What's in a name? A rose
By any other name would smell as sweet

Hello everyone. Ah, October. The time of the Wanderlust. The temptation to migrate somewhere where the air isn't full of the icy uncompromisingness of Coventry; the rain cutting idly into your skin, the wind ruffling through your unprotected hair, frost lengthening your journey, unable to take the short cut to lectures. The time you want to go on a journey. Take up thy bed, and walk! The time when you need something resembling a journey to occupy you through the mundane days. The time for a new television show which might enrapture you.

My gut instincts: there are four programmes on television that I watch unfailingly. C4's 'Today at the Test'. 'Have I Got News For You', a topical news quiz. 'Six Feet Under', which I've seen the third and most of the fourth season of. And Bremner, Bird and Fortune, an impression and political satire show. Prior to its cancellation, I was an Angel fan, and a Buffy fan before that. I have not watched a lot of dramatic serial television, with only my faith in Joss Whedon and, to a lesser extent, Alan Ball to keep me to the belief that television drama can be art.

But it's definitely time for another journey. And as a result of the enthusiasm of sections of my friends' list, and on the strong recommendation of my best friend, I think it's time to embark on Alias

Here are the rules: Mark spoilers for upcoming episodes, so I can ignore them. Try to keep me interested. Tell me if I'm taking up acres of your co-owned computer screen space for no apparent reason.

Right. Let's go...

Alias

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison-
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets- and yet
No one actually starves.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I knoe, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
It hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

i don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

-Phillip Larkin; notice how ingenious his half-rhymes are at embodying his dissatisfaction.

1.1- Truth be Told

You spend a long time in college, listening to lecturers rattle on about Tennyson and how he re-used the hoary old cliche of woman falling in love and then losing her man. Tis better to have loved and lost... Tennyson's argument is an optimistic one, eventually. He says that it's better to go out and experience life. It's a kind of distillation of the attitude that we'll try anything once. See how hard it is to lose someone, and then tell me it wasn't worth being in love with them in the first place.

And so in the first episode of JJ Abrams programme, we see the obligatory teacher. Here, though, the intellectual rambling is hardened by the experience of Sydney Bristow, a student in the class who has just lost her fiance, because she spilt information about her being a CIA agent. Automatically, and without any prompting of the audience by overly conscious visuals, we're straight into the middle of what grief means. What it means to be reminded of someone by every day life- at the most inopportune moments, when you're desperately trying to keep your eye on the important business of just living.

Abrams uses the delicious, (Devilicious) infinite possibilities of the first episode of a television show to weave in themes with in themes, showing a dizzying amount of vivacity and directorial and authorial intelligence. Where your average lunkhead or even a really good writer, might start a show by organising a few characters and setting up a plot which tells us a little bit about the internal universe we're submersed in, Abrams breaks all the rules.

-We start three-quarters of the way through the episode, with Bristow, in disguise, being tortured. Good grief man! You don't do a timeframe manipulation before you even know who someone is, and what they like normally.

-Very insistently, Abrams sets up the one-word title of the show as a main raison d'etre. The most obvious way of doing it is to use it as a plottish desk-tidy. Look, Sydney, college girl alias spy, and Jack aeroplane maker alias CBI man, and Sloane, good guy alias bad guy alias who knows what. But also, there's a thread running through the episode of what it means to take an alias in real life. What does it mean that Bristow doll up in a sequinned dress and act as stupid as a Marilyn Monroe character? What means it that she hides her real self from her boyfriend? Does making a dichotomy between your professional character and your social character start to destroy you? Can it be overcome like Buffy Summers? And at what point do you draw your personal relationships into your professional situation?

In a world where we constantly play little characters of who we think we are supposed to be in the situation, Sydney's role as a spy immediately takes on metaphorical intensity under the aegis of such an intelligent writer. We are made to think about why it is, exactly, that often work seems to be killing our social life with its intensity. In an office, you'll come in late and have to explain to your husband why he's had to keep the lamb in another hour while you were a high powered executive. In Alias, your fiance gets killed.

It's for this reason that the central tableau of the episode works for me. I'm not a fan of red, raw action, there for the fact that one needs a plot to have fights in. I'm in for the references, for the mirroring worlds and the fractal dynamite you get by having the writers' thoughts on life interact with your own.

Above the idea of Alias, there's the idea of the name of this particular episode 'Truth Be Told'. But who's telling the truth? Sydney, to Danny, and it ends in his death. Jack to his daughter, and it ends in her cold-heartedly, (the absentee father is not to be trusted), ignoring his advice and help. The truth is told in this episode, but there's no fudge on the part of the writer to claim that honesty makes it all better. To be honest with yourself is important, but to be honest in a world where truth plays second fiddle to alias as a word, is more dicey. This is the essential conflict of this universe; what drives the show's thematic core, thusfar.

So will Sydney let the toad, Work, squat on her life? The simple answer is, it's not the kind of work that Larkin was carrying out whilst filing in Hull. It's the kind of work which consumes your life and you develop a passion for. You live the job. But the question deep down is, does the disguise of our pretty heroine, the wigs she dresses up in, like a ten-year-old with Auntie's lip-stick, corrode? Does it start to eat away at your essential character? How is it best to deal with a life of denying yourself, taking up your cross, and following the challenges of your employment? In the last year of university life, this is a question that intrigues me on more than just a game-playing intellectual level.

Thoughts on the episode:
-The set up of Jack and Sydney is marvellous. Really good. There's a kind of family business vibe going on at the end- this is Kay from The Godfather becoming a consiglieri. Sydney hates the idea of working with her father on an instinctive level. And when she asks 'How do I know you're not lying to me?' the answer that Jack doesn't need to give is, You don't. This is the first time that a truth told is constructive, and the preceding lies have made its status so opaque that the character is distrustful of it. Father/daughter relationships are fun, and this one shows real promise.

-I love the geek man with his gadgets, and the snippet, 'I can make it up to 42, but I want 47 because it's a prime number'. There's a sort of joy in his obsessiveness and his delight in his work which shows a nicely rounded thought- it's not the cheap joke at the person who likes machinery.

-Sloane is effortlessly slimy and implacable. More please.

-I like the echo between Sydney's obsessive note-taking at the moment we meet her as an exam-sitter, and then at the end when she's in the room with Weiss and Vaughn, (Michael Vaughn? You're joking, surely!). This is her new area of study.

There was much more to be said, but I've forgotten it. Perhaps the next episode calls for note-taking. It's like last time, all over again.

Thanks for reading.

TCH