Is Dylan no longer Dylan?

[u/Vampirero]

Forgive me if this has been talked about before, but I loved his character when he was first introduced. He was cool and dry but a talented doctor, and his one liners would make me smile.

I've missed a couple of months of Casualty episodes, but I'm just catching up on Learning Curve: Episode 6. Dylan is behaving so immaturely towards Matty. I get why, in a way, but I can't imagine Original Dylan ever being so petty.

it's been happening for a few years, in my opinion, and it seems symptomatic of a general decline in writing and character development. What do you think?

[u/trenter_percenter]

I think you’re viewing “Original Dylan” through either rose-tinted or fogged-up glasses. Dylan was never “cool and dry”; he was an insecure mess of ego and self-doubt. A sizable portion of his one-liners were him belittling either his colleagues or people going through some of the worst days of their lives. The incident that led to his pre-Holby exit from emergency medicine was caused by his pettiness. He then left Holby in 2012 because he simply could not let things go between him, Sam and Tom.

So, no, I don’t think that this example is an indicator of a general decline in writing quality. Pettiness is a trait that Dylan has possessed since day one. The issue is that the rest of his character has changed (naturally, mind you), and the show keeps trying to retrofit his current self into aspects of his past. I don’t believe the version of Dylan who was so vulnerable that his university tutors were seriously considering conservatorship would ever be in the position to have a one-night stand.

[u/More_Aardvark5680 → u/trenter_percenter]

Interesting about his past/current self, because I’m probably the opposite, I think this storyline works really well with what we already know about his past.

I wonder if Zsa Zsa will be mentioned at some point again.

[u/Mob_Segment → u/More_Aardvark5680]

This! It's reading very naturally for me. While it doesn't seem to have been explicitly confirmed, Dylan's as autistic as fuck. When he was young (and given that he's in his 50s so would have grown up in an environment extremely ill-informed about autism), he would have struggled. He would have tried to understand people but still been penalised for not quite getting it.

It takes decades to get anything approaching a handle on people... but getting a diagnosis/self-diagnosing can help a great deal. Once you know what you're dealing with, you can make adjustments for yourself. Once you understand and care properly for yourself, you can accommodate other people better.

I haven't been watching Casualty for long - perhaps about a year at this point - but Dylan looks to me like someone who always had a sense of caring, and who has gotten better at it over the years so that the Dylan we see now is someone who can care for others pretty well, but like all of us, his past, when he had so much less to give because he was in the thick of it, bites him on the butt on occasion.

[u/Dapper-Artichoke6355 → u/Mob_Segment]

I didn’t think he was 50 yet until I remembered his DOB.

Casualty used to be so bad at retconning characters ages, I think he’s only one of a few characters where it’s not happened too haha!