Why Syfy’s superhero series Alphas is TV’s best show about mental illness
TV has always had trouble tackling mental illness as a
topic. The idea of doing a series about depressed, manic-depressive, or
schizophrenic characters is daunting: Where is there room for the
semi-standard weekly moments of uplift? HBO’s In Treatment
took viewers through several weeks of intensive psychotherapy with a
variety of patients, but it never delved too deeply into actual mental
illness; instead, it focused more on people with debilitating problems
in their past that could be overcome with diligent talk therapy and lots
of focus. (To its credit, the show never suggested these people could
be “cured” in a matter of weeks, but it did speed along the process leading to their breakthroughs.) The Sopranos and Homeland
revolve around protagonists with mental-health issues, but this is a
color around the edges of the show, an element that informs the other
stories going on at any given time.
TV’s best current show at tackling the topic of mental illness (and
many other issues as well) is a science-fiction series that seems, at
first, to have nothing to do with the subject. Syfy’s Alphas,
ending its second season on Monday, October 22, appears to be the most
successful superhero show in many years, though it never calls its
characters superheroes, or involves them in typical comic-book stories.
For the most part, it’s a superhero procedural, in which the central
“team” of Alphas use their powers—everything from super-senses to the
ability to read the electronic waves floating all around us—to track
down villains who are using their own abilities to evil ends. The show’s
second season ties this all together into an overarching narrative
about the team’s battle with the seemingly immortal Stanton Parish, who
wishes to wipe non-Alphas from the Earth. Which may sound a little like
an X-Men plot, because it is.
Yet Alphas contains a surprising emotional resonance for a series that seemingly aims to be just another Syfy case-of-the-week show. Alphas is
good at bread-and-butter sorts of things, with teammate banter and
action sequences that are a cut above other Syfy shows. Yet the show is
capable of moments of superb feeling and beauty, and it’s always
striving to do much more than simply tell superhero tales in a modern
setting. After just a superficial look at the show, it becomes clear
what it’s really about: a group of mental patients coming
together to work through their issues in a group-therapy setting. (It’s
no coincidence that the show’s ostensible protagonist and team leader,
played by David Strathairn, is a psychologist.)
To be fair, this is easy to miss. I certainly did, and I’ve reviewed
two seasons of the show so far. What turned me on to this undercurrent
was this comment
by The Real Dylan Toback on a recent review. Toback points out the
similarities between the way the show frequently shows the more negative
flipside of the characters’ powers and the mental illnesses that would
most commonly be associated with those sorts of powers. For example,
Rachel, the character who has super-senses and can focus all of her
ability into one sense or another to, say, track an escaped Alpha by his
scent, also has to keep her distance from other humans and has to have
things in a certain way, so as not to set off her too-keen senses. The
show has frequently portrayed this downside of her power as something
akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it’s made the scenes this
season where she learned to let her first boyfriend in several years
into her personal space all the more affecting.
Toback’s comment unlocked a world within the show for me, one that
had always been lurking underneath its surface without really calling
attention to itself. Team member Bill—who’s capable of immense brute
strength when provoked—is dealing with rage issues, while Hicks—able to
make incredible shots with only the slightest moment to aim—has little
patience or empathy for those who won’t do things his way. The show’s
newest character, Kat, and a prominent guest character this season,
Mitchell, offer resonant takes on amnesia and Alzheimer’s. Kat can only
remember about a month’s worth of her experiences. This rapid short-term
memory cycling allows her to pick up anything she wants in short order,
but it’s also kept the truth about her past from her. (In a devastating
reveal, a memory she had of her mother turned out to be a memory of a
TV commercial.) Mitchell, meanwhile, has the opposite problem.
He’s able to take on any memory anyone else gives him, becoming a sort
of journal of Alpha experience, and obscuring his own memories. The two
play out different sides of the memory-loss coin, with Mitchell rattling
off memories from others that have no meaning to his present company,
and Kat creating endless video diaries to remind herself of things she
already knows for when she no longer knows them.
The series similarly builds up its mental-illness analogies in its
structure and mythology. Straithairn’s character, Dr. Lee Rosen,
assembled the team because their particular abilities would be helpful
in capturing the bad guys, sure, but the characters also frequently talk
through their problems, hopes, and aspirations, as would be common in a
group-therapy setting. Rosen, for his part, aims to do his best to help
them move past the downsides of their abilities, to become more fully
realized human beings and celebrate what’s good about their powers, just
as anyone suffering from mental illness will eventually have to come to
terms with how it’s a part of their life. The villains of the week tend
to be characters whose Alpha powers have relegated them to the edges of
society, where they vainly struggle to belong, or use their powers for
ill-gotten gain. These stories also frequently deal with the Alphas
having to cope with situations they don’t entirely understand because
their own powers (or illnesses) keep them from doing so. For instance,
recurring character Skylar (played by Summer Glau) is attempting to
build a better life for her Alpha daughter than the one she had. Even
the series’ most horrific end for the Alphas—a place called Building
Seven at a facility in Binghamton, New York—strongly resembles a mental
hospital in almost every way, right down to the way Alphas sent there
are essentially sedated, so they don’t have access to their powers.
The show’s second season has focused the most attention on three
characters who drive home the series’ fascination with mental-health
issues even more. One character, Gary (played by Ryan Cartwright, in one
of the best performances on TV right now) became prominent simply
because he was so popular in season one. Yet the show is careful to
depict how the flipside of his power—the ability to read those waves
floating out in the ether—becomes a kind of debilitating autism, one
that was keeping him from meaningful human interaction with anyone other
than his mother until he joined the team. He hasn’t been cured, or
anything close to it, but he’s learning, through his proximity to the
others in the group, how to function in society, to the point where he
moved out of his house this season and began to work through the trauma
incurred during a stint in Binghamton.
Much of the season’s first half focused on Rosen’s daughter,
Danielle, a character with ties both to her father and Stanton, the
season’s Big Bad. Danielle’s power, the ability to feel what anyone else
was feeling and then communicate that to someone else, was in some ways
the flipside of Hicks’ ability: She had too much empathy, where
he had too little. (Naturally, they started sleeping together.) A closer
read of Danielle’s arc—she died midway through the season, in a moment
of self-sacrifice that seems remarkably close to outright
suicide—reveals that she was the show’s take on depression, on finding
the world and its emotions a little too close to the surface, and too
difficult to take. It wasn’t always clear what the show was doing with
this character, but once she was gone, Alphas became even more
pointed on this particular notion: Rosen spent his life trying to save
his daughter from the demons he knew would inevitably consume her, and
he failed. The situation sent him spiraling.
But the strongest work of the season in this regard came from Nina
(Laura Mennell), one of the characters fans least liked in season one.
Nina’s power involves being able to look into anyone’s eyes and give
them orders that must be obeyed. The show calls this ability “pushing,”
and the downside of has been portrayed as something akin to addiction or
narcissistic personality disorder. Nina has an all-encompassing need to
control the situation around her, to make everything go a certain way,
and when the season begins, she’s splitting off from the group, ready to
go her own way and abuse her power to get whatever she wants. In a
terrific episode called “When Push Comes To Shove,” the series not only
depicts how this becomes her psychological nadir, but also how events in
her childhood—when she realized she could use her power to force her
parents to stay together—cycled outward to create the damaged wreck she
is today. The episode is impressively dark, though it ends with a moving
moment where Rosen chooses to trust her not to push him, so he might
help her get better. The episode contains a moment of naked recognition
of what anyone suffering from a mental illness goes through, a moment
when Nina looks into a car window at her own reflection and tries to
push herself into feeling better. It doesn’t work. She can’t
escape the cycle by herself. She needs help and diligence, and the only
place she can find them is in that therapeutic setting.
Alphas hasn’t yet figured out how to escape the dilemma of all
series whose leads have mental illnesses—namely the idea that such
illnesses make the characters such super-bad-ass crime solvers that
their powers become enviable. (For an execrable example of this, check
out TNT’s Perception from earlier this year, about a
crime-solving professor with schizophrenia.) This is, perhaps, the sort
of thing the series will never escape, given that superpowers
will always seem cool on their surface. Yet the series has committed so
successfully to portraying how these powers line up with real-world
mental illnesses that it mostly sidesteps this question. Yes, there are
cool moments, and yes, there are moments when the guy who seems least
likely to save the day does so, but there are also the dark hours of the
soul, when all seems lost and nobody knows what to do. At its core, Alphas
is a series about healing, but it also realizes that all healing is
only temporary. These people can—and will—always be wounded again.
