Sheriff Jack Carter from ‘Eureka’

For those that never saw this SyFy show, ‘Eureka’ was about a secret town where all of these scientific geniuses lived.  They created advances in various technologies and there were always things running amok.  Jack Carter was made the town sheriff and he’s typically shown as the ‘Everyman’, which makes him the audience surrogate.  Things have to be explained to him as he helps fix whatever mess is going on.  After rewatching the series completely for the first time since it first aired, I have some thoughts on this character type.

The meme says ‘most stupid man’, but you have to understand that he’s in a town where everyone has genius-level IQs.  This includes a highly intelligent dog. So, he’s not stupid, so much as your average human.  I think this is a key point to such a character because they can’t be the smartest person in the room.  In fact, they really should be the least knowledgeable to allow the actual geniuses to explain things that the audience needs to understand the story.  If everyone knows all of the facts then essential information will not be said out loud.  So, this character already serves an essential purpose for setting and background info.

Another talent or purpose for this character is to show how those of average intellect can still be smart.  Something that ‘Eureka’ demonstrates is that geniuses can overthink things or get tunnel vision.  Many characters will stay within a strict mindset during a crisis and have trouble budging.  They have all of this knowledge, which they can’t quickly sift through because they either miss a small component or are following a faulty path of logic.  Carter would ask a ‘stupid question’ by connecting previous ideas or machines to the problem, which would get the genius characters to divert to a plan that works.  So, he is proven to be smart even if his IQ is the lowest in the room.  This makes the character useful and not overshadowed by their peers.

I think this also demonstrates a division of mental abilities that one sees in Dungeons & Dragons, but works with any character design.  The 6 stats are divided into 3 physical and 3 mental, but we only care about the second pairing.  Charisma stands on its own, but you have Intelligence and Wisdom.  I used to have trouble discerning these, but someone explained it like this:

“Intelligence is book smarts and Wisdom is street smarts.”

So, a character with high intelligence can have all of this knowledge and be able to logically figure stuff out with ease.  If they have low wisdom, they will miss social cues, have trouble connecting things out of context, and suffer from the previously mentioned tunnel vision problem.  A character with wisdom might not have absorbed all of the detailed knowledge, but they can work off instinct and awareness to figure things out.  Using ‘Eureka’ as an example, most characters have a high IQ and average to low Wisdom score, but Carter has a high wisdom and average IQ score.  It’s all about putting puzzle pieces together, which is really more of a wisdom thing.  Doesn’t matter how much you read about building a puzzle if you have trouble figuring out where the pieces go.

Personally, I really like having a character like this in my stories.  Luke Callindor would probably fall into this archetype.  He wasn’t the smartest, but he had instincts to help him figure out problems.  I used him to ask questions to get exposition into the story without it being a bizarre info dump.  It also gave me a character who I could use to put the plot pieces together if it didn’t make sense for the smarter ones to do so.  Attention to detail might be something that all of these characters have in common, but they aren’t always aware of this skill.  Oddly ironic there.