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You’re Not a Bad Person
You just fell out of character
Mike Ross has a photographic memory, and yet, he keeps losing his phone.
The first time I watched Suits, I didn’t understand why. It seemed odd. A misplaced trait in a genius character.
How could the writers have missed this? How did this anomaly slip through the cracks?
The more I watched, the more I understood: The writers didn’t miss these flaws. They put them there. They’re what keeps Mike interesting.
Mike Ross is a good man whom bad things have happened to. He’s a lawyer but not a real one. He’s loyal but naïve. Mike is full of conflict.
In other words, more so than a character on a TV show, Mike Ross is human.
Mike is madly, deeply, purely in love with Rachel. And yet, he starts an affair with another woman. Mike can outwit any intellectual attacker. And yet, he lets himself get blackmailed. That’s unlike him, but that’s what we do, isn’t it?
We fall out of character — and that’s what keeps us interesting.
We all have this idea of who we want to be. The perfect version of our character. Of course, we’ll never get there.
We all take the odd highway exit here and there. We do things we can’t make sense of in hindsight…
