It’s true that the show doesn’t spend a lot of time with Patrick - he doesn’t get even one line! The biggest indication of his character then is the one way that we do hear from him:
“Patrick to Allison: ‘We’re doing fine!’” splashed across a magazine cover, Patrick and Claire hugging next to a picture of Allison’s face captioned, “No reason to look back.” I can’t come up with any interpretation of this where Patrick is not an absolute piece of shit.
But this isn’t really a post about Patrick, it’s about Allison. Since she is actually a main character, we get to know a lot more about her personality and choices over the course of the show. And because of that, I am really confused where some of these ideas are coming from.
Allison talks about her marriage very little. The worst thing she says about Patrick is when Vanya says he sounds like an asshole, and Allison says, “That’s one word for it.” Her talking about Patrick having custody is ‘blaming him for her separation from Claire’ only in a very literal sense - him having custody is the literal reason why she is separated from Claire. But whenever she talks about what happened, she always brings the blame back to herself.
That’s Allison in a nutshell. She carries around blame even when she doesn’t need to. (This post is getting too long, but also, everything about her relationship with Vanya, her entire plot for s1, is about her going out of her way to try and mend a frayed relationship. She makes a point to be kind and inclusive and communicative with Vanya, and is always quick to apologize and try again. That is working on a relationship, and is much more than ‘good intentions’ vibing ineffectually out into the universe. If you are looking for indicators on what kind of a person Allison is, I’d recommend watching her storyline in s1 again.)
Talking to Luther in 1x01, she cites the reason for the divorce and for losing custody as, “I made a wish and it came true and I couldn’t take it back.” In 1x03, they talk more in depth about it and she shares about how she rumored Claire to get her to stop having a meltdown, saying “I told myself, any parent with my power would do the same.” Which, honestly? Yeah. Raising kids is hard, and I’d imagine even more so when you are famous and have no close friends or family and no childhood experience to draw on and emulate.
She does at this point recognize that it’s wrong, though. She’s been attending therapy, and clearly she’s been thinking a lot about her powers and how the ways she’s used them have impacted her life. “Now I know nothing in my life was real. So I’m starting over. I just didn’t think it would be so hard.”
Her actual words are nothing like an angry, “I may have done something wrong but fuck if I’m going to see any consequences for it,” as described above. She is a woman who has given up her entire life to try to atone for her mistakes, and it’s harder than she had ever imagined. She is choosing to live with those consequences anyway.
And it is a choice. In 1x01, Luther casually points out that she could fix it with her “rumor thing.” He’s right, she totally could. What she is facing now is fixable with her powers, and a worse and harder experience than she ever could have imagined, and yet she continues to choose, day after day, not to use her powers because she believes so fiercely that to do so would be wrong.
I think she also believes that she deserves the pain she is feeling - she did a bad thing, now any suffering she experiences is justified. I think there’s more nuance than that.
I think that she did some awful things she never should have done, but that she was raised by a horrible abusive man, and just like her siblings, she grew into a fucked up adult with a lot of issues to sort out. Unlike most of her siblings, she is actively working on sorting out those issues.
I think that the point of the show is that bad choices in the past can’t be fixed, but better choices can be made now. Some things just take time, and some things just stay broken. But you are not a thing. You can choose to do the work of healing yourself, and you can choose not to break more things.
Allison makes the choice in a very big way at the end of the season. She’s not going to break anything else; she finds a third option.
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