Two and a Half Men — the new season

I was very pleased with the first episode of Two and a Half Men in the new Season 9, which was on last Monday night.  It was much better than I was expecting.  The sitcom broke records with 27.8 million viewers, as people tuned in to see how the show would manage without Charlie Sheen, who was fired last season.  Ashton Kutcher played the part of a new character and he did quite well.  I was impressed with his good acting performance; he fit right in as though he had always been one of the characters on the show.   Kutcher did not replace Charlie’s character, Charlie Harper.  No one could ever replace Charlie Sheen, nor his character, Charlie Harper.

The best part about the new show is that there is a possibility that Charlie Harper could come back.  I’m not sure if the producers of the show realize that they have left a way open for the return of Charlie Harper.

The first show of the new season starts off with the funeral of Charlie Harper as his wife Rose tells the mourners about his death:  he fell off a train platform in Paris and was hit by a train.  This happened just after he had told Rose that he had been unfaithful.  It was strongly implied that Rose had pushed him off the platform.  His body was cut into hamburger meat.   A coffin was shown at his funeral, but his remains were not in the closed casket.  So how do we know that Charlie is really dead?  We don’t!  Rose is a known liar and as regular viewers of the show know, Rose cannot be trusted.  Maybe she pushed him, maybe he fell, or maybe Rose was lying.

Later in the show, Charlie’s brother Alan is carrying Charlie’s ashes in a large urn when the new character, Walden Schmidt, shows up at Charlie’s Malibu beach house where Alan and his son still live.  At that moment, Alan spills Charlie’s ashes inside the house and they are cleaned up (off camera) with a hand vacuum cleaner.  Presumably the hand vacuum cleaner is emptied into the trash and Charlie is now completely gone.  Gone but not forgotten!

Charlie Sheen has millions of fans and if he should return, it would bring even more viewers to the show.  It would be easy to have a plot twist in which it is revealed that Rose was lying about Charlie’s death.  Did someone really pick up all the tiny pieces of Charlie’s body after he was allegedly hit by a train?  Was a DNA test done to make sure that it was Charlie?  Did this really happen at all, or was Rose lying?