Is The Irrational About to Do Away With Alec’s Scars? Showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman Weighs In

This post contains spoilers from Tuesday’s episode of The Irrational. Proceed accordingly.

Remember Izzy, the burn patient from Alec helped last season on The Irrational? She’s back in this week’s episode with an interesting proposition: She’s undergoing laser therapy for her burn scars, and she points out that it works on old scars, too.

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Alec gently brushes her off, saying that he hasn’t thought about removing the physical reminders of how he barely survived a bombing decades earlier. But that’s not entirely true. And by the end of the hour, he admits to his sister, Kylie, that he hadn’t had a lot of hope in the idea, but that he was starting to entertain it. (And because he’s Prof. Alec Mercer, he said as much in the most academic way possible, citing that he was “lost in negativity bias” about the treatment.)

Kylie let him know she supported him, no matter what he chose, and then surprised him by having Izzy as an unannounced dinner guest to help him weigh the pros and cons of scar-removal.

Might the good prof actually go through with it? We took the question directly to showrunner Arika Lisanne Mittman.

“Alec this season is going to be exploring how he feels about his scars and whether he wants to change that aspect of himself, or whether it’s a permanent part of him that he wants to keep,” she told TVLine during a conversation at the Television Critics Association summer press tour.

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If Alec no longer had his scars, that would mean series star Jesse L. Martin would have roughly two hours’ less time in the makeup chair every day — “but that is not what is driving the story,” Mittman was quick to point out. “This is just a very personal, emotional story for him. There is not a magical procedure that will make all of his scars go away, anyway, but he has to decide whether he wants to do something to make him look much more ‘normal.'”

She adds: “That’s a dilemma for him this season.” — With reporting by Matt Webb Mitovich

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