Hey guys, sorry I missed last week. It was…a week. I still wanted to sneak one last newsletter in before December hit, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to be devoting the entire month to year-end lists (I love year end lists). In the meantime, if there’s any subject you guys would be interested in seeing me write about once the new year rolls around, feel free to drop me a comment or reply to this email and let me know! I would love to make this a conversation!
In any sort of ongoing story featuring an ensemble cast, certain characters tend to receive their own spotlight episodes or storylines that focus on their lives and personalities and give them a chance to shine. As a way to balance out your cast and make sure every character gets a little bit of focus, it only makes sense. Yet, over time I’ve noticed a phenomenom I’m going to call the “out of focus highlight.” This is when a character is, ostensibly, the star of a certain storyline, yet they end up sidelined throughout most of it.
I first noticed this back during the original Teen Titans animated series in the early 2000s. Though largely episodic, each season would devote a four or five episode storyline to one of the main characters that would culminate in the season finale. Season One was devoted to Slade’s obsession with Robin, Two to the star-crossed tale of Beast Boy and Terra, and Three to Brother Blood’s attempts to break Cyborg.
Season Four was to be Raven’s season, finally diving into her often-hinted-at backstory and the monstrous being who is her father, Trigon the Terrible. Yet, in this five episode storyline, Raven vanishes about halfway through episode three, is entirely absent for episode four until the final seconds as a cliffhanger, then spends almost all of episode five as an amnesiac child. Sure, it’s technically Raven’s storyline, a tale driven by her backstory and resolved by her newfound independence, but she’s absent for a significant chunk of the story, many of its most climatic scenes in fact, with the perspective shifting to Robin in those moments instead, essentially making it a duel Raven/Robin story.
(The original comic book storyline this was based off of, The New Teen Titans’ “The Terror of Trigon,” was even worse, with Raven flat out dying early in the storyline in order to resurrect Trigon and not returning to the series until probably two years later real time.)
Luckily, Raven at least received ample screen time and spotlight episodes throughout the rest of the series, but the same can’t be said for other victims of the out of focus highlight. Today I wanted to talk about one victim specifically, a character I really wanted to see more from: Charlie, from DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
Legends was the third interconnected superhero show to air on the CW, and when it debuted it was mostly treated as a dumping ground for supporting characters from Arrow and The Flash who were fan favorites, yet had reached the end of their stories on their original series. It took until a few episodes into its second season for Legends to find its own tone and voice, but when it did it easily became the highlight of the network, a show that’s silly and absurd yet heartfelt and full of well-observed and constructed characters, and that knows how to keep its plots moving swiftly where other CW series tend to get bogged down and repetitive.
Season Four of Legends revolved around the team’s mission to capture hoards of magical creatures released from Hell and into the timestream, and one such creature is a shapeshifter named Charlie. At one point in her introductory episode Charlie takes on the appearance of the Legends’ former teammate, Amaya Jiwe/Vixen, and becomes stuck in the form, allowing Amaya’s actress, Maisie Richardson-Sellers, to remain a regular on the series while portraying a totally new character. In fact, Charlie is Amaya’s complete opposite, loud and anarchic in comparison to Amaya’s straight-laced, somewhat meek exterior. Charlie is also a punk rocker, first introduced playing with her band in a legit 80s punk club (in the legit 80s). To say I immediately fell in love with the character would be an understatement.
Charlie initially looked to be a pretty big part of the season’s overall storyline, with her status as one of the very magical creatures the rest of the team was chasing giving her a unique and important perspective. Yet, about halfway through the season she started to fall more and more into the background, for a few different, frustrating reasons.
The first reason was that Nate’s father, played by Back to the Future’s own Biff Tannen, Tom Wilson, was originally intended to be the villain of the season, but the crew fell in love with Wilson and threw out and rewrote the back half of the season in order to change his fate, leading to a somewhat messy and scattered second half. The second reason comes down to another new character introduced in Season Four, Mona Wu.
Now, I like Mona, but she came to dominate the season in a way none of the other characters — and certainly not Charlie — ever did. While the writers were able to introduce Charlie, give her a vague backstory, explore her powers, and integrate her onto the team in the space of one episode without it feeling rushed, they spent a good third of the season doing the same for Mona, and it came to the point where Mona was almost overwhelming, pushing other characters out of the spotlight, and none moreso than Charlie.
(Ironically, Mona was bumped down to a recurring character in Season Five. It wasn’t a bad move, as Mona works much better in small doses, but it makes her utter dominance of much of Season Four even more frustrating in retrospect.)
I was really hoping for more of Charlie in Season Five, and was pretty quickly disappointed, as she ran off early in the premiere and was then absent for several episodes, apparently because Richardson-Sellers was busy filming another project (good for her, I suppose). When Charlie did return, though, things started to get interesting, as Charlie was acting “off” in a way that didn’t seem like bad writing, but instead like a purposeful decision to explore her character more deeply. Charlie wasn’t her usual bombastic, confident self, but instead scared and paranoid. What could do that to Charlie?
The answer: her sisters. Charlie pretty quickly became the centerpiece of Season Five thanks to her newly tweaked backstory*: she’s actually Clotho, one of the three Fates who once controlled humanity’s every decision. Millenia ago she decided to champion freedom and free will, destroyed the Loom of Destiny that gave the Fates their power, scattered its pieces throughout the multiverse, and went into hiding. Now that the Multiverse has been destroyed and reassembled**, though, her sisters have been able to track down Charlie and the shattered pieces of the loom, and are again looking to subjugate mankind.
*This conflicts a bit with the vague “magical creature” origin Charlie was given in Season Four, which is perhaps why she fell out of focus later in that season as they started tweaking things behind the scenes.
**This happened in the CW’s big “Crisis on Infinite Earths” crossover event between their shows. Just roll with it.
The Fates storyline was an interesting move because it centered Charlie in the season’s overarching storyline in a way Legends had never really done for any of its characters in previous seasons — this story was undeniably about her. Or, at least, it should have been. In reality, as Season Five progressed Charlie felt more sidelined than ever before. I can find two reasons for this.
First, Charlie’s role in the overarching season-long storyline tended to separate her from the rest of the main cast. Early in the season this came in the form of isolating her in B-Plots with John Constantine, where they established the lore of the main storyline while the rest of the cast got the more glamorous, fun A-Plots fighting villains of the week. Late in the season, this meant isolating Charlie with her villainous sisters while the rest of the cast fought whatever threat the Fates threw their way. In both situations, the result was that Charlie was there to do necessary narrative heavy lifting, but she didn’t actually get to be a part of the team, a part of the goofy fun that’s made Legends so beloved to begin with.
The best example of this comes in the season’s penultimate episode, “The One Where We’re Trapped on TV.” While the rest of the cast are, obviously, trapped in the TV, living out brilliantly ridiculous parodies of various popular TV shows, Charlie is the one who trapped them there in the first place to protect them from her sisters. It’s an important emotional moment for Charlie, showing how much she cares for her teammates and giving the first signs that she’s building up the courage to once again rebel against her sisters, but it also means she gets, at most, two minutes of screen time in the episode, and again separates her from the rest of the cast and excludes her from the gimmick that the episode will always be remembered for.
The second reason is that Charlie’s fear of her sister changes her character’s personality and dynamic with the rest of the cast. When first introduced she was a wild rebel, but Charlie spends much of Season Five not herself, instead scared, timid, conforming. So even the episodes where Charlie is fully integrated into the cast can’t really tap into the fun of the character because she’s still too affected by the events of the season’s overarching storyline.
By the end of the season Charlie has once again rebelled against her sisters, helping the Legends free the world from the Fates once and for all, and she’s once again her wild, anarchic self, with the finale even closing at a seedy punk dive while Charlie plays with her band. Charlie’s proven her loyalty to her friends and truly become one of them. It would be a great launching pad for the character…if she was sticking around. Instead, though, it’s Charlie’s last episode for now, as Maisie Richardson-Sellers has left the series to pursue other opportunities.
According to interviews, it was always Richardson-Sellers’ plan to leave the series at this point, and the writers knew it — apparently when she joined Legends she gave the crew a five year plan for her future laying it all out. In that sense, I applaud the Legends writers for wanting to give Richardson-Sellers and Charlie a big story for her final season. But in doing so, they inadvertently shuffled Charlie out of the spotlight even during a story that was supposed to be about her. Starring in the story ended up drastically cutting the amount of actual screentime Charlie received. It kept her at the fringes of most of the episodic stories, weakening her ties to the rest of the cast and her role as part of the ensemble. It meant that when she was on screen she was barely recognizable as a character, certainly not the rebellious, big-attitude wild card of a character I originally fell in love with.
It’s a shame, too, because Season Five as a whole was an improvement on the kinda scattered and messy (but still wildly fun) Season Four. But if Season Five was to be Charlie’s last hurrah, I’d rather her have been made a more important, featured part of the ensemble than be given a big story that ultimately resulted in her showing up less and less. Charlie deserved better than to be the Out of Focus Highlight.
DESTIEL UPDATE
Okay, I really thought I wasn’t going to do this again. Two installments ago my newsletter was about the internet fracas created when Supernatural, a show I don’t watch, almost canonized a fan-favorite pairing, but in the most insulting, late, backwards way possible, and the waves of schadenfreude-fueled serotonin it gave me. In my last newsletter I gave a brief update on an equally brief, yet utterly ridiculous (non)follow up scene.
Last week came the finale, and it was wildly absurd for many reasons, from the Dollar Store props and wigs to the utterly deflating death to the car making it to heaven when Cas seemingly didn’t, and while I’ve greatly enjoyed the memes, it didn’t feel like my place to make fun of it this time, at least not in such a brash, public way. You ever have that thing that you love to make fun of, but if anybody else makes fun of it you get real hot under the collar real fast? I started to feel like I was stepping into that territory, especially when I saw how seriously some people were taking it.
You see, the Supernatural finale inspired conspiracy theories. Fans were pulling out receipts, screenshots from Twitter and other platforms that were supposed to prove that there were scenes that were missing from both the finale and the Destiel confession episode, that the CW edited the episode at the last minute to remove Dean reciprocating Castiel’s confession, etc. I felt bad making fun of it seeing people put such earnest work into dissecting it, seeing how emotionally invested some people still were even after everything that happened.
But then…but then…Destiel became canon…again.
Exactly 20 days after the last time, on November 25, 2020, CW’s Spanish affiliates aired their dubbed Spanish version of the Destiel confession episode, only this time…Dean really did reciprocate Castiel’s confession of love with a “I love you too.” Were the conspiracy theories right? Are the CW executives in a frantic Zoom meeting as we speak trying to spin damage control? What are we to make of this Schrödinger's Relationship, where Dean and Cas love each other in one language but not in another? All I know is that, even after Supernatural has aired its final episode, it’s still providing prime level chaos. This is truly uncharted territory. It truly feels like anything could happen, as if I’m in a world of limitless potential. It seems impossible that this saga could surprise me anymore, but I’ll probably be proven wrong soon enough. Supernatural keeps making me put on my clown shoes, but in this case, I don’t mind. Could someone please pass me a shoehorn?
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!