by Garrett Gilchrist » Sun Feb 16, 2014 8:04 am
Sometimes you watch an episode of a series, where a character acts a certain way, or is referred to in a certain way, and you know it's going to change that character. "Oh," you think. "That's going to be the way that character is, and has always been, from now on."
Character traits get exaggerated over time. On television, if something works, they're going to do it over and over again.
So, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Season 2, episode 8. The Gang Runs for Office.
Dennis recites a script for his political campaign commercial, written by Charlie. It's incoherent.
"Hello fellow American. This you should vote me. I leave power. Good. Thank you, thank you. If you vote me, I'm hot. Taxes, they'll be lower... son. The democratic vote for me is the right thing to do Philadelphia, so doo!"
I think I remember hearing (in the Making Of videos) that this was an adlib by Glenn. It's funny, but my immediate reaction was, "This is what Charlie is from now on."
Later in the same episode, Dennis says "You clearly have a learning disability, dude."
Charlie's difficulties reading and writing were referenced in episode 2 and 6 of the same season, but this really hammered it home.
The idea of "Charlie work" and Charlie (and by extension Frank) living like an animal also got fleshed out further and further over time.
The "It's Always Sunny" Wiki, by the way, is written by people with Charlie's level of literacy. The amount of groupthink involved makes it not always obvious, but much of it is not coherent English. It's worse than a Tarantino screenplay.
This brings us to Season 5, Episode 9, "Mac and Dennis Break Up." This is a bit late in a series to be introducing major character traits, but here we are. Here, Mac and Dennis have been living together so long that they don't know what to do without one another. They can't go an hour apart. Mac is also clearly in love with Dennis on some level, and that's something I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about from here on out. He's also interested in muscular actors.
There wasn't much to suggest this previously. In the previous episode, Dennis modeled a woman's thong for Mac, who didn't seem to mind. But these are five people who have paired up in all sorts of different ways to screw over one another and try out harebrained schemes, and the show will continue to do this. Season 4's "Mac's Banging the Waitress" centered around who was Charlie's "best friend" - Mac or Dennis.
It's a big stretch to say that Mac and Dennis can't go an hour without checking in with one another, considering all the crazy events of previous and future seasons. There's something here showing that the characters have changed, and their lives intertwined based on who's living with who - Frank and Charlie being equally inseparable, as we've seen a lot previously. And Dee being alone and ignored by the guys. But mostly this feels like a turning point for Mac. That from now on we'll be hearing more about ... this.
EDIT: Two episodes later, Mac and to a lesser extent Charlie are hesitant to pursue Dennis' idea of turning their Dolph Lundgren movie idea into full-on pornography. Mac feels that scenes with women get in the way of an action movie.
By this point it's clear that Dennis, Mac and Charlie have lots of issues getting in the way of their sexuality. They are not mentally-healthy heterosexual men any more than they are good, normal people.
The first episode showed Dennis as vain, and in love with himself primarily. We've seen his obsession with breasts and the act of penetration, and he is incapable of seeing women as people. He engages with them on the level of pornography, and emotionally destroys them with the D.E.N.N.I.S. system (as of season 5, episode 10). He claims that this system makes women love him, but it's mainly designed to torture and discard them. A parody of the worst aspects of male sexuality, then.
In season one, episode 2, Charlie had slept with Stacy Corvelli in high school. This now actually seems a stretch for Charlie, as since then he's not been known to have dallied with any other women. He is obsessed with The Waitress and that's it - he has very little sexuality otherwise. Here's a deleted scene from 5.11 -
Charlie: "So here's the thing. This guy, he does not get women and women don't get him. You know, they just had a... you know, they butt-heads like crazy. And he does not get SEX. You know, sex is the thing that's really weird. You know, because the last time he made sex with a girl it was like gross, dude, it was just super gross, and she found him to be gross, and the whole thing was just gross, and then she, you know, later on said "Oh, I have a kid now, and it's your kid", and he was like ready to raise this kid, and he was like "I didn't know if I even had sex right to have a kid", you know, because it was so gross, and just cold, and wet, and just gross. And like everytime he thinks about sex he gets a little sick, you know what I mean, unless he thinks about sex with this one girl, but like otherwise it's like gross".
Charlie has good reason to think of sex as "gross." 3.9's "Sweet Dee's Dating a Retarded Person" introduced Charlie's classic songs "The Nightman" and "The Dayman," later made into a full musical in 4.13's "The Nightman Cometh." Charlie seems to be confessing to being molested as a child, and wanting to become a powerful man rather than a scared boy - though he denies this. Much earlier, 1.7's "Charlie Got Molested" hinted that a minor character, Charlie's Uncle Jack, is a pedophile, but this was a minor detail and easily ignored at the time. Season 5, episode 3, "The Great Recession," makes the connection clearly, with Uncle Jack and Charlie talking about Jack's inappropriate behavior when Charlie was a boy - and Jack's desire to continue that.
Charlie and Mac are both eternally childlike.
Mac became overly attached to Dennis and Dee's mother, and in 5.10 shows he's been picking up the women that Dennis discards. He likes muscular male action stars in movies, and living with Dennis. Mac's sexuality is a work in progress in season 5.