#robert muchamore

But first, James’ arc. It’s really hard to miss what the character development is meant to be for James this go-around. It starts when, in a sulk from Kerry breaking up with him, James beats the shit out of some other kid for no reason and then is all ‘woe is me’ when all of his friends blank him for it. Yeah, that’s what happens when you beat up someone for no good reason just because they got in your way. Idiot. So James has to learn to control his temper and not lash out at others. The thing is, though, the narrative is focused a little too much on his self-pity. I get that we’re not necessarily supposed to think James beating that kid up is good, but we’re expected to keep sympathising with him as the everyman main character. And I just can’t sympathise with James. He’s too volatile, a little scary, and largely unrepentant for the bad things he does. I’m not sure he even really learns his lesson. I don’t like it!

So let’s talk crooked cops. James encounters the crooked cop of this piece, Michael Patel, when he slams James’ head into a car during an arrest for no real reason. It later turns out that Patel totally killed a kid and was helping the car dealer in a heist. I...question the decision to have the only confirmed cop character who is a person of colour be the one who is crooked and working with the Bad Guys, and also the lack of perspective on what makes a bad cop. Granted, I’m writing this well after the BLM movement’s existence, but it’s not like police violence wasn’t a Thing in the mid-2000s. Patel is just shown as being Bad. We don’t see him justifying his own actions as Stopping The Bad Guys in the way that real bad cops do. There is a moment where our good cop character closes ranks around him initially, but she does a 180 after looking into Patel’s record and learning that he is, actually, Bad. No sense of all cops closing ranks around murderers even when they know they’re murderers. As is becoming the norm for CHERUB, the morality is just a little too black and white for the complex situations they’re covering.

Which is saying something when the climax of James’ mission is him and the other agents manipulating the emotions of Patel and the car dealer so they’d be at each other’s throats and let slip a confession. I dunno, this kind of cop work never sits right with me, the idea of near-gaslighting someone just so that they will confess their crimes next to a microphone they don’t know is there. But of course, Patel and co are Bad People, so James and the others are narratively justified for anything they do to stop them. Obviously.