's entire history in which a character on a show shills a version of herself.
Dean goes after Dark Charlie, who at this point is in full god-mode [4] and foils him at every turn with the assistance of the writer dumbing Dean down to the IQ level of a 5 year old. Dark Charlie gets to her target without Dean realizing she is going to kill him. The target, Mr. Douchey Richguy, also gets affected by Dark Charlie’s godly powers and apologizes to her profusely before she kills him.
Afterwards Dean and Dark Charlie have a drink, a scene purely there so Thompson could establish the next trope he has planned for his self-insert, i.e. drawing parallels between Dean and Charlie. [5] I’m not going to go into detail about their conversation other than to say the whole purpose for it is to anvil-slam us with the theory that Charlie’s dark and light sides are the same as Dean’s hunter and MoC sides.
4 - Good Charlie is also made of awesome
Turns out Good Charlie can god-mode too [4]. When she and Sam arrive at the doorstep of Clive Dillon's house, he’s been living there for years as Michael Carter, not giving a fig about his alter ego wreaking havoc in Oz. But as soon as Charlie makes eyes at him he folds and agrees to not only call out his other self, but sacrifice himself in order to stop him.
So far the idea was to find half of a broken key to get Dark and Light Charlie back to Oz where they could be fused together. Yet, since up to this point, Charlie hasn't done anything heroic and/or self-sacrificial in the episode, Thompson decides to retcon his own script. In an act similar to what happens at the end of the Divergent series, everything realigns itself toward the singular goal of Charlie having her big moment. The deal changes from returning to Oz to killing the Wizard. Sam and Dean both become stunned imbeciles, one lying on the floor staring at the enemy helpless while the other beats on Dark Charlie when he could just hold her wrists and minimize the damage to Good Charlie. Amid all this insanity Charlie shoots the Wizard’s counterpart and saves the day. Naturally her heroics leave her badly injured, paving the way for Sam and Dean to coddle her to the max and fuss over her like a wounded kitten [1]. We’re treated to 3 full minutes of extreme Charlie angst in which Dark Charlie throws one last praise at her alter ego (“The magic was in you all the time,”) before a laughably bad CGI puts Good and Bad Charlie back together.
5 – She forgives Dean
Back at the MoL cave Sam
6 – What’s left...
I want to point out that nothing that happened in this episode really mattered. The only thing that was saved was Charlie's identity and possibly Oz (if there ever was a danger to Oz and she wasn’t just trolling the Winchesters.) The real world – or the show’s universe – was in no danger except for the mayhem Dark Charlie visited upon it, which would have easily been resolved had Sam and Dean handed both Dark and Light versions of her to the cops.
Kudos – The ratings
Since I started watching the show I've been an advocate for the show’s ratings. I remember Saturday mornings, when I had long, heated conversations with non-fans on the TVbythenumbers’ article comment sections, arguing why the show deserved a better time slot and why its ratings were by no means a reflection of its quality but rather a direct result of CW’s mistreatment of it. I always cheered when the show got good ratings and chewed on my nails when it didn’t.
This week’s episode earned a 0.7 in the 18-49 demo and 2.06M in viewer numbers, a clear nosedive from previous week’s 0.9 and 2.42M. And this time, I cheered for the bad ratings.
My hope is that the rating decline works as a wakeup call for the show’s bosses and shows them that there’s a problem that needs to be fixed. Letting writers run amok in their scripts, turning the show into a showcase of their own favorite characters, or worse, their self-inserts, should have its consequences. Consequences that hit the network's bank accounts are the only ones that are important to TPTB, not fan outrage or reviews like this.
Speaking of writers running amok, next week is Adam Glass’s turn to take the show for a spin. I remember the last time he was in charge of writing teenage Dean he bragged on his twitter how he modeled Dean's story after his own teen years, i.e. another self-insert.[8] I’m sure we’re all going to have a jolly good time watching that fanfiction.
Don’t forget to leave your thoughts in the comment section. Below is the list of tropes I used throughout this article. Have fun reading these too.
References:
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SympatheticSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JerkSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GodModeSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CopyCatSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FixerSue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PuritySue
- http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CanonSue
Tessa
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