halfamoon | Day 6: Charlie Cameron [Secrets/Lies] (Reply)

Gif Source

Today I wrote some meta about Charlie Cameron from Roswell New Mexico! Thanks to jocarthage on tumblr for the prompt. Charlie was a bioweapons engineer for the military at some point before canon, and got very good at keeping Government secrets. However, she decided to leak unspecified classified documents, and when her sister Jenna realized what Charlie did, she reported her. Charlie was subsequently arrested and convicted. She eventually escapes military prison, and that's how her character joins the show in season 2.

Her character has many similarities with Chelsea Manning. She's trans, and she had high-level government access at some point. She had an ideological break with those she was working for, and they wouldn't change their course of action unless she did something huge (or at least that was her perception). She didn't seem daunted by the prospect of punishment, because she was driven by her own sense of what was right. However, Jesse Manes implies that Charlie also leaked the documents in order to get arrested, which is where her story diverges from Manning's. This fact isn't actually confirmed, but Charlie does seem to be a very sophisticated character who would know how to avoid getting caught.

The show seems to build on Manning's real life story by adding in some specific technical expertise and some ownership over the situation as a whole. The government secrets Charlie knows about are directly related to something she herself built and put out into the world. She wants to have some ownership over her creation and put it back into the box, but she can't. Leaking classified docs seems like a choice she made to take back some control of her life - the punishment/outcome was predictable, and she would be put in prison rather than face the possibility that others might torture her or her family to find out what she knew. She's still a sophisticated/smart enough character to escape prison and aid her sister later on, anyway.

Charlie wanted her bioweapon discoveries to be used to target specific individuals and greatly reduce civilian causalities, but she finds out her scientific advancements were actually turned over to Jesse Manes' military Project Shepard. She says in 2.12 that: a "catalytic toxin atomizer that was developed in a top secret operation involving weapons specialists from both the Army and the Air Force" and Michael confirms that she's referring to Project Shepard. She does seem surprised to learn in 2.12 that Manes is targeting "actual aliens," so that leads me to believe she never knew about the alien part. Only that Project Shepard was going to use her technology without a clear mission and without her okay.

The show does not tell us what type of information was leaked, but if her idealogical break was with Project Shepard, I can only assume the documents that got out where related to the existence of the lab in Roswell. The show does say she's trying to hide from Deep Sky, because they want to know about her technology and use her expertise, but she leaves the show with more secrets than she started with.