I, personally, am a big fan of the idea that Danny is actually really smart, it’s just that school doesn’t work with him. Whether that be because of constant ghost attacks, him playing down his intelligence, ADHD problems, etc., it doesn’t matter.
I like most stuff where Danny is a tech genius, or where he’s essentially a ghost culture expert with several notebooks on the topic, or a historian nerd, or *something*. I like all of those, but there’s one that I really, really love that I don’t think I’ve properly seen anywhere. It’s hard to explain so I’m gonna give an example that’s been stuck in my head.
One night, a mere few weeks after the accident, Danny’s laying in his bed, still debating if he’s human or not anymore, still trying to figure out exactly what’s happened to him. Due to the pestering of Sam and Tucker, he knows his heart rate is in the 30’s, well below what’s needed for adequate oxygen perfusion, his internal temperature is 33 degrees Celsius, where he should be suffering from hypothermia, although his skin appears to be warmer for some reason. Point is, Danny is wondering how deep his changes go, and he decides to test his DNA. Additionally, Danny being a truly brilliant dumbass, decides to test his parents DNA as well, doing a basic paternity test, which he does get:
Danny scowled as he looked at the clock above the doorway. He should be able to get the necessary equipment and materials from the lab, but there was one thing missing if he wanted this to be a proper test, which was technically in the lab but would be out of reach for the next two days if he didn’t get it now.
Bouncing on his toes, shaking himself a bit, Danny took a deep breath as he shoved his nervousness down and put on his best, ‘just doing my job ma’am’ face.
“Hey mom?” Danny called down the stairs, taking deliberately heavy footsteps.
“Yes honey?” Maddie said, voice echoing slightly up the stairwell. This was it, this was the moment of truth! Please don’t question it.
“Can I have a few vials of yours and dads blood?” He said, now standing at the doorway to the lab.
Maddie paused in her soldering work, head pulling up and staring straight forward for a moment. And then her head turned towards Danny with the most bewildered face he had ever seen on her.
“What?” Shit, she questioned it! Quick, random bullshit go!
“Uhhh, school said they wanted us to do a paternit- I mean uh, an ancestral dna test? You know, to introduce us to how evolution works?” That’s the best you can come up with?! Does that even make sense? Note to self, figure out if that makes sense.
While Danny was distracting himself with questions on if his made up excuse even fit together with his syllabus, or if DNA tests were even a good way to demonstrate evolution, Maddie thankfully understood exactly what he was talking about (She understood nothing).
“Oh, why didn’t you say so honey!” She said, standing up and spinning to face her son, “Why, I remember when I first started wondering if I was adopted!”
“Oh, I tired everything to get blood samples directly from the source,” She said, giving Danny a hug, “They could have been putting samples of my real parent’s hair in the hairbrushes after all. Jazz went through a similar phase too, though she did look oddly disappointed about the results.” She was silent for a moment after that, tilting her head and letting Danny stew in baffled thought.
After two seconds too much of introspection, Maddie gave her son one last squeeze and peck on the cheek, before she sprang up and over to a strangely bare part of lab wall.
Pressing a button and flicking a hidden switch or two, a number panel came out of the wall. Maddie called out over her shoulder as quickly typed in a ridiculously number of digits in.
“Now, which sample do you want?” She said, snapping Danny out of his trance as a seam appeared and frigid air hissed out between the gaps.
“What?” Danny said, still processing, not quite understanding what she meant by that.
“Which blood sample do you want? For that ‘school project’ of yours.” She said, fingers catching on a ridge and pulling it open to reveal two levels full of vials, one labeled Maddie and the other labeled Jack, with dates and times on each vial.
Okay, I might have gotten carried away there. Man, I really need to write more often, that was coming so easily!
Anyway, with the blood samples, he waits until his parents and Jazz are gone and collects own blood sample, following all the correct procedures that he searched up, although ignoring the ones that don’t apply to him because he’s not taking someone else’s blood. He also searched up how DNA tests work and decided to do some extra testing, such as centrifuges, which come up weird due to parts of his blood going intangible which results in his plasma not fully separating, no matter how much he spins it.
Anyway, using the materials from the lab and a basic understanding of how a dna test works, he creates a homemade dna tester.
(You can skip this if you want, it’s unimportant but I’m just going over how electrophoresis dna testers work. (Which is what Danny is doing here))
Essentially, everyone gets half their chromosomes from their parents. There’s stuff that alter the chromosomes you get, like chromosomes crossing over and exchanging bits and pieces, but that isn’t to important here. The basic is, you have half your moms dna, and half your dads dna. Now, something important to note, is that chromosomes all come in varying sizes, you can see this just by searching it up, an X chromosome is much bigger than a Y chromosome, which is on the 23rd chromosomal pair, and say, chromosome pair 1 can be bigger than chromosome pair 9. There’s a lot of variation however, I’d recommend looking at an image for an idea what I’m talking about. Regardless, this size thing is important for how paternity tests work. Essentially, they get a sample that has dna in it, remove everything except that dna and a solution of water or something (i dunno) to keep it in, and then they get this gel thing and put the sample on one side of it and do something called electrophoresis, where an electric current goes through the stuff, and the dna move towards the positive electrode. Basically, this gel has a sort of fibre mesh through out it, and smaller dna chromosomes move towards the positive electrode faster than the larger ones. This means that they get separated really effectively, forming obvious lines. In two tests done this way on different people, a few lines will get the same distance in the same amount of time, but not all of them. Now, if those two people had a child, and then had the same test done, then the results would look like the child just saw the lines of the previous two and just picked and choose randomly, because all of Danny’s results should match up with either his moms, or his dads.
(Dna test explanation ends here, you can relax)
Now, while danny does this, Maddie’s and Jack’s fin normal, and then he does his own. And the previously mentioned problem occurs, in that some of his dna goes intangible, which ruins his results and makes a complete mess of the entire thing, and now he knows the accident has changed his very dna (which we know from the tv show intro!), and that his very essence has been changed. Now he’s left wondering if he can even be regarded as human or ghost anymore, because ghosts don’t have dna, but he does? And his dna is different now, would it even match the normal human genome? Is he less human than monkeys are now? He needs to do more tests to find out…
Alright, now we’re past the example. What was the thing that stuck out about Danny here? Was it that he doesn’t plan the most basic of shit out? Was it his parents keeping preserved samples of their own blood? Or was it the fact that Danny researched, figured out how to, and then built his own DNA tester from scratch? I’d say all three options personally, but the topic of this one is the last option.
Danny was being crazy smart there. He had a problem, figured a solution, went about getting the materials in the stupidest possible way, absorbed knowledge, did separate tests to satisfy his curiosity, and solved his problem. Although now he has new ones.
I might be able to do something similar if I had, like, three weeks to do it or something, but Danny was easily able to think of equivalents that he could find in the lab, or at least things that are close enough that he could substitute them, and he did it quickly and easily, in like, a day. That’s really really smart to me.
All together, this, this right here, is the kind of intelligence I really like being written about. Intelligence that is shown, not told.
Wow this got away from me. Whoops.
