


Double Bonus: He refuses anesthesia for the operation.Bonus: Because of his invulnerability, they have to perform the surgery with an industrial-strength oil drill.The doctors comply, he goes back to his old life, and he couldn't be happier.

Before he meets the same fate, Rhino orders the surgeons to not only reverse the procedure but make him stupider than he was before "just to be on the safe side". The "Algernon" of the story, an ape that went through the same procedure, eventually commits suicide out of boredom. The procedure works, but he finds that his intelligence just keeps growing (at one point he rewrites Hamlet due to finding the writing style "sloppy", and later manages to discover Spidey's secret identity through a mathematical equation on top of utterly humiliating the webslinger in a fight and getting a restraining order against him through manipulating the legal system), until he grows too smart to properly form relationships with people, loses interest due to Measuring the Marigolds (at one point, his love interest calls him a monster, and to his horror, all he can think of is the definition and etymology of the word), and growing boredom and nihilism, as there's no longer anything he can't figure out. The Spider-Man storyline "Flowers For Rhino" (guess what it was named after): dimwitted Spidey villain Rhino has a midlife crisis and goes through a brain-boosting procedure to make him super-intelligent so he isn't treated like shit.Charlie, though, finds that his intelligence isolates him just as much as his dimness did before it. To an astounding degree, as it turns out: his intellectual breadth and knowledge allow him to learn languages of all kinds, science of all branches, surpassing even those that performed the operation. In the story, the main character, cognitively disabled Charlie, undergoes a surgery that boosts his intelligence. In the Trope Namer short story Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (later expanded into a novel), it was a side effect of the imperfect procedure that granted the intelligence in the first place. At other times, it's a bow to Status Quo Is God. Sometimes, it's because the method used to acquire the new ability (or perhaps even the new ability itself) presents an actual danger to the character who has it ( and possibly even others). Sometimes, it's because the character's "normality" is required to solve a problem. However, by the end of the episode, the character is back to normal. loses something that is considered in general as bad ( jerkassery or stupidity as examples).gains something that is considered in general as good ( intelligence is a common one), or.
