Hello. How are you all? Hope you're well.
(good old Marshall)

1.6- 'Reckoning'

Occasionally the bell tolls a little bit too loudly, and I'm afraid I think the 'No man is an island' poetry reference, which I really ought to be delighted by, smacked of false profundity, in my reckoning. This I think was the weakest episode to date. It also had a random moment of pathos that really didn't work and a moment of odd, failing patriotism.

-Donne's point, used to much greater effect in About a Boy is that you can't sit all by yourself in your room all day; can't sneer at anyone who comes into contact with you, and ultimately, can't shut yourself off from death. Every time someone dies, and the whisper of a peal comes back to you, you die a little. So what relevance does this message have ultimately to this episode. Well, I suppose it's fair enough to identify Sydney as the candidate for this message. Oddly, though, there's no real hint that she;s had an epiphany about this in the episode itself. Around half way through, when she comes back to see Francie's chicken fricaseeing in the oven, she is happy enough to disclose that she's had a bad trip. One thing that keeps Sydney going, in the long run, is that although she's rarely honest about the little details of her life to anyone, she's emotionally honest to just about everyone. So she reveals that she had a bad trip, and that people in her job were terminated. And then, instead of suppressing her emotion, she can express it to her friend and let the frustration, the guilt out of her. The classic situation in films is that people pretend nothing is going on at all, and then behave oddly around friends and family resulting in even more disturbance. Syd seems to have the right way of dealing with the situation covered.

To stretch the poetry much further is to claim that Orlando Bloom is part of the Holy Trinity, so I'll ease off, pointing out that poetry shouldn't just be fobbed off on the audience so cursorily.

-'Those men died for their country', claims Vaughn to Sydney's silence. How are we supposed to interpret this? As a truth of their loyalty to the flag? As an analogy to the lions led by donkeys in the first world war, their pointless sacrifices explained by the insufficient loin cloth of patriotism? As a weak excuse? There were bits and pieces of this episode that puzzled me, and unfortunately it wasn't really the bits that were supposed to.

-The 'My Dad was a hero' bit doesn't work either, since we haven't seen the child before. It acts as some kind of saccharine emotion. But the problem with this scene, over and above the fact that we're unfamiliar with the characters, is symptomatic of the episode. Long chunks are devoted to things we're not interested in, and in parallel, we miss some really interesting things that the last episode promised us. There's never a genuine contretemps between Sydney and either Dixon or Vaughn, and in the situation, that's daft. We're not allowed to feel anything, because we're too busy being rushed off in myriad directions which are barely ever interesting.

-The music playing over the funeral was familiar to me, and it occured to me a few beats before the end that the words are some kind of spiritual, but the music is lifted from the beautiful middle Woodwind section of Sibelius' Finlandia. It's a shame it wasn't used for any wider reason, but it cheered me up a little.

-We leave on Fisher's death, yet another case in point on this episodes mis-steps. His death has no emotional resonance because we've only just been introduced to him. It only acts as a guarantor that, yes, Sydney is about to be in peril again.

This is the weakest episode to date, and really mediocre television, I'm afraid.

1.7- 'Color-blind'

Excuse me if I turn a blind eye to the odd 'u' in this review!

Right, before anyone thinks someone's just run over my cat or something, this is a much better episode.

It has some really interesting assertions in it, lines that are begging to be written down. in particular, I liked the first interaction in the series between Vaughn and Jack Bristow. Of course, the very first time we see Jack on the series, it's as the icy-cold father-in-law to Danny, and we, like him, have no idea where exactly where to place him. He corrects Danny and explains how it's just a courtesy call on his part. We laugh, but uncomfortably. Here, it appears that Jack is not all that impressed by Vaughn's claim to Syd. Or at very least, he doesn't like the way he's gone about ingratiating himself by digging up Jack's files. And this is, really, understandable. The really fascinating moment in the conversation, is where the two turn to Sydney herself. Vaughn contends that it would be worth certain shortfalls in the mission in order to get Sydney back safe. Jack demurs; to her, he says, the Mission, her life, is what gets her up in the morning. Sydney's life is not as important to her as the mission.

The question we're made to ask here is manifold. Firstly, does Jack actually know his own daughter well enough to make a well-informed judgement on the matter? Or does he only say this because, in his professional opinion, it is more likely to get the naive Vaughn, (lacking, as he makes clear he believes in wisdom), to do what is good for the mission? Furthermore, though, regardless of Jack's purposes in making the statement, is it true? Does Sydney indeed go through her life as colour-blind as Shepherd does, interested only in what will help her to accomplish the next task set her by SD-6 or the CIA? She has many times asserted that this is in fact not true. The spying came upon her, and is a stopgap measure. But, in a delight of a thing does well, does she really relish her profession above all else?

Also, we get the little slipped-in comment from Sloane, also speaking to Jack, along the lines of 'I believe in her as I'd believe in my own daughter'. What is Sloane trying to do here? We are perhaps supposed to think that Sloane is gently admonishing Jack for the lack of time he has spent with her recently. But then again, it could be a way of attempting to ingratiate himself with one of his more important lieutenants. More questions are raised than answered by the comment itself, which is the best way in serial drama.

-The name Eloise Kurtz raises all sorts of thoughts, mostly along the rather obvious lines of 'What horror has she seen?'. The storyline shows no sign of immediately resolving itself, but in the mean-time, Will continues to live his life colour-blind to only finding out about Danny's fate. This fixation is so pronounced that he seems genuinely shocked and surprised when Jenny kisses him at Thanksgiving. It may be that he's still caught up in winning Syd's affection through his investigations, but it showcases how one-tracked he's been at his work in the recent past considering Jenny falls all ove rhiim at any possible opportunity.

-It occurred to me that, despite the fact that Anna has been used as integral aspects of Syd's character, there are actually only two female characters who are regulars in the cast, these being Jennifer Garner herself and Merrin Dungey as Francie, (who appears to be the most in the dark of all the regulars as to what's going on). So the question has to be posed, despite the strong female central character, how are we supposed to react to a workplace which is otherwise predominantly male? Is the subject of gender brought up explicitly or implicitly in the show? I've really seen nothing explicit to date on the subject, just implicit stuff to the suggestions that Bristow is aomply qualified and amazingly competent at her job.

-The most interesting performance of all in this episode, perhaps, comes from yet another male character, Shepherd. Sometimes you need a Scot to inject a bit of real suffering into an apparently gritty situation, and the actor here does a fine job. His chemistry with Sydney is excellent, and he manages to handle the scenes where it's revealed he killed Danny without mawkish over-happiness that Syd doesn't seek vengeance, or any kind of generic bad guy sneer. These scenes were only a hair's breadth away from becoming a schmaltzy trashy version of a victim having to help her murderer, and it could have been genuinely troubling had it not been well acted and directed. As it was, it just about worked for me.

The scene of Francie, Wil, Sydney and Charlie as the real family of the show was touching, as, heartrendingly, was Sydney's automatic closing of the door behind her when her father showed up during the Thanksgiving meal. He's not privileged to understand what goes on in the moments where his daughter relaxes. To complexify the situation though, he explains succinctly why he chose to tell her of Shepherd's murder of Danny, as something he shouldn't hide from her for no reason, thereby cutting short her implicit allegation of his insensitivity. This relationship continues to deepen.

The ending is also interesting. Just as the family rift is mending itself, and Sydney gives Jack the cold leftovers of her familiarity, it comes to appear that this may be the worst time of all for the family moles to show their relationship to each other, as Sloane vows to make an example of any double-dealers he catches in his cell. Full steam ahead, with an intelligent rather than merely visceral ending.

Well, um, that's all for now, so, err, have a safe journey home. You don't have far to go do you? Well, umm, bye.

TCH