Posted: September 14, 2023

Lessons of the Evil Spawn

Ruth and I are currently binging Grey's Anatomy -- centered around a group of surgeons at a fictional Seattle hospital -- and enjoying it for all sorts of reasons. (Bailey is brilliant.) Remarkably, the show is still fresh and original after nineteen seasons. Most shows, even the best, rarely last more than five or six without falling apart -- the phrase "Jumping the Shark" comes from the episode in the fifth season of Happy Days when the show crossed a line there was no coming back from.

Why should writers be interested in a television show? Writing and screenwriting have different tropes, techniques, and expectations. And Gray's Anatomy has regularly replaced cast members, a technique that also helped other longrunning shows, (MASH or the Law and Order franchise) stay fresh. Writers can't exactly introduce new characters mid-novel.

Still, many Gray's Anatomy characters last for a decade or more without becoming repetitive or ridiculous, and three of them -- Meredith, Bailey, and Weber -- have been there since the beginning. These characters stay interesting because they are developed to a depth that writers can only envy -- and learn from. I'd like to focus on one in particular, Dr. Alex Karev, played for sixteen seasons by Justin Chambers. I think it goes without saying, but spoilers abound.

Writers know their heroes have to be flawed and their villains have to be sympathetic. They also know that characters need to grow, to overcome difficulties in the course of the story. The go-to trope for all of this is a troubled childhood -- sensibly enough, since this is where a lot of character problems have their roots in real life.

Alex grew up with a drug-addicted father who abandoned the family when his mother developed schizophrenia. While Alex was still a child, he had to not only care for his younger brother and sister, he had to make sure his mother took her meds -- too many responsibilities way too young. He kept his situation secret out of shame, which prevented him from forming friendships outside the family. He eventually wound up in foster homes -- and getting thrown out of foster homes -- before finally winning a scholarship and going to med school. This all left him angry and emotionally stunted, with a willingness to lash out and step over others to get what he wanted. So much so that in season one, Cristina Yang dubs him "Evil Spawn."

Alex eventually overcomes a lot of this damage in ways writers might be familiar with. When his brother comes to him for medical help, he reveals a lot of Alex's history, something Alex kept hidden out of habit. Yet his fellow residents don't hold him in contempt (or in Cristina's case, more contempt -- she has her own issues). He later brings a patient whose life he saved home with him, to take care of her when she develops psychological problems, much as he cared for his mother. When he's forced to commit her, he learns that his habit of caring for crazy people has its limits. And when his father shows up at the hospital, Alex is still angry, refusing to see him and later punching him out. When his father returns to the hospital again some time later, Alex manages to reconcile with him before he dies.

Too many writers stop there, treating a character's childhood damage as a problem to be solved. And once it's solved, it's gone. Alex's life is a lot more complicated than that.

For one thing, his problems don't go away after they're "solved." Long after he's developed some compassion, genuine friendships, and a sense of self worth, he believes an intern, DeLuca, took advantage of the new love of his life, Jo Wilson, while she was drunk. He beats DeLuca to the point of nearly blinding him. Afterwards, he's shocked that he has this much violence still in him, but it's there. Then later, when he discovers that Jo's first husband was also abusive, he has to fight to not hunt him down and hurt him. His broken childhood heals, but the scars remain.

More important, Alex's best characteristics as an adult are rooted in his childhood trauma. He doesn't overcome his damage and put it behind him. He harnesses it. By being forced to care for his mother, he developed a habit of sacrificing himself to care for his patients, to the point where he nearly missed his board exams to take care of a premature baby whose organs were failing. (Note, there were other doctors on the scene. Alex did not need to be there to save the child's life.)

His often unsympathetic bluntness ("Look, your kid's going to die anyway if you don't do it . . .") convinces several parents to agree to give their children needed surgery. This bluntness also endears him to a lot of his child patients -- kids can detect false cheer and respect honesty. Being robbed of his own childhood, and the emotional stunting that results, lets him connect with the children he treats, making him a very effective pediatric surgeon. At one point, he convinces a five or six year old that the tumor he's removing is a little man living inside of the boy that Alex will dismember in ways that he describes with relish and in gruesome detail. It's exactly what the kid needs to hear, and Alex saw that.

If you can get past seeing your character's flaws in black and white terms -- seeing that flaws can also be strengths, and vice versa -- you have room to take your character to more interesting places. You also have a chance to develop more interesting conflicts with other characters. The best clashes aren't the ones where one side is right and the other is wrong. It's where readers can see both sides and aren't sure which side they're on.

Alex is attracted to Izzy Stevens, a fellow intern, early on. But several seasons pass before he grows up enough to have a relationship with her. In the meantime, Izzy falls in love with a patient who later dies. (Izzy has issues, too.) When she starts seeing the ghost of the dead patient, Alex dismisses the visions as unimportant because his experience with his mother made craziness feel normal. When Izzy finds the hallucinations are the result of a brain tumor, Alex is devastated for not noticing it earlier. She eventually has the tumor removed and undergoes grueling chemotherapy, with Alex by her side, eventually marrying her. But when she resumes work, he pushes a little too hard to care for her -- yanking her out of an OR to make her take her medications, for instance.

There's no clear right or wrong here. Izzy neglects herself because she wants to put the cancer behind her and focus on her career. Alex pushes hard from both guilt that he missed the cancer and terror that Izzy's ignoring her problem, which brings up echoes of his mother. It's hard to see how they can make it together because it's hard to see how either one of them could do otherwise and still be themselves. And . . . they don't. Alex tells his attendings that Izzy is pushing herself too hard, which leads them to suspend her from the residency program. Izzy blames him for costing her career and disappears, leaving him frantic for her health. When she returns, he can't forgive her for abandoning him, which brings up echoes of his father, and they eventually part ways. (They also get together in the end, but that's another story.)

I do believe in right and wrong and am cool with characters who have moral cores. I also believe humanity is often more complicated than that. If you ignore moral ambiguity -- if one side is always clearly right and the other side equally wrong -- your stories will tend to be more predictable and less interesting. Either the good guys win or the bad guys win. To really draw readers in, make it sometimes hard to tell who the good and bad guys are. Watching a virtuous character win is far less interesting that watching a flawed character find a way to use their flaws to get where they need to go.