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.
No comments:
Post a Comment