Charlie Jade

From Feminist SF Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Charlie Jade (2005) is a science-fiction television series that was co-produced by Canada and South Africa and created by Chris Roland and Robert Wertheimer. It ran for one season. A second season was scripted, but has not as yet been produced.

Twenty episodes were originally made for the first (and, to date, only) season of Charlie Jade. A special "catch-up" episode, filmed in Montréal at a later date, was added to this run at the request of the Canadian network CHUM, in order to bring new viewers up to speed. This episode, "Can of Worms", fits in between episodes 16 and 17.

No episodes of this series were either written or directed by women.

Cast

  • Jeffrey Pierce as Charlie Jade
  • Patricia McKenzie as Reena
  • Tyrone Benskin as Karl Lubinsky
  • Michael Filipowich as 01 Boxer
  • Michelle Burgers as Essa Rompkin
  • Marie-Julie Rivest as Jasmine/Paula
  • Danny Keogh as Julius Galt
  • Langley Kirkwood as Renn Porter
  • David Dennis as Sew Sew Tukarrs
  • Rolanda Marais as Blues Paddock
  • Graham Clarke as Brion Boxer

Notes:

The title character, Charlie Jade, and his antagonist, 01 Boxer, are both white males from AlphaVerse. (The name 01 is pronounced "Oh One".)

Reena is a black woman from GammaVerse; Sew Sew Tukarrs is a black man and Essa Rompkin a white woman from AlphaVerse; Jasmine and Paula are alternate versions of the same white woman, one in Alpha and the other in Beta; Blues Paddock is a white woman and Karl Lubinsky a black man from BetaVerse.

Charlie Jade has a multinational cast from Canada and South Africa, and a lead actor from the USA. To see details about the actors' nationalities, see the cast information on the official website. For an explanation of the Alpha/Beta/Gamma Verses, see below or refer to the multiverse page on the official website.

Overview

The series follows the adventures of the title character, Charlie Jade, a (white, male) detective from a parallel universe accidentally transported to ours.



Spoiler warning: This page and any other dealing with the content of works may have plot and/or ending details revealed.





There are three main universes ("Verses") across which the story takes place:

  • Alpha, a dystopic, very noir world ruled by corporations, notably VexCor
  • Beta, which is our own universe, "half an hour in the future"
  • Gamma, a utopian world whose unspoiled natural resources the AlphaVerse villains covet

The series is set in and around Cape Town, South Africa, in BetaVerse, its corresponding AlphaVerse twin, the highly polluted, technologically advanced Cape City, and their GammaVerse cousin, where there is no city at all.

At the beginning of the series, while trying to solve a case, Charlie Jade is caught in the blast of a multiversal explosion that sends him from his world (Alpha) to ours (Beta), along with Reena, a Gammaverse woman partly responsible for setting off the bomb.

But their lives take different paths: while Reena is on the run because she is called a terrorist in Beta, Charlie encounters Karl Lubinsky, a conspiracy theorist who becomes his ally.

Meanwhile, in Alpha, Essa Rompkin, Chairman of VexCor, whose facility was destroyed in the explosion, sends 01 Boxer, the only man capable of travelling at will from universe to universe, as a courier to VexCor's offices in BetaVerse, but 01 has his own agenda.

Although the overall plot eventually emerges as a fairly straightforward quest to save the world, the series's complex set-up, meandering pace and tangled narrative strands make Charlie Jade a highly challenging programme to watch.

Commentary

Although Charlie Jade has several important female characters, the portrayal and narrative functions of these characters are often quite problematic. To begin with, they are often sidelined in the narrative, which focuses most strongly on two white male characters (Charlie and 01); they often depend on those male characters for their own motivations and implication in the plot; and female characters very rarely interact with each other.

The series also presents themes of race and class relations, and encounters problems in these areas along the way.

Jasmine, Charlie's lover in Alphaverse, belongs to the slave class population, and has no rights of her own. She is wholly dependent on Charlie's benevolent attitude towards her (as his personal sex slave), and thus his unexpected disappearance from Alpha at the beginning of the series places her at risk for worse exploitation.

Neither Karl Lubinsky, a black American man in Betaverse who came to South Africa to fight apartheid, nor Reena, who is a black woman from Gamma, which has no such form of oppression -- the two most prominent black characters in the series -- are representative of South Africa's indigenous black population. Although both Karl and Reena suffer from (and fight against) the local dangers to them that are exacerbated by racism, South African racial oppression is mostly portrayed as a background presence in the series, a variation on the themes that it explores, rather than directly addressed as a radical concern. (Reena, who does not come from a world where she was oppressed, nonetheless stuggles for agency throughout the series.)

The oppressor who must be fought is VexCor, and after Reena's act of sabotage in the first episode, it is a white man who must take up the fight against the oppressive establishment -- because he's the title character, and it's his story.

External Links

The article about this title/work is a STUB, meaning it is tiny and needs lots of work. Help flesh it out.


Retrieved from "https://wiki.feministsf.net/index.php?title=Charlie_Jade&oldid=47300"