It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia S9 E8 - Flowers for Charlie (Cut Reaction)
Added 2025-12-01 16:19:17 +0000 UTCAn experiment successfully multiplies Charlie's intellect and takes him away from the bar; the gang find themselves struggling to complete Charlie's work.
Comments
Jimmy O. Yang, who plays the Mandarin-speaking scientist, was also hysterical and wickedly funny on Silicon Valley, another show to binge at some future date!
Steven Heinig
2025-12-10 20:31:28 +0000 UTCThank you!
Damon Richmond
2025-12-01 18:27:51 +0000 UTCLove yall
lensimms07
2025-12-01 18:27:14 +0000 UTCThank you for the extra info! It is a great episode!
Damon Richmond
2025-12-01 17:10:17 +0000 UTCThis is one of my favorite episodes of the whole series. Charlie Day is just incredible in it. And, maybe I'm the only one, but I bought that Charlie was getting smarter (because in the source material it's real!--see below) so the reveal at the end had me in tears of laughter. The title and plot of the episode is a play on "Flowers for Algernon." It's a short sci-fi (ish?) story by Daniel Keyes about a man (funnily enough, a janitor named "Charlie"!) who has an intellectual disability and undergoes an experimental surgery to increase his intelligence. The story is told through Charlie's progress reports and we see his steep intellectual growth into a genius and then his tragic decline. It's quite sad because the more intelligent he becomes, the more aware of how poorly he was treated before even by his friends. Algernon, by the way, is the name of the rat in the story who was given the surgery first. Algernon regresses first and eventually dies and as Charlie begins to follow that path (not to death--at least where the story ends--he just returns to his original state), he requests (in a progress report riddled with misspellings and confusion) that flowers be put on Algernon's grave. I'm sure they knew early on they had to do a story like this. Between Charlie being the rat king and being a janitor named Charlie, any fan of the classic short story would have seen the opportunity. And they did it so well. I'm glad they skipped the tragedy of it all--that wouldn't be IASIP's style--but anyway, yeah, one of the more clever and funny episodes in my opinion. :)
SierraNicole
2025-12-01 16:52:16 +0000 UTC
