Alistair is certainly a piece of work, isn't he? We know him. Most of us like him. And yet, when we first meet him he's a cross between Sy Lieberman and your local car dealer. Our first impulse is not to like him. He really makes us have to work to get beyond that initial impression.
Early on Lionel refer to him as a twerp. Lionel doesn't understand him and he resents the fact that someone so young and so transparent can be as rich and as powerful as Alistair obviously is. He tells bad jokes, calls Lionel everything but "Lionel" and uses words like "monster" and "brilliant" in unfamiliar ways. Lionel doesn't speak his language. Not at all.
As silly as Alistair sometimes is, it's also clear that he's rich for a reason. He knows what he's doing and he knows how to get what he wants. He's a serious schmoozer and does what he feels he has to do to be successful. He promotes Lionel, the coffee plantation owner as some kind of wild game hunter. He hires shills to draw a crowd at the book signing and he books Lionel on the lecture circuit. He promotes and even sells the miniseries and he flies from England to L.A. just because Jean told him that things weren't going well. He even tries to hire Sandy. Nothing personal -- it's all business.
He wants very much to be liked. And he spares no expense -- he gives bigger bouquets, more candy, gorillagrams, heralds, knights and balloons and whatever else it takes. And still he doesn't seem to be able to get a date. Jean brushes him off. He turns to Judith. Judith brushes him off. He bargains for Sandy. Sandy brushes him off. Daisy doesn't want him. Remember when he got on the phone and had to explain exactly who he was before the woman on the other end even recognized him? Well, she didn't want him either. And Mercury? Don't even ask. Alistair just doesn't understand what he's doing wrong.
On the face of it, it just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. Alistair has money and looks and an Aston Martin. He doesn't appear to drink to excess. He can pick up and leave and bring anyone with him anywhere he wants to go. Or he can afford to stay home and hire someone to bring everything to him.. Sometimes he seems to work miracles: he plans a wedding, saves Stephen's Anniversary party from becoming a disaster, helps Lionel surprise Jean with a long-overdue honeymoon trip and goes so far as to buy the house next door just because Jean asks him to.
He seems to have found a new set of parents in Lionel and Jean. There's not much he wouldn't do if they say the word. One of the best things about Alistair is that he doesn't do the good things he does for the recognition. If Lionel wouldn't have pressed him to find out why the book was published, Alistair would have kept his father's secret. He didn't feel it was necessary to tell Penny that Stephen had messed everything up. He wanted to organize things and make things better when they weren't going well because that's how he was. He really enjoyed the challenge. He's not the same silly man we saw in Episode 1.