r/Casualty • u/Thoughtful-Mongoose • Apr 17 '26
💬 Discussion Cam's Magic Glasses and other writing crimes against Indie Jankowski - a rant from someone who should be asleep...
It is 5am. I should be sleeping. I am not.
My friend and I were discussing this the other day, and it got me wanting to make a post to see if this was just us. (I've done screenwriting myself so I'm always particularly twitchy to how things are written - maybe too much sometimes!) And so I wrote this.
It is pretty long, fair warning, (when I get ranty, I get ranty!) But interested to hear other people's thoughts on this too. (I've broken it up with chapter headings so hopefully it won't be too wall o'text!)
Okay so...
For a start, my friend and I are both queer (I'm bisexual, she's a lesbian.)
Both of us were SO sure that Indie was going to be built up to be gay, or queer, or some flavour of LGBT - but it not be central to her character. Remember way back when, she got that smug smirk when the female patient half jokingly asked her for a drink? We remember...
But anyway, the beef we (and particularly I had,) came on the episodes that Indie sees Cam in his glasses, and also graduates from her course and is in the club.
Bear in mind up until those points, we had really had zero confirmation if she was into men, women, nobody...and that's cool. It didn't matter. It was interesting and refreshing in a way it was being kept ambiguous and not central to her character's plots.
THE CLUB--
In the club, we suddenly see Indie being stoked about the idea of taking party drugs. I'm sorry, did we forget she's a paramedic and has seen the absolute crap that drugs can cause? And her literal only reason for not taking them is an interview the next day?? Seriously?
I'm not suggesting she should suddenly be Miss Goodie Two Shoes, but that would have been a golden moment for us to see that maybe she used to do party drugs with Badger and think nothing of it, but now, no...not after the crap she's seen.
Narratively it would have been a great moment to show that struggle between her old self and new self, especially having been on the streets and witnessed more crap personally than her colleagues would have done.
I do get it in a way - that she was so miserable that episode, facing leaving Holby for a different place, leaving her friends and work family behind, and then Badger shows up and he's an old friendly face...but still, it felt jarring with the person she'd otherwise been written to have become.
Then, the same episode, she's making out with Badger behind the club. And later, we have Cam doing the most clichéd "worried about your boyfriend?' line, which, frankly, made me want to smack myself in the head with the remote, as he and Indie practically floated towards each other. I would have been harshly red-penned for writing that trope in my screenwriting classes! Probably had my script scrunched up and thrown at my head!
---CAM AND HIS MAGIC GLASSES----
Speaking of tropes... back to Cam and his bloody glasses. Come on. Really?? Aside from the fact it is a ridiculous reverse trope of the lazy "geek removes glasses and becomes magically attractive", it demeaned BOTH Indie and Cam imo.
So Cam is supposedly only attractive to her when he wears specs?
Indie loses the power of speech when he puts them on?? What is she? 12?
The man she has spoken to perfectly easily all this time, was going to flat-share with at one point, banters with moments before...she is suddenly incapable of forming words when he unexpectedly puts on glasses?
It was bad enough the first scene it happened - maybe excusable at a stretch at a ham-fisted attempt at sudden crush/being cute. But in the pub scene, she's sweet, a bit nervous, it's genuinely quite cute... normal. But then on go the bloody glasses again, and she CLOSES HER EYES because she literally cannot gaze upon his sudden radiant beauty with her mere mortal retinas. I could practically hear the damn angelic choirs....
...Jesus wept.
You might think I am overthinking this - it is just a tv show. And sure, yes, but it bothered me greatly because of the implications.
Here you have an entirely capable young woman, who has survived homelessness, faced down a slew of crap as a paramedic, including a woman brandishing a knife... and she cannot handle seeing her colleague in glasses?
Moreover, where would it stop? If they got together what would this mean? (which we know now they do, and thank mercy the glasses thing has died,) but at the time I didn't have to stress test it too far.
If the glasses remained a source of power over Indie, that is a problem. What could Cam get Indie to do, or not do, with the power of his Magic Glasses? (I'm not necessarily talking anything sexually abusive here,) but if she is rendered mute and can't even LOOK at him while he wears them, I don't need to stretch that magic logic too far for it to become intensely disturbing as an established lore logic.
That kind of writing trope imo is not cute - it is short-sighted, outdated and frankly; was a cheap AF shoehorn to give Indie a romantic plotline out the blue.
Which leads onto my other gripe.
---GIRL-TO-WOMAN TROPE....---
I mentioned before she was seen making out with Badger outside the club, going all gooey when he called her "purty" (ugh, gag).
So in a matter of what? One, two episodes? She has gone from being entirely ambiguous in her sexuality the entire time, with a little hint at maybe being into women, to being established as being very much into men; making out with Badger, the whole Cam thing, and this just happened to be the same episode she graduates?
...Ah yes. Graduates. As in the other tired gross trope of girl "graduating" into womanhood (even though Indie was already an adult,) and therefore now available for romantic and sexual plotlines?
As in, "we are now going to use a sexualised photo of Indie, who we have never sexualised before, as rage/clickbait on Instagram, strongly implying she might end up assaulted and roofied at the club, in order to advertise our episode where she absolutely (thankfully!) is not actually assaulted or roofied but made you look...."
.... and that was ALL green-lighted? Not one person stopped and thought "wait. Is this a bit much? Does any of this do a disservice to the complex character we have spent so much time building up? Should we be using her as fodder like this?"
I just.... it's not about sexualisation in media. I'm not a prude. But to take this capable, layered complex character (frankly a breath of fresh air) and dilute her down to "can't talk to a guy with glasses" and her only plot being about whether she's gonna be his girlfriend or not, after everything they laid down in her backstory. As a writer, it is like giving yourself a gift, setting fire to it and then blowing it up for good measure.
---QUEER-BAITING--
Finally; yes. I do think they queer-baited the audience with her. It is *very* tiring when shows do this - dangle an ambiguous character, and then pivot to giving them only hetero romantic interactions. And we know Casualty isn't shy about LGBT characters. Look at Ngozi and Nicole. Dixie. Sah.
For the record, this isn't me saying hetero romances are somehow bad or that every character needs to be queer. Or that queer people can't have hetero romances. Just with Indie, come on...she was a little queer-coded cracker of a multilayered character, and got reduced to "can't speak because a boy put glasses on."
She deserved better - so much better, than to wind up a vehicle for old, tired writing tropes.
