Alice’s push

So, I wasn’t crazy about the Alice pushed herself reveal. I mean, if it had been maybe a more future Alice with some different plot point or narrative to advance then it would have been cool. But Alice a couple months into the future, pushing herself because she knew she had to in order to start her 1974 adventure just wasn’t a super satisfying reveal to me, for something that we all had wondered all season.

But then I started thinking, well maybe it was important to the theme/question that sort of resonated this season for Alice which was “am I in control of my own destiny?” And in that way, giving herself her own push was kind of a cool symbolic way of showing she doesn’t have to follow what others think she should do, but should follow her heart and her dreams instead. And I love that for her (and everyone else).

But…as I’ve been thinking about it, I’ve landed on the reason that I didn’t love the reveal from the beginning. When Alice is at the pond watching herself on the phone, she’s looking around and waiting for the person to come push her, realizes no one is coming, and quickly realizes that what happened has to happen so pushes herself.

She pushes herself because…she got pushed by herself.

What happened will always happen.

So, really this feels like the opposite of having any kind of agency over your life. I feel like more and more this season, but even throughout the show, we are seeing the characters just sort of compelled by fate to do certain things. And some of the reveals feel sort of underwhelming because they just sort of show fate just being fate, versus maybe advancing the narrative a bit more. I hope that makes sense. It’s sort of the best I can do to explain the little nagging reason why I just didn’t love the Alice pushes herself thing.

Also worth noting , the “character does it themselves” was done a few times this season as well (Susanna pulled her own chapter, and another huge mystery, KC themself removed the file from the folder) so that also contributed to an unsatisfying reveal, but that’s kind of another point.

Anyway, this isn’t the point at which I would have wanted to see Alice “test” fate, as we had already seen the gift of 1974 and everything that resulted from it. But it would be interesting to see a character try to fight it or something. (What always comes to mind is Kat looking at the bicycle she dropped when looking for Jacob and realizing that it was exactly as pictured in news articles about his disappearance. We have many times said “just move it a little Kat!”, haha.)

The show is definitely a really interesting exploration of fate/destiny versus or maybe “working with” free will and agency. But I do hope we don’t get a bunch of juicy mysteries and questions that end up being answered by “well somebody did it just because they knew it had been done”. I hope that makes sense.