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A character either:
- gains something that is perceived in general as good (intelligence, for example), or
- loses something that is perceived in general as bad (stupidity or bossy behavior, as examples).
However, by the end of the episode, the character is back to normal, sometimes because the character's "normalcy" is required to solve a problem. At other time as a bow to Status Quo Is God.
Named for the book (expanded from a short story) Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes. In the book, the main character, a mentally retarded man named Charlie, undergoes medical treatment that boosts his intelligence. It gradually fades, however, and he ends up no different (and possibly a little worse) than he started. The stage and film adaptations of Flowers for Algernon are entitled Charly. Some references to this story will therefore play off this title.
The polar opposite of Brought Down To Normal.
See also We Want Our Jerk Back.
Done badly, this is a warped or family unfriendly message that being smart or even above average will make you unhappy and insufferable, and the only way to have friends and be acceptable is to be at (or below) their own level. Smart is bad, dumb is good. It's done badly fairly often.
Examples:
- Newsradio, "Flowers for Matthew", Matthew drinks what he thinks is a intelligence-boosting drink and becomes smart through the placebo effect. Ironically, his intelligence eventually drives him to understand that the drink has no actual chemical effect, at which point the placebo stops working on him and he rapidly returns to his original state.
- Rugrats, "Smell of Success": A copy of "Flowers For Algernon", except with Chuckie gaining and losing an uncanny sense of smell. Came complete with Chuckie befriending the white lab mouse as homage.
- Futurama did this twice:
- In "The Cyber House Rules" Leela gets a second eye surgically installed. She goes back to one, after seeing that the person she's been dating (and who gave her the operation) treats a kid with three ears differently from other kids.
- In "Parasites Lost" Fry accidentally ingests parasitic worms that make him super-strong and super-intelligent. He gets rid of the worms because he wants Leela to love him for who he really is.
- And because he had worms.
- Subverted in an episode where Farnsworth gives a monkey an intelligence hat, and the monkey decides he doesn't like being smart, and throws the hat away. Then he realizes he doesn't like not being sapient either, so he puts the hat back on, but it's damaged. Then he finds he likes just being moderately smart.
- The Simpsons, "HOMR". Dumb Homer had a crayon lodged in his nose since childhood, and when it was removed he became intelligent Homer. He eventually had the crayon re-inserted after discovering that a man with a 102 IQ is too intelligent to be happy in today's world. The title plays off Charly.
- Ducktales, Bubba Duck becomes intelligent and civilized. He becomes dumb and barbaric again when his brute strength is needed to pound a monster threatening his friends.
- Transformers: Grimlock, who by the third season had suffered Flanderization to the point where he could barely speak coherently, became super intelligent after getting hit with a Transformation Ray. He quickly became the best Autobot you could have ever wanted, but was forced to build a new team of combining robots and transfer his intelligence into them to solve a dilemma.
- The Weekenders, "Sense and Sensitivity": Tino wants Lor to pass the ball to her teammate in an upcoming hoops game. Lor becomes nice. Next thing you know, Tino fears that she'll pass to the opposition.
- The Six Million Dollar Man -- Jaime Sommers' first appearance in the show gave her bionics, then apparently ended with her death because her body rejected them. (Of course, she was revived and re-empowered when the network discovered she'd make a good spinoff, but that was outside of the realm of the original episode's plot.)
- Monk, "Mr. Monk Takes His Medicine" -- Adrian Monk begins taking medication to combat his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. It works; however, he not only loses his amazing detecting abilities but in a twist, he also turns into an insufferable egotistical jerk who talks like a '50s hipster and wants to be referred to as "The Monk." Naturally, by the end of the episode, everyone is begging him to stop taking the medicine.
- Angel -- Charles Gunn undergoes a magical procedure to give him encyclopedic legal knowledge, but after half a season it begins to degrade. This is referred to in the episode as 'acute "Flowers for Algernon" syndrome.' He is able to regain the intelligence though.
- Red Dwarf: Rimmer gets a "mind patch" to raise his intelligence to genius-level so he can pass the entrance exam for a ship of super-genius holograms. Naturally, his brain rejects it. (But he passes anyway, when his opponent forfeits.)
- Rimmer also gains his self-confidence and self-respect back (externalised as dashing swordsmen) in the episode Terrorform, but loses them again almost at once on finding out what his comrades really think of him.
- Rimmer assumes his dashing alter-ego Ace on a number of occasions, but things are soon back to normal
- Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys: Gor gets a full dose from the intelligence booster (his original dose was interrupted partway through), but becomes too detached to access his anger-fueled super-strength. He later reverses the process.
- In Scrubs, psychiatrist Molly Clock talks to The Todd, the innuendo-spouting stereotypical jock surgeon, and manages to turn him into a normal, nice man. When asked about it, she responds "Yeah, but I only talked to him for a few hours. Without continuing therapy, he'll probably be back to normal in a week," which serves as a Handwave for the Snap Back in the next episode. Of course, given that Scrubs has gag-specific Negative Continuity anyway, one wonders what the deal was about.
- In Animorphs, Tobias overstays his morph as a hawk and ends up stuck that way (and Wangsting over it) for a considerably long time. Later, a sufficiently advanced alien known as the Ellimist restores his morphing power and allows him the option to become human again - for two hours. You see, that's the catch: if he chooses to stay human for good, he'll lose his powers again and thus not be able to participate in the war.
- In John DeChancie's Living With Aliens, the main character starts out as a below-average teenage boy who befriends a pair of eccentric, stoner, renegade aliens. They offer him "smart pills", which greatly boost his intelligence into high genius levels. Since the story is written in first person, the effects of the intelligence drugs change the prose as the story goes along. Eventually, the pills wear off slightly, but enough of the effect lasts that he's able to maintain membership in Mensa.
- In the My Teacher is an Alien book series, unintelligent bully Duncan Dougal has his brain fried into a more intelligent state in the second book, and later becomes horrified when learning that he may lose this intelligence.
- Elroy does this to Astro in the 1980s Revival of TheJetsons.
- Family Guy does this, but with looks instead of smarts. Peter gets cosmetic surgery to become beautiful. He also becomes a jerk. And, even though his family recognize that he has become a jerk, most of them are willing to put up with it because he is beautiful. At the end, he is restored to the status quo by accidentally falling into a vat of lard at a meat factory and eating the contents to not drown/suffocate. The family is happier. Lois asks, "I guess you learned a valuable lesson?" to which he replies, "Nope."
- In the Let's Play of Fallout 2 ( http://fromearth.net/LetsPlay/Fallout%202/
 ) Trogg overdoses on Mentats, and becomes a near-genius from a barely sentient troglodyte. He realizes what he was doing and sets out to atone. When the effects wear off, though, he reverts to his old self, not understanding why he did things he did.
- The Spider-Man storyline "Flowers For Rhino": dimwitted Spidey villain Rhino goes through a brain procedure to make him super-intelligent. While the procedure works, he finds that his intelligence just keeps growing to the detriment of his ability to feel joy (for example, he even rewrote Hamlet due to finding the writing style "sloppy"). When his intelligence starts to reach near-omniscient levels (even managing to discover Spidey's secret identity through a mathematical equation), he 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 doctors comply and he couldn't be happier.
- Bonus: Because of his invulnerability, they had to perform the surgery with an industrial strength oil drill.
- In the 2000 The Invisible Man series, the protagonist's partner, Hobbes, is accidentally injected with an intelligence-boosting retrovirus. Unfortunately, the effects ultimately lead to mental overload and catatonia; by the time this is discovered Hobbes doesn't care, but his partner does, and manages to emotionally blackmail him into creating an antidote.
- In an episode of Spongebob Squarepants, Patrick becomes a super-genius, but decides to go back to being stupid after he realizes he's turning into an Insufferable Genius and alienating all his friends.
- This trope is the major plot point of a 1990 movie starring Robin Williams, Awakenings, which has some basis on real life and describes the treatment of catatonic patients with a then-new drug called L-Dopa.
- In an episode of Malcolm In The Middle, school bully Reese is beaten by a girl in wrestling. This knocks some sense into him, making him decide that he doesn't want to be a bully anymore. Unfortunately, this leaves a power vacuum in the school, with numerous students running rampant, picking on others randomly. Even his brother Malcolm, who was left alone despite being a particularly snarky Insufferable Genius, suffers painful payback now that the threat of fraternal vengeance is gone. After all this is pointed out by Malcolm and his friends, Reese reestablishes both his role as school bully and order in the school.
- The newspaper comic Tank McNamara did a riff on this trope. Tank gets zapped by one of Dr. Tzapp's experimental machines, and it cures his fumblemouth. Before long, Tank starts fancying himself an incisive critic, and the show's ratings plummet because nobody wants to listen to that. Eventually one of the other characters re-zaps him and he turns into his lovable, fumblemouthed self again.
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