Letter: Alicenjack

Submitted by Aaron Arkin.

Alice-And-Jack is a recent PBS fictional 6-part dramatic series about two opposites, but like the elided title of this essay, feel complete only when together. Alice is a high-maintenance financial analyst and successful hedge fund owner; Jack is a biomedical researcher with a strong sense of purpose whose life revolves around work. Somewhat shy, he refers to himself as a “lab rat”.

They meet using an on-line dating service which Alice employs to troll for one-night stands. She is fast-talking, witty, challenging and provocative. Intrigued, Jack comes out of his shell and decides to go along with her suggestion for sex, winning (for the first time she tells him) a second one-night stand.

Thus begins a fifteen-year off-again-on-again intense relationship which, when they are not seeing each other, includes Jack marrying and divorcing someone else with whom he has a child, and his efforts to navigate the dating-world. At inexplicably random moments Alice intrudes in Jack’s life causing course-changing events, including precipitating his divorce. She almost marries someone else (ducks out on the day before her wedding to which by the way she invited Jack (he came)), and makes Jack rich by convincing him to invest in her hedge fund. When it looks like they may never get together again they meet (in a plot-contrivance with a nod to predestination) by chance in Cuba.

Abundantly clear now that Alice has skeletons in her closet, we also learn that she was a victim of child abuse, making it difficult if not impossible to sustain close or long-term relationships. For his part, Jack turns out to be a fool in the truest sense, not being able to see what everyone else around him can: that he needs to move on. Jack’s ex-wife, a more fully developed character (unusual for a secondary role), and one of the more reasonable people in this tale, gives him a clue, telling him that while she still loves him, she is over him (by this time she had remarried).

Unfortunately, moving forward for Jack means going on match-making dates where he tries to explain to potential prospects that he is “available” although he is in love and always will be with Alice. In one memorable scene, a woman he has just hit it off with, upon receiving this news looks at him incredulously, gets up and leaves a befuddled Jack in the middle of dinner. If there is a lesson for doomed pairings here, it’s that although there may be no limit to the kind of person one may be attracted to or infatuated with, there definitely is a limit to how much baggage you can bring to a relationship and still make it work.

Bringing us to the present, and after 15 years of recurring and infrequent liaisons, Alice gets Jack to impregnate her and tells him she finally believes she is able to settle down in a loving and sustained relationship with him. Given the story-line that they both will soon expire from terminal illnesses, not even god is having any of this.

In the closing scenes, Jack’s daughter, now grown, learns more about Alice and Jack’s “special” relationship and arranges for Alice and Jack to be buried next to each other, achieving in death what they could not accomplish in life. Presumably, there are some unspecified life-lessons here that will help the daughter in the future (perhaps with a sequel in the works).

Despite its verisimilitude issues, the story remains very moving, give credit to the actors including the supporting cast, all whom are excellent; and as a bonus we get to see wonderful areas of London, making the city another character in the story. But if you are looking for what lessons these two provide about the difficulty couples can have navigating life together, I’m reminded of that old saying about the diner, who having finished a Chinese meal, was hungry an hour later.