Good evening everyone.

We seem to be nearly a lot of things at the moment. Nearly the Presidential election. Nearly November. Nearly clocks going back. Nearly half way through my university term, (we've done 24 out of the 49 days; and no, I don't have a countdown calendar). So let me break with all this pussy-footing around landmarks and actually start something. Yes, I'm upstaging November, the annual lie-in and dozens of other forthcoming events by declaring the second season of By Any Other Name officially open. Don't all burst into spontaneous applause at once then...

2.1- 'The Enemy Walks In'

Twice actually, once at the beginning of the episode and once at the end of the same. This episode has no right to be as good as it is, since it has the necessity of resolving a lot of the cliffhangers left by last season's finale, as well having to introduce a new character and feeling the need to actually go back over some footage of the previous season after the Previously segment. And yet it manages to be really good fun. Some reasons why ensue:

-Mother superior. So we're allowed to let the revelation we heard a while ago really sink in and become genuine now. Sydney's mother is the man, and she is superior to Khasinau. Though I didn't really figure it, it makes perfect symbolic sense: why on earth would some shadowy figure be of more important to the Russians than the woman who took out all those agents, letting alone the fact that on this show, the closer you are to Sydney, the more power you seem to possess.

-The shrink conceit at the beginning of the episode handily fulfils a dual purpose; it allows the sewing in of the necessary infill sections, as well as leaving us at an unspecified point in the future where a viewer who's seen the old stuff before can place it within the context of Sydney's conversation with the shrink. It's good and entertaining that in her interactions with all three cast members so far, she has been considered a waste of time, only not to be hoodwinked as quickly as her subject had expected. The shrink holds the banner for psychological perception in the show, and it's relieving to me to see that people's hunches on people, their instinctual ideas, their body language and so forth, are considered as important to Sydney, Vaughn and Jack's successes as the cool fights and the swanky Op Tech. It shows the creator still has its interests in how humans work together at heart.

-I also enjoyed the little timeframe joke they managed to get in when the shrink asks Sydney how Will took the explanation of Syd's life, and he replies straight to her, (not unlike Spike in 'Fool For Love', though less brilliantly bridged) 'Seriously?'. Will does the job of substituting for the new viewer who's tuned in on a friend's recommendation to the new series, hoping there'll be a nice cogent explanation, and it will all get simple. Not so much. If you didn't watch the previous finale, the premiere is not easy to watch. It certainly doesn't do what an episode like 'Lessons' does, posing as an introduction while revealing subtleties lower down. It pretty much says, we're done condescending, work it out for yourselves.

-Looks like I was a little premature on the Jack/Will friendship thing, although I still maintain that it works thematically in 'Thirty Years Later'. In this episode, Jack doses Will and then leaves him to be found out as a drug-taker, to an extraordinary lack of bemusement from Francie. I know she's loving and accepting of people and all, but surely she'd expect to have just a little evidence that Will was on a Class A substance at some point? It's not like spying, where you go out, fly to foreign climes, do a cool action stunt and come back with no physical trace. There'd be like, dead eyes and stuff, surely. In any case while Francie is being supportive again, Jack is arguably putting into practice his now-legenday tough love, that Syd knows so well. Will is lucky to be alive, the argument goes.

-Cliffhanger updates: a); Vaughn wasn't, even remotely, dead. This surprises me rather less than someone whose seen few cliffhangers before- it's a problem with cliffhangers that it becomes obvious after a while how the series is going to resolve them, the pattern of them, so it's barely worth keeping any suspense in at all. Here, though, we see Vaughn rescued by Sydney during a mission, from a fate which looks nastily as if they're doing weird stuff to people's brains. Have K-directorate been up to some kind of biological manipulation of their agents for their own ends, or is this merely torture?

-Cliffhanger updates: b); The Dixon doubt contretemps is resolved a little easily for my liking. This was only from a feasibility point of view though. I liked it for the two important reasons. The first was that the scene between Sydney and Dixon is extremely well-written. As Dixon slowly unravels his 'Moral of the Story is' speech, you feel desperately sorry that this guy thinks he's mistrusted when he should have felt, deep down, that Sydney would not hurt him. That he went through 'one of those lost times for me'. This abasing apology, a tip of an iceberg suggesting that he also feels inner turmoil, (for when has Dixon ever said something he doesn't mean?), is heart-wrenching since he was right, and he did do his duty, and he has never emotionally betrayed anyone in his whole life, (hmmm, may have to go back and expurgate that unverified assumption when we have the Dixon's shady past plot-line in Season 4). So that was fun, in a scream-at-lead-character type way. But also, the whole set-up of the series would become unbalanced if Dixon distrusted Sydney for a lengthy stretch. Dixon is there to symbolise Sydney's qualities, (despite the constant necessity of deceit), of faithfulness, trust and solidarity. If Dixon doesn't show this towards Syd, (like, for other qualities, Vaughn shows her intelligence, Jack her determination, Marshall her geekiness), then the elaborate structure of the character's inter-relations becomes merely pulpy soap-opera. And as much as I like pulpy soap-opera, to have metaphor stuff going on underneath is always preferable.

-Cliffhanger updates: c); it appears for the moment that I was reading too much in, and Emily is dead, dead, dead, having been poisoned by her husband. Oh, the cheeriness of it all. Sydney's speech is interesting at the time when her feelings for her surrogate mother reveal all her insecurities about her birth mother.

-D'you reckon Will is overly philosophical about his life in this episode? I know he showed remarkable strength of character and determination in the season finale, but that all rang true to me as a flowering of some of his latent talents, (oooh, anagram-y goodness!). This time, we're suppose to accept that the person whose life was ruined by Syd's spy exploits was Will's, and that he's grateful just to be alive. I know Will is loving and an amazing character, but to have this acceptance of his life being virtually shelved for the near future seems such a large burden that it would be hard not to make some comment to Sydney.

-The double screwdriver moment. Vaughn uses it to escape, but then when the CIA think they have Khasinau, a screwdriver-type devices allows the unmanned sniper to keep firing. You should know when a character nominates something twisty and reversible as the greatest invention ever that it's going to come back to haunt him. In this case, Weiss is hurt, a shame since he's becoming quite fun to have around.

-So then Irina Derevko shoots Khasinau, and tells Sydney 'Truth Takes Time'. You have to love such moments. Enigmatic phrase meets baffling action in a lurid curio of bafflement. Plus, as it becomes extremely clear by the end of the next episode. Lena Olin can really, really act. Like Ron Rifkin act. Her character, as twisted and unpleasant as it is, speedily becomes the tangle at the heart of the show. And that action can happen as soon as she turns herself into the FBI, pending lots and lots of Lord Asriel/ Mrs Coulter questions just aching to emerge from the woodwork. In the meantime, we already have questions of the Evil Mother. How far is she softened by the recognition of what maternity means enshrined in her daughter's form? And how much is such a sentimental outlook a cover for her real conniving motivations. We continue to ponder these during...

2.2- 'Trust Me'

Weeellll[/Cartman voice]
The deputy walks on hard nails and the preacher rides a mount
But nothing really matters much, it's doom alone that counts
And the one-eyed undertaker, he blows a futile horn.
"Come in," she said,
"I'll give you shelter from the storm."

This particular verse, out of the nine or ten there are in all, is not at all germane to the episode in question, (or not more than any other verse), but I just love the Lewis Caroll-ian mysterious things left unsaid mood of this one. The song in general, (which, for slowcoaches, is by Dylan, and plays very successfully over the last five minutes or so of this episode), was picked, I suppose, for its hint that Irina might in fact be some kind of refuge to Sydney after all. Sydney goes through the episode believing that she has nothing to say to her Mother, that the comforting lie, (didn't she always, somewhere, know it was a lie?) she told herself that Laura was dead can still be metaphorically true as long as she doesn't acknowledge her existence. But as with all close family, their doings, as little interest as you take in them, will come back to haunt you in the end. When it comes to the vital moment, Sydney makes the wrong decision not because she doesn't know that her mother has told Vaughn the truth, (she does, instinctually), but because she still won't except to herself that her mother is alive, and therefore that it is possible to factor in the advice in her exploits. She comes to understand this later, and so creates importance for the names Laura Bristow and Irina Derevko. Laura, she tells her mother, is dead in the car. Irina lives on. But now, Syd's trying to consider Irina as not her mother, not the entity that Laura was in her memories. And that's never going to work.

-This episode is big in the giggle department. The show's become self-conscious now and decided that it's long past time for some jokes at its own internal structures, and I for one say not a moment too soon. In this episode, most of the best lines are the joke ones which work because the audience knows its characters now. Towards the beginning, Francie in her big-hearted be friendly to everyone persona asks Jack very earnestly what colour would do best for a new restaurant. Jack replies that he doesn't know much about interior decorating, (much in the manner of Ralph on 'The Fast Show', mumbling apologetically 'Oh, I wouldn't know moch about dat, Ted'). Then, reminded subconsciously perhaps of his shrink's criticism about his front, and Syd's implications about his lack of friends, (since Francie asks about when he's out with friends), he changes his mind. If the audience had gone "Silly Jack, won't give an opinion to good old Francie", first time, they recoil in horror about what he's going to actually say once he summons up the courage. The "white is a symbol of agony and torture [ish]" was truly dripping tap hideous, and then he almost rights himself with his plumping for red. He may already have lost Francie though. Fun moment.

-Equally fun, Vaughn's lovely aside to Kendall: "You're not the easiest guy to work with, are you?", when Vaughn asks for a favour in return for getting information from Derevko. Oh, the delights of wit to a gruff but lovable superior. Of course, Syd goes for the more abrasive route later when she brusquely tells Kendall that 'it's time he started acting like' her team-mate.

-I enjoyed Sydney's immediate assumption of Sloane's guilt in regard to Emily's death. It would be an occasion too easy to gloss over without going into the reasons for Syd's lack of understanding. But since she knows Sloane is now a full member, she again shows her perceptiveness.

-I haven't really mentioned Jennifer Garner's acting as much as I should do. She's not the kind of actress who really interests me: big, sincere expressions, very occasional nuances of slight amusal, bemusal or confusal, but it should be said she's doing a bang-up job for the series as a whole. More relevant to this episode though, Michael Vartan, usually given stock po-faced stuff, is here given a chance to really flex some emotion muscles. He did much better than I expected him to, a really good job as the slightly overwhelmed school boy in Lecter's cell. His reaction to Irina's final retort is good to watch. Strong, but with that vulnerable boy in there somewhere, desperate not to be broken.

-It's not often that you get a CD of porn called 'a physical manifestation of human weakness'. It must be Sloane going all aloof and poetic again. Even more water pouring to baptise the Season, as well. I thought he was excellent when attempting to retrieve the CD at the action climax of the episode. All brooding menace. That Sloane has become Sydney's personal vendetta after her assumption about Emily is all the more gratifying since it allows Sloane as much time as we'd hope on screen.

-And so, last and least least, to the fabulous Lena Olin. I know she's way old and stuff but, oh those smouldering eyes and the twitching, cat-with-fly mouth. There's that wondrous feeling you get with actors, (sometimes near the start of a film, if you're quick, but most often near the start of a serial), that they're just showing you the edges of their skill for the moment, and that, rest assured, they have miles and miles further to go before they sleep. I have to come right out and say that Victor Garber as an actor tricked me into thinking he was better than he is by being perfectly cast, (love the character, not too much regard for the actor), but Lena Olin? I think she's gonna blow me away. Otherwise I'll just stare at her softly playing with her prey and feel cheered up.

Here with the very few lines she gets, she's marvellous. 'Trust me, because I'm your mother', is just what Sydney doesn't want to hear at the precise moment of the conversation. Similarly, the 'You look just like him', to Vaughn, betraying both her knowledge and her apparent lack of remorse, scythes through the scene to create its own little bubble of resonance. Then finally, we get, Yes, Agent Bristow. Simple few words, but both subversively belligerent in the manner of Malcolm McDowell just before The Ninth, and also, as I'm sure she notices in the pattern of her speech, exactly what she might have said to Jack, to the word.

The only question left at my mind at this point, (other than tricksy plot ones), is how come Abrams had the audacity to put what he knew would be his strongest plot-line, (mother and father fight over Syd's alleigance) in a second season? Because from where I'm sitting at the moment, all those first 22 episodes seem merely prologue to the swelling act of the imperial theme. But then, perhaps I've just been whipped up into a frenzy by all the things which are nearly happening, to believe that everything significant is just over the horizon.

Sleep well.

TCH