Season 2 has concluded! I can’t believe it! Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who watched it, who supported it, who loved it, who hated it, and who helped me make it. The experience of watching my silly little show grow from a funny concept back in college to two full, wonderful seasons of a web series has been incomparable. And today I want to talk about my girl Alison, who has become my constant companion these past two years and who has helped me through more things than she could have ever known.
I think my favorite thing about Alison is how all of her motivations, however selfish or shitty, make complete sense to her and are never intended to be selfish or shitty. This doesn’t erase the harm, which was something I had a lot of fun with this season, but it does inform a lot about the kind of person she is. I’ll explain.
Alison deals with problems by compartmentalizing them and making schedules based on priority and assumed severity. In some ways, I am very similar. It’s a control thing: wanting problems to have clear, logical solutions. Of course, this isn’t always possible, because humans (and functioning undead) are not clear or logical. Alison says what she means and assumes that others will do the same. When she tells Damian she doesn’t want to be exclusive and he says “that sounds… fair,” she doesn’t hear his sarcasm. She hears “fair,” which is her exact intention. If they both get to get around, and he technically agrees, what’s the problem?
The same could be said for her relationship with Carl and Greta.
Greta feels betrayed because Alison’s obsession with Carl scientifically turned into a deep personal connection, which shut Greta out and seemingly replaced her with a potentially dangerous monster. Imagine losing your best friend to a creature whose kin tore the rest of your friends apart right in front of you. Plus you have general PTSD plus you were already kind of difficult so making other friends isn’t exactly a solution. I’d be upset too.
Carl is more complicated, and as sad as it was that Colin, our brilliant new actor in this role, didn’t get to flex many comedy muscles this season, Carl just couldn’t go back to his usual self as quickly. He was hours away from a fate worse than death- giving over his body to a monster’s psyche and losing everything that made him… him. Yes, Alison investigated on his behalf and saved him, but then what does she do immediately after giving him a bloody tupperware of fresh brains to snack on? Go on a date. And then when that date goes bad, she goes to the lab, a location he now associates with literal torture. And then for the next week she’s basically constantly in bed with Damian, which he notes as they move into their new apartment. In his eyes, he’s been replaced by a new obsession, the same way Greta was replaced by him. Starting to see a pattern?
In Alison’s eyes, she’s done nothing wrong, of course. Just because she spends more time with new people doesn’t mean that she’s “abandoning” her old friends. But she stops making the same kind of effort to see them, and for people who have a hard time making friends, that can be incredibly hurtful and isolating. Greta has no one else, and Carl is mistrusted by almost everyone else on campus. But for Alison, if they don’t make their own effort to spend time with her or sit her down and talk about why they’re upset, then it’s their problem, not hers. She’s open and often over-communicative, so why can’t they be the same? (Hence why she’s not the behavioralist, she’s the scientist)
So we’ve laid out how Alison is kind of the worst, not just this season but in most of her interactions. Now I want to talk about how she’s also not the worst.
We’ve already established that Alison compartmentalizes, and part of that is making plans. With Damian, she was pretty open about her plans. Step 1, wear colors to psychologically condition him to see me as a potential sex partner. Step 2, spend as much time alone with him as possible. Step 3, get to know him on a personal level by asking probing personal questions, some to determine his death status and some to learn more about him. Step 4, sex and happily ever after.
This season, she’s not so expository, but her plans are almost as clear. She learned at the end of last season a little more about why Greta is so mad at her recently, so this season she actively sought out her old friend to attempt to repair that relationship. Step 1, attempt to bond over common ground- being upset about Sherman and annoyed about Edgar. Step 2, spend time alone. Step 3, bring up Carl and try to convince her why she’s wrong. Step 4, friendship restored and happily ever after. Her inherent misunderstanding about why Greta hates Carl is, naturally, an obstacle in repairing their friendship, but she catches on eventually that the best route to go with Greta is to talk about Sherman, the one constant in both of their lives since before the apocalypse. By the end of episode 6, Alison has a new plan for Greta, which, to her excitement, coincides with a plan for Sherman, and it ultimately pans out. Their relationship ends the season on a much better notes than last season.
Her plan with Carl was even more simple: Step 1, pretend like everything is ok so he knows everything will be ok, no matter what happens. Step 2, after realizing he hasn’t been cooking, attempt to trick him into cooking to reinforce that nothing has changed. Step 3, Carl is fine, everyone is fine, happily ever after.
This is why my favorite conversation this season is her fight with Carl in episode 9; it was a way for me to work out exactly why Alison’s clinical strategy wasn’t necessarily a good thing despite it seeming so reasonable, while also acknowledging that she’s not the only one to blame for all of these relationships falling apart. She’s just the loudest person in the room, and thus the easiest to blame.
This is the most important line in that entire episode: “I’m sorry I wasn’t listening, but you also weren’t talking.” On the surface, this is an apology, albeit not an entirely unselfish one. It admits blame while allocating the remainder of the blame on the other person. She’s not wrong, but that’s also kind of not the point when you’re apologizing. But this is important: she’s not wrong.
Carl is clearly changed by his experience, and Alison picks up on this, but he keeps up his flippant cynicism and Alison’s biggest attempt to reach out to him, in the form of “Cooking with Calison,” he rebuffs. Yes, CWC was also part of her latest love trap (or, as Carl puts it in a fantastic Colin improv, her “weird threeway”), but Alison is nothing if not efficient. She really did intend to spend time with her friend and try to get him back on track to normal. But Carl can’t eat cookies, so she figured she’d use their creation for another purpose as well. Efficiency isn’t bad, but sometimes you have to focus on one person at a time, even if your ultimate goals take a bit longer. He should have said something, even insisted she turn off the camera, but he didn’t. He just left after saying something sarcastic, and Alison needs people to be very specific about their feelings. Not everyone can check a few boxes and feel better. Not even Alison, which brings us to my favorite part about Alison: despite her clinical efficiency and multi-level plans, her shit is SO not together.
Alison is desperate. Before the plague, she had her whole life planned out. She had a family, a new field of study she was incredibly excited by, friends, a silly YouTube channel, and a whole world of possibility. Then, zombies. Like, are you kidding? Girl didn’t have time for zombies! She just declared her major and bought $400 worth of textbooks! So she begrudgingly shifted to survival mode for a few years, though she decided to keep studying despite it, and now, there’s a light at the end of the putrid, undead tunnel. Zombies, even in the Brains universe, make no damn sense. So what does she do? Study them obsessively. Alison is the kind of person who, in the face of chaos, gets incredibly sassy about things not making sense. Everything in her life is assembled carefully and completely, so other people mucking it up with their “humanity” and illogical emotional impulses is confusing and distressing. She’s not a robot, she just doesn’t understand how to navigate subtext and chaos. She’s going to need to get over that, and I think she will, with the help of Carl and Greta and maybe Dom and definitely Sophie, but it’ll take time.
I love Alison. I sympathize with every choice she makes, but I have enough of Carl in me to recognize the nuances of human behavior she misses, purposefully or not. She is a bit of a shit this season, absolutely. But she, just like anyone else, is a human, and she’s working on it.
