Alias Grace part 3 review: Who is telling the story?

The mystery of Grace Marks deepens as she tells of her time before the infamous murders. Will the third episode of Alias Grace offer any answers?

The third episode of Alias Grace opens on a distraught Grace Marks during her time at the asylum. She’s banging her head against a wall, her hair in disarray.

However, it soon becomes clear that we won’t begin with one of Grace’s dizzying monologues. Instead, we hear and then see Dr. Jordan talking with the Reverend from the first episode. Jordan tells the Reverend that Grace’s memory seems fine. She has excellent recall of her early life, he says, though it’s worth noting that Dr. Jordan has no way of confirming this beyond the bare facts.

But, as far as Jordan is concerned, Grace is telling the truth. As for the story of Mary Whitney’s death and her post-mortem request to “let me in”, he’s more skeptical. It’s “an auditory hallucination, of course”.

Jordan is irritated when the Reverend asks for results. The Reverend and his friends want Grace to be released, for in their story Grace is an innocent if wayward lamb. “My methods take time,” says Jordan. It certainly seems as if Marks and Dr. Jordan, for all the mystery to their intentions, both want to take their time.

Instead of going directly to yet another meeting between the two, however, we see a brief scene between Jordan and his landlady. “You’re so much more caring than my husband ever was,” she tells him. Many women, it seems, have designs on Dr. Jordan. Consider also the prison governor’s daughter, who interrupts the Doctor’s meetings with Grace with questions about his comfort.

Still, can you blame them? They must balance respectability and their own human urges. They must be “good”, lest they turn into a murderess or a cold corpse in a deceitful maid’s bed. And, to achieve these goals, to be a fine woman, they must need a good man. Indeed, they are dependent on men for so much in their lives that all of the simpering of both the landlady and the governor’s daughter begins to look more like survival tactics.

Jordan’s interest in Grace

Alas, however, Dr. Jordan isn’t interested in these “good” women. More and more, it’s clear that he’s intrigued by and attracted to the enigmatic Grace Marks. While his solicitousness to his landlady feels like a duty, his questions about Grace’s situation are less expected and so more striking. Why, after all, would a doctor of this time and place care about the happiness of a lowly prison inmate?

If it wasn’t clear enough that Jordan is in thrall (whether it’s of his own making or Grace’s), we’re treated to yet another vision of his. He pauses outside the door of the sitting room where Grace is waiting. She’s sewing, as always, and singing. Then there is a dreamlike vision where the two embrace, very nearly kissing – but whose is it?

At any rate, Dr. Jordan is quickly becoming as subjective and confused as anyone else involved in Grace Mark’s strange, sad life. His assumptions and repressions have begun to undermine his formerly solid foundation.

Soon enough, they return to the end of Mary Whitney. “She was buried in my very best nightdress,” Grace tells Dr. Jordan. “All laid out in white like that, she looked just like a bride”.

Mary’s death is like a broken spell – everything begins to fall apart. George Parkinson, the son of the family who almost certainly was the villain of Mary’s tale, has now set his sights on Grace. One night, he rattles at her locked door, asking to be let in. “Sooner or later, he’d find a way of getting in,” says Grace. And when a man does, she claims, it’s always the woman who’s blamed for the result.

Nancy Montgomery

Then, Nancy Montgomery appears in the home’s kitchen. She’s a proud person – proud of her employer, Mr. Kinnear, proud of her station, and proud of her ugly pink and yellow plaid dress. Seriously, if you’ve ever gotten caught up in the romantic fashions of the Victorian period, think again. There are some real clunkers out there and Nancy Montgomery is in one of them. It’s not as ostentatiously bad as some, to be sure, but it feels like the creation of a woman who is fumblingly trying to be refined.

Anna Paquin deserves praise for creating an unsettling, unlikeable character in Nancy Montgomery. She’s off-putting, though in a way that’s so subtle at first that it’s hard to understand why you don’t like her. Is it the way she seems so sure of herself? How she assumes that Or perhaps it’s her brittle smile, the way she looks at young Grace like the girl is a tool one minute, and a human being the next? Something about her seems eminently false and arrogant.

Grace’s move to the Kinnear home

But naive, young Grace doesn’t see what we might. She sees a happy, well-dressed housekeeper who will pay her much more to work in her household. Even when the Parkinson’s cook says that it’s not a suitable position for a young lady, Grace forges ahead through this flash of uncertainty.

Moreover, the happy, dark-haired Nancy initially reminds her of Mary. Between this and the increasingly handsy George, it’s not a difficult decision to leave.

On the journey to Richmond Hill, where Mr. Kinnear lives, Grace is accosted by a man on the coach. Mr. Kinnear appears and decks the man for saying that Grace is “no lady, only a whore”. Mr. Kinnear also seems kind, especially when he tells her to sit next to him on the ride home.

Yet, nearly as soon as they arrive at Kinnear’s home, Grace feels “something squeezed tight about my heart”. There is Nancy, in a large pink dress, picking roses. And there’s James McDermott, who would later be executed for the murders. Montgomery and McDermott do plenty of glaring at each other, in case the murder charge didn’t alert the viewers to their animosity.

Nancy, as it turns out, is an odd sort of housekeeper. Beside her ostentatious dresses, she wears fine gold earrings and plays the piano while Grace works. She’s also strangely possessive of her employer. Any hint that Grace might interact with Kinnear appears to bother Nancy.

Second impressions

After an awkward exchange, Grace takes Kinnear his tea one morning, only to find him lounging in bed, decidedly unclothed. He makes no move towards Grace, but she’s clearly surprised and disturbed. Kinnear, it becomes clear, is more louche than she had first believed. Later in the episode, he tells Grace that “it is very becoming for a young woman to blush”.

Back in the present, Dr. Jordan asks about Grace’s duties as a maid. She’s taken aback at first, thinking that Jordan must be making a strange sort of joke. But, no, he actually wants to go through her daily drudgery.

“You really don’t know. Men such as yourself do not have to clean up the messes you make,” Grace says in a voiceover. “In that way, you are like children. You do not have to think ahead or worry about the consequences of what you do. But it is not your fault. It is only how you are brought up.”

The episode ends on an ominous note. Grace and Nancy sit on the porch, sewing, while a young neighbor boy named Jamie plays his flute. McDermott shows off on a nearby fence, running and hefting himself around, though he pretends that he is not being watched.

“That evening was so beautiful it made a pain in my heart,” Grace tells Dr. Jordan. She wishes that she could somehow preserve this single evening forever. Surely, with the knowledge of the murders looming over everyone’s memory and all of the unpleasantness of the home besides, this moment must have seemed all the more bittersweet.

Different angles

This series becomes more complex the more you consider it. One scene can be viewed from so many different angles that each viewing feels like a different story. Maybe Grace only noted Nancy’s gold earrings with only curiosity. Or, could it be that she was jealous?

Were Grace or McDermott moved to acts of murder because Nancy did not stay in her place with the others? Maybe, given the character’s focus on class divides, the aspirational Nancy is one of the worst sinners imaginable.

Alias Grace gives us no easy answers. As the audience, we’re also best served when we remember that this is a story told from one character to another. We are not objective observers. It could very well be that Grace is presenting herself in the kindest light possible, given that Jordan could be her ticket out of the horrifying penitentiary.

Next: Alias Grace part 2 review: ‘I’m angry. I’m so very angry’

The characters, meanwhile, are so multifaceted that it’s difficult to assign them easy roles. Is Nancy Montgomery a fairy tale witch, or is she a flesh-and-blood woman trying to survive? Is McDermott a leering thug, or could he be right about some matters?

Grace, meanwhile, remains a cipher. It’s clear enough that she dealt with significant upheavals in her young life with much more to follow. Moreover, there’s abundant evidence that she’s powerless in a very real, very practical way. But she is still difficult to pin down, by the viewers as much as the increasingly confused Dr. Jordan.