Love Island’s Dr Alex has taken us on a journey and divided group chats across the land

It's day 48 of Love Island, and somehow, Dr. Alex is still here.

Love Island 2018 has posed so many questions. Who is Kendall again? Why did Ellie have such bad hair extensions? And was she from the same gene pool as Charlie? Was Georgia ever loyal? But the most pertinent of all: How the hell is Alex still here?

After weeks of failures and setbacks, somehow Doctor Love is still here. Here's a run through of everything that's happened to Dr. Alex so far, and how he's managed to stay.

He was loved, then hated, then loved again, and now we're all downright confused. So let's reconsider the journey he's been on and, quite frankly, the journey he's taken us all on.

The Beginning

On Day One, we witnessed the first of many times Alex would be pied off during Love Island.

No one stepped forward for Alex. That should have been it. When you're on a TV show about sex and no one wants to sex you up, let alone slather factor 50 on your meaty back, then sorry mate, it's time to jump into the Balearic sea.

But then he bravely coupled up with Needy Laura, who immediately pied him for Wes, and so began three weeks of a tactical platonic coupling with Samira.

The beginning of the end

By this point, Alex was well and truly immersed in the mythical 'friendzone' by Samira, with no hope of romance there. Enter Megan, the shy but chaotic sex goddess who was put on this earth to torture us all with her beauty.

Alex, like Icarus, flew too close to the sun with this one, and was more or less instantly pied off in favour of Eyal. With an insensitive forced kiss right in front of his face sealing the deal, we all realised the leitmotif of Alex's Love Island journey would be this: doomed to be single forever, pied off constantly, trotting back to a fortunately single Samira to sit on a beanbag turning a slowly deeper shade of crimson. For eight weeks.

The Rise

After being mugged off by Megan and Eyal, the public were pretty much on Alex's side by now. The introduction of Ellie and Zara surely meant finally, finally, there would be a girl for him. He secured dates with both of them, and things started to look a bit more hopeful.

And then, at bloody last, Alex couples up with a girl that isn't Samira. The days of platonic couplings are over! Thank the world for Ellie Brown, sweet Geordie girl who is a feminist but also has an undying love for ironing. Nothing can possibly go wrong now. Not at all.

The Fall

Well, fuck. Alex got pied off by Ellie and handled it in the least graceful manner seen yet. We saw him turn his deepest shade of magenta yet as he struggled to fathom why a girl wasn't attracted to him, and thus began the public turn against him.

Alex was still only in at this point because he made it, crawling on his bare hands and knees, to Casa Amor, before another recoupling happened. After giving up on Charlie, he made some painfully awkward attempts at flirting with Grace by talking about hairdressing (weak verbal foreplay, New Jack cut to the chase and got a buzzcut off her within two hours of chat). Alex then managed to recouple with Grace, and he stayed in the villa.

The last roll of the dice

We never saw the demise of Alex and Grace, but we can pretty much fill in the gaps from what we've already learnt. And for whatever reason, the producers decided Alex deserved a sixth chance, and so they threw in a girl who liked petrol and Wimbledon just as much as him to spare us the torture. Meet Alexandra.

And then, in a bizarre character arc, after a happy few days Alex cools things off with Alexandra and she's heartbroken.

Which, really, is fair enough. He doesn't have to like any girl who comes into the villa just because she's single. But come on Alex, you could have been a bit nicer about it.

It's now Day 48, and somehow, after all that, Alex is still here, having reconciled with Alexandra. It could be theorised he's been playing a game all along, that his move to Ellie, recognising her loud presence in the villa making her an invaluable member, was tactical, and his flitting about between Charlie, Grace, and Alexandra was all a scheme to stay in the villa.

But Alex's "I'm a nice guy so I'm entitled to female attention" worldview is so sincere, so embedded in his psyche, it's actually become a part of his very identity. Dr. Alex is not a modern Mephistopheles playing a love game, he's stuck in through the sheer power of being so nice everyone either takes pity on him and couples up with him as a friend, or the producers throw in a nice girl who suffers minimal damage from his terrible dirty talk. Somehow he's lucky enough to narrowly avoid recouplings, or clings to just the right amount of public approval (Margot Robbie knows his name, for god's sake), and he stays.

Alex is still in the villa because he's nice, but mostly, it's just been sheer luck.