YMMV / Double Identity

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • How good as parents are Walter and Hillary? While they certainly love Bethany, how much of their treatment of her is distorted by the fact that she's Elizabeth's clone, and was unequivocally created in order to replace her? Not to mention that they dumped her with an aunt she'd never met before, with no means to contact either of them herself, her mother consistently leaves frightening and confusing messages through Aunt Myrlie's phone and inadvertently gives Bethany an identity crisis by suddenly telling her she was a clone. While they deserve some slack for being traumatized by Elizabeth's death, and Hillary is clearly mentally ill and not in her best mind, the two of them could be seen as emotionally unfit to care for Bethany, as they often double down on the paranoia from their first child's death to deprive Bethany of living a normal life and knowing the truth about her family tree (and they only told her when she did her own investigating and never even told Myrlie, the adult in charge of her, any of the context for what they were doing and why). Perhaps the story ending with the three of them getting therapy was for the best.
  • Is Dalton Van Dyne a sinister monster, or an Anti-Villain who we're seeing through a biased lens? Bethany sees him as evil at first, but she's also a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to believe her parents are innocent, and she thinks Van Dyne is trying to kidnap her because of her own paranoia and stress from being abandoned. His lone actions show that, while he engaged in shady deals with Walter, all he actually wants is to see the clone that Walter promised to give him but never did, because he's a lonely person who thought is was the only way to be loved. Aside from that, he never actually harms anyone in the story, and by the end he and Joss open up a program to help abused boys, in order to give them a childhood Van Dyne never had, showing that he might not have been all that bad to begin with.
• Nightmare Fuel: The mysterious calls Aunt Myrlie gets, which consist of someone calling, then hanging up. The fact that the landline goes suddenly dead.