Welcome back to the eighth instalment of the biweekly October Faction review! “Alice” was, quite frankly, a mess. I don’t know how the show just completely devolved into cliche and empty, wooden scenes in the space of one episode, but this was a complete slump. But that means I get to pick it apart for all of you, so strap yourselves in and enjoy! Spoilers ahead.
1. Welcome to the mutant monster metaphor
I think I could tell from the opening shot that this was going to be a frustrating episode. The kids in monster masks staring through a chain link fence would be a creative shot if it wasn’t also the single most cliche way to start an episode all about racial allegory. So the episode walks us through this weirdly rural town as Alice and her husband Omari spout the usual “they don’t understand our kind” style of hollow commentary. Someone call the X-Men, October Faction’s trying to steal their catch-all commentary!
It doesn’t help that any pretence of culture the warlocks have in this episode is so skin deep that it almost detracts from their message. No actual religion would ever refer to its prayer as ‘ancient rituals,’ but for some reason the monsters do, it’s so coded and clueless. Plus the last two episodes made it abundantly clear that monsters have their own language, yet for some reason, no one ever speaks it here. I guess Netflix didn’t think people were up to reading subtitles; but if people can get through three seasons of Daenerys speaking Dothraki then I’m sure they can survive 40 minutes of that.
This all culminates in the most thinly veiled ideological debate with Moshe tries to convince Alice and Omari to join him in a war against Presidio, the whole scene feels so awkward. just don’t get how writers can put together dialogue like “I’ve lost women, men, children and family” and not realise they’re holding the single most cliche script on earth. This isn’t new, I can’t sympathise with a YA stereotype.
2. Maybe the real monster was the friends we made along the way
What would Presidio have done if Alice just realised Kate was a terrible friend and stopped talking to her? Because I feel like that was a distinct possibility here. For one Kate pressured Alice into reading her fortune then slagged her the whole time for it, big move from someone who was tripping on pills less than a minute after taking one. Either she has the fastest metabolism on the planet or Presidio’s acting school has no idea how drugs work. Kate and Alice both prove that they would be terrible parents as well, at one point Alice says “oh you’ll lose your daughter, but you’ve got me” when they’re talking about putting Kate in rehab, as if that’s any sort of consolation and not just the most egotistical and insulting platitude ever. Kate somehow tops this moment when she finally reveals her identity and starts espousing about how “I would never put a child in that kind of danger” as if the fact that Sarah being her actual daughter means she was in any less danger around Alice. It’s so weird and haughty.
Speaking of Sarah though, this episode goes out of it’s way to throw in the most overused trope in fantasy TV, talking about how “humans are the real monsters” every second line, then giving us a bunch of rote monster-centric scenes in the background that would make good metaphors if they had literally any secondary meaning. This is epitomised in the scene where Sarah gets scared of their being a monster under her bed and Alice telling her monsters aren’t real. I know, it was so edgy, I almost got cut. I’m just so sick of this show using half-baked metaphors that it didn’t even think of. This episode is so far from having a single original concept, I really didn’t think I was capable of this level of hatred.
3. Contrive to survive
Maybe, MAYBE I could have come out of this episode happy if it had just made sense. Sure, it would still be riddled with more cliches than a Star Wars fan film, but it would at least be digestible. Instead we have this weird story that does plothole gymnastics to try get characters where they need to be for a twist you can spot coming thirty minutes ahead of time.
Kate, Alice’s supposed best friend, has the most unintentionally hilarious story ever just because of how contrived and obvious her whole arc is. Like after they decide to put her in rehab, Alice is “forced” to take her into Harlow House so she doesn’t go homeless. WHY?! How could she possibly become homeless out of all of this??!! There’s no financial risk, in fact we know she has an amazing house! The only reason given is that ‘the hospital rejected her insurance claim’ as if that somehow justifies why she can’t live in HER OWN HOUSE. I don’t… I don’t get it. I guess the real enemy here is the American healthcare system. Obviously it becomes clear that Kate’s going there so she can find the warlock community, but I just don’t understand why that’s anything close to a convincing series of events.
Of course after the inevitable betrayal we get another scene to remind us that Presidio are the worst people on the planet as masked soldiers (except for Fred and Deloris because they’re special and have bullet proof heads apparently) massacre Harlow House and we see just how bad they are at their job. Alice is incredibly bad at hiding in this episode, yet she somehow survives, despite being the sole reason Presidio were able to find the place at all. She’s the most trackable person out of everyone at Harlow House and yet she just sneaks away into the night. Are you really telling me that Presidio inexplicably never searched her house even though it’s the only place Kate actually stayed in and that they didn’t hear Alice screaming as she gave birth, but then decided to still blow up her house hours later for little to no reason? In fact, who planted the explosives??? Why was this the only house they blew up??? I don’t even want to know this at this point, we’re probably going to get a 20 minute flashback next episode that painstakingly goes over it but still doesn’t actually fix any of the plot holes. What a show.
4. Why did these choices get made
Honestly, I don’t even think that this episode is just bad cosmetically, it feels like it’s even screwed on a structural level. Why did we need another female villain origin story about pregnancy and the death of a husband? Spider-Man grieves Uncle ben, Batman grieves Thomas Wayne, Superman grieves Jor-El. But then Wonder Woman grieves after Steve Trevor, Black Widow grieves over her lost uterus, Harley Quinn grieves her relationship with the Joker. Can’t Harlow just have an origin story that’s either detached from her femininity or actually builds on it in a way that doesn’t argue ‘any woman without a nuclear family is psychotic.’ Just have a new idea for once.
The narration over the whole episode is another nail in the coffin (honestly this is starting to feel more like a game of Pop-Up Pirate than a funeral) that tips it from simply cheesy to painfully unwatchable. Everyone’s happy to just let Alice monologue, which solidifies her as a villain more than any of her countless murders. But also, none of the narration actually tells us anything new, at one point she exposits on her horrible nightmares, even though we literally just saw one. It’s all redundant. It just cheapens the whole thing, because no one talks about unprocessed trauma this fluently, and if she had processed it she wouldn’t be snapping necks and bathing in blood. What happened to that perfect, silent, slaughterous Harlow?
5. Stiff as a stake
I know this is the most negative review ever, but I just don’t get how every aspect of this show was such a dud. I appreciate that all the actors in this were working with less than nothing, but I really don’t think there’s a single serviceable performance in this. Even Alice Harlow, who I’ve been the biggest proponent for over the last seven episodes was an unrecognizable cliche here. I swear, once she hits the third trimester in the show some director must have just drilled it in Maxim Roy’s head that if she ever stops rubbing her belly she’ll get kicked out of Hollywood.
The most egregious culprits of this though are the new characters introduced for this episode. Andrew Moodie’s Omari has the most stilted, empty delivery for every line. My favourite moment in the whole episode might be when Alice very lightly spanks him (with apparently no sound because the sound guy couldn’t be bothered) and then we get this way too smug reaction from Omari as Moodie desperately flounders to prove his character has a personality. Kate Ross as Kate Marshall (nice creative name choice) is just as bad, basically having the default facial expression of a cat about to throw up in every scene where she’s supposed to be sad. On top of that we get to see her act her way through the most conspicuous and obviously staged drug deal ever, yet somehow Alice is still surprised when her friend turns out to be a plant. It’s acting on acting and none of the layers are good.
Her daughter is pretty great evidence for why you should never have child actors in a series with a script as weak as this, never before has a child ticked this many boxes in a game of ‘cliche bingo.’ The only accurate part of this whole episode might be how everyone becomes a nosy prick the moment Alice gets pregnant, just leave her alone. We know you used to be pregnant too, that doesn’t give you an incredible connection, just let her conspicuously save the lives of jaywalkers on her own.
“Alice” is a spectacular train-wreck of an episode, but I’m almost obsessed with seeing how it ends. We only have two episodes left after this and there’s so many loose threads to pull together, so come back next time for episode nine “Bonds of Blood” (or rewatch episode six of Watchmen like this inspired me to. It’s kinda the same story. But better).
