Why Rafael is actually a geniusly written character
This is something I could talk about at length but I’m gonna keep it brief cause I’m on my lunch break at work lol.
After the events of Undiscovered Country, a lot of fans thought Rafa unplugging the baby was wildly out of character and the cause of bad writing (while I agree that the writers has 100 other ways to write him off and they chose *that*, sucks) but tbh I disagree. I think it was quite in character for him.
What we see of Rafael throughout the series is this calm, calculated, put-together persona that he has. He always knows what he’s doing and has a plan, right?
Well here’s the thing. If you look very closely, you’d see that Rafael isn’t all of those things. I think he’s actually a complete mess. Behind his organized facade, he actually can be impulsive, reckless, and very irresponsible at the worst of times. Like Liv or Carisi, he gets way too into his cases, and sometimes that makes him do things that endanger himself and others for the sake of a case. Consider that he’s directly caused the death of at least 2 people.
He gave a gang member his home address, he convinced a violent rapist to choke him, he bought drugs for a drug addict and it ended up killing her, he gave her daughter secret money for 10 years, of course y’all know about the baby incident, but the nail in the coffin was really 22x04, when he took Mickey’s case completely on a whim just because Carisi suggested it to him, even though he knew Liv would be mad at him for it.
TLDR Raf is a surprisingly complex character and I really like that
