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ladynecropolis · 1 month ago

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this is a post about charlie pace: this wasn't a story about redemption.

so I started thinking a lot about him recently cause of some discussion I've been having and i thought I'd make some of my more complex opinions about his character arc known.

to preface this, I have to say 1: I am biased in his favor because he's my favorite character in the show. i will not pretend anything I'm about to say here is objectively correct, he's my little man. and 2: this post contains spoilers for like, his entire storyline? reader discretion is advised.

charlie pace, of all the characters I've ever truly loved, might be the most chronically misunderstood character I have ever known. this is in part about people who dislike him, but I honestly see it more often with people who do like him. he's frequently treated like a totally innocent victim of circumstance, for one thing, a total sweetheart who gets treated unfairly by the people around him and winds up having to earn their respect in the end, through a heroic act of self-sacrifice. on the other hand, it's also very easy to take that concept and twist it into some sort of redemption, claiming that his martyrdom was the ending of his character's journey from darkness to light, or whatever. that this was somehow absolution, the only way he could be forgiven for the mistakes he's made his entire life.

and to me, this feels...wrong. it feels like a failure to fully grasp the weight of his final decision, reducing it to something as simple as a final moment of redemption, when his arc...isn't about redemption. it was never about redeeming himself; he wasn't a character who needed to be redeemed. and to claim that he was feels like a fundamental misinterpretation of one of the central themes of his entire character.

so let's backtrack a bit—I want to talk about his character in season one.

in season one, at first, he's largely shown to be...well, kind of an asshole. he's definitely meant to be one of the more unserious types in the group, and he's very quickly understood by other characters to be someone you just don't take seriously, what with all his talk, and he falls into this spot within the social dynamic that immediately marks him as a sort of...unspoken burden. he falls in with the people who aren't immediately useful and thus are there to be protected and not to protect. (this is part of his bond with claire, more on that later.) and there's definitely a sense that he'd rather not be there—he's someone who wants very badly to be taken seriously, and can't be. this is the beginning of the very clear bitterness and jealousy he displays throughout his entire time on the show.

he's also...incredibly self absorbed in a way that probably has one of the biggest impacts on his personal relationships. he has a tendency to take things as personal slights when they really aren't about him at all, and a lot of his motivations early on are primarily selfish. the thing I always, always source when talking about this is the scene early on where someone is drowning and charlie lies saying that he can't swim, when the truth is he just didn't want to get his heroin wet; the fact that he can, in fact, swim, is very important.

and that leads me to the third important thing about his character early on, which is, of course, the heroin abuse.

which at the time is an extremely important aspect of his character, the arc where he's pressured by locke into quitting juxtaposed with the story of why he started using to begin with, and it's meant to be such a massive triumph for his character that he's able to overcome this. but, like, the way this is treated narratively, it's more of a symbol than an actual part of the story on its own. ( @lost-inanotherlife makes an excellent point about this in her own post here.) but more on that later.

charlies character takes a fascinating turn later in season one during the ethan rom arc, and one that really solidified him as my favorite the first time I saw it. this is the arc where we are introduced the the concept of the Others, and it becomes a massive threat to claire in particular. yes, they do wound charlie personally, too (specifically, he gets hanged in a tree, which was insane), but this isn't about that, because that doesn't matter to him as much. let me explain.

in the episode homecoming, we see a very washed up charlie, a charlie who has been reduced to stealing from people for heroin money. and then we see him meet somebody who he genuinely wants to care for. this person is, however, somebody he is supposed to be stealing from. this ends disastrously, another failure by charlie to do the right thing, another glaring reminder for him that he can't take care of anyone. this is paralleled with his story with claire here, where he is haunted by his failure to protect her from ethan, and that failure, that guilt and subsequent anger as he pins it on ethan, is why ethan rom is killed.

it's honestly a very strong moment for me with his character, because of everything it tells us—how badly he wants to be able to care for someone, and how much it frightens him when he can't.

in season two, this concept comes together with the narrative device that is his prior heroin dependency.

largely, in the story, his heroin dependency is used as a symbol of several aspects in his life, a major one being the fact that he isn't taken seriously by anybody. he starts using because he feels uncared for/unloved by his brother, who, as it happens, also seems to care more for the heroin than he does for charlie. (even after his brother cleans up his act, charlie doesn't stop—which serves as a different symbol altogether. more on that later.) and when charlie starts having..even more problems in season 2, what does it come back to, of course, but the heroin.

it's important to note that he does not relapse. it's also important to note that every time he has a serious issue in this arc, everyone assumes that he has, and as a result he will not be listened to. which is obviously unfair. his already precarious social status is on a knife's edge, and he winds up destroying his relationship with claire, even before his breakdown.

now I get to talk about fire+water. my favorite! buckle in.

fire+water is a pretty dramatic culmination both of the idea of Not Being Listened To and of the desire to protect something. in this case, aaron. it very aggressively brings out charlies fear that he won't be able to save anything , ever—that his presence is worthless at best and makes things worse at worst. and he tries so hard to do the right thing. or at least what he's convinced it is. but his attempts at being a protector here just make him a threat. he isn't heard, because when it's charlie, it must be the bloody drugs, right?

he's convinced he has to save aaron, from...something. it's a very catholic episode—I mean, this is lost, right? but really, it's no coincidence that this happened when it did, and it's no coincidence that this carried the themes it did. the idea that the only way to save the baby is to baptize him—that idea, coming to charlie through those visions? the dream he has, where he, as a child, essentially is told by his parents that he's going to have to be the one to save their family. of course, he can't even save himself.

which is probably the most important part of it all—he can't save himself, and that means he cant save anything else, either, can he? the episode brings to light this troubling circular thing within him. he knows, from a very early point, that he's ruined his own chances of being saved, but he still wants to believe there's hope, so he tries to protect something else because maybe, maybe, if he can do that, there's hope for him, too.

the baptism thing is interesting. this particular interpretation was brought to my attention by the very lovely @bagelcult to whom I owe this and much more—the desire to absolve the baby of sin takes on a fascinating angle when you consider the idea that charlie views himself as being full of the stuff. sin, that is. it begs the question—is he trying to save the baby from himself? is his innate understanding that he is always crashing and burning the reason why? if he can save someone else from himself, is it possible he could save himself, too?

in the end, he fails, and is punished for it severely. because he's not a protector, of course. he will never have that respect.

he spends the rest of season two bitter and lonely, but this isn't about that. he'd probably have found a different reason to be bitter and lonely anyway. that's just how he rolls

but things get really interesting again with regards to his doomed status when desmond hume enters the scene—this one's another favorite of mine.

desmond exists in the narrative of charlie pace as a kind of memento mori. he's here as a both a victim and a symbol of the fate that will inevitably befall charlie, and he spends the entire season trying to save him, hereby proving that he can't be saved. it's all very sisyphean.

(heres a parallel for your consideration: what if desmond wants to save charlie to prove the narrative can be altered? what if he wants to save himself, too?)

much of this is a back and forth fight between knowing what must happen and wanting to stop it anyway. there's a lot I could say here about that, because I've thought so much about des and charlie that it's probably giving me brain damage, but that's for a later post. what it boils down to is blind desperation, and eventual acceptance. charlie reaches acceptance before desmond does.

because charlie has known within him for a very long time that he was doomed, even before all this. he was teetering in the balance of fate for such a long time now, and des exists as the last thread holding charlie back from oblivion. it creates an extremely unstable tether that they both know must be cut, but one of them is refusing to let go.

which is why it's very, very important to me that charlies death was a decision he made. instead of allowing desmond to take his place, he is resigned to what must happen now.

and a part of that is acceptance that he was doomed from the start, but a part of that is also, I think, still his need to save something. he'd sacrifice himself just for the possibility he might be able to protect the people dear to him, because all he ever wanted was to be able to do that. and it settles pretty much his biggest thing; no, he can't save himself, but that doesn't mean he can't save you.

so, you might be asking yourself now: hey, nicky, what the hell are you talking about?

what I'm saying here is that this isn't a matter of redemption. that's a lazy way to look at it, honestly. to say this is a matter of redemption implies that charlie is someone who needed to be redeemed, and he didn't. he wasn't (on a moral level) ever low enough to need to be raised higher. he mightve, to a point, believed himself to be as such, but that was never the point with him. for all his character development into the sort of person who would do this, it was something that was, to an extent, always with him. it's not a story about how someone like him must die to be forgiven. it's far more complex than that. it's moreso about proving that he can, despite how everything in his life was always pushing him toward a bitter end, ultimately do good for someone else, even though he was made to believe he couldn't. it's about looking your inevitable doom in the eye and saying you're gonna make this count. he's allowed to own his death in the end, and it's not about somehow repairing his moral worth. lost is a show about cycles, and he intended to break one, because he couldn't break his own.

as for the use of drug dependency as a symbol of that, well, again, there's a much better post about that linked in a previous paragraph. the optics of that suck. but it's moreso a product of the writers just overlooking it, i think. the idea that his drug dependency serves as a symbol of his downfall might be a sloppy writing choice. if you see it that way. but I kind of don't. I mostly saw the drug thing as being about his loneliness, which is a separate issue. I mean, he quits. like, in the story. maybe a part of that ties into the ultimate thing with him; there's a decision that has to be made, and that's the only way you can break the cycle.

or something.

I dunno, I think about him a lot. I've always been of the opinion that he was supposed to die in the crash, honestly.

I know this sounds like I'm giving the writers a lot of credit, so let me just say...no. lmao. I don't know if the writers intended any of this. with the sheer amount of shit they totally fumbled on this show, there's every likelihood that the majority of the things I just said were completely by accident. but, hey, art is what we make of it! you bring your own baggage to the fictional media and call it analysis.

I think that's all I had to say on that. thanks for taking a look. feel free to argue with me, that's what I log on for!

#WHEW. it's done.#took me a while to actually post this because ive been super busy with my fanfics BUT. i never run out of things to say about charlie.#anyway #at some point ill probably do a post about him and desmond in depth too. because theyre my favorite duo <3 #in a completely normal and not at all mentally ill way of course #uhhh anyway. i have doubts that this post makes...any sense? but thats okay.#um. whatever. charlie amiright #i love him so much i want to punch him in the stomach #lost abc #lost 2004 #lost tv #charlie pace

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