Wasted character/storyline opputunities in Waterloo Road.

Seeing as we will be waving goodbye to the show soon, now feels like as good a time as any to look at all the times it really looked like a storyline could have happened, but didn't, or they could have done something with one of the characters, but didn't.

I may think of more, but at the moment, as far as characters go, I feel that Karla Bentham ended up as a very wasted character in the end. She was brought in as a new student with Aspergers, and at the time was a well written character; her autism was neither played for laughs, nor made her look stupid, but simply held her back with certain aspects, while she was perfectly fine (and in some cases better) in others, and most of her worst moments were due to teachers not understanding her. Basically the writers did well in showing that having autism doesn't make someone abnormal or stupid - Karla clearly knew what was going on, and was very good at certain subjects; her autism affected her anxiety more than anything (and the fact that she'd take phrases like "wait outside" at face value). So a good storyline about how certain stereotypes about people may be (and often are) wrong, exaggerated, or based on a select group of people, and stated as fact about everyone else.

However (and yes, I realize that was pretty long, and I apologise) the waste of her character is that she ended up as nothing else other than "The One With Autism", which kind of defeats the object of her character in a sense. It's like they brought her in during season 4, I think - that should have been the only season to focus purely on her autism, and from then on she should have just been given her own storylines; like the kind of storylines the other students had - the way she was written made her seem like wasn't part of any of the storylines, or had any storylines of her own. She was brought in for one storyline, and then stuck around to do nothing else except occasionally remind us she had autism (they could still have done this even if they had given her other storylines).

Though I think their biggest mistake was not showing that all people with a particular form of autism aren't exactly the same as one another. Take Karla's autism for example; Aspergers, it comes in levels or stages or something, so some people have it more than others (if that makes sense, it's hard to explain), and some get a little "better" at handling it at a certain age. They could have introduced another character with Aspergers and had him or her be "better" at coping with it than Karla was, to show that it affects people differently, or give him/her certain traits that Karla didn't have or vice versa.

Sorry that was longer than I thought, I'll try not to do the others in essay standard if I can help it.