What about the pre-midnight section of the day? The fifteen hours before you stay up half the night and allow yourself no sleep? Oh well, talking to a past self is never successful really. Plus, I actually have some genuine excuses today. Concert (Nigel Hess is a genius). Actually did some cladistics work, which is good because it was starting to look like it was on the Indefinite Postponement shelf of my brain. A few hours of lectures. Washing. Banking some cheques. Had to actually watch the episodes first. Yes, I haven't been coasting. I just had seventeen hours worth of stuff to do today. Hopefully I'll have nearer ten tomorrow, and then I can take an afternoon nap. The thing that daydreams are made of. I was particularly thinking this while almost dropping off to sleep in my Lie Groups lecture about the exponential group of a Lie algebra. Just because something's complex, doesn't automatically make it interesting, more's the pity.

2.18- 'Truth Takes Time'

That seemed random, but I managed to wend my way, (wend is so full of Anglo-Saxon goodness, I reckon), to a point of some kind. Just because 'Alias' has a complicated plot, doesn't automatically mean it has a resonant one. And just because Sloane has a complicated existence, doesn't mean it's a satisfying one. These are two of the central points addressed in this episode. The first one in a round about way, by example. Big and important stuff happens in this episode, but the reason why it's in the top five episodes of the show to date is because it is resonant. Sloane has always seemed to enjoy his mazy mind, (not labyrinthine, a labyrinth has only one solution, and no dead ends), but it turns out that the complexity is all outweighed by the minimalistic, gigantic despair he feels over losing his wife. Simple emotion, but that's what matters.

(It should be made clear at this point, that I'm not saying complex things can't be important and interesting. I'm not promulgating the idea that we all go back to the Passionate Shepherd solution and live out a simplistic idyll. It's just that Byzantine architecture, for all its beauty, can still be flattened by the same earthquake that knocks down the little pig's house of straw).

-I say again, I'm a sucker for timeframe manipulation, for calling into question whether a beginning is an end, for taking T S Eliot's Quartet musing at face value and starting from the conclusion. So when we see Sydney chase her mother, shoot at her, and then come to see a dead body with crying eyes, the narrative tension is built up. We know what's happened, but not the details of it. But we want to know. The glory of the Twist, Alias' greatest accomplishment, its mastered dance [let's twist again...], is that it reveals a depth we never saw at the beginning. We aren't merely tricked into seeing Irina dying and Sydney grieving when it should be Emily. Much more importantly, we're told the truth at the beginning. We're told that Sydney grieves for her mother. And she does. It's just that she grieves for her emotional rather than physical mother. For Emily not Irina.

-I was not a fan of Jack having implanted the passive tracking device, because it dethrones the pathos of the ending of the previous episode. The fact that Kendall has been overlooked for operational control of the Retrieve Irina mission, and Jack has been given it, though, is delightful. We see lots of scenes of the two dressed up in antlers, butting into each other and trying to subjugate the other male ego.

-Sydney returns to the empty cell of her mother, and is greeted by emptiness of betrayal, but also Vaughn, telling her that 'No-one should have to hunt down their own mother'. Only a couple of minutes earlier, in a really nice moment, Dixon opines that 'No-one can be blamed for trusting their mother'. I love it when shows use language neatly like this. Not only are both characters shown to care for Sydney, but we also see their psyche in the different thoughts they have about her and Derevko. Dixon is all about trust, about faithfulness and its essential goodness. Vaughn is about duty, and lines that should not be crossed. The lines that his father talked about in his note-book, but never voiced to the CIA. The lines that he deals with a little more proactively.

-And so, inevitably to Sloane, although to be fair this episode really is about him for once, (it's a great credit to the writer that he services so many other characters so well while writing a Sloane episode, since Sloane's mostly in isolation and can't interact with them). I've been waiting ages for Lena Olin and Ron Rifkin to act at each other, and in their very first lengthy scene, we get an absolutely delicious 'Gah!' moment. Irina Derevko becomes the first person on the series ever to call Sloane on his facade of the noble, misunderstood man. When he talks about his love for Sydney, Irina demolishes him. Tells him that she sees through his act of compassion and mercy to lesser mortals. And it's really beautiful. I think the way that Sloane powerlessly, but with the hope of wresting control tells Irina that she needs some rest, for once fundamentally wrongfooted, is what the whole show was made for.

-If Sloane's supposed patrician side is just a front, how about his husbandry? The whole episode is a meditation on the issue. We start with the suggestion he's selling everything to Derevko and really about to live in Tuscany unencumbered by the other world. Then the Love Triangle kicks in, and Sloane's utter obsession with Rambaldi starts to lure him away from Emily again. To the point where she betrays him, and, as a result, ends up dead. Even in a world where the person you trusted and learn for certain is horrible is the person you betray, you still get your karmic retribution for playing someone. Sloane's sphere tends to work like that. In the mean time, he babbles inconsequent but lovely phrases like 'What I'm pursuing is truth', which has corners and surfaces of truth, but is shaded by all the lies he must tell his wife.

-The Berlin action sequence is excellent because we've got about eight characters either there or back at the CIA weighing in, and each appears to have a slightly different motivation. Sloane, Sark and Irina are not th emost united triumvirate. Sydney and Vaughn see eye to shoulder half the time. Jack and Kendall are still deciding the primacy of Yosemite. Irina eventually, it seems, saves Sydney from death- something that Marshall in full Tomb Raider mode can't compute- an act of love in a two-player adversarial game.

-There are hooks of good dialogue in this episode which are missing from many of the previous ones. Emily says 'Arvin was my tether'. Is it just me, or is this a much more economical, spare and fragile way than 'kite-string'?

-Emily's situation, which Sydney calls impossible, is compelling here; does she betray a man who loves her, because he is the perpetrator of so many bad acts. Does she turn in him without compassion? She demands the State's mercy, bartering that he must not get the death penalty. Then when it becomes a completely different scenario, she can't follow through with the hidden wire, and Sloane instantly forgives her, making her fall in love again. It's a hard life being married to a man for whom you can understand the simplicity of his love for you, but not the complexity of his business. It's only human to except the Love as the cornerstone of his personality. The show makes the question of which he ultimately loves more, Rambaldi or Emily, the abiding question of the character. But the relationship with Rambaldi is so complex that no-one can imagine how deeply it stretches under the man at a glance at the scrub on his face, seemingly ephemeral stubble.

-In the twice-shown scene, does Syd shoot Irina to wound only, as Irina does Syd in 2.1? The suggestion from the ear-rings is certainly so; We hear again Irina's non-explanation-explanation; 'Truth Takes Time'. Thematically it fits.

-And it's Dixon, the reluctant soldier, who eventually shoots down Emily. There'll be hell to pay, and the Devil take the hindmost and anyone else he can get his water-pouring hands on.

Great episode. Really complicated denouements made resonant by the simple question with the elusive answer: 'Who is Sydney's mother?'

2.19- 'Endgame'

This one, interesting, but not nearly so good.

-Christian Slater's back again, and working on encryption. He really is the multi-purpose mathematician nowadays. Since Sloane originally went to the effort of finding the world's premier knot theorist, wouldn't it be stretching to entreat Caplan to solve a decoding problem that is a totally alien discipline of mathematics to his specialisation? Not that he wouldn't be skilled at it, he just wouldn't know the jinks an expert would.

The parallels in this episode, between the Caplans and the Bristows, are hammer-heavy. Though they clearly work to give the story some subtlety: (is Jack's second betrayal blinding him? No. Is Syd's judgement unsound because of feminine wiles of Russian spies? Also no), the parallel perhaps could have done with working slightly more behind the scenes. When Jack is confronted by the fact that 'She is not Irina Derevko', (a fact he'll learn in his own, cruel way later, by claiming she is and that she doesn't care about her children), we have to end any hope that the characters are acting out shadows of their own past lives, rather than consciously examining and developing them. I prefer the former, though I know many would plump for the latter.

-Sloane spends much of this episode railing against cruel fate, and decides in the end that the only thing to do is to kill the gunman on the grassy knoll. Who is Dixon. If anyone doesn't deserve a personal vendetta from Sloane, he doesn't, having served him so well and faithfully only to find out he had been doing so under false pretences. I like to see the moment when he gets out of the car, rather than just a cheesy quirk of fate to end the episode on, as a moment when Dixon's own essential goodness saves him- I want to think that when he said 'Oh and by the way,' to Vaughn and Syd, he was going to say something charming about their relationship. Evil Francie's bomb doesn't work, and the Bad Man fails via the nature of his badness. I don't think Alias is at all morality play, but on this occasion, I think Dixon has earnt all my scrabbling around to say that he deserves life.

-Cos of the scene where his wife tells him she has understood his actions now. That she knew who Dixon was all along, she just didn't know what he did. When Diane says she will support his husband whatever his decision, and we cut to that gigantic, creased shirt of a face, and Marcus almost loses it, we can't help but be delighted in a character who, though intensely human, enough to be cut to the quick by perceived betrayals by Syd, is essentially configured as a Good Man.

-Mrs Caplan lives in Irina's cell, a nice bit of legerdemain in plotting that could have done enough to outline the parallel without the later ramming.

-Not that it appears to be likely to happen now, but I wonder what Jack's 'action that you will regret' that he threatens Vaughn with would have been. Considering the usual tendency of hypothetical points made by characters to become actual situations, I suspect we just might see.

-I love the whole drawer thing in this episode, the clincher being Weiss' refusal to give Vaughn his virtual drawer when they share a cell.

-Sydney's saving of Caplan becomes that bit more complicated when it turns out he wasn't a civilian after all. We seem to have almost arrived at Season Seven Sunnydale by now in Alias; anyone we're interested in knows at least part of the secret of the intelligence agency already.

-Sark snippet; suggestion of lost childhood, more slightly amorphous fuel for the fire that Sark is a (half-)brother to Sydney. As with Sloane actually being Syd's biological father, these becoming facts would be interesting only for their fall-out, not for the revelation itself, which would be slightly cloying, so I'll continue to ignore it in these reviews from now on unless we're baited rather more explicitly. Here, we're left with the truism: 'What I want is what I never had'. Oh, and it's prem-ature David, not pre-mature. Honestly, if you want an English character, hire an Englishman, (see Tony Head), or get them to get their accents absolutely spot on. Otherwise it infuriates me.

If the last one was Gah, this was Myuh. And so to the end of the Season, this time tomorrow.

TCH