ACT 1

WORLDVIEW ARC: ISOLATED TO VULNERABLE

Alice, a socially isolated loner keeps her head down in order to make it through life unnoticed. With a core belief that she’s broken, or that something is deeply wrong with her that she can never let other people find out about, she is subject to people-pleasing behaviors, a performative effort her core is steeped in.

Even though she has the title “people-pleaser” this disposition is anything but pleasant. It’s a worldview directed by black-and-white ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, should and shouldn’t, spewed by a harsh inner critic, fueling a perpetual motion machine of self-contempt. Alice looks upon normal people and says “I wish I could be like them, but…” This thought is an effort to avoid the pain of rejection and remain invulnerable to shame.

She’s got no sense of self, and because of that she’s subject to the harshest, most aggressive and insensitive propaganda about herself received from the mouths of people too self-involved to care about how they affect her. Themselves often succumbing to the environmental programming of the harsh, aggressive, propaganda that conspires to instill the illusion of separateness - the idea that you are just little you, one small consciousness observing, and trapped in an alien and separate world. Ignoring the complex interdependence of all living things and environments, an idea that instills the basic sense that one is separate from the world around them.

“If there is basic unity between self and other, individual and universe, how have our minds become so narrow that we don’t know it? Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes to us are the mirror in which we learn to see ourselves, but the mirror is distorted. Just because we do not exist apart from the community, the community is able to convince us that we do - that each one of us is the independent source of action with a mind of it’s own, with the result that children raised in such an environment are almost permanently confused. The very society from which the individual is inseparable is using its whole irresistible force to persuade the individual that they are indeed separate!

…

Society as we now know it is therefore playing a game with self-contradictory rules. A game with self-contradictory rules is a double-bind, a game doomed to perpetual self-frustration. The social double bind can be phrased in several ways:

The first rule of this game is that it is not a game.

Everyone must play

You must love us.

You must go on living.

Be yourself, but play a consistent and acceptable role.

Control yourself and be natural.” - The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts

What easy prey Alice is to this existential bullying - “You want to belong don’t you? Then listen to me, because I know the way the world works,” said each ignorant asshole desperate enough to reaffirm their own worldview in order to protect their scared ego from self-reflection.

Without a foundational sense of self this is the kind of passive manipulation Alice bases her self-worth on, tides changing with the moods of whomever spouts Alice’s only known source of validation, the judgment of others. But a weak damsel does not this disposition make. Subject to a harsh world, Alice is indeed a harsh person. It usually comes out as judgmental deadpan snark, though there can be times where it comes out as combativeness.

An exercised defiance of her own need to be judged favorably results in a cold persona that proclaims “I don’t care what anybody thinks of me,” a prickly exterior that seeks to prevent anyone from knowing her in any real way. That would risk emotional exposure, vulnerability, the risk of being seen in a way that reaffirms her worst held beliefs about herself.

Functionally this boils down to not caring about being liked. In fact Alice disdains, not even the popular, but those who can afford vulnerability and self-focus, on one’s own needs, wants, fulfillment, desires and interests, all things Alice feels separate from, unworthy of.

Prickly, isolated, and barren inside, Alice knows only the fight to remain invulnerable in life. Until she meets her first conflict mentor and major relationship, Cleo, an old classmate and Alice’s foil. Cleo is one of these people who Alice looks upon with envy. Cleo not only has the personal freedom Alice envies, but she also embodies an enviable personality, one Alice feels can only go hand-in-hand with the validation and worthiness she herself lacks. When you were younger did you ever see someone who’s hot and popular, but then you meet them and they’re also really nice, and cool, and you’re like “will you fuck off and let me hate you?” This is how Alice comes to look at Cleo.

When Alice witnesses Cleo at the bottom rung of the social ladder in a “Mean Girls” office environment she’s intrigued, and we explore a basic concept from Brené Brown’s “The Gifts of Imperfection.” That people with satisfying personal relationships and fulfilling lives, have them simply because they believe they deserve them. It comes down to a basic sense of worthiness vs. unworthiness. Which is the core difference between Alice and Cleo. Cleo has a sense of self-worth, and Alice doesn’t.

Alice decided to stick around Cleo when she has the chance to walk away, and this is her first step toward vulnerability. Somewhere deep inside she knows that they’re more alike than she’s willing to think kindly enough of herself to admit. She’s one step closer to cognitively recognizing that her life isn’t what she wants it to be, and that she deserves more. Something scary to admit when you’ve never had trust enough in the world to think anyone would agree with you.

This is her first conflict stage she faces. Trust vs. mistrust, an intrapersonal conflict at the heart of her extrapersonal conflict hope vs. hopelessness, and her interpersonal conflict kindness vs. judgment.

Cleo, after losing a sales competition at work feels fine, whereas Alice has made it to be a much bigger deal than it really is, and she thinks Cleo should feel much worse. Alice’s co-dependence and people-pleasing means she dove full in to help, focusing on Cleo instead of on herself, self-abandoning. Only knowing concrete external judgment, Alice assumes that Cleo’s feelings of “having a perfectly good life, but never getting to shine and have a star moment,” must hold as much weight as Alice’s inarticulate desire for better life, and when Cleo feels fine Alice resents having gone through such effort to help.

Alice comes to realize that her harsh inner judgment is driving the conflict between her and Cleo. Cleo is able to offer herself kindness and grace, which is totally foreign to Alice who only knows severe judgment. When Alice can offer Cleo kindness and make up, it means that she can finally offer that kindness to herself. After all, we can only give to others that which we possess in the first place.

Once Alice is treated as a worthy human being by Cleo, a greater sense of trust grows within her, and once the scales are more balanced in this conflict of trust vs. mistrust, Alice takes a chance, and embodies the value trait necessary to complete this stage - kindness. And she is awarded the prize for completing this first stage - hope; the feeling that what is wanted can be had or that events will turn out for the best. Erikson described hope as an openness to experience, tempered by some wariness that danger may be present. Hope is the first character strength upon which Alice’s subsequent character strengths are built.

Alice’s intrapersonal conflict (conflict within herself) is a basic sense of trust vs. mistrust in the world. This intrapersonal conflict informs her interpersonal conflict (conflict between persons) kindness vs. judgment, and her extrapersonal conflict (conflict with environment) hope vs. hopelessness.

The intra-personal conflict is what’s causing problems at every level, the stake of this conflict is the ability to move onto the next conflict stage and whether or not she continues gaining a stronger sense of self, encapsulated by the last conflict stage, ego integrity vs. despair.

The inter-personal conflict’s stake is the value trait required to successfully conquer her internal conflict. When she successfully demonstrates a value trait it’s integrated into her personality, albeit a part she has to consciously work on.

Successfully completing an internal conflict stage, and demonstrating the value trait, awards character strength which is relied on to continue gaining a stronger sense of self, this is the extra-personal conflict stake.

In this case demonstrating kindness tips the scales of trust vs. mistrust toward trust, and she’s found the strength of hope. This is the process of getting what she wants, being more personable and at ease like Cleo, a better life. When Alice apologizes to Cleo, she’s admitting that she’s imposing her own self-limiting beliefs onto Cleo, and that she wants to be more like her. Once this happens and Alice gains new values and strengths she moves onto the next stage of conflict and stakes, while the previous stage moves into her cognitive efforts of growth, in this case growing out of isolation and toward vulnerability.

While the foundations of her sense of trust, her value of kindness, and her strength of hope are still shaky, Alice runs into an ex-flame one night. Alice is feeling the best she’s ever felt, she’s finally focusing on herself, and she’s having a fun night out with friends. In the most attractive light for an ex to see her in, interest is reignited, and we begin examining the next conflict stage - autonomy vs. shame and doubt.

The relationship between Alice and her ex-flame examines Alice’s problem of seeking the approval of others. The co-dependent and the narcissist, the anxious pre-occupied and the fearful avoidant, whatever you call it, this dynamic becomes all too clear to us before it does to Alice, in an all too familiar game of “ye who cares the least holds the most power.” A game Alice is normally adept at winning, however, ironically, in matters of the heart she’s much too vulnerable.

As she steps back into the playing field of her less mature self, from when she didn’t yet have trust or hope, she focuses on these things in her mind, but she’s not experienced enough yet to spot the lure pulling her back to that known, comfortable space of her sense of self-worth being pushed and pulled by the whim of someone whose judgment she values more than her own. Spending more energy on someone else’s approval than her own, self-abandoning.

The value trait needed to complete this conflict stage of autonomy vs. shame and doubt, is for cuteness (the appreciation of beauty and excellence) to overcome ugliness (seeing the worst), cute vs. ugly. A layer deeper on the conflict of kindness vs. judgment, as it’s a focus on how those two things are applied to herself.

Alice is treated as a worthy person and accepted as-is by Cleo, and Mack, a beach-rat musician friend, both of whom meet her where she’s at, instead of trying to change, control, or manipulate her through shame. Cleo’s big contribution to Alice is imparting a wisdom that’s one of the five freedoms of a fully functioning human being: that she can feel what she feels, and say it, instead of trying to force herself to feel what she’s “supposed to” or “should” feel. The freedom to feel what she feels is a freedom Alice has never had before, and this is exactly what allowed her to be controlled by her harsh inner critic, and aggressive outside critics who claim what “should” be, and enforce their ideas through shame.

This new freedom is in conflict with the old familiar situation Alice is being pulled back to by her ex-flame. After they bump into each other Alice is toying around with the idea of pursuing him again, and we watch one night as she works up the courage to call him. She’s nervously baited on the ringing phone while he’s out living his life without a care in the world, most likely with another girl, an omen of the relationship history to unfold in front of us.

The two get together a few times and flirt with the idea of something happening, but old problems come to a head one night when Alice is blown off by her ex-flame again. When Alice says how she feels, that she’s disappointed because she was excited to get together, she’s met with defensive, toxic, manipulation, “you’re too needy, too much, you shouldn’t and have no right to feel how you do.”

In this defining moment, when Alice would normally relent and people-please in order to keep the other person happy, and judging her favorably to keep the relationship going, and avoid rejection. Alice instead stands up for herself. The things she’s been holding in, a festering hope, kindness, and appreciation for herself falls out of her mouth. “Other people like me, and treat me right. Other people like me, and want me in their life. Other people want to hang out with me, other people choose me, and you treat me like your last option. I used to love you, but now I love me too.”

And finally we have a sense of completion for Alice’s growth from isolation to vulnerability. And she is rewarded with the character strength - will; the power of control the mind has over its own actions; the power of choosing one’s own actions, something that exploded out of Alice in this make-or-break moment.

SEQUENCE 1:

We’re doing a tale of 3 cities type of thing, examining the social classes through performance. Alice feels like she doesn’t belong anywhere so she’s constantly performing in her everyday life, people-pleasing and trying to keep her head down. Cleo is our middle caste of performance, a saleswoman at the cosmetics and self-care company Fabulism. The upper caste are the hyper-achievers, the rockstars at Fabulism. The lower caste is the beach-rat, vagrant, musicians headed by Mack.

Episode 1: Alice is just keeping her head down working her service job at a cheesy party company/event center (think Party Down meets Chuck E. Cheese). On this particularly stressful night plagued by short-staffing, Alice notices a familiar face amongst the guests, Cleo, a former classmate who Alice doesn’t want to run into at the grocery store, let alone while working a nightmare shift.

We start the episode with a scene between two little girls, aged 5-6, an interaction in which one of the little girls puts down the other, and asserts herself as superior, an assault on innocence. Twenty years later we catch up with Alice at work, so this is interpreted as the de facto introduction to Alice and Cleo’s relationship.

(However, later in the series we find out that Alice and Cleo didn’t meet until middle school and it no longer makes sense for this interaction to be between them. Later, once Evelyn is established as Alice’s villainous mirror, we preempt one of her scenes by revisiting this scene between the two little girls. We expand on the scene and focus on the relationship between one little girl and her self-involved mother, revealing Evelyn to be the girl who put the other one down, and shedding light on the fact of her being ruled by shame in a way that drove her to live up to a sense of superiority placed on her as a child. The mirror to Alice who plays herself down due to a sense of inferiority.)

We follow Alice as she spends the night fulfilling her waitressing and bussing duties, and extra hospitality duties are thrust upon her by her manager who is filling in as CLOWN DJ for the evening. He tells her to be the company mascot and greet and mingle with arriving guests.

CLOWN DJ:

“Get in the squirrel.”

After Alice unfurls herself from her sweat-prison she spends the rest of the night trying to fulfill her duties while also trying to avoid Cleo, a feat that leaves her exhausted by the end of the night.

After her shift, Alice sits in the parking garage, windows down, scrolling mindlessly on her phone as she feels the breeze blow through her car, resting her feet as she cools into clammy relief. Behind her, a now stumbling-drunk Cleo enters frame. Wanting to know if it’s safe to leave her car over night, Cleo notices Alice sitting in her car and sets on approach. When Cleo knocks on the window she’s too drunk to notice that it’s already rolled down and flails her drunk hand into Alice’s face.

Startled by this, an ever-on-edge Alice’s lightning quick reaction is to use one hand to grab Cleo’s forearm, pulling her toward the car, and with her other hand shoots the door open, resulting in a violent check by Alice’s car door for Cleo. When Alice turns to look at her as of yet unknown assailant, her spine runs cold when she sees a woman in a cocktail dress laying between her car and the next, it’s most certainly a guest. When she gets out of the car and sees the blonde hair she’s struck with further unease as she realizes out loud “Cleo?” Profusely apologetic, and overcome by guilt, Alice is compelled to take the too-drunk-to-live Cleo home safely.

What should be a simple ride turns into a whole ordeal when an ill-fated sneeze unlodges the blood-clot in Cleo’s broken nose, spraying droplets of blood all over Alice’s windshield and interior. Upon being asked for a tampon, Alice says “actually with my birth control I don’t get a period.” Met with glaring resentment from Cleo.

Deciding to stop at a late night convenience store to get something for all the blood, Alice runs into the convenience store and she’s mean-mugged by the two clerks (think Tom Hardy and Jason Stathem). Alice sheeps her way into an aisle, where to her relief there’s a little old Spanish woman. Alice asks her where the feminine products are, and the woman responds in spanish. A burley latin man (think Javier Bardem) exits a back office, and approaches, saying something to the old woman sweetly in spanish and sends her on her way. “Something I can help you with” he says, giving Alice a stare matching the intensity of the front clerks. Alice nervously picks up a pack of coffee filters next to her and turns a 180 heading back to the front of the store. She’s stared down as she’s rung up by one of the clerks when out of the stockroom enters a short Mexican man who, going by looks, would be the most intimidating of all, if not for his friendly demeanor (think Danny Trejo). “Be nice to the customers,” he tells the clerks, taking over the transaction, sending them to the back. “Pfft.. immigrants” he jokes to Alice about his British cashiers. “Is this all,” ringing up the coffee filters and some aspirin. Alice barely nods. “Have a good night miss, and stay safe out there.” Alice grabs her items and scurries out of the store.

Outside, Cleo felt the need to relieve herself and got out of the car to find a good spot to do so, and she ran into some friends, a group of neighborhood vagrant, beach-rat musician types who invite her to a bonfire on the beach a few blocks away (think Venice, CA). When Alice comes out to find an empty car, and a missing Cleo, she searches the area. Heading to the back of the building tension mounts as a growling and rustling is heard. Hoping it’s rats, Alice is startled when the couple lingering members of the band pop out as she sees Cleo walking all the way at the other end of the alley. Alice is invited to the bonfire, but declines, happy to be done with Cleo for the night. Which would be a blessing if Cleo hadn’t taken the keys for safe-keeping.

Forced to attend the bonfire, Alice reluctantly sticks around while Cleo has “one drink” with her friends. Alice isn’t really a drinker, but accepts a cup out of politeness and nurses a few sips while eyeballing Cleo having the time of her life - having fun and laughing with friends. As the vagrant musicians gather and play “Acid Rain” around the bonfire Alice gets a picture-perfect moment of everything she envies about Cleo. Eventually Alice’s tiredness catches up with her, and later Cleo’s drink with her, the two succumb to their respective fatigues and fall asleep on the beach.

Episode 2: Alice is forced to accompany Cleo to Fabulism, a sunshine-and-rainbows make-up and self-care company where Cleo works. When Cleo lacks confidence in her chances at winning a sales competition, Alice is surprisingly (back-handedly) encouraging, and decides to aid Cleo in the competition.

The morning after the beach bonfire, Alice and Cleo wake up in the sand, and make their way back to convenience store parking lot where they’re met with a horrible surprise - Alice’s care is gone. They turn their heads, noticing a handicap placard fixed to the brick wall in front of where Alice’s car was parked. Cleo promises to fix the situation, but she has to get her spare keys from her desk at work. A pair of dead cellphones means the girls are walking to the office in the hot morning hours.

Arriving at the office, taking a breather at the courtyard fountain while making their way into the office building. Alice is taking in the environment and Cleo notices NICOLE approaching as she and Evelyn exit the Fabulsim offices. “Oh fuck.” We crash zoom into a close-up of Nicole and hear a clean take of the words “Fucking Hostile” @1:25 followed by an instrumental of the thrashing guitar, cut back to Alice sitting on the side of the fountain in a two-shot, Cleo having caught her attention “Oh fuck what?” Back to the approaching Nicole and returning to “Fucking Hostile” @1:34 catching the quickly said “bitch” before Nicole pulls up to Cleo.

Cleo remains polite as she receives a thinly-veiled dressing down about her disheveled appearance from Nicole, who is the beta to Evelyn’s alpha. Nicole enjoys her higher-caste, high-achieving rank for the shallow social status, whereas Evelyn enjoys the high-achieving for the validation of being superior in business. Nicole enjoys engaging in mean-girl social politics, and flirting with higher ups, while Evelyn cares more about succeeding and getting shit done, said higher ups being too distracted to interfere with her work.

Cleo just stands there and takes this verbal abuse from Nicole and Alice is dumbfounded watching it. She’s shocked watching Cleo be treated in the same way she herself gets treated by equally aggressive and insensitive people at work. Alice normally compares Cleo so favorably to herself, but now she’s inspired with sympathy for this person she’s normally so envious of.

Nicole finally gives Cleo peace with her exit and we’ve been introduced to the major antagonist for this sequence. Nicole is the first antagonistic reflection of Alice, embodying criticism (judgment), a tool of shame, in this sequence. We’re doing a sales competition, so imagine “Tommy Boy,” but instead of Rob Lowe and the con-artist fake step-mom not wanting Tommy to sell enough brake pads, it’s “Mean Girls” that don’t want losers to sell enough make-up and bath bombs. This interaction with Nicole is the first crack in Alice’s worldview, somewhere inside recognizing that she over-idealizes the lives of others. When Alice remarks about the interaction, Cleo responds in a mostly mature fashion, not really being brought down by Nicole, recognizing that Nicole needs to feel superior because she is void of any real life substance, or to put it simply “She’s a bitch and there’s nothing I can do to make her not be a bitch.”

Entering the office, Cleo goes off to get her keys and Alice gets a run down on the place from the receptionist BLAIR. We learn about the sales competition around the office, the status of Evelyn and Nicole as high achievers, the office cliques, and the boss HARVEY - a male relic in a female dominated market who would resent having power in a post me-too era work environment if it weren’t for women like Nicole, and all that pampering and schmoozing he gets to do while making big deals, leaving the ambitious Evelyn with little oversight.

Cleo returns with her keys, and she and Alice join Blair for lunch. Cleo expresses little confidence about the sales competition, but she clearly has a desire to win, just not the confidence, or more likely the hunger, to fight for the win. Alice, now over-identifying with Cleo, wants to help. Perhaps there’s some prize money that will alleviate the burden of her impounded car. The remainder of the episode sees the beginning ordeal of the sales competition.

Episode 3: Alice aids Cleo in the sales competition at Fabulism, a work environment modeled after stand-up comedy and by proxy all artistic vocations - everybody has the same job, but are still in competition with each other. The product is not just the ware itself, but the seller as well. In this way image is everything. Cliques are divided by prestige and dedication even though on a basic level everyone is equal.

At the end of the episode, even through all their efforts Cleo doesn’t win the sales competition. Cleo is a little let down, but not overcome with disappointment or sadness. Alice gets into a fight with Cleo when she feels that Cleo isn’t torn up enough over her loss. Alice resents getting sucked into something that in the end wasn’t really important, but secretly she resents herself for attaching herself to someone else’s outcome and desires, focusing on someone else’s life instead of her own, self-abandoning.

SEQUENCE 2:

We get to do a “monster of the week” type thing for this section

Episode 4: We do a tongue-in-cheek number with Alice to “Living On My Own.” Newspaper in hand, help wanted ads circled, looking for a new direction in life, Alice walks on the sidewalk, directly to camera, dancing along interpretively (feigning exhaustion, dramatically throwing her head back as she dances, it really reminds me of the Muppets for some reason) to the song. This is the first time we use an entire song in a musical sequence. Walking down the street doing her pop-y Peanuts/Scooby-Doo dance, @0:33 “I go crazy” Alice mouths along and pantomimes “crazy” to the camera.

At each mention of the lyrics “I don’t have no time for no monkey business” we show an actual monkey business. An exotic pet store in a strip mall with big red letters above the entrance that read “Monkey Business.” @1:26 Alice passes the store a second time. @1:35 the lyrics “got to be some good times ahead” are the immediate precursor to our shift/misdirection of the sequence.. Right after “got to be some good times ahead” the bee-bopping/scatting is choreographed with the movements of a knife-wielding homeless man introduced to the sequence. Wildly swinging and chasing Alice, the force of his lunges propelling him forward. They run across the screen, left to right, and the rest of the sequence is Alice trying to escape her pursuer.

@2:15 it's on this iteration of "I don't have no time for no monkey business" that Alice bursts through the doors of the Monkey Business, a wake of chaos behind her as she runs straight through: feathers flying through the air, food pellets spilling, caged animals in riot, dogs barking. Running through the store, Cleo's scarf Alice has is caught on an upswung countertop. @2:29 the scatting / bee-bops start to echo, and as they echo out we see Alice in the alley behind the strip mall, crouched behind some milk crates, cardboard roof over her head, as the slats in the milk crates create the horizontal highlight across her eyes. And as the last bee-bops sound her eyes dart around, back and forth with each bee-bop as she hides behind the milk crates. 

Alice is realizing that she’s tired of the way she lives life, and tired of being on her own. Regretting her actions toward Cleo, Alice makes an apology.

(To bring this Back to “Tommy Boy” for a moment: since Tommy Boy is a movie that has to be wrapped up after 90 minutes, Tommy wins the sales competition, David Spade and Chris Farley become better friends. Since this series isn’t a movie that’s wrapping up, it’s like if they lost the competition and David Spade realized that he wants to be more like Chris Farley, and thus the story continues. It’s worth making note of this moment to demonstrate how the “tonal guides” influence the sequence.

Episode 1 is not immediately “Tommy Boy meets Mean Girls", that’s built through the narrative, where we’re brought by the characters, and climaxes in Episode3. Now, Episode 4, is the falling action of the previous tonal episode (sequence 1), but is more importantly the transition into the next tonal episode. Here in the beginning of the series we move past these tones onto the next as we’re deconstructing them, but later in the series when we’re reconstructing things these play into each other more. We can also note that for the “x meets y” notation, it can be read as “what if x was happening in y” like in this instance the tone was “what if Tommy Boy was happening in Mean Girls.”)

Cleo accepts Alice’s apology and invites her to a night on the town with her friends.

Alice joins Cleo, and her friends, BOWIE and MELISSA for a “Fat Bottomed Girls” make-over montage before heading out. They all catch up with Blair later that night, and have a zany night after being told a folktale about The Three Sisters of White Evil: Ignorance, Pity, and Helpfulness. They foil the three girls who embody the traits of White Evil and have a great time doing it. Alice is having the time of her life, finally getting a taste of the life she’s felt cosmically restrained from, burden-free, laughing and drinking with friends. At the end of the night when the girls are exiting the bar in a hurry, Alice bumps into a man. They share a look and recognize each other, an ex-flame of Alice’s, he sees her the happiest she’s ever been, and the most attractive she could be, sparking a reignited interest.

Episode 5: Wrapping up their night on the town, Alice and Cleo go to a private family and friends show inaugurating the rehearsal space of their vagrant, beach-rat musician friends. They’ve got a show coming up at a community festival and good opportunities could arise from a good performance.

The band plays “Going Gets Tough,” but their playful rehearsal is cut short when a cobalt blue Ghoul menacingly enters the makeshift theater to scare away the party. When the ordeal is over and the audience is cleared out the gang tries to find out what’s going on. Alice, playing the realistic audience surrogate in this moment,

ALICE:

You.. a band.. are going to investigate?

This is hand-waved away with the explanation that they aren’t legally renting the space and it’s more of a thought-to-be abandoned warehouse on the docks, so they can’t exactly call the police, and all of their equipment is already there. When a link is found connecting the Ghoul to Fabulism, Alice and Cleo agree to snoop around there.

Alice is clearly anxious, as demonstrated by reflexively bashing Cleo’s face in Episode 1, and the paranoid scene in the convenience store, and being nervous at the rustling garbage when the beach-rats are introduced, and she’s been having nightmares. Alice has a nightmare with a person obscured from identification standing in her doorway, thought to be about the intimidating Nicole, or Evelyn, anxiety is intensifying upon snooping around Fabulism. What was once written off as anxiety can no longer be ignored when the girls come home to find Cleo’s apartment ransacked one night.

Episode 6: The girls snoop around Fabulism and collectively the gang searches for a way to get the Ghoul out of their hair.

After investigating, Alice goes home and works up the courage to call her ex-flame, he doesn’t pick up. Mack sits alone on a dock singing “Telephone Line” to himself, underscoring the moment. Alice pines over her ex-flame while he’s out living his life. This seems like it’s just a cool stylistic choice to have Mack narrate what’s going on on screen, but this is foreshadowing, and a bit of misdirection. We don’t strongly play on the implication that Mack could be singing about seeing Alice unable to get out of her own way, not acknowledging him as a possible love interest.

Alice’s nightmare anxiety comes to a head one stormy night when a hooded figure appears outside Cleo’s apartment. Misdirected into a funny “Murders in the Rue Morgue” situation when the figure is revealed to be an orangutan in a slicker with a straight razor when the police and the monkey’s handler arrive last minute, sparing any misfortune.

The monkey has been very upset since its mother died, and it got the scent of Cleo from her scarf that got snagged on a countertop when Alice, who had the scarf at the time, ran through the Monkey Business in Episode 4. Cleo, upon hearing about the Monkey Business Owner’s struggle running things since the death of his wife, volunteers to work at the exotic pet store.

SEQUENCE 3:

Episode 7: Cleo spends her first day volunteering at the Monkey Business, the girls continue investigating Fabulism, and Alice flirts with her ex-flame.

This episode is mostly a bottle episode of Cleo working her first day at the Monkey Business, alternating with synchronus check-ins from Alice throughout. We wind up with this format due to a gag at the beginning of the episode. Alice says she has to do something incredibly boring, like go to the DMV, or maybe look through papers at Fabulism. When she’s leaving, the camera considers following Alice out of the store, but looks back to Cleo and decides to stay in the much more interesting exotic pet store. There’s a tongue-in-cheek MacGuffin, a nice bottle of booze that Cleo is supposed to keep an eye on.

Cleo’s time at the Monkey Business takes a horror bent when we do this creeping horror of I think somebody else is in here. Demonstrated with the bottle MacGuffin, and climaxing when the bottle goes missing and Cleo discovers the basement door ajar. Following her suspicions, Cleo enters the basement where we’re giving straight-up “Nosferatu”, black-and-white horror vibes. Until Cleo pulls back a blanket and reveals the “monster” cowering, more afraid of her than she is him. Cleo throws a scarf over the bare lightbulb contributing to the high contrast black-and-white, turning the mood a lovey pink and yellow as she calms the cowering half-monkey man, Harry.

Harry recounts the story of his parents’ romance, between the Monkey Business Owner and a chimp, and the series of events with his sister catching Cleo’s scent and trying to kill her. His father thinking the world not ready to accept Harry, has encouraged him to stay locked away for his entire life.

Episode 8: Alice and Cleo investigate Fabulism, and continue their secret love stories, Cleo keeping Harry a secret, and Alice being secretive about the situation with her ex-flame, not wanting to jinx it, or get into the complicated history.

One evening the gang is setting up a trap for when the Ghoul returns. When everything is almost in place, heading back to the warehouse, who do the gang run into in the parking lot, but the Ghoul himself. I imagine him wearing a leather jacket over his ghoul costume, casually clicking the key fob to a little red convertible that he just got out of when he’s noticed.

“HEY” they shout! The Ghoul gives the I don’t want any trouble shoulder shrug, palms up motion as the gang circles him and starts pushing him around. They beat. the. shit. out of the Ghoul. I mean they just keep throwing moves, and throwing moves, flying elbows as the Ghoul lay off screen. A fun over-the-top deconstruction of a campy moment.

The police arrest and unmask the Ghoul. He tries to say the classic “and I would have gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling kids,” but blood just pours out of his mouth. The unmasked Ghoul is moaning and doing the death grabs as two officers haul him to the squad car.

CONVENIENCE STORE OWNER:

I was worried about you kids being trouble makers, but once you nearly beat that old man to death I knew you have good hearts.

Episode 9: Alice and Cleo come clean about the romantic interests they’ve been keeping from each other. Alice is embarrassed to be in a situation with her kind-of ex, and Cleo’s half-monkey beau who’s been in hiding for his entire life, his father thinking the world not ready to accept him, is a difficult subject to breach. Alice finding this out, asks the question we’ve all begged. “So that dude fucked a monkey, right?” Honestly that’s probably also a pretty good reason to keep your half-chimp son a secret.

We finally piece together that Alice is abandoning herself in pursuing her ex-flame, and it’s sad to see her being pulled backward in life, in her growth. Ruled by shame and doubt, the comfort of familiar uncertainty. Cleo’s relationship with Harry isn’t doing much better. Harry is still too hesitant to go out into the world, and as much as Cleo cares about him, she’s coming to feel that they’re just at two different places in life. She ultimately decides to break it off with Harry, she still wants to be friends, and still cares about Harry, but thinks he needs to take care of himself right now, and that she needs to take care of her own fulfillment too.

SEQUENCE 4:

Episode 10: Harvey, the boss at Fabulism, finds Alice and Cleo snooping around when they’re putting a bow on their investigation, and violently confronts them. Harvey has long been suspected to be responsible for any unsavory activity at Fabulism, but when he confronts Alice and Cleo he accuses them of working for some clandestine criminal entity that he refused a deal from sometime earlier.

HARVEY:

I fly on private jets, I get executive brunches, I’ve got a watch that turns into a lifeboat! And I don’t want any of that nasty shit you’re trying to bring to my door! So you tell the people you work for to stay the hell away from me!

Once the girls convince him they don’t know what he’s talking about, Harvey lets them go and says, basically, “Ok. I’ll look into this, and you stay out of it, you don’t want anything to do with this.” An ominous act of decency from a man who was supposed to be the bad guy.

Later… It’s the day of the community festival the beach-rats have been practicing for. Alice invited her ex-flame, and after a weird and eventful week she’s excited to hang out, have fun, and relax. But when he flakes, and she voices her feelings, that she was looking forward to seeing him, she’s met with “You’re too clingy, what do you want from me?”

This is the moment when Alice’s cognitive dissonance clicks into focus. She would normally shrink, and people-please to not risk the relationship, or negative judgment, chasing that tacit lure of acceptance and approval. But conditional acceptance is not acceptance, and Alice fights through empty lungs to say “I want to be treated like a person with feelings. Other people treat me nice. People choose me. They want to spend time with me, and know me. You treat me like your last option, but other people choose me.” And as the words leave her mouth, clarity comes into focus. “I loved you, but now I love me too.”

In a moment of surreal style, the beach-rat band appears behind Alice as we pull out from her face, and the group play “Feelin’ Good” in tow behind her dejected walk home - à la a Greek chorus. Mack and the band parade behind Alice as realization clicks together. We show Alice toiling over her connection to her ex-flame, bidding for connection and being let down. And subsequent flashbacks of Alice engaging in the relationship without thought of how much suffering and emotional stress it puts her through.

“No one should suffer just for your satisfaction.” On the surface it would be thought that this lyric is about her ex-flame, but the visual montage suggests that Alice is both the sufferer, and the satisfied, depending on the situation. Alice with her ex-flame is “feeling good", but she’s “stealing that feeling” from her self that suffers.

Animation, non-specific expressionism, red, blue, purple, passion colors on a black background, amplifying the back-up singers’ incantations of “Just because it feels good, doesn’t mean it’s right. I know it sounds like it should, but that just isn’t life” help break up the song so that we don’t focus on any one thing too stark to tolerate for the entire duration.

WORLDVIEW ARC: DISORIENTED TO AUTHENTIC

When Alice is finally able to stand up for herself, she’s opened herself up to criticism, rejection, judgment, and shaming - being wounded or hurt; emotional exposure, vulnerability. Vulnerability is a strength, and Alice has had to learn this. After thinking for so long that vulnerability was the reason she was in a fight with the world around her, she’s coming to understand that the reason she was at odds with the world around her is because she was at odds with nature. A part of her has known that she deserves, and desires to be stood up for and treated good. We do not fight because we are weak, we fight because we are strong, and there’s a part deep within us that refuses to accept that we should roll over and be crushed by the world. The weak are those who have stopped fighting, or more likely - those who haven’t learned how to be strong enough to fight.

Alice is finally learning how to be strong, which means accepting that she’s been disoriented from her authentic, true self, for her entire life. She learns her strength when she realizes that she’s been beaten down by the weakest fucking people. There is a bitter after-shock, realizing how much of her life she spent brainwashed, never sticking up for herself. Weak people taught her to disorient herself from any sense of being a decent and worthy person, worth being treated decently. Instead she’s spent every day killing any authentic part of herself - a human being deserving of good love, and good relationships, a tender little creature that just wants a life worth living, sacrificed to the most aggressive, insensitive, and self-involved other.

“Living, loving, being natural or sincere - all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen “of themselves” like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores - weak and scentless like forced flowers, and tasteless like forced fruit.

…

We’re under the basic illusion that man and nature, the organism and the environment, the controller and the controlled are quite different things. We do not see that human nature and “outside nature” are all of a piece. In the same way we do not see that “I” as the knower and controller is the same fellow as “myself” as something to be known and controlled.

Nothing, perhaps, ever got nowhere with so much fascinating ado, as when Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle. The center, the essential trick of the game of black-and-white is a most tacit conspiracy to look as different as possible. It is like a stage fight so well acted that the audience is ready to believe it a real fight. Hidden behind their explicit differences is the implicit unity of what Vedanta calls the Self, the One-without-a-second, the what there is and the all there is which conceals itself in the form of you.” - The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts

Alice begins this new arc realizing that she’s allowed herself to be treated badly, and allowed her life to be something hard, rigid, and painful, that she hates, for no good reason. She’s wondering why she’s accepted all these things in her life that have been painful for her. Her internal conflict, identity vs. role confusion. Her extrapersonal conflict, fidelity (adhering to expected standards) vs. inconstancy. Her interpersonal conflict, funny (a sense of humor, fun, amusement) vs. serious. When Alice’s external circumstances catch up with her internal state she’s launched into literal disorientation when she flees the city and is separated from her known life.

While on the road, Alice calls into question her character and background when she handles herself all-too-well when wayfaring. It turns out that she’s much more adept and comfortable under stress than in normal life. This, combined with the little tips and tricks one picks up from living in unforgiving environments, physically, mentally, and emotionally, makes for a peculiar juxtaposition between Alice’s attitude vs. her demeanor.

Alice’s backstory is slowly uncovered. Unlike previously thought, Alice actually didn’t go to school with Cleo until middle school. That was around the time she was “adopted.” Prior, Alice lived on the street for a couple of years in a shanty called Strangers Row, filled specifically with homeless youths. Alice went through great lengths to go unnoticed and stay safe, she had good practice in the neglectful and abusive foster care she escaped. Until one day a woman was startled by the rare sight of a homeless girl, and functionally adopted her. Well meaning, but emotionally immature, Alice’s adoptive mother at least created some stability in her life.

On the run and trying to figure out a way back to normal life, Alice meets two men in a sanitarium who make Alice question the validity of the life she seems so eager to return to. For lack of a better reference, they’re her Tyler Durden, or, if I understood what he was saying, I would call them the caterpillar from “Alice in Wonderland.” DAVIE AND DOUGGIE, two men semi-voluntarily committed to a sanitarium as part of a scam that splits money allocated to caring for wards of the state amongst themselves and a few collaborators, as part of a plot to avoid falling victim to a fatal cover-up in their small industry town, tangentially related to the Fabulism conspiracy. Being committed removes their credibility so they can never give reliable testimony that would expose anything unsavory they may have witnessed or been party to.

They fall on the funny side of funny vs. serious, and raise to Alice the question of arbitrary fidelity to outside expectations vs. fidelity to herself. Echoing statements of Mack, from whom Alice learned the second of five freedoms of a fully functional human being - that she can want what she wants, and ask for it, instead of what she “should” or “ought to” want.

Finding a sense of humor allows Alice to not grip her identity so tightly - not being so subject to the stories and labels about herself, or overly-identifying with the roles and traits of an unconsciously programmed sense of self. Gaining a sense of fidelity to herself, showing up for herself gives her the internal sanctuary to move forward toward authenticity and showcase more of her unmanicured personality. To complete her arc to authentic, Alice has to face the big story she has believed about herself - the lie. Her core wound, believing that she’s broken, worthless, unlovable, unvaluable, as engrained by her early childhood experiences.

The story’s course of events sees Alice face-to-face with Danny, who gave her up as a toddler. Alice faces the intrapersonal conflict intimacy vs. isolation. The extrapersonal conflict, love vs. hate. The interpersonal conflict, forgiveness vs. blame. Alice, as you might expect, has a distant and somewhat hostile relationship with Danny.

Danny is biding time, figuring out how to tell her that he isn’t her father, but her godfather, and that her parents died, leaving her in his care. Far too young to take on such responsibility himself, he figured he would do the right thing and place her with a family that’s ready for a child. This has effected Danny for his whole life. He never told anybody, but it prevented him from emotionally developing properly. He stayed cool for longer than his friends who settled down, and when he did eventually get married, he got to be a step-dad to two boys and stay kind of cool.

Danny’s wife is freshly pregnant with his first biological child, and he’s had this sense of failure hanging over him since not stepping up for Alice twenty-something years ago. Somewhere inside, believing himself not good enough. And this is being thrown in his face now that Alice has shown up. He learns about what she’s been through and he’s crushed with guilt, he put her in the position for all these things to happen to her, and did not in fact, set her up for a better life with an attentive, loving family.

When Danny finally tells Alice the truth, she can see much more than the story she learned about herself growing up. This is her “big change,” the hump of the emotional midpoint. Alice can see that Danny tried to do the right thing, and he messed up. She can see how worried he is about showing up the right way for his unborn daughter. And through this she can see how much a parent cares about their child, how much her parents cared about her, and how much they loved her. By how pained Danny is in imagining failing like that again, Alice can see how much it would hurt her parents to see her life, the events, the circumstances, and especially how she’s felt about herself, the lies she believed about who she was, and how much she was loved, and how valuable she was.

In this moment, Alice forgives Danny, and steps toe over the line to her ultimate maturity.

ALICE:

I don’t blame you. You tried to do the right thing, and you did your best. I forgive you.

When Alice embodies the value of forgiveness, she completes the conflict stage intimacy vs. isolation. Intimacy wins and she’s rewarded with the character strength love. And as mentioned in the first worldview arc - we can only give to others that which we possess in the first place. Which means that Alice can finally start forgiving herself for all the pain she’s subjected herself to based on the lie she believed about herself, and begin loving the parts within her that have been starved of loving.

Building on her sense of humor, and not taking things so seriously, or so personal, Alice is able to embrace the knowledge that people do as good as they know how to do, as good as they can do. They still mess up, but that doesn’t make them villains, or you a targeted victim, what they do is about them and their struggle, not about you. She’s able to conquer the greater conflict of love vs. hate. To hate the world she lives in, to hate the people who hurt her, to hate her life, or to love life, forgive the people who were doing all they could do, and laugh at the way things are “supposed” to be. Alice gains a new sense of perspective on life from her interaction with Danny, and feels the third freedom of a fully functional human being -that it’s okay to ask for what she wants, instead of always waiting for permission, or for someone else to tell her that' she’s worthy.

Episode 11: Having a breather from their romantic griefs, Alice and Cleo join their beach-rat musician friends to keep their minds occupied and a loose end connected to the Ghoul pops up. This is Alice’s “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” moment. As the song goes “At the end of the rainbow there’s happiness. And to find it how often I’ve tried. But my life is a race, just a wild goose-chase, and my dreams have all been denied. Why have I always been a failure? What can the reason be? I wonder if the world is to blame? I wonder if it could be.. me?” After the content has taken a deconstructive turn, a cozy investigation lead to a violent confrontation, and a prospective romance turned into a hard-learned lesson, Alice is finally getting a chance to catch her breath, and she’s examining her life, talking to Cleo and Mack.

Something draws the group’s attention back to the warehouse, a loose-end attached to the Ghoul has popped up. On the way to check it out, Alice and Mack have a conversation where initially Alice thinks Mack embodies the “struggling artist” stereotype, and has dreams to “make it.” She’s surprised to learn that Mack’s vagrant status is somewhat voluntary. It’s the byproduct of his deeper fulfillment. He values his freedom, and having a life he feels is worth living. Which for him means spending time on his passions and gifts, playing, and not taking on arbitrary stresses. Yes, he’s been a vagrant/beach-rat all of his life, but this is not a status he succumbs to, rather one he transcends. Seen differently because of his lower-caste status, Mack had to find a sense of self-worth and value beyond his conditional veneer.

MACK:

I think that people like to think freedom means freedom from consequences. But for me it means the freedom to choose my consequence.

ALICE:

Are you telling me that I should be homeless?

MACK:

I’m just saying that a good life doesn’t always look like you think it would, when you’re paying attention to what you really want.

When investigating the loose end, the gang are startled to find the now-dead Ghoul, a load of contraband, and they’re in a compromising position as scores of police descend upon the building. The gang gets away by the skin of their teeth in a heart pounding evasion of the bulls. “Wipeout".” Just as the gang makes their revelation, a rustling is heard outside. As the drums begin we show a parade of cops marching up stairs, surrounding the building, showing up at doors with a battering ram. Everybody is shocked and we show the cops marching up, when the guitar kicks in everybody is fleeing and the police give chase.

Our group initially begins running together down the street and are split up, showed in split view, changing perspectives during the chase sequence. As they run down the street, making some headway, the sirens project their lights on the buildings a block behind them. Use the little guitar strokes, sporadic through the song, as beat points for perspective and shot changes. There are a wide variety of shots to use here, really wide shots from the side, snout cams of individual characters, shaky behind and in front POV shots.

@0:41 Our gang begins on the right side of the screen, as they run to the left our shot widens as they push it forward, and as they’re nearing the very left of the screen we see the squad car with its light heading down the same street.

@1:02-1:11ish the rhythm is perfect to intercut between characters, groups/pairing, and the police. I see Mack and Cleo, and Alice trying to hide from the police on the side of the street. Even if they’re able to do so for a moment, no one lasts for more than a second of breathing at any standstill, this is a chase sequence after all. As the guitars bear down, so do we on the intensity and the closeness of our shots.

@1:52 is the perfect slowdown beat, and opportunity for someone to catch a breath right before things start back up again and they wind-up their running legs, annoyed that they only got to catch one breath before running again.

@2:15 feels like cruising (or perhaps better to be used during the slowdown beat) turn the music down as Cleo and a POV shot are about to converse. Running behind some townhouses Cleo stopped to take a breath. We’re looking through a shaky POV, someone running. As we’re running, catching up to Cleo, we continue our sprint, and as she joins us, shoulder-to-shoulder, our left arm from the bottom of the screen, crosses the frame to shove her aside, down some stairs, and we continue our sprint head on, breathing heavy, arms swinging. We look back to see Cleo trailing behind as we hop some shrubbery.

@3:21 is the final bearing down. @3:39 our group is finally reunited in an alleyway out of sight from the cops, and they can all finally take a breather, though it’s not like they have much a choice because they’re all panting and near death from exerting themselves in their foot escape. Someone throws up.

Episode 12: Alice and Cleo have to make their way back to Fabulism to find Harvey, the only person powerful enough to help them with their predicament. When the girls get back to Fabulism and Harvey is nowhere to be found, Evelyn asks if there’s anything she can help them with, and it’s revealed that Evelyn is responsible for the criminal goings-on at Fabulism. And that Harvey isn’t coming back.

When the girls started snooping around Fabulism they raised alarms, and then when Evelyn found Harvey fuddling around in her business she thought it was him all along. It turns out that when he refused the deal from that criminal entity, seeing a way to the top, and always willing to go the extra mile to get what she deserves, Evelyn took the deal behind Harvey’s back. (Think Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton) When Evelyn asks the girls if there’s something she can help them with, she smiles and we sting with “Bring Back That Leroy Brown” @1:01 right before the bass kicks in.

The song is shown over a montage of criminal activity continuing as planned, and we reveal Evelyn taking the deal behind Harvey’s back. Harvey selfishly, or thoughtlessly screwed Evelyn over, she’s bent over, in hysterical pain, overtop are the lyrics “Big Mama Lulu Belle she had a nervous breakdown, Leroy taken’ her honey-child away.” We show her involvement in the subsequent criminal proceedings.

“But she met him down at the station. Put a shotgun to his head. And unless I be mistaken this is what she said.” I envision Evelyn literally holding a shotgun up to Harvey’s back. We as the viewer are looking at Evelyn from a position just in front of the shotgun barrels so the holes at the end are blurrily visible and dark. “Big bad Leroy, big bad Leroy Brown.” Beat. The shotgun fires, muzzle flare comes out the end and the force of the blast pushes us back. We’re forcefully pushed away from Evelyn by her shotgun blast, and abruptly met with her painted-on smile as we hard cut to a tight close-up Evelyn’s painted on company smile for the lyrics “I’m gonna get that cutie pie” @1:43. We stay on her face for a moment then hard cut to credits with the returning lyrics “Bring back, bring back, bring back that Leroy Brown” @1:44.

SEQUENCE 5:

Episode 13: We begin the episode with “I’ll Tumble 4 Ya,” a montage showing Evelyn’s morning routine leading up to her talking with Alice and Cleo at Fabulism. Evelyn spends the morning in bed with Nicole, then showering, going to the gym, work prep, and when she puts on her skirt suit, assembling in a fashion worthy of the ending trumpets, little jump, heels to the side and freeze-frame done when she puts it on, landing in the scene with Alice and Cleo. We expand on this series of events in the episode, intercut with Alice’s main story.

During the montage we insinuate that Evelyn and Nicole are in a sexual/romantic relationship, but during the episode we reveal that after Evelyn, using Harvey’s eagerness to avoid contact with the criminal entity or the police, she convinced him to get out of town and told him she would run point in helping him lay low; Harvey grabbed a bug-out bag and met Evelyn at a desolate train station a few hours out of town, and she went back to his cash-paid hotel room to stage the scene of his demise, where to her surprise, Nicole was there, having been brought along as a “travel companion.”

Evelyn and Nicole aren’t in a sexual relationship, but they do have the dynamic where it would take no convincing for Nicole if Evelyn wanted to use her. Just trying to bide time, this is the move Evelyn pulls trying to distract from Harvey’s absence and we see them the next morning. After they’re in bed, Evelyn continues their escapade in a dominant fashion, tricking Nicole into lubing up a phallus we’ve seen from an earlier gag insinuating that it was for Harvey. There’s bad news, and I don’t have an easy way to say this. Evelyn fucks Nicole off a balcony. Her lubed up hands providing no friction to keep her from flipping over the railing. Haha, railing. We continue to follow Evelyn’s morning up to, and following her interaction with Alice and Cleo.

Evelyn tells the girls that Harvey went out of town on an emergency trip. Given Harvey’s reputation as a general cockroach, it’s no surprise that he fucked-off and bailed. Assuming they’ve been hung out to dry, Alice tells Evelyn some excuse about why they were supposed to meet Harvey so she and Cleo can loot his office.

It’s no longer safe for Alice and Cleo to stay in the city, and they flee with help from Mack and the beach-rat musicians, who help them hop a train. The last thing we see is the girls framed in open boxcar doors (if both doors are open, on each side, then we can have a shot/reverse-shot, from behind them, their perspective, the city fades into the distance, and the reverse-shot from in front of them, we see the sun setting over a horizon of open hills and meadows behind them). Dumbfounded by their displacement, looking on the passing horizon with expressions that ask the question “what do we do now?” we sting with “The Miracle” @2:08ish and the screen goes pink and yellow for the cut to credits. End Season One.

ACT 2

A small-town villainous grinch gripes about an unsavory, underhanded plot involving a power company that’s no longer going in his favor. During this, Alice and the gang learn of nearby fruit farms that are friendly to migrant workers. The girls head there to try and scrape together a few dollars at the end of harvest season. They learn that the farms supply a few subsidiaries of The Colorful Company, Fabulism’s parent company. The small-town villainous grinch’s power plot involves the moon towers lighting the fields at night. Uncovering this plot leads Alice to track down Davey and Douggie who are committed to the sanitarium, and she subsequently begins investigating the farms’ supply chains.

The beach-rat band has a run of shows lined up, the band catches up with Mack, Alice, and Cleo in the logging town before taking off to play their shows. They catch back up with the girls when they can. They play an open mic one night where we also first see THE MYSTERIOUS NEIGHBOR, a ranch-hand at a farm nearby the one Alice and Cleo found themselves at. The Mysterious Neighbor causes romantic tension between Alice and Mack to blossom. One day when Alice and Cleo are squatting at a house, a suburban neighbor drops by looking for his bird. When the bird snatches Cleo’s scarf, in no position to refuse repayments, the girls show up to a barbecue where they run into Danny. Not saying anything outright, but clearly with extra weight on her mind, Alice is a little snappy, Mack snaps back at her and we learn about Alice’s rumored tragic backstory. Once learning about this, Mack sees Alice in a new light, having previously assumed her to be a regular suburbanite like Cleo. Later the tension breaks and Alice and Mack get together.

The Mysterious Neighbor shows up one day to warn about wild animals causing havoc on the farms. Working at the farms earns Alice and Cleo shotguns, we see Alice use hers on a weird animal trapped in a storehouse on the farm. Further investigating the supply chain, and Fabulism, explores The Sweet Peach Soda Co., a soda company that sweetens with natural peach nectar from a locally owned family farm; a Candle Manufacturer, the more cushy and steady job, the hiring pool usually consisting of laborers from the farms; and a Candy Company headed by a man-boy who’s in over his head. All three of these business use fragrance oils, essential oils distilled from fresh fruit.

(Cursory research shows that we can “Hollywood” this up for a big explosion at the end. And on a personal note, early in this treatment I mentioned going after what I need, in order to get something greater than success. Obviously the thing I want that’s greater than success is fulfillment, which I get from dedicating time to explore my understanding of the world, dedicating time to myself, my own growth and development, what I think is important, and what I enjoy, but there are still things that I just want, as a person, that would be more impressive than only “success.”

These companies allow me to get these things as a byproduct of my fulfillment. They don’t make my favorite candle anymore. What if I had crates, a lifetime supply of my favorite scent, mango cherry-blossom? That would make me happy in a way that praise, or “success” can’t. This is true success to me. They don’t bottle my favorite soda, peach Mello-Yello, what if I could have my own, in fully recyclable paper or aluminum bottles?

I digress here to also talk about future marketing opportunities. I thought about “Interstellar,” and I believe I heard they turned a profit on location by really planting the cornfields in the movie, and selling what wasn’t destroyed. Why not take this further?

If I’m going to have to learn about chemistry to see what can reasonably be artistically exaggerated, then I’ll have to talk to a scientist. And if i’m going to have to learn more about these industries from experts, then why not have my marketing team be researchers, and actually make these things happen? Instead of relying on random sponsorships, there are already some products truly integrated into the voice of the show, so why not produce them? If I believed I could affect CRISPR technology or biochemistry I would do something with that too, but short of that, I still think this is the most artistic way to sell out.) Now back to the show…

Investigating a research & development facility, the girls find a clandestine lab filled with half-alive animal frankensteins, along with what look like vials of blood, the same as the weird animal Alice killed earlier. All of this and they find some chemicals like they’ve seen at the distillery and remember the a name they saw on some paperwork. The girls have discovered the existence of the dangerous Dr. DeLareux, and begin uncovering a criminal organization that’s hidden itself in legitimate business infrastructure. Now chasing the mad-scientist DeLareux, Alice and Cleo are in even more danger when their snooping, again, alerts the bad guys to their existence. Alice’s ordeal with Danny sees Alice rewarded with a family heirloom, a powder blue, white interior 1968 Shelby Cobra GT500. With firepower and a new ride, Alice, along with Cleo, is far more equipped for the challenges she’s facing.

Alice and Cleo return to the r&d lab to try and catch DeLareux, but they just missed him as he packed up shop. Crazy, but no fool, DeLareux has a contingency plan for things like this, and calls in a favor from a biker gang he’s been doing business with. He’s been helping them manufacture drugs, and a few other things, not really for the money, but for protection in a situation like this in which it’s greatly favorable to have outlaw bikers that want to keep him around.

DeLareux is doing a few things to support his passion project, genetic mutation and what-not, most namely, he’s helping to sabotage candles, essentially making them explode a little, amongst some other things, to tank stock prices and allow a “legitimate” take-over of businesses by a criminal entity. Evelyn, being powerful enough to get stuff done, but not technically on top, will be in a perfect position to be appointed to a higher role. Once current leadership is thrown under the bus by their saboteur, Evelyn will be appointed to a higher position by the new ownership she’s been conspiring with.

Shortly after leaving the r&d lab, the girls are still pumped and feeling like bad-asses. They’re trying to formulate a new plan when they’re run off the road by a suped-up hearse driven by the Biker Boss who’s come to hold up his end of the deal with DeLareux. Abandoning the car in front of a little cabin way out in the country, Alice and Cleo survive the night as they’re pursued into the woods by bikers. Once they break out from the tree line, Alice and Cleo run to the nearest building, the Candy Factory.

Eventually, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, Alice and Cleo neutralize the biker threat long enough to make good on a plan to “rescue” the mad-scientist DeLareux, so that he can testify to this whole criminal business in exchange for immunity and return to the mainstream scientific community and be heralded as a great scientist for his work in biology and genetics. Less surprising, this plan doesn’t work. It’s too naive and innocent. Just when Alice and Cleo think they’ve won, our last bit of trope deconstruction sees this would-be victorious moment turn into the mad-scientist DeLareux’s last stand. Cleo is killed in the clash. Fatally wounded, she stumbles over to Alice and passes in her arms, sending Alice into an atomic rage that sees the brutal beatdown of DeLareux. Ending in the death of DeLareux, the destruction of his lab, and the death of any chance at returning to a good life.

Alice spends some time locked away, grieving, at Danny’s. Danny exits the room Alice is in.

ERIN (DANNY’S WIFE):

How’s she doing?

DANNY:

Well she keeps watching V for Vendetta and that Anne Hathaway princess movie back-to-back.

LATER

DANNY:

I got her some Bruce Lee movies and Miss Congeniality, but she’s watching Pirates of the Caribbean right now, so she might have settled on a middle ground.

ERIN:

The first one?

DANNY:

No, I put the first one in but she said the skeleton monkey scares her so I put in Dead Man’s Chest.

ERIN:

That doesn’t make any sense, she’s scared of a ghost monkey, but she’s fine with a guy that has an octopus face?

DANNY:
Listen, I can’t have this conversation again. It doesn’t make sense to me either.

When Alice finally exits her room we watch her pack up her life. “Going Home” a surreal sequence sees Alice floating home, eventually laying in bed, intercut with her picking up some things from the cabin they squatted in for a while, breaking up with Mack, and driving off. But at the end of the sequence Alice isn’t back home in bed. She drove to a mountainside villa, and when Alice knocks, it’s Evelyn who opens the door.

Wrapping up a talk, Alice yells to an off-screen ally. “Throw me the gun.” Alice raises a hand as a strike of lightning washes out the screen, silhouetting Alice’s triumphant boomstick pose in a big circular drain turned picture window in the converted villa. From a close-up of Alice we pull out.

ALICE:

Did you throw me a goddamn mop!

The Candy Factory Man-Boy, running away on the catwalk above, “I’m sorry!” In a scuffle Alice is trucked out the window that once highlighted her triumphant pose. We slowly pull out, revealing the rocky mountainside, storm over the cliff’s horizon, a close by waterfall spilling into the river below, bits of jagged rock revealed by the water riled by storm.

We’re so far out that the light from the window Alice crashed through is a flicker on the blackened mountainside, torrential downpour batters the mid-ground, and flashes of lighting flicker, lighting up our view. As we collectively take a breath to let this moment sink in, we sting with “Little Acorns” @3:28ish as a flash of lightning again washes out the screen to reveal a living-and-pissed Alice draped over a boulder in front of us, gasping with animalistic intensity for breath, our framing revealed to be a perspective trick,. Synced with the song, another flash of lighting washes over the screen one more time to reveal Alice’s absence from the again-empty boulder. End Season Two.

ACT 3

It’s not the limitation, rather the axiom of this series to arrange events and styles according to the proper tonal context. I bring this up to discuss the first half of season 3. The first half of season 3 sees Alice become the narrator. While it does fit with the show’s idea of seeing Alice become the narrator/conscious observer of her life, I think that to do this for the rest of the series would ultimately be a betrayal of the show’s voice since our viewing relationship to Alice is to her as the naive narrator. She’s experiencing the story, which is what allows us to be present with her, and connect with her as an avatar experiencing our real life psycho-social problems in a more dramatic and fantastical setting.

However, I do think it would be cool for Alice to take over narrating for a bit to then reveal her literally telling the story to somebody. We get the metaphorical transformation of Alice becoming the narrator, and showing us that she’s now living her life consciously, without disappointing the audience in the long-run.

Since we reveal Alice to be the narrator, events here don’t necessarily have to be in chronological order. In fact we demonstrate a very core idea of the show, which we do by using specific selected events of common tone in series to create a context for the idea of “who” Alice is. (The way the world tells us who we are, but the mirror is distorted, because it’s not truly an image of our full self. We do the same here, with Alice giving a specific recollection to paint an idea of herself to the observer/ audience of her story.) This is revealed to the audience once the story catches up with itself. Until that happens we’re left wondering about who Alice has become.

Hero, Victim, Villain? We intercut a series of events to raise these questions about Alice, and three times we reveal her to be telling a story to somebody, perhaps once in a police interrogation, once to Cleo, and we circle around to Alice talking to Evelyn. We reveal the end of season two to be a flash forward, or perhaps, the entire series up to this point has been the conversation between Alice and Evelyn? Which is why we see all of Alice’s story, what’s important and memorable anyway, from a subjective POV, along with snippets of Evelyn’s story that are relevant to intersecting moments with Alice.

We do a “missing piece of the puzzle” episode where Alice puts all of the intercut events in context in a sequence of the remaining in-between moments, getting deepest into Alice’s psyche/POV, until we catch back up to the conversation with Evelyn. Then we follow Alice’s plan following this newly contextualized incident with Evelyn.

*For the sake of demonstration, let’s say we have 12 scenes, divided into 4 episodes. A normal chronology would be Figure 1, and the mentioned chronology would be like Figure 2.

This season sees Alice try to take the place of the mad-scientist in her original plan. She’s going to act like a menace to draw attention to herself, so that the police follow her to the confrontation with Evelyn, where she will give herself up, calling herself a co-conspirator and testify to her knowledge of criminal conspiracy in exchange for immunity. When this doesn’t work, Alice has turned herself into a wanted criminal for no reason, and opened herself up to be targeted by Evelyn who can pin her own crimes on the mad-Alice.

Alice’s only benefit now is that she’s assumed dead after her fall out Evelyn’s window, and with all her failed plans behind her, Alice now decides to personally dismantle Evelyn’s plans, operating in secret lest a man-hunt starts - which it does.

A passing comment makes Alice realize that the mad-scientist DeLareux’s technology could possibly be used to bring back Cleo. Dr. DeLareux is deceased, but his “Igor,” the Mad-Scientist’s Assistant is still around, and is the only hope for such a plan to work. Alice tracks down the mad-scientist DeLareux’s assistant and adventures to gather everything necessary to execute this improbable plan.

The plan to bring back Cleo works, and now with her best friend back Alice carries on, finishing off the bikers, facing a fixer sent by the criminal entity to keep an eye on/help Evelyn. Evelyn’s plans become more desperate, and violent with Alice’s constant intervention. The campy tonal tropes we’ve deconstructed are the materials used to reconstruct pulpy tropes culminating in the western-style showdown between the outlaw “Hero” Alice, and the overwhelmed/unhinged Evelyn.

Alice defeats Evelyn publicly, ruining her career and reputation. It seems the fight is over, but Evelyn responds in a final act of pure villainy ending in a factory explosion that claims her own life. Alice narrowly escapes the blast, as she high-tails it out of there in her Blue Beauty, speeding around the bend of a perimeter wall, the frame freezes and transitions into a comic book panel of the same shot.

We pull out of the panel to reveal a little girl, aged 5-6, reading it in line at a gas station. Mack, behind her in line, comments saying it’s a cool book. The little girl says something along the lines of her father telling her it’s not real, to which Mack delivers the series’ moral, that Alice had to believe in herself, and make people bear witness to who she really was, before anyone else could see her real self.

MACK:

Maybe if you like Alice, you’re something alike her. What do you like most about her?

LITTLE GIRL:

She’s strong. And she’s mean to the bad guys. And she’s funny and nice.

MACK:

Well maybe you like her because you’re strong, and you can be mean to the bad guys.

LITTLE GIRL:

But I’m small.

MACK:

Well, do you know how Alice got so strong?

LITTLE GIRL:

How?

MACK:

Because she knew that someone like you was out here that she needed to be strong for.

LITTLE GIRL:

But we’ve never even met.

MACK:

Alice knows there are people in the world who haven't learned how to be brave and strong like her yet. But by seeing her be brave and strong then maybe they can learn how to do it to. Being strong isn't about always getting into fist-fights and car-chases. Real strength is being strong enough to let the world see who you really are, because then someone else might see you in the world and feel strong enough to be who they are.

When Mack walks outside, from the perspective of the little girl we see Alice outside filling up her Blue Beauty, wearing her iconic white pants and white jacket, along with Cleo getting in the car. The car fish-tails it on the gravel heading out of the parking lot of this rural little gas station/diner. We see the license plate says “Someday.”

The song plays and we move into credits. We throw in whatever fun little extras we want to give the audience, intercut with the car driving down country roads. Eventually arriving at the cabin they squatted in earlier, to clear out things they left there. We see an establishing shot of the cabin as the gang enters. We start pulling away from the cabin and into the woods. 

Int.: Cabin A book is taken out and we hear Cleo mumbling, trying to sound out the words to herself until she asks Alice how she would say this. 

ALICE:

Klatuu..

Verata..

Nikto.

BEAT

ALICE (CONT):

What’s this?

Cleo:

Oh, I don't know, I just found it.

Alice:

What do you mean you just found it? You found it here?

Cleo:

Yeah.

ALICE:

You can't just have people read latin out of random books you find laying around in the woods. Do you have any idea what you could've done to us you stupid - 

The camera is pushed back as a force rushes through the woods toward the cabin, gliding over the ground, uprooting shrubs, whirling foliage around and cracking branches all until it smashes into the cabin, flinging the door open! We hear a scream as the screen cuts to black! It then reads "Alice will return for... 

THE EVIL DEAD: IN TECHNICOLOR"

A Surrealist Easter Acid Horror movie where a dickhead genie mind-fucks our beloved hero.

In the technicolor process a special camera is used to capture an image. The incidental light wave passes through the camera lens, and then inside the body of the camera it passes through a beam-splitting prism which splits the singular image into it’s constituent wave-lengths, at which point a single image is captured on three separate film strips, one sensitive to red, one sensitive to blue, and one sensitive to green. Each film strip is then processed and dyed individually before being recombined along with a contrast-defining black-and-white strip to form a one-of-a-kind, lush, hi-fidelity picture. This technological process holds the underlying operating principles that guide the show.

The syncopation of different genre stories, and conflicts are captured in specific observable tones, through narrative elements. Like the constituent wavelengths in a technicolor image, each tone is processed on it’s own before being recombined into single, lush, high-fidelity image at the end. These are the different tones that are deconstructed and reconstructed in a unilateral process of form and function. The point of the show is like the point of the character - to watch it change. To be made aware of it’s constituent wavelengths and the interplaying fields providing the existential context for such phenomena, and understanding that each does not compose the whole like pieces of a puzzle.  They are each an examination within specific guidelines, occupying the same time and space, and we focus on them in particular rhythms tuned into the expression of something within such realms. It is only by understanding the relationship - the space between these elements, and intersecting arenas - that we can begin to see the whole picture.

This movie pays off the diligence behind what we’ve been doing, the tones of voice we’ve been creating through the theatrical and cinematic design. The threads running through the whole show: horror, panic, mental illness, a fractured self, isolation, perception, persona, and perspective. And in turn their opposites : grace, healing, wholeness, connection, ignorance, projection, and narcissism. These all come together in this epilogue to capture the  “Alice Cooper meets Alice in Wonderland” essence of the series.

Like a shepherd tone, there’s a base note, with notes an octave above and an octave below, interweaving, as one gets louder, the other one gets quieter, continually switching places. Creating an auditory illusion of infinite escalation. We have modern emotionally grounded storytelling, with the legacy technicolor process and the less prestigious horror genre interweaving for a unique escalating adventure.

The nuanced examination of minute experiences in the rest of the series allows subtle character work to shine in this playful technicolor spectacle. Revealing a deliberate and cohesive style as the series flows harder and harder. Emblematic narrative elements used throughout the rest of the series, setting up the epilogue, allow the audience recognizable symbols in this unique cinematic experience expressing the ultimate metaphorical tale of Alice’s psyche. The hook of an Acid & Lead Technicolor Terror-thon is there, but it’s the promise we're making to our audience consistently through diligently building a voice, that makes this worth witnessing.

Alice upon reading from the Necronomicon unleashes an unrelenting evil into the world, reciting an incantation summoning a genie-like demon, and unwittingly making a wish for the demon to fulfill when she’s feeling down. The price for this wish is her soul; eternal torture by the granting demon. Genies being notorious dicks about semantics, the demon grants her wish and comes to collect by immediately torturing her.

Alice fights the evil that she unleashed into the world; starting out as a haunting movie.  Seeing as Alice’s soul is in her body… this takes a possession twist. The Genie Demon initially bonds to Alice like a parasite,  like that familiar, unrelenting critic inside all of us that makes us question ourselves, but this time the stakes aren't self esteem. It's sanity. This demon makes her question not only herself, but her reality.

When Alice evicts the Genie Demon from her psyche the demon chooses to reanimate Evelyn to fuck with Alice; Evelyn’s soul is being tortured in Hell while her corporeal body is possessed. The demon accesses the “evil"; the unresolved pain and suffering, inside of Evelyn and keeps it alive, ensuring her no peace in the afterlife. A cosmic tragedy when the most forgiving thing Evelyn could be is forgotten.

Alice fights the Genie Demon in the night realm, in her dreams, and the other forces of Deadite evil in her waking life. So we’re doing this “Evil Dead meets A Nightmare on Elm Street” type thing. With the overall composition as such: Singin' in the Rain meets The Evil Dead , The Wizard of Oz meets Psycho Circus, The Magical Mystery Tour meets A Christmas Carol, The Sound of music meets A Nightmare on Elm Street, with an undercurrent of Rambo meets The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt running between. 

The format is the visual apex of the style we’ve been building in both content and in form; the growing aspect ratio. Series Act 1 is in 1:78:1, series Act 2 is in 1:85:1, series Act 3 is in 2:39:1, and this cinema-going-worthy experience is in 2:75:1. We use our huge frame to create a fantastical, larger-than-life experience and allow this to serve as a vehicle for the dream-like quality that draws us to picturesque locations, like the hills from “The Sound of Music,” and some other ideas I have for colorful international towns, and using the large format film medium of, and the technicolor process we get the perfect vehicle to juxtapose prestigious grandeur against the low-rent entertainment of the circus/fair, and create a uniquely textured experience with lush natural pastels and meta-natural florescence in an aspect ratio for an expansive landscape used to magnify multiple scopes of existence.

We’re going to recreate the technicolor process, both in the classical sense, as well as some ideas I have for a revitalized application of the technology, think of it as technicolor cubed. Just from the testing and refining alone we are going to have the most visually singular picture imaginable. And the work it serves is going to make it that much more incredible.

Utilizing compositional principles in different incidental contexts through evolving tonality allows us to seize the mystery breathing behind the life-long experience of finding one’s “self,” which is different than one’s ego. The ego is the “us” that’s formed by the story we tell ourself about who we are. Different from the identity: the labels we give our characteristics, our strengths, and our values. Different from our persona: the way in which we show up in the world, how our identity is lived out. Self is the culmination of understanding the relationship between all these parts of one’s self, a freedom granted by the wisdom that comes from the examination of each constituent part.

With the knowledge from sustained conscious observation; this Self is put in the context of the world around it. A recognition of the harmonious interplay of all living things. Which includes you, the solid earth, the stars, and the space between. An understanding of the biological, the physical, the psychological and the philosophical. All with their explicit differences in the game of black-and-white, a veneer over the implicit unity of what Vedanta calls the Self, the One-without-a-second, the what there is and the all there is that conceals itself in the form of you.