Who Has The Idiot Ball?
It seems to me that the plotting for this show depended on at least one major character carrying the Idiot Ball, i.e. doing something that's utterly stupid and that he has no reason to think would help him meet his goals as a character just because the plot requires it. Harker seemed to carry the Idiot Ball more often than anyone else, carrying it at least once in nearly every episode, but plenty of other characters did too.
What are your favorite examples of a character in this show carrying the Idiot Ball? Here are a few of mine to get the thread started.
1. Lucy Westenra who lived in a nation at a time when homosexuality was a crime (wasn't it punishable by death?!), listening to the advice of Lady Jayne, a woman she had just met, telling her that it was all "a perfectly normal part of a woman's maturation" to engage in a lesbian affair and that Mina surely had the same feelings too so Lucy should just make her move because everyone would be okay with it!
2. Lucy letting herself be pushed into seducing Harker on the advice of Lady Jayne, a woman that she still barely knew, no doubt on the strength of how well her earlier advice had worked. </sarcasm>
3. Harker announcing to all his buddies that Mina would no doubt lose all interest in medicine in order to be the doting wife of a glorified messenger boy, just in time for her to overhear it, all to help the writers try to explain away their eventual intention of having Mina ditch Harker in order to shack up with a corpse.
4. Harker swearing on pain of death to make the Order the most important thing in his life beyond family, friends, and everything else for as long as he lived, before he even knew what they were really up to and when he thought they were just trying to get an economic monopoly on fossil fuels in Turkey.
5. Renfield finally getting hold of the Dresden triptych that meant so much to Dracula who had been searching for it for such a long time and then leaving it unattended in his hotel room while he went out for a stroll and doing nothing to hide it but stick it behind a piece of furniture.
6. Lady Jayne panting after Dracula like an animal in heat to the point of absurdity. Seriously, unless the guy secretes irresistible pheromones through his fingers, the scene in the opera box breaks credibility.