There's a lot of stuff to be said about these three episodes, and I could do them episode by episode, paragraph by paragraph, enumerating themes. But it doesn't feel like the time.

2.11-2.13 'A Higher Echelon', 'The Getaway', 'Phase One'

With thanks to William Faulkner.

He sat on his chair, in front of his laptop again, again eating another samosa. He had got quite intrigued by their taste, the slightly pungent aroma, the softness of them. Almost flesh-like in its consistency. It has been a good day. Will gets a new job with the CIA, and his friendship with Vaughn appears to be doing exactly as well as it always should have done. Sydney and Dixon rescue Marshall from Mexico City, to his delight and lasting gratitude.The flowers, oversized, are given to Sydney, an outsized expression of gratitude, typical of Marshall. He values his friendships, maybe, because he's never had anyone interested in him alone, in love with him as a person. He doesn't quite understand the terms of Sydney's friendship with him, as sweet as he is. And then Dixon and Marshall, with Dixon urging Marshall under the table when the real CIA come to disband the Alliance. Dixon, who thought he knew what his friendship was with Sydney, who kept laying suspicions aside, who grovelled an apology so meaningfully and so sadly when Jack covered for Syd at the beginning of the Season. The friendship of Sloane and Jack. Always questionable, with that betrayal by Jack in the background of the frame. Or was it a betrayal? Were the two working for the same thing all along? In any case, Jack wasn't being betrayaed by his boss, only palmed off until he could write an e-mail, not talk to him where the alliance could hear. Sloane, having refound his wife, having tricked the audience, (even if I did suspect as much in the finale last year), and never having poisoned his wife at all. Instead constructing an elaborate scheme to throw out the perceptions of even the most careful readerNow who would do that, I wonder. In the meanwhile, we see Sloane conversing with Sark, new friends, doing, it appears, more than we could ever have imagined. Changing the paradigm of the show for good. Pulling it away from, a little episode about Marshall, the comedy side-kick come good, or a complicated cracker of a meditation on the meaning of love, its permanence or ephemerality.

In this episode, we have Syd and Vaughn, consistently testing the idea of having a relationship through work. We expect it, perhaps, to be all about how work is duty, and duty is the most important thing of all. What a relief its not. Yes, they make a mistake and go to a restaurant, being followed by Kane's spies. But instead of the pat moral, the 'We were irresponsible, see our guilt', we instead get the firm resolution that they work well together, that they have done better than a non-involved agent and handler would. Though in drama a recognition of a relationship that works is dangerously likely to invoke staticness, the kiss at the end makes us think about a relationship that really could work. This is particularly good here because throughout the episode, we've been getting hints that it might all be a dream. First, we're supposed to think its real, then it seems so hyper-real, so 'Awakenings-ish'm that we wonder if we're being toyed with. Then it all turns out to have been true all along. Not unlike today really. Bush really is back. So surreal it can't be true. But it is.

A lot of people seem to be on the verge of returning and in very different guises. We started out with Rutger Hauer going all 80's sci-fi, working out Syd and Jack's alleigance and tracking them down. They manage to get rid of him by means of a code. But just as we think we've seen regime change, we see that the old master has been in power all along. It was Sloane who allowed the CIA to mastermind Phase One. So what does he have in mind next for the remains of the Alliance? Or does he merely want to cooperate with the CIA to find out the meanings behind Rambaldi's propheciesIf his fundamentalist glee about Rambaldi still over-rides his love for his wife though, he's playing it very quietly. Everything went quiet during Emily and Arvin's conversation in 'Almost Thirty Years' because it was too intimate, it was stuff between husband and wife. Now we see, in the double purpose of the consummate storyteller, it was also used so the audience wouldn't know Sloane's deeply complex plan. Questions like, did he plant the wine and the finger himself, remain to be found out.

Talking of people who aren't themselves, what about Francie? First we think that she's, not a double agent, cos there was no evidence she knew anything to start with, but a single, enemy one to Sydney and Will. Then her doppelganger shows up. Did the original Francie know nothing, or was she secretly in league with Will? Is Irina co-ordinating attack policies with Sark, and thus getting at Sloane? Or helping Sloane? Sloane has what? With huh?What has this to do with Sloane's apparent disinterest in Marshall's capture? Did he know all along that Sark's agency who held him would never kill him? Or is he as callous and cold-hearted as we always took for granted?Except where his wife is concerned, of course, where he seems almost human. Perhaps Sloane's eventual problem is that he's actually just 'too' human. But then again, he seems totally disinterested in Syd and Dixon's plan to rescue Marshall, too busy with Echelon, the code from the sky that seems to be a key point in his dream, to offer more than 'Our efforts continue, as do our prayers', in a very cursory manner.Is his final dream more than his wife? Does Emily cut off her finger, (or have it cut off), for unconditional love, to find out that she's only second behind a religious prodigy? Or is she part of the Rambaldi club too?Here, it appears that Sloane is having a bad day, everyone else is too clever for him, and he's just a puppetBy this point, he seems to have the main thing he wantsso that when he goes 'MIA' here, we wonder if he's gone for good. But in the end, it all appears to be part of the master plan, and Sloane, somewhere, will be re-elected.

But for all the good things that happen, for every chicken samosa, there's some gone off milk in the fridge. Dixon seems distraught that Sydney has been hiding so much from him, while his life has been collapsing, getting to the point of saying 'Don't talk to me'. Earlier, he has gathered what crumbs of comfort he can from his wife, but it is clear he believes he may have been betrayed for good. It is humbling both for us and the surrogate audience Syd to see Dixon's pre-conceptions suddenly fall apart, and notable that here there are several clips that deliberately play on shots from the first episode. Syd entering SD-6, and the slowed tracking shot, as she this time sees Kane for the first time as who she really isBack here, the whole episode is devoted to the apparent tragedy that Marshall, who was to become one of the good guys he always thought he was, has to go back to working with SloaneIn retrospect, the fact this sadness lasts only two episodes strengthens the episode with its odd foresight irony.Marshall and Dixon are presented as unknowing Angels, cherubs, to Sloane's conniving devil, as is noted in a late scene where they are very deliberately cut to while the respective lyrics are in the background.Again, later considerations turn this whole, slyly, innocently simplistic scene around. The whole of the episode has a kind of gormless joy in it, which contrasts with the latter two. As impressive and dramatic of the scenes where Irina is unhandcuffed are, she's spent the last two weeks gallivanting around India with only her close family for company. Allowing her a cup of coffee is hardly mind-bending. Syd spilling on her friend called Michael is given a lot of prominenceBut is her doppelganger listening in and finding a lot out here? And do we suspect thatKane is anything to do with this all? Is she in league with Briault and his extortion? Does she find out about Syd so quickly because of the fake Francie, or is it Rutger Hauer's Gaiger, the counter, who's getting the benefit of her intell? The plot thickens.

So the whole thing started, (if we're going chronological all of a sudden) with Syd narrating over what appears to be some documentary footage. It's puzzling but then we find out she's telling Will about Echelon. It reminds us that he's supposed to be writing a magazine, and being journalistic. It also tell us that what is being filmed, though stylised, is to be perceived as fact, so that when we come upon this surrealist telling of Syd in lingerie, (pandering 'FLESH' alert!), and the 'Goldfinger' plane conceit, (and what about the ultra-cheeky directing of Syd seen in the reflective roof in the middle of what can only be described as a Big O), we are to take it at face value and not discount the suggestion that the tale is being told truthfully, just at its own pace and in its own timeframe.. And after all, who doesn't love scrambled timeframes?

Well, except for whoever was writing the Haladcki plot-line, who obviously needed it to be clear that Jack shot the annoying little snitch on the same day that Emily Sloane went missing? Did Jack kill Emily, wonders Bonnie? But her credibility goes under quickly once she's linked to Briault. This might not be considered all that important in the long run though, since it appears that Sloane knows both Jack and Syd were double agents all along. Are we expecting Syd's betrayal to end up working to her disadvantage, or was Sloane's earlier comment that Syd will do whatever Sloane tells her actually a bluff when he actually knows all that she gets up to, and tacitly sanctioned it? Since Sloane ends the episode apart from the absolutely knock-out Francie reveal, most of the things we can even comprehend lead back to what his influence on the puppet-show is.

So good things bad things. The season finale of 'Six Feet Under' is really beautifully crafted. It's been a wondrous season, all things considered. I also managed to find Cuaron's 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' in Coventry for a fiver, and have been enjoying Cuaron's irresistably kinetic camera in a film oddly different yet the same, (about teenage rites of passage, just with the semen less metaphorical) as 'Azkaban'. And Jack has been watching a movie too, in one of the best beginnings of an episode ever. We get Syd and Vaughn's contretemps, prior to their going too far and shirking their duty, and then subverting the cliche of Work Keeps Us Apart to end the episode brilliantly. We also get a really good fight scene that even I put down my cup of tea and enjoyed. The Sydney/Jack stuff, for a while seems to be heading towards the same idea in Alias 2.13 as was addressed in Buffy 2.14, that of a love consummated and then immediately turning to a nightmare But in the end, the consummation in this episode plays out more like 'Smashed', (wreckage all around), than 'Innocence'. Though Syd/Vaughn remains much more Bangel than Spuffy, for my money

Meanwhile, things poor out unexpectedly. Vaughn talks about wine, and then we cut to water. Another symbol of this run of episodes; things seem ornate, elaborate, intoxicating. Actually they're merely telling the truth- it's us who want to see the lies We want to see the lies that our future is nightmarish because of others, do we? That, under an American with a Republican government, there's no chance of spending a day getting a first class essay back from 'History of Mathematics', and then shopping for a little brother's present. One he'll love. Sure, the bloke we didn't want got in. I didn't want. Perhpas. But what's the odds he's as complicatedly ambiguous, in the end, as Sloane, not merely a lunkhead, more complexly wrong, with more moments of accidental grace and goodness What's the likelihood, in the end, that unusual treasures, the 47 euros Dixon unwittingly collects as a disguised charity worker, the 47 Server which never exists, the number 47 in Abrams' crazed imagination, won't turn out to cheer us up in the end, regardless of Sloane's masterplan?Maybe in the end, we'll be as a happy as Marshall, working away apparently under torture, and completing a game of 'Pong' for his captors.As Vaughn, prepared as a Boy Scout, even under the regime of Kendall that he so dislikes. As many have said, if we find subversive comfort in this world despite the result, the more strength to us. We keep fighting. It's the idea of being hungry. Vaughn uses the metaphor for romance, but the very animal urge of the word makes the scene between him and Sydney unwittingly sexual. Our basic drives and instincts continue despite the higher powers. In doing so, often, we achieve more good than by trying merely to rip through others' authority. We achieve all the amazing disguises and breakthroughs Sydney has under Vaughn's supervision. Marhshall still managing his smile, and not to be forgotten his ingenuity, through his Artful Dodger ring, even though he misunderstands, naming it from the guy in that movie. 'Oliver', intones Dixon despairingly. That love of life in Marshall, depsite how little he understands, is achievable, even if we are the less deceived. Remember how Sydney seems baffled, (subverting a cliche of the 'Alias' universe, Whedon-style), that so many people should be in a park, enjoying themselves in the middle of the day, and not have work to do, and not have places to be, and not have Eses which Muss Sein. It's the hour we steal from authority, for our own personal pleasure. It's the joy of living somewhere where there's still that odd fleck of freedom.

For all that it seems so much more complicated now, one of the moment that is lovely before you start to doubt it is Francie and Will getting together. Because it's a moment which is not, while it's happening, shown as being operated by deceit. It's something that just happens, of the free will of the two participants. Maybe now, we'll be shown how much more complicated Francie's role was. But there, it was a second when the two said: Kissing ain't illegal. We can do what we want. And, despite all the deceit, despite all the back-stabbing, despite all the authoritarian malarkee and moments where it seems like it's all crumbling down, that's what they can do.

Go on living what is not merely a country painted red.

TCH