Yes, so more 'Alias'. This post is not fun if you despise 'Alias'. However, I can offer you a post free of political comment and much more conventional than yesterday's, if that helps.

NB: To anyone expecting the denouement of the second Season, (reviews) over the weekend, I'm going home, so there'll be no reviews tomorrow or Saturday, and whether I'm back Sunday evening is unknowable for now. Adjust your evenings accordingly ;-) (Now have a ludicrous scene in my mind of someone lying in bed, going over their checklist. Turned off oven. Gave children Calpol. Fed cat. Watered plants. Wrote e-mail to absent friend. Oh, damn, I forgot to read the 'Alias' reviews. The world is ending...)

Two episodes with agent in the title today. The first one has an element of the 'I Fall to Pieces' about it, taking what's expected to be metaphorical as literal. The second is a lot more complex.

2.13- 'Double Agent'

In all the showiness of yesterday, I didn't really have the opportunity to say that I think 'The Getaway' is the best 'Alias' episode to date, and that I really enjoyed 'Phase One', although mainly as a concept rather than as the perfect hour's entertainment in itself. But I'm also finding I'm either schizophrenic or hyper-senstive to episodes' qualities this Season. Or at least I think it's me. But this Season seems to have a strange complexion of two really excellent hours television followed by a disaster or two, and so on and so forth. Tuning in is a bit like tuning in to golf. It could be insanely exciting top-quality sport. But it's more likely to be sarcastic comments about eccentric hosepipe trousers, and the odd shank into a bunker. It makes watching an episode a real unknown. None of the tedious, predictable 'Angel' drivel, where you just get the same thing week after week; genius. This is a rollercoaster experience.

So this episode is an absolute disaster. Not quite as bad as the second part of 'Passage', which really plumbed those depths, but it feels so distended that it makes you wonder whether it wasn't casually pencilled in for an earlier point in the Season and never got round to. All the things we actually care about are side-lined; all the irritations are showcased. But it's a serial, so it had its moments:

-Squares. They are absolutely all over the first scene, directed by the rather-skilled, by now, Ken Olin. The room has so many square tiles, square picture frames, square patterns on walls, square mirrors. I didn't really grasp the meaning of these, (maybe it's just stylistic interest), but it certainly had me interested, while one spy I didn't know betrayed another spy I didn't know, and so on and so forth.

-Ethan Hawke didn't play his two different characters with any distinction, so that in the final scene, I had no idea who was Jim and who was the impostor, and whether he'd been lying to Syd or not. Frankly by this stage though, I'd given up caring.

-Metanarration, (this is an Orci/Kurtzmann script, they're executive producers, and obviously thought this was way cool), as Sydney says 'I keep expecting to wake up and find out it's all a dream'. It occured to me after I wrote the last set of reviews that 'Phase One' must have aired at a very similar time to 'Awakening' (and in the same Season, obviously), so I wonder whether it was a wink to Angel's series-transforming-but-dream rollercoaster over on the other side at the same time. If you wathced both shows casually, it would have been easy to get confused from the big plot twist to the big plot Moebius strip.

-I thought the gruesome scene where the spy kept expecting to go up in flames every time she got to the word 'Pop' in 'Pop goes the weasel' was really, really disturbing, up there with 'Mother's Milk is Red Today'. What made it even worse was that she was confirmed in her predictions; the world turned out to be just as nasty as she always feared it would be. [Stringently apolitical so far, hey? ;-)]

-The ingenue who Sydney talks to, trying to remember back to when she got to SD-6 for the first time, is not given much to do, but is potentially interesting.

-It seems like the producers got some stock footage of Merrin Dungey doing a hokey, enigmatic gurn while hugging people in this episode and then dropped it in to the episode occasionally, like a sugar replacement into a cup of tea. Did it work? Not to date, but there's always the possibility that the Francie plot-line will turn out to be interesting, and not just time to do something with the only ignorant (of the espionage) character on the show. For now, I'm cynical.

-Jennifer Garner Ursula Andresses her way out of a pool this week. I find myself oscillating between post-modern acceptance of flaunting Syd's body and making her wear lingerie or swimsuits and stuff because, after all, it's a strong woman, and perhaps over-sensitive suspicions that if it was John Garner, there wouldn't be quite so much ogling of his body done by the camera. What do you think? I mean, like Claudius' politic and unctuous 'With one auspicious and one dropping eye', I wonder if I'm just using my occasional objections as fig lead to my lasciviousness, but the cameras are complicit in Syd's black and red lingerie sequence in 'Phase One', not somehow impartial observers.

-Another one for the 47 list: Room 47. The man's obsessive.

-I liked the line 'Beware the grieving man and his bottle' from Hawke's character as Syd came to console him and tell him the story of Danny. It seemed about to lead to something more poetic, but instead spluttered and died. It's a shame- Ethan Hawke's a great actor but can't save a boring pair of roles.

-Bin Laden's name drop was a bit of a moment that pulled me out of the internal universe. Not that I don't accept he exists, but if you start name-dropping people in current affairs, it's a slippery slope down to full out comments on American politics, and I don't believe 'Alias' wants to get ensnared in that. Plus it would countermand my description of this post, and 'a vague disclaimer is nobody's friend'.

-The end has an aspect of the Wisdom of Solomon about it. Sydney works out that only the true James won't mind staying in his doppelganger facade. An elegant moment in an unremarkable episode.

Which ends with Sydney and Vaughn falling into bed. I may have watched too much stuff which uses filmic shorthand, (or spent too much time around rabid fan-fiction, O my friends), but I took the end of the last episode as suggesting they had consummated their relationship. I'm obviously imagining things.

2.15- 'A Free Agent'

A much better episode, since now we have the reactions of Marshall and Dixon to their new environment, what Sydney wants to do with the future, Irina's ultimatum and a general feeling that everything, as per the second pilot, actually has changed for good, rather than mere lip-service being paid to the idea.

There's much consideration of the idea of retiring in this episode, of giving up the good fight because it's not worth the effect it has on people. I suppose in a way it symbolises what Finn McCool was saying over on the board, and I knew was wrong but couldn't put my finger on it; the suspicion that it's best to do a little bit of good to a few people you care about, without stretching yourself, without sacrificing your good mood or jeopardising your happiness. This episode doesn't complete the story of why Dixon goes back to the CIA or Sydney realises how indispenable espionage has become in her life, but it carefully and gently, almost absent-mindedly, keeps giving reasons why doing good as a profession, (a metaphor for a life lived in concern and active anxiety for Rwandans and whoever else), is so important.

-So we start on Sydney's resignation. Now the Alliance is gone, now Vaughn has helped not merely to take off an arm of the monster, but to kill the monster, Sydney has fulfilled her obligation. And in her relationship, burgeoning, with Vaughn, and in her graudation day, she sees the hopes she had before Sloane's monolith enveloped her life. She dances to the polka of opportunities sunk and now resurfaced. She wears her mortar and receives her mark of high intelligence, (hey, she's no fool, she knows what 'agar' is!). Kendall tells her that he will withdraw her privilege of seeing Irina if she becomes a civilian, if she takes up the Witness Protection Scheme. Jack, curmudgeonly but against his usual nature, tells Sydney how he is right in terms of legality and wrong in terms of ethics.

But then, just as we wonder whether Sydney, poleaxed by the blackmail, is about to continue her job out of some kind of understandable yet real self-indulgence, we get a jolting and brilliant scene between her and her mother. The kind of scene I really wasn't expecting, but which plays out perfectly within the motivations of the people in the show. And those are the best moments of all for the unspoiled, I think, the moments when all the juvenile coy smiles become impotent in the face of someone enjoying the shock of unrevealed drama. Cos Irina tells Sydney that she should not stay in the CIA for her sake. The speech beginning 'You're too forgiving', and containing such nuggets as Irina accepting that she doesn't desrve a second chance, that she isn't Syd's real, emotional mother, (another nod towards Emily?), that even if Syd does stay on, Derevko won't speak to her, is beautiful, and complicated and right. It turns out later that Syd will have more compelling, altrustic reasons to reconsider her resignation, but for now, Irina's action is a selfless one, (watch her usually serene face crease like baking paper after Syd is too far away to know she isn't remaining strong), and for my money, in the circumstances, the right one. Irina isn't willing to ruin Syd's life a second time jsut because she's stuck in a cell and Kendall is playing power politics.

-To lighter things for a moment. The aquariam was spooky and atmospheric, but I wonder whether the Sark/Shark pun was deliberate here- he was certainly preying on the weakest fish in the Sea, and he certainly struts around in a kind of alpha male way throughout the teaser. Just flitted into my mind as apposite here.

-The dropping of Knot Theory into the conversation was interesting. I did a course in Knot Theory last year; it's a fascinating discpline, which, despite what Jack says, is acutally based upon physical knots themselves, although developing from the simplistic elements of such a construction into some pretty high powered group theory which has uses in a myriad of other disciplines. The entanglement with quantam magnetism here makes absolutely no sense at all, unfortunately. So as much as I enjoy the metaphor of O what a tangled knot we weave, it works there only; the maths falls down under closer observation. It doesn't quite have the depth of 'Supersymmetry', for example.

-Dixon and Marshall acts as flip-sides of a dime in this episode; Marshall revels in all the positives of his move into CIA, (just as Sydney predicted when she told Will about the (failed) attempt to inform him). The moment where he tells the CIA geeks how he spotted them is priceless. I like his attempt to be interested and polite to Kendall, with two 'ls' (quite possibly a reference to fans writing it as Kendal, or even Marshal, but what am I to know?). But while Marshall is living the high life, Dixon has all the negative angles of the deceit to think about. Sydney tries everything she knows, through truth, through persuasion, through rationalisation, to the point of "Your friendship was the only thing that kept me sane. You were my anchor", and yet it's still not quite enough. Marcus is suffering too; he has to tell his wife of his CIA involvement, and he gets the backlash he has just inflicted on Sydney. What is noticeable here, (and tidy, though perhaps becoming obvious in the next episode), is that Dixon is taken to task by his wife in exactly the way he does the same to his partner. He can't handle the lies, regardless of the fact they were acts of love, conceived out of the need for protection, and under the best intentions of the perpertrator. The key is, that like Tara in 'All the Way', Sydney and Dixon have made decisions for somebody in a relationship they didn't understand. It is the fact that Dixon (husband and wife) are unequal in the relationship which makes it hard to bear. But if Dixon is to understand whathis wife feels, then he's going to have to forgive Sydney, and this was a symmetry I found clever and heartfelt, as our big-hearted fall guy sits in the rain, thinking about disappointment and faithlessness.

-Sloane's lying as well, which is nothing spectacular. Except that this time it's for Emily, for whom he concocted his amazingly elaborate plan, (that we still don't know the finer details of), to keep in his life, as his prime love. Perhaps the Tuscan villa is already bought, but the conflict between Emily and Rambaldi will soon start to heat up, I predict.

-And before we get to the irresistable bank hold-up and Sloane's request to our heroine of a chauffeur, she saves a child. And starts to think about just what it would mean to resign from the CIA. Sydney must know that she's exceptional at her job, (it is her sharpness with Kendall that allows him to showcase her fighting her corner, wanting to do the job well, and leaves her feeling slightly embarassed), and that she's routinely saving lives. Can she square that with retiring to a life as the teacher who she envisioned her mother as being? Really?

Eventually it's not about duty to country, flag or boss. Not even about duty to parents. It's about duty to one's own spiritual capacity. The ability to be a better person.

And to wear skimpy disguises.

TCH