Charlie has been sidelined this season, mostly offering advice and preparing for a long-awaited Jeopardy! appearance. His Jeopardy! segment includes cameos and narration but he performs poorly, making slips, forgetting answers, dropping the buzzer, and nearly fainting. The public exposure of the humiliation worries him, prompting research into shutting down the episode through contacts at the production company. Sylvia is too absorbed in planning a high-stress company party to provide emotional support. Charlie's anxiety grows as he contemplates the episode airing nationally and searches for options to prevent the broadcast.
So far this season, I've largely confined Charlie to the notes at the end of my recaps, despite Luke Macfarlane's solid supporting performance. Compared to season one, when the character's insecurities about Sylvia and Will's friendship were front and center, he has been at the margins, mainly offering unheeded advice to Sylvia and practicing for his big Jeopardy! moment. Now that moment is here, though, and Charlie is stepping up.
The glimpse we get feels as real as you'd hope, with a cameo from Ken Jennings and Johnny Gilbert's narration. But Charlie chokes, thrown off by some combination of his wife's lateness and the pressure of finally experiencing something he has pictured for decades. First, it's a little slipup: His mouth gets ahead of his brain, and he appends the word mode to his Beauty and the Beast answer (well, technically, question). Then he buzzes in but forgets The Bell Jar.
Anyone who has competed on or any non-live reality competition knows that being humiliated on-camera doesn't stop at the end of the taping; there's typically a period of waiting for the actual show to be televised, and that can be almost as excruciating. In the wake of Charlie's performance, he can't stop thinking about it airing on national TV, to the point that he's researching possible ways to stop it. Apparently, there's a man in business affairs at King World (the production company that once distributed Jeopardy!) named Ed Little who could kill the episode if he wanted to.
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