What I Hope to See in Alice Isn’t Dead Season 2

(image via nightvalepresents)

I may have mentioned before that Alice Isn’t Dead is one of my all time favorite podcasts, and it’s finally back! The second season of Alice Isn’t Dead will begin on April 4th, but until then we have been treated to three short four minute segments to build up to the Season 2 plot. Each segment introduces us to what our protagonist Keisha has been doing since the events of Season 1, and we finally meet the elusive Alice, letting us get a sense of who she is. These segments also start to allude to a new evil that might be even more dangerous than the Thistle Man.

In the first segment, “North Rim, Arizona”, Keisha returns to speaking into her radio after going silent for so long. She explains that she went silent because she realized “they” were listening. Whether “they” is one or more of the other Thistle Men or something new that Keisha has learned about, we don’t know yet. But she goes on to describe how something that is not a Thistle Man has been following her.

The Fremont Troll (image via wikipedia)

In the next segment “Fremont, Washington”, Keisha stops to see the Fremont Troll, which is a sculpture under a highway bridge in the Seattle area. Keisha explains some of the creepy events that surround the Fremont Troll—which I now desperately want to see–before she begins filling in some of the gaps from last season, and continues to sense someone following her. She describes what has happened to Sylvia since the events of last season and continues to worry that someone is still following her.

The final segment is titled “Haugen, Montana”, which is interesting because Keisha says she thinks someone dangerous is following her and that she has been unsettled since Montana. So we can potentially assume that this segment actually took place before the first two. What makes this so interesting is that for the first time, we get to hear more from Alice. This segment paints Alice as a very dangerous sort of person and perhaps even the dangerous person that Keisha thinks has been following her since Montana. She makes it sound like her job is to scare children, she buys ten knives at a gift shop, and if you meet her, it’s implied that you might not live long to talk about it. It’s clear that Alice might not be a good person and may not even be the person Keisha thought she was.

Overall, these segments set up some potentially interesting plot lines and some great chances to explore characters from Season 1.

First and foremost, I am excited about Alice. Alice’s character is played by Roberta Colindrez, so we potentially get another woman of color as one of our main characters! The actress doesn’t necessarily indicate that Alice is a woman of color, but often Night Vale Presents casts people of color to play characters of color, so I’d say there is definitely a good chance of this. It will be interesting to see more of what Alice is like as a character as well. We briefly heard Alice speak at the end of Season 1, but this is the first time we hear a whole monologue from her. Alice is not really what I initially expected, so I can’t wait to learn more about her perspective on things and why she left Keisha in the first place.

Pictured: Roberta Colindrez (image via Broadway.com)

Secondly, I’m excited to learn more about Keisha and Alice’s relationship. The two main characters seem to have a complex relationship filled with secrets and I can’t wait to discover more, especially we have largely only heard Keisha’s side. In the segments building up to Season 2, we learn a little more about Keisha’s feelings for Alice after finally seeing her again in Episode 10. I was pleased to find that the anger that Keisha felt for Alice for lying to her all these years and then disappearing isn’t gone just because of one brief meeting. Keisha explains that she loves Alice, but still doesn’t really forgive her. This makes so much sense given everything that has happened between the two of them; Keisha is understandably not over what Alice has done to her. We also get to see a little of Alice’s perspective on their relationship. Alice explains that she followed Keisha to Montana, but that she doesn’t know that. She says:

I’m not hiding. Keisha walked right passed me. Didn’t know who I was. And why would she? If Alice was here, maybe Alice could warn her, but of course Alice isn’t here—I am.

It’s extremely interesting because in Season 1, again in the episode “Signs and Wonders”, Keisha describes how she thinks that Alice wasn’t the same person that she was at home. She says:

I think the you on the road wasn’t the you that was home.

So is this what Alice is acknowledging? That she really is a different person on the road when she is doing her mysterious work? Or is there something more sinister going on? Especially considering that Keisha is worried about a dangerous person following her, and then we learn Alice is following her. I really hope that Alice doesn’t end up being the villain, though. As a pansexual woman who loves speculative fiction, it’s great seeing a queer couple as the main characters in a fantasy/horror story, and if Alice ends up evil I worry the podcast could turn into yet another story with tragic queer characters. That being said, I love that Keisha and Alice have a complex relationship that has good and bad qualities to it as well, and that’s what I hope to see the most in this season.

And finally, I’m super excited to hear about Sylvia again. She was one of my favorite characters in Season 1 and I definitely want to learn more about her this season. I have a theory that Sylvia may already actually be dead and is actually a ghost, because her name was listed on one of the billboards as a victim of the Thistle Man in “Signs and Wonders”. So it could be that Sylvia is a specter that Keisha has encountered or it could be that Sylvia was named after her mother, who we already know was killed by the Thistle Man. Whatever the case, I think Joseph Fink is definitely implying there is more going on with Sylvia than we realize.

(art by antipathari)

In short, I can’t wait until April 4^th when we will learn more about Sylvia and what has happened to her. We’ll finally learn more about Alice and maybe even why she left Keisha to begin with, and of course discover what Keisha has been doing all this time. I’m looking forward to another exciting season!

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