"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, October 28, 2019

Favorite Characters: Alison Hendrix (Orphan Black)


While I immediately liked Sarah, adored Cosima, and was fascinated by Helena, it took me a while to warm up to Alison (admittedly, it helped a lot when she started interacting with Felix more – as I’ve said, those two are gold together!)  But even though the affection developed more gradually, I’ve come to really enjoy Alison (some Alison-related spoilers.)

As far as first impressions go, Alison seems initially to be the least-appealing member of clone club.  Cosima welcomes Sarah with open arms and a mouthful of technobabble, and at least with Helena, you can’t really look away, but Alison?  Alison is presented to us as a suburban housewife with a stick up her butt who’s short with Sarah anout the whole clone business and, more than anything, feels a little detached from the proceedings. 

However, the layers start peeking through almost right away (Alison improves a lot for me on rewatch.)  She’s brusque and unwelcoming to Sarah, yes, but we quickly see her reasons for that.  1) By the time they meet face-to-face, Alison knows that Sarah has been impersonating Beth, who’s now dead.  Alison can’t share her grief with anyone but Cosima, so those pent-up feelings get directed at Sarah, along with some resentment and distrust along the lines of “how dare she waltz in here and act like she can just be Beth?”  2) Alison takes the rules of clone club seriously, and that involves major secrecy.  It’s true that part of it is down to appearances – whatever would the neighbors think if they knew? – but more than that, it’s about the safety of her family.  She has a husband and two small children, and she doesn’t want anything jeopardizing her life with them.

This last point is also a big part of the reason why Alison often feels off in her own plots.  So much of Alison’s arc through the series is about her attempts to keep her house in order and cling to some semblance of a normal life.  And so, she throws herself into neighborhood potlucks, community theatre, and school trustee elections, because she doesn’t want to be defined by Dyad or Proletheans or whatever insane thing is happening in the clones’ lives – of course, it doesn’t take her long to find plenty of craziness all by herself.  Her sisters (especially Sarah) have a tendency to call her out on this, arguing that she needs to pull her weight more and getting wrapped up in her own stuff is selfish when there’s so much important crap going down, but really, she’s trying to get on with what they’re all fighting for:  the freedom to make her own choices and do what she wants.  It’s also worth mentioning that she helps out more than Sarah gives her credit for.  In addition to providing a lot of money for clone-related goings-on (and clean urine samples to any of her sisters who ask, no explanation necessary,) she steps up when she’s needed.  Whether that’s impersonating Sarah in a pinch, opening her home to Helena, or poking into Brightborn, Alison’s no slouch.

And honestly, Alison spends a lot of time just keeping her head above water.  I know that our introduction to Beth involves her suicide and Helena’s all kinds of messed up from being abused and brainwashed by the Proletheans who raised her, but Alison is a great ongoing example of how the revelation that one is a clone can shake a person’s sense of self.  She has a really hard time reconciling who she is, whether she’s even “real,” and we can see how these doubts fracture the “perfect” suburban life she tries so hard to maintain.  She leans too heavily on pills and alcohol, she feels herself going crazy with paranoia about monitors, and no matter how hard she tries to right the ship, everything seems to keep going wrong.  I appreciate that the show explores this side of things through her character, the difficulty of being a clone even before you get into shadowy conspiracies and assassination attempts.

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