ALICE AND JACK. WED AND THUR 9pm - ch 4 - tv pace. No spoilers

[Blondeshavemorefun]

I’m sure I did a thread for this but can’t find it

starts tonight. On wed and thur for 3w

Alice, played by Andrea Riseborough – yes, the Andrea Riseborough of Academy Award-nominated notoriety (https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/oscars/a43777187/oscars-changes-andrea-riseborough-controversy/) – meets Jack, played by Domhnall Gleeson, with all of his About Time (https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a509440/about-time-review-richard-curtiss-directorial-swansong/) romantic-lead kudos.

If you loved Gleeson in that Richard Curtis gem, you will probably fall for him in this, since he's playing much the same sort of bloke.

Jack is an awkward but adorable lab scientist who becomes utterly besotted with spiky female finance-bro (sis?) Alice, who resolves to keep him at a remove the length of several bargepoles.

After the pair spend the night together, Alice unceremoniously asks him to leave and never contact her again.

So far, so romantic. We then scoot forward a couple of years and find Jack has had a child with the rather warmer Lynn (Aisling Bea).

Then Alice calls and the wheels of ill-fated romance are set in motion

The six-parter has been ambitiously billed as a "love story for the ages". That might be a stretch, given that the mood of Alice & Jack is utterly at the mercy of melancholic Alice, helped along by an earnest strumming score which at times feels fittingly bittersweet and at others is reminiscent of hotel foyer music.

As the pair's offbeat and somewhat unlikely connection bubbles away across the years, the question of the piece becomes why is Alice so determined to push Jack away? When the answer comes, the melancholia only quadruples.

Oh. I'm really fucking it up this thread 🙀🙀😂😂

Working nights has fried my brain this week

@tennissquare my op even said it's 6 parts

I did wonder how they could finish it in 60m

Equally ca. we stand another 180m of Alice being mean to jack

I actually am feeling more anger at him for how he is choosing to semi-live until she waltzes in to cause chaos before dropping him again. I mean, he messed up his marriage, he's an arse about her new husband who is looking after his kid in front of his daughter who clearly knows him on a regular basis and doesn't think much of him, his friend thinks he is actually insane and he spent the start of the last episode not allowing/getting extremely cross and upset that a woman he had shagged twice had started another relationship after 2 YEARS of them being apart? I am wondering if it is actually him who has some serious issues. Maybe there will be a big reveal that he is in some kind of rehabilitation simulation at the end?

If I look at it on a gender level, Alice has a very male character (I don't think if she were a man we would be feeling the hate for her at any rate) and other than the way he isn't really being much of a parent, he has taken on the more "mooney" role we usually see in women. Maybe that's why it feels so odd and unnatural?

I see what you mean but I still dislike Alice more. I just think she's selfish and cold.

It's a very gas lighting relationship

She beckons to see how far she can get him

Yes it’s totally gaslighty! But weirdly it’s as if the writer’s aren’t aware of that, and we’re supposed to think it’s all really romantic?!

But we are at least given some reasoning for that coldness and fear of commitment with her abusive past. With him he seems to be annoyingly unable to live in the real world when she is not there for zero reason other than he shagged her twice and has ridiculously let her break up his marriage and family. How has he not become similarly obsessed with another 1 night stand in what, 5 years?

Jack understands how and why she is damaged. It's a tragedy that her pain causes waves of collateral damage in so many other lives.
That's what it's about. It's not trying to be romantic. It's not about whether you 'like' Alice or Jack.
Alice is successful and competent in other ways but cannot do good relationships. She hurts other people. She may well damage other people. That is the double tragedy of abuse, or of mental illness - the pain of the person themself and the savage repercussions for other lives.

OK, that I can get on board with as a premise. I don't think her background has been well explained on how it has affected her which is why she is in the firing line a lot. Presumably this is meant to resemble RL where people don't often talk about their history of abuse. It feels very disjointed, which is a shame as I feel it could have made some good points for a wider audience.

I get that and actually I think most abusive men have had poor childhoods and particularly a lack of affection and support from their fathers that leads to their poor behaviour (and possibly watched their mum accommodate their dad’s a shitty behaviour and so expect that from their partners and are shits to them if they don’t get it)

but I still think as an adult you have to take responsibility and do the work to heal yourself.

for some people that might involve at least a period of not seeking to form relationships if you can’t do it without being abusive

i agree we see it more clearly because Alice is a woman.

lots of popular ‘romantic’ stories are about a crap man and his crap behaviour and how a great woman over looks that / forgives him / waits for him time and again

The blurb say it's a love story

Not sure I would call it that

It's on tonight at 10pm x

This is a TV paced thread. Post on the spoiler thread if are posting about future episodes which this was referring to

Cuba hasn't been shown on Tele yet.
Don't understand why some people aren't going to the spoiler thread

Jack's friend is actually the best thing about this ❤️

All her money could buy a lot of that thing called therapy.

What the fuck

Eggsackerly.

It's all just so unrelatable
I think that's the problem

Just thinking, we know nada, zero, zilch about Jack's family background.
Maybe he's a similar/different kind of orphan to Alice.

I don't think I can do any more. That's enough hours of my life jumping through years of NC between them for them to keep pretending whatever the feck they have is "love" rather than a flirtation they pick up and put down whenever the other appears in an attempt to escape real life. I don't understand why so much is happening (e.g the daughter who met her once when she was a toddler deciding to rock up at a stranger's house to ask deep questions about a 4 line note and become bezzie mates with Alice, a notoriously cold fish). How the writers imagined any of this to be even remotely believable; the terminology about specific processes sounds like a 20yo has written it to the point it almost falls into a comedy. I just can't. I still don't like either of them and I think it is actually portraying a really negative version of trauma survivors as puppets constantly lurching from one drama to another while refusing to get therapy. It feels as though every character, including his ex wife and daughter has some kind of amnesia and issues with boundaries. I wish I had learnt something worthwhile.
Over and out here!

I hear you @fabio12 .....
I'm going to hang in, in the hope of some kind of redemption arc.
Life can be messy and driven high achievers can have spectacularly chaotic family lives.
It's not a conventional love story, but he is present at significant moments in her life and she has given back. He's her emotional anchor, even though they can't create a functional relationship.
I'm interested to see what impact the new unconventional girlfriend will have. Is she just being the cool girl or can she genuinely handle the 'complication' of Alice....

If she turns into a girlfriend
She might just want someone to have sex with. It looks that way at the minute. And I don't see how he can have a relationship while he's still hanging onto Alice anyway