Losing Alice Review: The Scene (Season 1 Episode 7)

Losing Alice Season 1 Episode 7, “The Scene,” is the drama’s most uncomfortable and disturbing hour yet, and the first time where many of us may find the show difficult to watch.

The premise of the episode is simple, it’s time for Alice, David, and Sophie have to film the big sex scene in Room 209.

It’s extended and very graphic and everyone’s apparently having a difficult time — not just with the act of shooting it, but with everything else that goes along with it, emotionally speaking.

There’s Alice, insisting that she’s completely nonplussed by watching her husband get naked with another woman, a woman with whom she, herself, has a fraught relationship. There’s Sophie, telling Alice that she’s uncomfortable simulating sex with her husband in front of her. And there’s David, who’s trying to coast through the whole thing until he isn’t. 

David’s been one of the most consistently absent figures in recent episodes of Losing Alice, so we, as viewers, don’t necessarily have a good read on where his headspace is at during this episode.

Because we’ve spent more time with Sophie and Alice than we have David, it’s much easier to dislike him, even though we’ve ostensibly seen the two women commit much worse acts.

Part of it is that David’s been consistently selfish and mildly terribly throughout the series, with little guilt or remorse or even awareness of most of them. Whether he’s been dumping his kids on his creepily overinvolved mother, criticizing his wife for her professional choices, or inappropriately fantasizing about Sophie, he’s hardly a candidate for Husband of the Year. 

But his reaction to Alice daring to critique his performance is so ugly and unnecessarily cruel. Granted, her obsession with this sex scene and her inability to verbalize what she wants from it is problematic in and of itself, because so much of it seems to be about her needs rather than the work. 

Yet, David’s treatment of her is straight vicious. He basically calls her a failure as a mother an an artist to her face, insisting that he’s worked with better directors than she is, and that she’s just insecure and jealous. And he never, not once apologizes for any of it, never takes any of it back.

Truly, David is the worst.

But, unfortunately, this is an episode — and a show — if we’re honest, full of terrible people. 

When the sex scene that everyone’s so obsessed with is finally filmed in its entirety, it’s…well, it’s something. It clocks in at nearly fifteen uninterupted minutes of Sophie and David kissing aggressively and having sex on various surfaces around the hotel room. 

There’s a lot of nudity, and frequent blurring of lines — between pleasure and pain, between consent and refusal, between roughhousing and real fighting. 

It’s likely that a lot of people guessed that as soon as we saw the modesty panel Sophie was meant to wear — Chekov’s Gun and all — that it would never make it through the scene in question, and that something more than acting was going to take place. 

That there’s little direct acknowledgment of this is unsettling, as though Losing Alice is somehow trying to gaslight both Alice and those of us watching her story, and making us question what we thought we saw. But there’s little doubt that Sophie and David have sex for real in “The Scene”, and apparently quite enjoy it. 

This is a sequence that’s clearly meant to titillate, but Losing Alice has spent little time on the connection between these characters and what results instead feels tawdry and sleazy rather than groundbreaking or shocking.

And it leaves us with even less understanding about why telling this particular story was so important to Alice, to David, even to Sophie herself. 

Was Sophie simply trying to wreck Alice’s marriage? Did she really just want to sleep with David? Or make what is basically prestige pornography? Who can say? With one episode to go, here’s hoping we can still find some clarity. 

Stray Thoughts and Observations

• This entire episode is just a master class in Ayelet Zurer’s face. Alice has to react to so many things in a nonverbal way and manages to convey volumes by the simple act of, say, widening her eyes. 
• The fact that it’s impossible to tell in the final scene whether Alice is crying, laughing or some mix of both is a gut punch. Which is it — did she just make a great film or watch her husband have sex with someone else in front of her? Or both?
• The scene where David’s mother hangs out with him in the bath, I just cannot. Boundaries, people!!
• Truly, I have no idea what the show is doing with the whole rats in the neighbors’ house subplot. I mean, Tamir’s wife shrieking next to a pool infested with vermin? What?
• I wish this episode had dealt in some way with Alice’s apparent realization that Sophie didn’t write her script. That she’s decided to be fine with it, to make the movie anyway, because it’s apparently that important.

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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