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.

Doctor Who: Series 5, Episode 1 – “The Eleventh Hour” (2010)

I’m pretty sure I’ve admitted before that I was prepared to not-love the Eleventh Doctor. I fell into the group of doubters who saw images of Matt Smith and thought, Who’s this child??, and I was sure I needed some convincing before I could believe he had what it took to be the Doctor (this was before I learned that, like Pixar films, Who casting is basically always to be trusted.) Then, “The Eleventh Hour” happened (premise spoilers.)

The newly-regenerated Eleventh Doctor crashes the TARDIS outside the home of Amelia Pond, a little Scottish girl with a mysterious Crack in her bedroom wall, through which she can hear voices from another world. The Doctor’s inspection of the Crack leads to the escape of the shapeshifting Prisoner Zero on the other side, and while the Doctor is hot on the trail, a malfunction in the TARDIS causes him to pick it up twelve years later.

We’ll get the nitpicks out of the way first. I’m not a fan of the adult Amy working as a “kissogram,” and this episode kicks off the first of Moffat’s “companion mystery” arcs, which keeps Amy from feeling as fully realized as some of her predecessors. The creepy repetition from the threat of the week (a la, “Prisoner Zero has escaped,”) gets annoying long before it’s over. And Olivia Colman, who’s since become an Oscar winner with The Favourite, is wasted in a one-scene role.

But there’s so much about it that’s so great. By the time I first saw this episode, even if I was wary about Matt Smith as Eleven, I felt RTD’s showrunner tricks were getting played out and I was ready for Moffat’s (though, as I’ve made clear quite a few places on this blog, his began to grate in time as well.) Young Amelia is a delight, and while grown-up Amy doesn’t interest me quite as much here, the idea of a companion who met the Doctor as a child and has been waiting her whole life to travel with him is a neat concept – I get the notion that it’s just a rehash of “The Girl in the Fireplace,” but it feels different enough to me, and I wish the show had done more with this aspect of Amy. Meanwhile, Rory immediately proves himself clever and observant, although he gets bowled over easily by stronger personalities (between Amy and the Doctor, he doesn’t stand a chance.)

But, as we all know, the big headline here is Eleven. Ten minutes into the episode, I was in complete platonic love with him. From him rope-climbing out of the sideways TARDIS, to his slightly-delighted admission that he’s “still cooking,” to the wonderfully-eccentric way he throws the water out of a glass before using it as a listening device, he is immediately, exquisitely, every inch the Doctor. Simultaneously laser-focused and infuriatingly-distractable, bringing both the excitement of a puppy and the steadiness of a centuries-old near-immortal, he just lights up the screen. You feel the adventure and the warmth radiating from him, and he even makes the doofy outfit weirdly work. I’ll gladly forgive “The Eleventh Hour” for any faults it may have, simply because it introduces this truly-excellent Doctor to us.

Top Five Gags: The Hayseed

October 26, 1919 – the day The Hayseed was released. As far as Keaton-Arbuckle shorts go, this one’s pretty middling and feels more meandering than usual, but it still includes some fun gags. Here are my favorites (spoilers.)

Horse Upkeep

Easy but delightful gag. Buster pulls up to the post office in the horse cart and then jumps down with an oil can to oil the horse’s legs. The execution is well-timed, with the horse bending each knee as Buster oils its joints, and bonus points for Buster ducking underneath the horse to get at the other side.

Dear Departed Whiskey

This gag is totally random, but it cracks me up. While making his mail deliveries, Fatty stops to pick some flowers and comes across an empty whiskey bottle. He immediately buries it, sets up a stone to mark the “grave,” and scatters his flowers over it. It’s funny enough as it is, but it now occurs to me that Prohibition would been starting close to the time this short was being made, making the “death” of this whiskey bottle even more tragic for Fatty!

Ring Size

Cut and clever. Fatty “discreetly” measures his girlfriend’s ring finger by jamming it into a piece of cheese. He then sticks a pickle in the hole her finger made, notes where it “fits” comfortably, and sends away for a ring, with instructions to fit it to “the third bump on the enclosed pickle” to ensure the right size.

Measuring the Suit

Fatty sends away for a suit as well, and he enlists Buster to help him with the measurements. While it’s an obvious comedy bit, that doesn’t stop the various bits of business within it from being a hoot. I especially like Fatty repeatedly knocking Buster on the chin as he sticks his arm out and Buster attempting to measure Fatty’s generous backside with a yard stick.

Cutting a Rug

At the town dance, Fatty and Buster take turns with an enthusiastic partner. First, Fatty spins her around the floor like a rag doll (at one point knocking Buster off his feet.) Then, when Buster takes over and the two of them stumble together, he does a backward somersault over the top of her as she goes down. Even in a so-so short, Buster’s comic acrobatics are something to see!