Losing Alice Review: The Bad Reader (Season 1 Episode 6)

With just three episodes left in the series, it feels as though Losing Alice Season 1 Episode 6, “The Bad Reader,” should really start pulling the pieces of this story together into some kind of coherent endgame. Yet, somehow, the truth of what’s really happening feels further away than ever before. 

Her paranoia growing, Alice is struggling in her day-to-day life. She’s not sleeping well, she’s exhausted all the time, and she’s obsessing over Pnina, the homeless woman who lives in the car park under her production studio, who also happens to be the mother of Sophie’s missing friend Nomi Alfissi. 

The ridiculous coincidence of these connections is quickly becoming annoying, mostly because they don’t seem to really lead anywhere. This episode both implies that Pnina could easily be telling the truth — a possibility that this same episode backs up by having multiple people remind Alice how damaging Sophie is — and that she’s dangerously mentally ill, a toxic mother who drove her daughter away. 

It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, but one where all the roads go nowhere. 

In this same episode, Alice is so convinced that Sophie is hiding some sort of dark past that she dreams about her trying to murder her in her own bathtub — naked, naturally, because everything about this relationship is uncomfortably sexualized in a way that I wish this show would more forthrightly address.

But she also bursts into tears with some weird mixture of joy and relief when Sophie’s boyfriend Ami tells her that Nomi didn’t even have a father for her to have an affair with, and confirms that her script is a work of fiction.

There’s no proof that the things he’s saying are any more or less true than the homeless lady’s claims, but since Alice so desperately wants to believe them, she does.

And that’s all before she sort of hooks up with Ami on their balcony while they’re both high and Sophie catches them there. 

What I’m saying is that Losing Alice is rapidly careening toward the ridiculous at this point — something that doesn’t feel so great this close to the end of the story.

To be fair, the way that “The Bad Reader” manages to make you feel that Alice’s suspicions are most likely correct and also that she’s crazy for ever considering that Sophie wasn’t completely on the up and up in the first place all within the same hour (sometimes even within the same scene) is masterfully done. 

But it’s also wildly frustrating because once again the audience is left not knowing who to trust or what parts of this story are real. And that’s not an experience we should be having with so few episodes to go. It’s narrative flip-flopping that makes it seem as though Losing Alice doesn’t really have a point. 

Maybe, we’re supposed to decide that the “awakening” Alice speaks of is pure selfishness, that she’s simply decided that she’s going to make her movie and none of this stuff she’s been so worried about matters anymore, because art. 

Maybe the fact that she herself now shares a potentially life-ruining secret with Sophie — who seems to get over the whole Alice and her boyfriend balcony sex thing pretty quickly in the face of Chinese food and girl time — has rendered all the other shady stuff irrelevant. 

And given that Alice seems to find definitive proof that Sophie stole at least some portion of her script from her dead friend, only to throw it into her digital trash bin certainly seems to indicate that she’s made some kind of definitive choice. About the kind of person she is, and about the kind of artist she wants to be. 

After six episodes of waffling, gaslighting, reversals, and twists, we still don’t know precisely want Sophie has done, what truly inspired her script, or where it came from. But “The Bad Reader” seems to be telling us that it doesn’t matter anymore, anyway. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• Truly, I could not care less about Alice’s neighbors’ marriage or if Tamir’s wife that we’ve never seen before this moment is angry that he cheated. Though I guess at least her joining the Greek chorus of people insisting Sophie is dangerous and Alice needs to watch her back makes the most sense out of everyone.
• At this point, I have to assume that Ami is meant to make me deeply uncomfortable whenever he appears onscreen. He’s just so gross. (Also, who wears three watchbands at the same time for no reason? Is this a 1980s Swatch ad?)
• Entirely too many people on this show are comfortable just answering their front door in their underwear.
• I’m honestly surprised that David has become such a nonentity in the past few episodes of this show.

What did you think of this episode of Losing Alice? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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New episodes of Losing Alice stream Fridays on AppleTV+.

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