Short version: "Come on, you guys! As if all that shit hadn't been planned out back when Charlotte was introduced already! And as if we didn't care about that! You of little faith! No, what happened is that Rebecca Mader acted like a diva, and we merely failed to rectify the mess she made in time."
Thing is... Mader heard about that, and got pissed that the showrunners were blaming her when the 1979 date
was actually right there in the script in the first place.
Cue the showrunners' apology:
Where to begin...
For starters, how the hell does one go from
that to "Mader acted like a capricious and vain woman on the set, and we don't have a problem with telling the whole story in vivid details on our podcast"? What kind of irresponsible asshole manages to get something
that wrong and publicly talk shit about a member of their cast without even bothering to check?
Of course, that's
if it was all a mistake/misunderstanding...
For one thing, Rebecca Mader's birthday isn't July 2, 1979 (Charlotte's birthday as stated on the show), but
April 24, 1977. So there goes the explanation that they decided to use the actress' birth date for the character.
(and even if they did that out of concern for the actress looking too young, would you fix that by now having the character be two years younger than the actress?)
And of course, how do you reconcile this and that?
1) Their earlier claims that they
obviously pay attention to their dates, and would have naturally corrected the inconsistency Mader's capricious interference introduced, had they caught it in time.
2) Their revised version about how
they're the ones who decided to change Charlotte's birth date to July 2, 1979,
carefully planned timeline be damned. Oh, but when we'll get to the point where the characters go back into the past, Charlotte
will be around in 1974 anyway. No problem!
Did their priorities entirely change overnight? From "c'mon, guys, like we'd leave an inconsistency like that be if we had noticed it!" to "actually,
we introduced it in the first place, because we figured: why the fuck not? it's no biggie!" How does that happen?
They also added in
a later podcast that when they were looking for someone to play Charlotte, they were actually bringing in actresses in their late 30s / early 40s, and Mader was just too young, so they felt like they had to change the character's birth date (again, fuck the carefully planned out timeline, I guess?)...
But wait a minute... Isn't it well documented (the showrunners themselves said as much
there, before the whole mess) that Charlotte was originally set to be played by Kristen Bell, before she left for
Heroes (a gambit her agent probably dubbed "
Operation Charybdis or Scylla")?
Kristen Bell? Late 30s / early 40s?
Really?
Ah, well, maybe they just happened to like
two actresses who were younger than what they were initially going for, and...
Oh.
To sum up: they tried to bullshit their way out of a fuck-up by blaming it on one of their actresses while saying "c'mon, as if we could possibly fuck that shit up when we're so careful with our chronology!", and, when they got caught red-handed, came up with
more bullshit.
Classy
all the way.
Okay, so that's what I thought...
And again, it seems you fail to consider a third option:
1) it was a weird mistake,
2) it was done on purpose and part of
the Plan,
3) it was just the writers doing some random shit without any kind of plan in mind, merely for the sake of having fans dissect the hell of that online.
Since it would indeed be an odd mistake (1)), and
there was no payoff whatsoever (2)), it wouldn't be a good idea to dismiss 3) right off the bat (especially considering the anecdote above doesn't exactly scream "unblemished integrity")...
That was but one example...
Why, of course...
Look. For the sake of the argument, let's say the entire show was aaaaall "the magic box"'s doing...
What kind of story do you tell in a setting where
absolutely nothing is tethered/grounded, where
absolutely everything, no matter how intricate or contradictory, could be argued to have been conjured into existence by the unconscious of
whoever? Can you have proper character arcs with this shit? Or explore any kind of theme?
You're seeing a nonsensical mess, and simply arguing that it was
meant to be that way so that's okay (never mind what
that achieves, narratively speaking). There's no story bad enough that you couldn't "justify" it, with that kind of reasoning (actually the king of all cop outs... at least, you're putting that one upfront instead of only playing that card once you're cornered, like a lot of people have done in this topic so far).
