Why does Cathy keep seeing Charles in East of Eden? Netflix stars explain his strange return

*Warning: Spoilers ahead for East of Eden*

Cathy and Charles have one of the most intriguing relationships in Netflix’s East of Eden. They seem to understand each other better than almost anyone else does – as he puts it, “Kind recognises kind” – and yet also, at times, outright despise one another.

Charles (Mike Faist) is Adam Trask’s (Christopher Abbott) brother, and from the moment Cathy (Florence Pugh) enters their lives, he sees something in her that Adam doesn’t. For Adam, it’s love at first sight, but Charles is immediately suspicious of the stories she tells about her past, recognising a darkness that perhaps reminds him of himself.

Their relationship becomes even more complicated when Cathy not-so-accidentally drugs Adam and pursues Charles. They end up sleeping together, shortly before she and Adam leave for California.

Cathy goes on to give birth to their twin sons, Cal (Joseph Zada) and Aron (Joe Anders), before shooting her husband (he doesn’t die) and abandoning the family. Charles, meanwhile, remains behind on the Trask farm.

The brothers never see each other again, and years later Adam receives a letter informing him that Charles has died after a two-week illness caused by a problem with his lungs.

By this point, Cathy has reinvented herself as Kate and eventually takes control of a brothel, while Adam raises their sons with Lee (Hoon Lee), believing she is gone for good. But Charles unexpectedly returns to the story years after his death – or, at least, Cathy’s version of him does.

As her life and her mental state begin to unravel, she repeatedly sees and speaks to Charles as though he’s right there beside her. They have ongoing conversations, with his apparition forcing her to confront things she’d rather avoid.

So, what’s going on here? Is she being haunted by Charles? Is it a result of her ongoing morphine use and mental deterioration? Well, Florence Pugh, Mike Faist and showrunner Zoe Kazan have explained what’s actually happening, and it turns out it’s derived from a tiny detail in John Steinbeck’s original East of Eden novel.

Why does Cathy see Charles even after he’s dead?

There are essentially two reasons behind Charles’ return. For Kazan, bringing him back was a way to give viewers access to Cathy’s inner life without having to invent a new character that goes against how isolated she’s become at this point in her life.

For Pugh, it’s Cathy coming to terms with her life and the decisions she’s made, perhaps realising that Charles might have been her one true love.

It’s interesting to see this part of the book being expanded on, given it’s such a small detail in the source material. In Steinbeck’s East of Eden, shortly after Ethel’s visit, Cathy claims to not be disturbed by it. But she later has a flash memory of Faye, the woman she murdered to obtain the brothel.

“How was the dark face of Charles involved in the thought? And Sam Hamilton’s puzzled and merry eyes? And why did she get a shiver of fear from the flashing thought? She gave it up and went back to her work, but the face of Charles was behind her, looking over her shoulder,” Steinbeck writes.

Pugh, Faist and Kazan spoke to TV Insider about why this brief moment was turned into such a significant part of Cathy’s story in the finale of the Netflix adaptation. “I think the moment she meets her children, and they don’t want her, it breaks her in a way that is irreparable,” Pugh said.

“I don’t think she comes back from that. And the way that she is processing her life and thinking about the decisions that she made is obviously making her feel very sick and having Charles in her mind constantly and talking to her…

“I believed in those moments when we were shooting them that she is coming to terms with the fact that he probably could have been her one true love. Whether that is the case or not, that was definitely a way of me accessing that relationship, and her kind of romanticising what could have been, or even just the short while that they did have.”

Faist added, “She’s having these reflections after having lived the life that she has led, and she’s bringing him up as this kind of almost Cheshire Cat figure in her Alice in Wonderland story.

“And I think it’s very natural because her character makes the choice to marry Adam and move out west, and she’s lived with these choices that she’s made. And the person that she’s talking to in the end is Charles, the person that she actually left behind.

“It kind of just goes back to that thing that Charles ultimately says: kind recognising kind. I think these are two people that really see each other. They see this thing that exists within each other, and they have a very powerful connection.”

For Kazan, it was also a functional decision, as she told the outlet that she needed to access Cathy’s “inner life” and realised Charles’ presence would be a way to do that.

“Cathy is an incredibly lonely person, and her self-isolation is, I think, central to her fate and to her character. I think that it is an extension of her viewpoint of the world, which is that the world is full of evil and full of stupid and evil people,” Kazan explained.

“I, at the same time, really needed access to her inner life, and so I couldn’t give her a friend to talk to. I had been playing with this direct address from the very start of the series, like her voice-over. She’s speaking directly to the audience, and I always thought of that as her speaking to herself.

“And I kind of wanted to do a little sleight of hand where Charles stands in for herself, and I think it thematically doubles back on this idea of kind recognises kind, and her idea that maybe – and maybe she says it’s just for effect, or maybe not – that she maybe could have loved Charles.

“I found it very useful, and also the way that she describes having an imaginary friend in Alice, like her conception of Alice in Wonderland. I thought, oh, there’s quite a lot of textual support for this choice, and then also we just wanted to get lovely Mike back on screen.”

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Featured image credit: Netflix