Alice & Jack Finale Recap: ‘Til Death Do Us Part — Grade the Season
The titular Alice & Jack‘s “unfiltered” 15-year love story came to an end this Sunday night, with PBS’ airing of the six-episode MASTERPIECE drama’s finale.
Or… will Alice and Jack in fact be together forever?
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For all the complexity that a typical Alice & Jack episode offered, the series finale felt a bit… thin? The bulk of the episode involved Jack visiting Alice in the hospital where she was receiving treatment for her stage 4 bile duct cancer. He came armed with almond croissants and flowers, flagrantly ignoring her “house rules.” There was some dark humor about how Jack cannot die first and thus “steal” Alice’s “f–king thunder,” and how once Alice is gone, Jack is forbidden from having any contact with other females. Curled up together in Alice’s hospital bed, they shared a soft kiss, then fell asleep in each other’s arms.
The sequence was interrupted by a bright, vibrant visual of Alice in an outdoor setting — a memory we had not seen before — smiling. Jack was jostled awake at the hospital by the sound of Alice’s beeping monitors indicating she was flatlining. He yelled for the staff to come see what’s what, but it was for naught. Though Alice thought she had a meaningful amount of time left, she had suddenly passed, in Jack’s arms.
Jack, bereft, stayed with Alice’s body as long as he could, sitting with it in a downstairs “holding area” for a while — or, at least long enough for him to cue up a six-minute montage of every major moment/exchange of words he and Alice had shared over the years. Said montage included a bit of a memory we had not seen yet, of Alice running up to and hugging Jack at some sort of colorful seaside location. More on that in a moment.
When Jack had to part with Alice’s body, he gave her forehead one last sweet kiss. He then took a walk outside, phoning daughter Celia with the news of Alice’s passing, seeing as the two had become closer years ago during the whole ballet phase. He also suggested that he and Celia have dinner that night, for which he’d be “very grateful.” Jack sat on a bench in a garden area, and entertained more memories. He got visibly agitated/distraught, shirt of breath and clutching his chest — or, was he experiencing medical distress related to his aortic aneurysm?
As Jack closed his eyes, wincing, we cut to the full context of the never-before-seen memory that had been glimpsed earlier in pieces. It was Jack in Cuba, years ago, where he very unexpectedly happened to cross paths with Alice. Each surprised to see the other, Alice ran up to and embraced Jack. They then embarked on a stroll, and spoke of kismet-y things.
But… was this just a memory of a pivotal incident from their off-and-on, decade-and-a-half courtship? Or were Alice and Jack symbolically reuniting somewhere else, on “another plane” that mirrored the memorable locale? Because next we saw Jack on the bench, it was from the back, his body still and his head listed.
Following a few more clips of Alice’s and Jack’s “greatest hits,” Jack’s own passing (from a “broken heart”?) was confirmed, as Celia visited the fresh, side-by-side graves where her father and his one true love now lay. Later, Celia paid a visit to her father’s self-storage unit, to shred some of his medical research files. Along the way, she found a box containing keepsakes from his life with Alice — a flyer for the kite festival, goofy photo booth snaps from Cuba, the “We’ll meet again” note she’d left for him after their financial windfalls…. Celia smiled warmly — she’d found this note once before, remember, under different circumstances — and then put it back in the box and closed up the unit.
What did you think of Alice and Jack’s roller coaster love story?
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