PROFILE

[nihilo]

NAME: Alice Morgan, Ph.D
SERIES: Luther
CANON POINT: After season 2, episode 2, on her way to Mexico, Marrakesh, Monte Carlo
LOSS: Any attempt to explain a mathematical formula will result in her reciting lines from the Basil Brush show. Being able to inspire awe from people by showing off her intelligence is nearly as important to her as breathing, so this will endlessly infuriate her while providing some comic relief and letting the mun get away with knowing zilch about physics. Boom boom!

ABOUT:
Alice Morgan's life started out painfully suburban. She was born, then she grew up in a converted farm outside of London, puttering through school until she proved the inverse tangent formula at the age of nine and was rewarded with a dress to wear to the press conference. It would be her first taste of admiration, of recognition for her singularity, her brilliance, her superiority over the rest of them. Her next few years were predictable enough. She entered Oxford at thirteen and messed about with a handful of older men just out of curiosity, then received her Ph.D in physics at eighteen; the distribution of dark matter in disc galaxies.

Somewhere along the way, whether by nature or nurture, Alice decided that the only thing that matters in the world is (excuse the pun) matter. Societal norms, relationships, sentiments are irrelevant, when you really think about it. A dead man is hardly so different from one living, let alone a person in love versus not. But matter in itself can be so terribly banal. Now dark matter intrigues because it is indecipherable in and of itself. Its presence and actions can only be derived from the matter that surrounds it, while it itself remains an enigma, an absence, the black hole that keeps your attention and never reveals itself. Something that sucks you in and keeps you, until it decides to destroy you for no reason other than it wants to.

Absence is the point she wanted to prove when she murdered her parents. How does a person become a non-person, someone who exists only as the dark mirror of those one meets, who is there and yet not there, if not by first erasing one's origins. Although, of course, because she wanted to would be reason enough in itself. That way, what others knew of her would be solely in her control. She would be Alice Morgan, period, which would be a definition in and of itself.

Now Alice Morgan is apathetic, mischievous and bold. She doesn't care enough to empathize with others or use her brilliance for higher purposes than to amuse and appease herself, because of course there is no better purpose than Alice Morgan. She likes toying with people, situations, puzzles, like pulling legs off of flies, because only manners and morality dictate that pulling legs off of people is unacceptable while with flies, it is all a-okay. And societal norms don't concern her. Flies are the same as people, the same as her family and the same as serial killers. None of them deserve to die more than the other, though nothing and everything deserves to die anyway. We are all just matter in space, and the universe, like Alice Morgan, is indifferent.

But she does care enough to be noticed, admired and to notice and admire in return. A self-diagnosed (and Luther-diagnosed) malignant narcissist, she is constantly compelled to seek attention and affirmation, which she does mostly using her intelligence and quite often using her sexual attractiveness drizzled with a fair amount of charm. One can never fault her for being dull. She wants her presence to dazzle that her departure leaves an indelible hollow. Absence, again, is the point. This compulsion is also her biggest weakness, however, as the lack of recognition and awe leaves her confused and floundering. She needs the constant attention or she feels she might dissolve into atoms and be forgotten, which would only be a little worse than death.

The keen difference between Alice and your every day psychopath is that she has an ideal, a compass, moral or not, and it is John Luther, who caught her attention because he was the light to her dark, the presence to her absence, the empathy to her apathy. Alice believes she has a keen view into what makes humans tick precisely because she stands far removed from them, while Luther believes the same because he lets himself delve deep and feel everything. He is her nemesis as much as she is his, and so, here it is, the matter to her dark matter. He is the only one who could prove her existence and imply her actions because he is brilliant enough and he cares so much.

At first he interested her as a project, how to prove that love doesn't exist and nothing matters and he is just as degenerate as she is. A murderer born. Then, oh dear, she fell in love. But Alice loves not only the man unrelated to everything that he cares about, she loves John Luther and his estranged wife and his obsession with work and his temper tantrums and his inability to resist dropping everything to help a stranger in need. He frustrates her because it would be so easy for her to do away with all of the things that bring him down, and she has tried, first by tugging on the strings and bringing his wife back to him, then by murdering Henry Madsen, the man who would cost Luther his job and everything he has worked for. It was her own actions that surprised her and the reasons even more, because she did it for him.

Her biggest sacrifice comes later, once Luther has almost lost everything (that is, everything to him because that's what Zoe is). Alice may deny being distracted by such follies like sentiments, but it is clear that she has grown to care enough about John to feel a palpable grief at the news of his wife's death. She even liked Zoe enough because John loves her. So when Luther vacillates between killing Ian Reed to avenge her death or doing the right thing and putting him behind bars, Alice did another unselfish thing by taking the gun and pulling the trigger. Because she knows what the murder would do to John if he had to do it, and what it would do to him to see Reed freed because of a flawed justice system.

And what is love if not that urge to do something for someone else's good? To care about someone other than yourself, which extends even to whatever else belongs to them?

But she might fantasize about the idea of cutting all ties and setting off into the sunset with her literal half, the symmetrical other, she understands that it can't happen precisely because John is who he is, the policeman, the bleeding heart, and she is who she is, a free uncaring soul. They may yet circle each other and sometimes collide but they can never walk in parallel, so that is what she will do, walk in circles around the world until they intersect, or not.

ABILITIES:
Alice is extremely intelligent, an expert on dark matter and fairly knowledgeable about other sciences, especially psychology. She is also armed with a lot of street smarts especially on how to commit illegal things without getting caught, including breaking and entering, escaping maximum security prisons and murdering people. She has mad stalking research skills as well and a keen understanding of what makes humans tick, which she will unapologetically use to her advantage.