Bang Bang Baby – Thoughts on the First Episode
A speculative recap – SPOILERS
The opening scene might be a short film unto itself, and if it does not pique your interest, stop watching, because you just won’t get it. Alice Barone (Arianna Becheroni) sits in a bar in Bussolengo, Italy in the 1986 eating pistachios (possibly to compensate for a diet high in fats and sugars), drinking Pepsi, and watching a bubble gum ad on television. The ad contains a snippet from what looks like a Rock Hudson film from 20 years earlier. (Rock is being driven somewhere by a blonde in a sports car.) It also has elements of spaghetti westerns, and a pigtailed girl in an Indiana Jones-style hat blowing big bubbles. Alice walks out into the street and speaks the first line of the series: “Love is a bastard. First it charms you, makes you feel special. But when you let your guard down it hits you. And when it hits you it hurts like hell. Some jump off bridges for love, others turn into monsters. That’s it. Can’t do shit about it. That’s the way we are. It’s also in those ancient Greek stories Mrs. Fabbri baffles us with in class.”

Pietro Paschini in his acting debut as Alice’s best friend Jimbo reacting to news that Alice’s father is alive.
Alice walks up some stairs to a tiled area, and an inexpensive car pulls onto the tiles. There are metal counters with awnings on either side and above in the background is a neon sign which reads ‘Ittici‘ (fish). The car’s headlights are switched off, and Alice sits in the back seat. In the front are two bearded men, but only one of whom (‘u Mintorcino, played by Pier Luigi Misasi) speaks. After identifying the girl, he tells her to “kiss the St. Michael the Archangel card” which he holds out for her (after admonishing her to “spit out the gum”). We get a closeup of the gum being transferred from her tongue to her hand, and then being attached to the car’s upholstery. Mintorcino asks for her index finger and pokes it with a pin, as though testing blood sugar levels. He mixes some of her blood with wine and paints her face with the stuff.

Alice submerged in an imaginary accumulation of M&Ms. Director Michele Alhaique sometimes shows us Alice’s hallucinations from an outside perspective.
Alice pledges her allegiance to the “Most Holy Society”, all the while having a vision of the girl in pigtails blowing bubbles from the TV ad, and during the oath, we get to hear what is going through Alice’s mind: “Until a few months ago, the Big Babol blondie was my hero. I thought she was so cool. She’d blow giant bubbles and shoot down all the bad guys. Now I know that you can’t kill with Big Babol. Well, even a moron could guess that. But what I still don’t get is why the fuck the blondie was laughing. Death isn’t funny. Death is scary.” The men give Alice a revolver. She points it at the bubble gum girl, but does not fire. “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, plays in the background.

Lucia Maschino as Alice’s mother, Gabriella Gianmatteo, who disapproves of the ‘ndrangheta, and keeps things from her daughter.
Cut to three months earlier, and Alice being driven to school by her mother Gabriella (Lucia Mascino). Alice sort of learns to drive by shifting gears for her mother. At school, the Professoressa di Scienze (Donatella Bartoli) teaches (symbolically?) about blood flow (focusing on the superior and inferior vena cavae). Later, Alice’s attempt to successfully build an electric light circuit in shop class fails when the teacher drops a copy of the latest Milan newspaper in front of her and she spots a picture of her father being arrested for public nudity. This surprises her because her father (she believes) was shot dead in front of her at a carnival on 19 December 1977.
Alice goes home, eats so much chocolate that she hallucinates a rain of M&M’s (or something like them), throws up in the toilet, and eventually takes off for Milan (about 150 kilometers to the West) with her best friend Jimbo (Pietro Pashini) in search of her seemingly resurrected daddy. At the prison she is denied access without a request from his attorney so she looks up her grandma in the phone book.
Her father’s family is associated with the ‘ndrangheta, and Don Carmine (Mattia Sbragia) has driven 12 hours (about how long it takes to drive from Calabria to Milan avoiding the toll roads) with his family to celebrate a local political victory, only to find it denied to him by the unexplained disappearance of a City Councillor the family had carefully installed. Nonna Lina (Dora Romano) is less than pleased to see Alice, but after Alice shows her that newspaper article, Nonna becomes much more friendly, and because she believes Alice’s dad knows something about what happened to that Councillor, Nonna Lina bullies a guard into letting Alice see her father, but not before she explains to him that the absence of “the damerino” (that’s how they refer to the missing dude) could cause her to lose her chance to join The Santa (a secret society within the ‘ndrangheta), and become the “first woman to sit with the Mammasantissimas.” She threatens to dissolve in acid anyone who might get in the way of that.

Alice and her grandmother Guendalina Barone on their way to visit Santo. Alice must decide between the conflicting interpretations of feminism represented by her mother and her grandmother.
So Santo Barone (Adriano Giannini) asks his daughter for a favour, and instructs her not to say anything to her grandma. “Here’s an address,” he tells her. “The keys to the apartment are hidden in a pot of roses. Go there right away. You’ve gotta clean it all up.” She asks what that means, but he just says “As of tomorrow, we’ll have our whole lives ahead of us.”
After a short trip back home, Alice returns to Milan and does as her father asks, and is gifted with more visions in the process. All this takes only a few days, and that opening scene happened three months later, so this series could be one giant flashback from when Alice joins whatever it is that she joined. Or maybe not. In any event, for some reason, Alice’s bedroom in her mother’s house has an aquarium, as does her father’s bedroom in Nonna’s house, and neither aquarium seems to have any fish in it.