Character Highlight: Charlie Smith (Class)

Class is kind of the redheaded stepchild of the Whoniverse: very short-lived, super gruesome and dark, and aside of the Coal Hill setting, barely related to Doctor Who. Still, it featured some interesting stuff, and I did enjoy watching it when it was on air. If there’s a part of me that wishes the show had lasted longer, it’s probably for the sake of the characters, all of whom had good potential. Today, we’re looking at Charlie (Charlie-related spoilers.)

I’ve mentioned this before, in talking about Turlough and Ace, but I appreciate it when Whoniverse characters have had considerable sci-fi upheaval in their lives prior to their debut on the show. It makes for a nice change of pace from “21^st-century human meets the Doctor and their world is completely rocked!” and “ordinary person suddenly has their eyes opened to the enormity of the universe!” (not that I don’t still love those scenarios, obviously.) In Charlie’s case, we meet him as a student at Coal Hill, smart and attractive but utterly without social knowhow. The lack of interpersonal skills is because he is in fact an alien refugee: the prince of Rhodia and the last of his kind. After both the Rhodians and Quill were destroyed on his home planet by the Shadow Kin, the Doctor brought the prince and his unwilling Quill bodyguard to earth for shelter, where they adopted new identities. The prince has been “Charlie Smith” ever since.

Much of Charlie’s social ignorance is simply down to his unfamiliarity with humanity. He doesn’t know much about pop culture, appropriate social conventions, or manners, and so he can easily offend others without meaning to. While Quill is often downright disdainful of humans, Charlie sometimes simply doesn’t know any better.

His background, both as an alien and as a prince, put him at odds with his classmates in other ways as well. Charlie was raised with different laws and a different value system, and there are things he does/believes that his friends find cold. There’s the imperiousness that comes with being a displaced monarch, the way he orders Quill around when she hates him but is physically unable to disobey, not caring about her autonomy because she was a captured rebel leader who’s now forced to serve him. Again, there are his experiences as someone who’s already survived a devastating alien invasion – while all these time/space horrors are new to his friends, he’s used to the idea of hostile visitors from other planets. And there’s also his possession of the Cabinet of Souls, an artifact said to contain the souls of the Rhodian race. While Charlie claims this as a fairytale or superstition, he knows that it’s true. And furthermore, that the Cabinet could potentially function as a doomsday weapon, using the souls inside to wipe out another race.

Perhaps unsurprisingly (like I said, he is a displaced monarch with a bodyguard forced to due his bidding and actual stewardship over life and death,) Charlie spends a decent amount of time focused on himself. His wants, his concerns, his safety. But over time, he begins, by degrees, to care more about others. In particular, as he starts to date Matteusz, Charlie becomes very invested in him. Charlie doesn’t care much about how his friends regard him, but he cares what Matteusz thinks, and his boyfriend gradually becomes something a moral compass for him, doing the right thing not so much because he believes in it but because he can’t bear the thought of how Matteusz will look at him if he doesn’t.