The philosophical concepts are drawn from Alan Watts’ “The Book On The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.” Which states in part, “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.” Watts’ book propagates intertext, a look into the relational fabric of the content presented, an invaluable resource to creation and collaboration. It influences the character’s worldview arc and therefor “who” the character is at a given moment.
The main psychological concept is Erik Eriksons proposed stages of psychosocial identity development. It states that each stage’s turning point is centered around a conflict and that the successful completion of each stage results in a psychological strength, each building upon each other, and serving us for the rest of our lives. Failing to complete each stage results in a weak sense of self. Erikson’s stages propagate universal conflict, another invaluable resource for creation and collaboration. It influences the plot, the emotional “why” of character action.
Then we come to physics. Specifically physics’ role in perception. Common to all human experience it informs the “what” of the story. Imagine for me, that you are in a room. The lights are off, it’s turning dusk outside. There’s a sliver of a gap between your curtains covering the window, and you can see the dust particles swirling around in that single slice of the sun’s light.
In reality we know that there’s a big swooshing ocean of atmospheric gases that all these bits of dust flow through. But imagine that you could stop time, and all the little dust particles stop. You can observe all the bits of dust stopped in that single slice of sunlight. Pick a piece of dust to look at. Think of this piece of dust as a photon - the quantum artifact of an electric pulsation through a magnetic field. Think of that slice of sunlight as your attention, you can perceive the whole room around you, but everything in this one sliver of light is what’s in focus.
Calling a photon a quantum artifact is to say that it’s an observable point of something that we know to be in motion. The photon, that little piece of electric dust, isn’t just a photon at this point in time and space that we observe. It’s moving through a magnetic field, and the sustained observation of the photon, or more accurately a slew of photons, sees it a light-wave. The little wiggles of its dissipating energy give it the crests and valleys of amplitude and frequency what we recognize as the shape of a wave. The sustained observation of this quantum artifact we call a photon, traveling with many photons behind, in front of, and next to each other is perceived as a beam of light.
It’s common knowledge that white light is actually made up of all of visible light-waves and it’s common knowledge that the amplitude and frequencies of electro-magnetic pulses determines if we observe the wave as x-ray, radio-waves, micro-waves, or visible light-waves, and these two together determine what color we perceive that light to be. But how do we see one beam of white light when it’s made up of all visible wavelengths?
Let’s take a look at the scientific instrument, the spectroscope. In a spectroscope that observable beam of white light is not observed directly. The light travels through an optical prism which splits the light into all its constituent wavelengths to then be observed as spectral lines. Lines marked on a continuum of wavelengths, specifically the spectrum of visible light.
When these constituent frequencies are phase matched, meaning they pretty much occupy the same space at the same time, they interfere with each other. Depending on the differential they can either constructively interfere, in which case the amplitude of given frequencies are added together, creating a perceivably larger wave. Or they can destructively interfere, in which case the “up” of one frequency aligns with the “down” of another, and vice versa, and they cancel each other out resulting in a wavelength that looks more like a straight line. Either way, the result is the sum total of interference between all interplaying frequencies.
In the same way, the sum total of frequencies result in perceiving a single wave of light so do the constituent elements result in a single feeling of this series, though the ups and downs of an element may be in one place or another depending on the moment it’s observed. By translating some conceptual data into x,y coordinates and creating a line graph for each functional element of the story we can observe constituent components on their own wave-length.
A Taylor series is used to translate derivative information at a single point into approximation information around that point. But this is an artistic interpretation of concepts done by someone who graduated high school with a 2.8 g.p.a. so don’t worry about things getting too dense. It’s basically the representation of the question “what if instead of the known pattern the wave behaved like this” - an examination of potential from a moment.
It’s the fancy way to say that the information in this treatment is meant to aid communication in a collaborative process of inductive reasoning. That’s to say, going from the specific to the general. Working from the bottom up using key elements, and key incidents as reference points in the process of finding the convergence of said elements and incidents.
STORY: the what
The frequencies of Society, Adventure, Horror, and Action lead into each other. Our beginning society stories give way to adventure, horror and action. At the beginning of the series we’re doing a tale-of-three-cities type of thing. We examine these castes through a performance narrative.
We’ve got our main character ALICE, who tries to sit outside of all three classes of society, feeling like she doesn’t belong anywhere, and constantly performing in regular life out of insecurity. This is characteristic of the lie she believes about herself, that there’s something wrong with her, that she’s broken and she has to hide it from everybody. She’s constantly performing through people-pleasing and perfectionistic self-expectations.
Then we’ve got CLEO, Alice’s bubbly foil, and soon to be best friend, and later sidekick. Cleo is of the middle caste, an acceptably performing saleswoman at the make-up and self-care company FABULISM. Cleo performs above her normal level in effort to win a sales competition. When Cleo seems unenthusiastic her chances at winning, always having had a fine life and performed fine, but never exceptionally achieving and having a star moment. Alice unconsciously sees an opportunity to live vicariously through Cleo and decides to help her.
Spending time at Fabulism also sees us examine the upper caste, the hyper-achievers, the rockstars, the untouchable who are proud of their high status either for shallow social status, or the validation of being a success in business.
In the lower caste there’s a neighborhood group of vagrant, beach-rat musicians in what should be our most straightforward performance story, but turns out to be subversive commentary on the nature of performance. The singer, MACK, has a conversation with Alice when she assumes that this is the classic “starving artist” tale, struggling while they try to make it big. Alice still sees performance as a lottery ticket in the case of the musicians, and for herself it’s a mechanism to fit into and earn her place in the world. Until, that is, Mack tells her that performance for him, is just the by-product from the focused expression of his gifts. He’s an appreciator of beauty and excellence, seeing it all over life, with love of music and poetry, and talent with lyrics. “Performance” is just part of the expression of these gifts, and he happens to find an enjoyable life more fulfilling than a traditional lifestyle. Learning this begins to change Alice’s idea of performance.
MACK:
People like to think that freedom is freedom from consequences,
but I think it means the freedom to choose your consequences.
ALICE:
Are you telling me that I should be homeless?
MACK:
[Laughing] No, I’m just saying that a happy life might not look anything like you think it should.
If you pay attention to what you really want.
When an element of mystery is folded into the narrative, one of the incidents dramatizing this is that a Scooby-Doo-like villain, THE GHOUL, shows up to scare away the audience at a family-and-friends show inaugurating the new rehearsal space of the beach-rat band. They’ve moved some equipment into a seemingly abandoned warehouse on the docks so they could rehearse in a big space to prepare for an upcoming opportunity.
ALICE:
You.. a band.. are going to investigate?
Alice and Cleo help the gang investigate, and when some hidden contraband is found connecting the warehouse to Fabulism, Alice and Cleo agree to head the investigation on this front. Their snooping, while at first cozy and nothing to worry about, raises alarms to the criminal link at Fabulism, EVELYN. When she finds people snooping in her business it’s time to clean house. She doesn’t know it’s the girls and the gang, but they still find themselves in an undesirable position when they accidentally discover the now-dead Ghoul, who was previously brought to justice by them in true Scooby-Doo fashion, just as swarms of police descend on the building. A heart-pounding evasion of the bulls launches us into adventure as the girls subsequently escape the city with the help of their vagabond friends.
Assuming they’re wanted by cops and criminals, and wanting a way back to normal life, Alice and Cleo try to reorient themselves while on the run. They hear from a small-town, villainous grinch about nearby fruit farms that are friendly to migrant workers. It turns out they’ve caught a break that puts them onto investigating the supply chain of multiple subsidiaries of THE COLORFUL CORPORATION, Fabulism’s parent company. THE SWEET PEACH SODA CO., a CANDLE MANUFACTURER, and THE CONFECTIONARY FACTORY all use distilled fragrance/essential oils distilled from fresh fruit in their products.
The investigation takes a horror twist when evidence at a clandestine research & development lab uncovers the existence of the dangerous DR. DELAREUX, a mad-scientist who is the mechanical mind behind a perilous plot of corporate sabotage under the direction of Evelyn, a part of a formidable criminal entity’s conspiracy.
The girls’ snooping again alerts the bad guys to their existence, and just when they’re getting close to apprehending the mad scientist, he calls in a favor from a group of macabre bikers, business associates he has a protection deal with, giving real-life terror to this weird horror element.
Miraculously Alice neutralizes the biker threat long enough to get access to Dr. DeLareux. The plan being Alice and Cleo can convince him to flip on his cohorts in exchange for immunity and open a route back to the scientific community where he’ll be heralded as a great scientist for his advancement in genetics. Having created a little pace-maker-like device that acts like a CRISPR gene editor for living beings, or perhaps could even clone an animal given the d.n.a. code and enough organic material, as we have seen by freaky mutant wild animals around the farms, and numerous half-alive animal frankensteins at his labs. This play is too naive and innocent though, as commented on by the scientist who lead them on.
DR. DELAREUX:
I work with real life, grown-up, criminals! Did you think they we’re gonna be like “oh it’s super-cool that you put us in jail, and took all our money away.” Or would they be like “MURDER. HIM.”?
CLEO:
You said that…
DR. DELAREUX:
YEAH. I was pretty sure that you were gonna be dead soon and that we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now.
ALICE:
… This guy sucks!
DR. DELAREUX:
Yeah well I never expected things to get this far because you were supposed to be dead by now. And since they didn’t kill you that means I’ve got to kill you.
What was playing out as a surprising triumph, about mid-way through the series, has turned out to be Dr. DeLareux’s last stand and Cleo is killed in the clash. Fatally wounded, Cleo stumbles over to Alice and passes in her arms, pressing Alice’s berserk button, resulting in a brutal beatdown that ends in the death of the mad-scientist, and the death of any chance at returning to a normal life, launching into more intense action carried out against the criminal conspiracy.
PLOT: the emotional truth of our character’s journey, the why
Starting out with the Love frequency, Alice’s friendship with Cleo showcases Alice’s inner feelings about the world and herself, which sets the stage to show how she interacts in love. When Cleo loses the sales competition at Fabulism, Alice gets into a fight with her, assuming that she should feel much worse about the loss. Alice unwittingly got over-invested in Cleo, caring more about her problems than her own, abandoning herself.
Alice assumed that it was a huge deal to Cleo, and she’s resentful that Cleo’s sense of self-worth is unaffected by the loss. The difference between Alice and Cleo is Alice’s worldview is based on the thought “I am broken, something is wrong with me, I am valueless, therefor I must do something to become valuable.” Cleo’s worldview is based on the thought “I’m fine, I’m enough, I’m okay, and so are other people.” Alice accepting somewhere within her that she wants to be more like Cleo, returns to apologize when she very well could have just walked away. Alice and Cleo have a make-up conversation where we see the knowledge Cleo, as a conflict mentor, shows Alice: that it’s okay to feel what you feel, instead of being eaten up by shame, because unlike Alice, shame isn’t the driving force in Cleo’s life.
Cleo invites Alice for a night on the town with her friends, and Alice has a great time. It’s the absolute most fun, probably one of the best nights of her entire life. When she’s out laughing, and giggling, and playing, Alice is practically glowing at the end of the night, looking as attractive as possible when she bumps into an ex-flame when she’s heading out of the bar. Seeing Alice in a state so unlike her “old self” he’s enticed to get together with this “new” person, and Alice feeling that barriers are starting to be lifted from her narrowly confined sense of self, and her life, is warmed by the idea of being with this guy. And she kind of has this fantasy about being a “new self” in a new life and recapturing an old love. It’s intoxicating, but like other forms of intoxication it’s an escape, self-abandonment. She doesn’t know this yet, but it becomes clear to us as we squirm watching this relationship bend before it breaks.
Alice gets caught up not only in what’s going on in her life, which is more lively now, but also in the thought of this relationship. The two flirt together, but ultimately we can see that Alice wants this more than her ex-flame does. In fact she "wants” it more than she actually wants it, because this relationship is a source of external validation for her. You can call this the co-dependent and the narcissist relationship, where one person is so desperate for approval and validation, security, and love, that they will put up with anything from the other person to keep the relationship going, and they can push-and-pull the anxious co-dependent all they want. She’s controlled and toyed with by the shame put on her by this person’s judgment that she values more than her own until she asks for basic consideration.
Up to this point that’s who Alice has been. Alice, having never thought of herself as worthy of anything good, was astonished by even the tiniest amount of it she received from Cleo and new friends. Thanks to Cleo, the good examples she’s set, and a little bit of security, Alice has begun to see life from a new perspective. Not entirely, but her path has diverged from it’s previous direction, and now we can see how she shrinks herself to keep the relationship with this ex-flame alive. She still feels like she’s both too much, and not enough, and doesn’t want to give any reason for conflict in the relationship. She has no boundaries.
The disparity between Alice’s life with Cleo, and her life with her ex-flame shows us the truth of who Alice has been in the world. It pains us to see this before she does herself. But finally after one last disappointment Alice is struck with a moment of clarity. The gig the beach-rat band was preparing for has come and Alice invited her ex-flame, she’s excited to see him. When he flakes on her and she’s disappointed by this, she says so and he’s unapologetic, defensive and angry even. In this moment where she would normally fold and people-please to keep the relationship going, Alice now fights through breathlessness as her cognitive dissonance clears into focus as the words come out of her mouth.
ALICE:
You only call me when you have nobody else. You just use me to fill yourself up. I’m a sweet person and you just treat me like your last choice and use me. But other people choose me. Other people like me, and want to hang out with me, and know me. I’m worth treating nice more than just when you want something from me. I loved you, but now I love me too.
Alice’s would-be love story has gone south, but it’s opened her up for the true love story waiting. Mack, like Cleo, meets Alice where she’s at and allows her room to be herself, instead of spouting shame or instilling doubt to reaffirm his own behaviors and interfere with Alice’s sense of autonomy. As we come to voice, this isn’t special, it’s a basic standard of decency for all people. But this feeling of the comfortability, and the safety to be her own person doesn’t go unnoticed or unappreciated by Alice.
When on the run, Mack and the beach-rat band have a run of gigs lined up, and spend what time they can with Alice and Cleo. During this time Alice reveals herself to be more adept under pressure than in regular life. This displays an interesting bit of her character. When she’s described as a co-dependent and a people-pleaser you imagine a pushover. Alice is a pushover all the way until she really isn’t. We see this come out as a bit of attitude along the way, biting sarcasm, but now it’s astonishing the people around her how even-keeled and even stoic she can be in intense situations.
This reveals the fight within her though, because being seen as a person who is capable in this sense reveals her character not only to us, but the people around her. And the name of the game having always been keep-away-from-authenticity, Alice is torn up inside because she’s alway tried to hide who she really is. Who she is , is someone put in the most unfortunate circumstances to gain apt streetwise ingenuity and the capability to handle herself physically. Alice’s multiplicity is that of the battered victim gaslit into believing they’re worthless, the brawler born to protect them, and the cagey facade put on to hide the first two from everyone. This conflict of trying to hide her real self, but needing her unique gifts to get by, creates friction within herself and with the people around her.
Unresolved romantic tension between Alice and Mack creates conflict during this tumultuous time. Mack gets short with Alice, frustrated by her attitude and sensitivity until learning about Alice’s backstory from Cleo. He had assumed Alice was an average, middle-class, pretty girl like Cleo, until she reveals that Alice and Cleo didn’t go to the same school until middle school, and recounts her rumored tragic backstory of homelessness before coming to that school.
Spending her earliest known life in foster care, suffering neglect and abuse, Alice one day ran away, and we can assume she spent around two of her tween years living in a shanty called STRANGERS ROW. Historically a place where fathers abandoned their young sons, the small slum eventually became self-sustaining in a way. People who have aged out of the place come around to help out sometimes, though with limited intervention, the philosophy of hoboism being that an almost over-egalitarian sense of personal freedom is extended to everybody in the life. It’s unheard of for girls to stay there though, given the extra dangers, and one day she was spotted by a woman who took her in as her de facto ADOPTIVE MOTHER.
Mack ends up apologizing to Alice, and through this conversation we learn the knowledge that Mack, as a conflict mentor, gives to Alice: that it’s okay to want what you want, instead of what you could, should, or ought to want. This gives Alice the security to face her Coming of Age story. This is a moment of overlap obviously as Alice’s backstory has been coming up, and has been setting the stage for Alice to face the lie she believes about herself. We see that Love is not just a romantic concept as Alice moves into this new stage of her life.
In the course of the adventure, Alice comes across DANNY, who she believes to be her birth father. She confronts the man she believes to be her father who abandoned her, and when she does she learns that he isn’t her father, he’s her godfather. Too young to take care of a kid when her parents passed, he tried to give her the best chance in life, thinking it would be best for her to be adopted into a loving family that’s ready for a child. And now Alice must face the lie she believed: that she was broken, worthless, unwanted, not worth loving, not worth protecting, not worth a good life.
She was loved an unimaginable amount, like all children. Her parents looked at her with all the joy and hope that any parent does. They wanted to see her play, and laugh, and grow up feeling secure, safe, and loved. But her parents are the victims in Alice’s story too. They didn’t get what they wanted, their daughter, beautiful, special, loved; grew up hating herself, learning nasty things about the world far too early, subject to violence, neglect, and emotional abuse that she internalized to be the story about who she is.
When Danny finally works up the courage to tell Alice who he is, she sees how tortured he is by everything that unfolded, and she can see how much her parents cared about her. Danny, deep down, felt like a screw up for his entire life after Alice. Now, he’s got his first baby on the way, and being confronted face-to-face with Alice, fear strikes his core, and in seeing how worried he is about giving his unborn daughter a good life, Alice can see how much a parent cares about their child, how much she’s cared about.
This is Alice’s big turning point, the thing that puts her over the edge on the journey to maturity. Accepting that people can only do the best they know how to do, and that their shortcomings are not a reflection of her worth, sometimes people just can’t get out of their own way in order to do what’s actually best. She forgives Danny, and even if it’s not stated outright, with new confidence she accepts the knowledge that Danny, as a conflict mentor, gives to her: it’s okay to take risks on your own behalf instead of always playing it safe.
Alice starts coming around to the idea that she’s a worthy person who was surrounded by weak, self-involved people for most of her life, and that nothing is wrong with her, she is simply “of” the life experience and the worlds she lived in. Alice has newfound confidence to start embracing herself, her gifts, her talents, and using them to surprising success with the crime she navigates. She starts fantasizing about getting to return to a normal, good life as acceptable, valid, and worthy person like all the people she envied; feeling like she could never be like them. Sadly, like the plan to convince Dr. DeLareux to flip on a criminal conspiracy, this idea is far too innocent and naive to be the conclusion to what’s going on in her life, and when Cleo is killed, Alice continues fighting in the crime world with new motivation.
CHARACTER: the “who” of a given moment
Alice’s character arc is centered around her worldview, the actions that distinguish “who she is” at a given moment in the story. Alice’s overarching worldview arc is comprised of four distinct worldview movements. All building on each other, given shape by a combination of Erikson’s stages, and Watts’ intertextual philosophy. The journey is indeed a complexity, and the easiest way to explore it is using TOTEM CHARACTERS. Totem characters are a few unique characters that tell the metaphorical story of Alice and her parts that we examine.
In season one Alice moves from ISOLATED TO VULNERABLE. We play on Alice’s sense of anxiety multiple times, until eventually nightmares that are written off as anxiety can no longer be ignored when the girls return home to find the apartment ransacked, around the time after the Ghoul/Fabulism investigation begins. The tension comes to a head one stormy night when a dark figure appears outside the window. This is misdirection for a funny “Murders in the Rue Morgue” twist when the figure is unveiled as an orangutan in a slicker, holding a straight razor. The police, and monkey’s handler arrive last minute and spare any misfortune.
The monkey has been upset since it’s mother died, and it got the scent of Cleo from a scarf snagged on an upswung countertop when Alice, stewarding the scarf at the time, ran through the MONKEY BUSINESS during a tongue-in-cheek dance sequence. Cleo, upon hearing of the MONKEY BUSINESS OWNER’s struggle to run things since the death of his wife, volunteers her time to help around the exotic pet store.
The Monkey Business is where we meet OUR FIRST TOTEM CHARACTER, for the sake of conversation let’s call him “HARRY.” Harry is the half-monkey-man hidden away in the basement of the Monkey Business, and he’s discovered by Cleo when strange things seem to be happening when she’s alone in the store. Cleo’s relationship with Harry has a romantic bent, giving symmetry to the time when Alice is enamored with her ex-flame.
Harry has been hidden away for his entire life, pretty much confined to the Monkey Business, his father thinking the world unready to accept him. Cleo is the first outsider he can ever open up to, which begins with relating his backstory. His father, the Monkey Business Owner’s romance with a chimp is grounded as a deeply sympathetic tale played for sentimentality. The mother chimp’s role is anthropomorphized in regards to running the business and child-rearing, the romance even begins when the Owner and the chimp’s hand meet when they reach for the same bug on a monkey’s back. Things have been hard since the passing of Harry’s mother, and when his sister caught Cleo’s scent off her scarf, in a fit of anger fueled by misplaced grief Harry’s sister sought to kill the new female scent she thought her father was replacing her mother with.
Harry is isolated from society just like Alice is, until he meets Cleo, who opens him up to the idea the he can be liked and accepted and valid, worthy of a decent life. Giving him hope for the future and allowing him the comfort and security to begin exposing more of his personality. He’s still not ready to go out into the world though, which unfortunately ends up being a deal-breaker for Cleo, feeling that they’re just at two different places in life.
Later when Alice and Cleo are sitting on the porch nursing their respective heart-aches, Harry shows up wasted in the street. We are again grounded, seeing the humanity of this situation, all-be-it in a light-hearted way where the deconstruction of this fantastical romance gives way to an all-too-real moment with a drunk guy in the street going “You bitch, you broke my heart.”
Doing so in a way that showcases that even though it is through the pain of losing her, it’s Cleo’s love that ultimately freed a man. He never would have been able to walk through the streets, if not fueled by the heart-ache of losing her. Unfortunately the story Harry and Alice share is all too similar, as this foreshadows that it’s not until losing Cleo that Alice starts showing up as her real self in the world.
By the end of season one Alice has already begun her second worldview movement from DISORIENTED TO AUTHENTIC. Realizing that she's been disoriented is the cognitive dissonance that clicks into focus when she stands up for herself to her ex-flame. When she’s finally vulnerable enough to admit that she doesn’t like how she’s being treated is when she completes the first arc and moves onto the second.
In season two when the girls are squatting in a house, we meet THE SECOND TOTEM CHARACTER, an unsettling PUPPET BIRD (think a combination of Placido Flamingo, Gritty the hockey mascot, and this thing), we recognize the bird from the Monkey Business. There’s a knock at the door…
THE BIRD’S NEW OWNER:
Listen, I gotta be honest. I’m training my bird to find water in case I ever get lost in the woods. He found your pool and I need to give him some positive reinforcement, can I go into your backyard for a minute?
When exiting through the house, the bird snatches Cleo’s scarf and she’s like “You know what, this thing has given me enough trouble, you can keep it.” This neighbor is from a nearby suburb and is a part of Danny’s friend group. The girls coming over to accept repayment for the scarf is when they meet Danny.
Later in season two, Alice begins moving through her third worldview arc INSIGNIFICANT TO VALIANT. When Alice and Cleo are run off the road by THE BIKER BOSS (think Davey Jones meets The Undertaker, as a Rob Zombie character), and his gang, the girls flee through the woods as night falls and we meet THE THIRD TOTEM CHARACTER, THE GROUSE. The Grouse is a juvenile trickster character, he’s totally harmless, but has the appearance of a germanic folk-horror/Hans Christian Anderson/ Brothers Grimm character, like a St. Bernard that thinks it’s a cat.
Very Edward Scissorhands inspired aesthetically, The Grouse lives in the woods outside of/around the Confectionary Factory, and spends his time scaring people and snickering like a child after. Alice and Cleo start their “survive the night” run through the woods being pursued by bikers who give up, knowing there are scarier things in the woods than them, and the girls end their run being pursued by the Grouse, an as-of-yet unknown entity.
The girls, exiting the tree line, race through an open field to an open factory door, the pneumatics slowly closing the door as they approach. When inside we get a rundown from the Confectionary’s proprietor, THE CANDY FACTORY MAN-BOY, whose situation is unabashedly “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” if Willy Wonka fucked off immediately, he said “It’s all yours Charlie,” and then got in his elevator and flew away - leaving 12 year old Charlie to run the factory by himself. I mean, he would have Grandpa Joe for a couple of years, but he’s still going to be a teenager running a factory by himself. He’s in his 30’s now and things are going just as well as you expect them to be. We get a rundown on the business and it’s afflictions, one of them being the Grouse.
ALICE:
He did all that?
CANDY FACTORY MAN-BOY:
Well, just the color shifts and the blinking lights, some crazy shit happened to the Grouse when he was a kid. He was on a hot air balloon that crashed, and one day he came into town growling. He was chased away, but eventually people started feeding the Grouse. One day he scared someone and a Reese’s Cup fell out of their hands and the Grouse took it as positive reinforcement. That’s why I always try to keep some Snappy Taffy on me. He’s been living off it for years. Honestly I don’t know how he’s still alive… Or how his teeth are still so sharp…
A man-beast comes out of the woods to scare you and you have to give him candy to go away - sounds kitschy, I know. But I assure you it is taxing.
CLEO:
He eats such colorful foods for a dark character.
ALICE:
Wait, you said he just did the colors, but what about all that other stuff?
CANDY FACTORY MAN-BOY:
Oh, something lives in those woods, but luckily it didn’t run into you.
ALICE:
Are you sure, I mean x,y,z happened. What does it do?
CANDY FACTORY MAN-BOY:
Oh, I guess I don’t know. No one’s been around to tell us what it does. Maybe you did run into it.
The Candy Factory Man-Boy has a special relationship with the Grouse. Considering they’ve both been arrested in their development, two people abandoned by the world around them, the Candy Factory Man-Boy understands the Grouse in a kindred way.
In season three, as Alice’s third worldview arc, insignificant to valiant, is coming to turn, a stroke of inspiration puts the idea in Alice’s head that the mad-scientist DeLareux’s technology could possibly bring Cleo back. Dr. DeLareux’s lab was destroyed in the same implosion that guaranteed his death, however the MAD-SCIENTIST’S ASSISTANT is still alive, and the only hope to execute this plan.
Alice has already decided to take the mad-scientist’s place in her original plan, and surrender herself as part of the criminal conspiracy, exposing everything in hopes for immunity, but when she gets the chance to bring Cleo back, she abandons everything to chase this wild hare.
Alice realizes the only chance she has to get Cleo’s d.n.a. is from her old scarf, usually riddled with her hair. Alice talks to the owner of the Puppet Bird who has most recently taken her scarf, but the exotic bird has migrated home, and the owner let the bird be the bird, because honestly it’s a lot to handle.
ALICE:
Does the bird have a chip or anything?
PUPPET BIRD’S OWNER:
No, but it ate my cellphone last week so you can probably track that.
Compelling the aid of the Mad-Scientist’s Assistant, and employing the help of the Candy Factory Man-Boy, Alice sets off to track down the Puppet Bird, arriving at a TROPICAL RAINFOREST. The terrain now impassable by car, retrieving their gear from the trunk the gang are startled when out springs the Grouse. The Grouse’s usual snicker, and the gang’s upset about their gear missing, is stifled as the Grouse looks upon the luscious green expanse. The scattered pops of blue, and red, and yellow, and violet gleam the Grouse’s eyes and the buzzing chitter-chatter of a forest dense with life fills his ears with song. His eyes soften, and his face drops as the pale white comes to color. Finally looking more man than beast, for the first time ever, we hear him speak
THE GROUSE:
I thought it was only.. a dream...
Undeterred and having unknowingly brought the Grouse to his homeland, Alice spurs her companions to journey into the jungle. This is where we solidify this piece as a work of Magical Realism, doing our most “100 Years of Solitude/Pan’s Labyrinth”-type tonal piece. The Grouse’s metaphorical examination of Alice sees the Grouse, and the other natives to this eldritch location embody a manifestation of the way other people see them, and the way they see themselves.
This is discovered in the climax of this tonal section where a big caterpillar-monster-thing (imagine the sandworm from “Beetlejuice,” huge with red and black segmentation, a flat face like Thomas the Tank Engine, and a mane of black hairs giving the monster’s head a sunflower silhouette) is encountered while tracking the Puppet Bird through the rainforest. In a twist of fate, the search party is doomed when the caterpillar-monster rips the roof off a building, but when the beast sees who it’s about to devour the beast is slain. The caterpillar-monster keels over, belly up, and splits open. Inside lays a woman covered in goo - THE GROUSE’S MOTHER, separated from him all those years ago. The Grouse and his Mother are the most human either of them have been in a lifetime.
(Plus now there’s enough organic material to use with the mad-scientist’s bio-technology.)
This is the first big win for Alice. Not the first thing that goes in her favor, but the first thing that makes her a hero. By decidedly going beyond her perceived limitations in order to bring Cleo back, trying to do something that is improbable, but not impossible, as a byproduct Alice has unintentionally committed an act of heroism, doing something good for others. With the Grouse growing more human the longer he’s in his homeland, we learn that a character separated from their proper environment, tells a different story than the naturally unfolding beautiful story of their proper context.
As thanks for her good deed slaying the caterpillar/reuniting the Grouse with his home and family, the native people help Alice find the Puppet Bird. When she does, the Puppet Bird looks almost majestic in its natural habitat, sitting on placid pond, moonlight reflecting off the water, in this calm Alice is able to walk right up and take the scarf off the bird’s neck, and all is in place in the world. This starts us reconstructing tropes instead of deconstructing them.
(“Deconstruction demonstrates what happens when tropes in fiction are played for realism by revealing all of the trope's possible assumptions after analyzing it. Thus, a fantasy about being a princess or a superhero is shown to have consequences, negatives, other facets, etc that are glazed over in fiction. The trope no longer works the same, so it doesn't look the same and ends up losing value. This is where Reconstruction comes in. A Reconstruction acknowledges the flaws and assumptions of a trope that has undergone Deconstruction, so it either modifies the trope in a way that resembles the original and still work in reality, or finds a solution for the trope to become useful again.” - tvtropes.org)
Cleo is revived/cloned with help from the Mad-Scientist’s Assistant, and the last distinct worldview arc begins, HELPLESS TO MATURE. In the arc THE FOURTH TOTEM CHARACTER is Alice herself, more specifically “HERO” ALICE.
Alice has her big change. The scope expands, more is in frame as her connection to life is fuller. Now that Alice is living consciously, and we know her well enough, we can see through the cracks of how she’s showing up to the world. Consciously examining her place in the world, and the role she’s playing in it, Alice’s once metaphorical examination is given focus and theater.
In a failed attempt to replace the mad-scientist and turn herself in as a criminal conspirator in exchange for immunity, Alice draws police attention to herself getting them to follow her to a confrontation with Evelyn. When this unexpectedly ends with Alice trucked out a window and presumed dead, Alice is in the unfortunate position to take the blame for anything Evelyn wants to lay on her. Painted as a crazy woman who broke into her house and held her up at gunpoint, Evelyn can say whatever she wants about the mad Alice and people will believe her.
On the wrong side of the law, and society, a narrative is pushed vilifying Alice, using her tragic upbringing and loner status as rationale for her villainization to the public. Is Alice’s sense of self strong enough to stand up against the stories being told about Alice by the world? She asks herself if she should keep going. After all, it is Alice’s intervention that makes things worse, raising the ire of Evelyn whose reactive plans become more and more unhinged and stand to mindlessly hurt more and more people.
Now with the whole world thinking any bad thought that she could’ve had about herself, Alice is literally being rejected and demonized as she battles her self-doubt to continue fighting. Now personally dismantling a criminal organization’s conspiracy and destroying Evelyn’s public image, Alice fights against a hostile world while consciously embodying a higher self: vulnerable, authentic, valiant, and mature.
A person alone in their environment is in the wilderness. The problem is when you hear wilderness you think the jungle. Think of it instead as the wildness. The wildness of the west. Being on the run where any interaction could be death is functionally no different than facing wild animals in nature.
The wildness belying society, love, adventure, coming of age, and tragedy, the link between action and emotion - you.
What if you didn't have the refuge of saying "at least I'm nice, or talented, or rich, or liked." And instead the world only reflected the worst possible version of yourself? Could you keep going? Could you shift your perspective, and allow yourself to find a life of fulfillment? Beginning right where you are right now. Could you fight through all of it? Do you believe you're a person worth fighting for?