Occasionally in a series, you feel a moment, where the character involved is just going about her daily life, is a gong; some kind of ancient warning to the immortal Gods that someone has just stepped that little too far into Hades; short-changed Cerberus, tripped over Persephone in Dis' fields, or tried to rescue Eurydice just one too many times. It's a disastrous moment, but as is most beautifully shown by Greek tragedy's personification and humanisation of the idea of hell and the Afterlife, it's just as liable to be brought on by the human foibles of someone trying to do good as it is by pre-planned, inexcusable evil. Sometimes bad things just befall a character, and miniscule mitakes grow to the height of tremendous blunder. In folklore it happens as well. Witness Jayne having a town named after him for some opportunistic bounty-hunting. Or, the possibly strategically wise general who instigated the battle of the Valley of Balaclava, still one hundred and fifty years one bemoaning Tennyson's immortalisation. The legacy of a decision that felt right can be dreadful. And by the end of these two episodes, Jack's reaction to his ex-wife's reappearance may enter the pantheon of decisions made in haste and without malice, but nevertheless ending in disaster.

2.3-'Cipher'

The cipher of the title is both literal and a metaphor for Irina at this point. What we see of her, her physical body and her thought-through mesmeric moments of conversation with Sydney and Vaughn leave us with the impression of a faultless, penitent woman. However, it is clear from what is already known that this is not the case. As a result of this, something that on the face of it looks like a list of Russian authors, ('Dostoyevsky. Nabokov. Tolstoy. Chekov'.) turns out to be the key to retrieving the map to the almost spiritually important Bible. Irina has had many attempts made to decode her, but ultimately no-one has yet found the key to her.

-Jack in this episode has yet to figure out the soul of psychiatry, which is to listen to people and allow them, through your own very presence, to heal themselves. He thinks that a psychiatrist is a problem solver, adept at understanding their charge and patronising ten steps to an easier future. This is why he is slightly confused when our lady immediately refuses to help him devise a strategy to deal with Sydney's apparent over-trust in Irina. He thinks that the best way to connect with someone is to solve the problems suggested by their stories to them. It's a very male failing: listen to the concern and then give an apparently objective answer to what is troubling them without taking into account the subjective nature of the storyteller. I do it all the time. Here, though, it's a matter of life or death, as Sydney continues to find out things from her mother that help her on missions and secure valuable resources for the CIA.

-Irina's scene with Sydney is compelling again. This time, it's the way that she relates a prescient concern of the CIA's to her daughter's childhood. The delight of watching a situation like Hannibal Lecter in 'The Silence of the Lambs', Angelus in 'Soulless' or Irina Derevko here is the way that we know, in reality, that they've had hours to form their strategies. And since they're wise and wily prisoners, they come up with really good responses. It's the blather of a busy person who barely has time to breathe between their sentences, and the Buddhist boddhisattva who spends his time catching fish and humming by the river. They are bound to have well-considered opinions, and an ability to express them. It is, after all, the focal point of their life. It is for this reason that the long and complicated chain of reasoning that Irina makes Sydney follow here is so entertaining to the audience. How will the chess grandmaster who has spent the last week in a cage with nothing to contemplate but the diagonalness of the bishop and the pitchfork action of the knight respond to the genius who has only five seconds to play their move?

-'Why do you still refer to her as Laura, her alias?' Are we supposed to tyake Jack's frailness here as a refusal to accept the necessary period of grief for his wife's death? Should we glean, maybe, that as much as Jack derides Irina's capacity for good, capacity to explain herself, he is in fact merely blotting out a backlash to a mourning process he never fully observed?

All of this happens before the teaser. This show has long teasers with much action. It's not just the intro of your average two minutes of network television. However, in the show's main section itself, even more happens...

-The reveal that Sydney was in fact a turkey is more than just the amusing and sweet you originally thought it was. Sydney asks her father if she was a Pilgrim? Or an Indian? And he replies, No, you were the turkey. The only turkey they spared. Sydney is in the position of neither being able to be full-bloodedly CIA, nor SD-6. Neither most faithful to Vaughn or to Will. Neither a daddy's girl nor her Mother's child. She is constantly caught between two simple possibilities, in that uncomfortable space reserved usually for the colour black, barbed wire and the epiphet 'No Man's Land'. She wasn't a turkey that was roasted- she's not merely a victim in this game, but a free agent, an element of chaos. What she will do with these equilibrised crises is part of the reason to watch further.

-Emily continues not to be convincingly dead. We get the seed box moment, another unhelpful marker to Sydney of her surrogate mother. Then, after Sloane has claimed that Emily's garden has withered and died, he walks out into the space to see rows of buds in full bloom. Are we only to see his grief as withering the flowers, or to expect something more sinister? Certainly the later phone call, composed mostly of static, suggests some kind of mischief is afoot.

-So does Sloane play Jack with his accusations that 'He's not a spiritual man' and his claim that he feels Emily everywhere, somehow hoping to tap in to the feeling that Bristow had about Laura, only for his inklings to be proved true and Irina to return in full technicolor? Or is it perhaps one of those even more painful moments, (to me at least), when Sloane opens up of his own free will, and allows father or daughter to exploit him? The plot thickens.

-'I don't want to lose the chance to explain myself one day'. A convincing explanation, though not one that can't be scuppered by the classic Missed Logic comment to such posturing: tell me the explanation now.

-Jack and Irina's scene is fun if limited: because at this moment they know more than Sydney, whose train of thought we are generally following in this series, and the writer doesn't want to give too much away about the cunning negative space surrounding so many aspects of their relationship. We do get the artless, tasty hook though, where Irina asserts, questioningly: "You haven't told her what you did to her after I disappeared, have you?"

-I know our heroine has a metaphorically and literally big heart, but if you dive into freezing water, it freezing back over in four seconds is the least of your concerns. You would die of the shock of the temperature change: notwithstanding the fact that you are wearing layers of heavy, (and hence impossible to swim in), clothing, which would almost instantaneously get sopping wet. It's the kind of telly logic you have to ignore.

A good episode, but its immediate subsequence was really good, it being:

2.4- 'Dead Drop'

This episode is all about Bristow's remaining issues about his wife and his betrayal, resulting in an ending that resonates more strongly than almost any other ending in this series to date. The episode again works well as a pair with its previous one- though 'Alias' is clearly serial, I wonder whether they consciously group episodes occasionally into two or three episode packages, increasing the power of the storytelling in putting them back to back. At the begining of 'Cipher' we have Jack asking our psychiatrist to devise a strategy- by the end of 'Dead Drop' he has masterminded one himself, which has worked beautifully, and which he feels deeply conflicted about.

-If Sloane doesn't have some inkling about Sydney's treachery by this stage, he's really slow on the issue, with a blindspot. Now this isn't an implausible explanation considering his apparent personal investment in Sydney's development, but he really does have an undebatable viewpoint on the corrosion of the music box: if Rambaldi, this mythos' indisputable genius, has managed successfully to preserve all other parts of his legacy, why would he go to all the effort of investing this inch of tundra with his symbol only for the cipher to drift away on time's eternal river.

-Will just about manages to succeed in keeping his secret about SD-6 from a plant put in his drug rehabilitation class to check for Sloane that he is not a threat. Whether his cracking after a while, his telling of his own story, ends up being forgotten merely because he's done so well so far, or whether on the contrary he has charmed the mole herself into protecting him, is left to the viewer. This viewer preferred the latter interpretation.

-Irina Derevko has a musical hook; every time we see her, strings come swelling up from out of her prison cell. Initially I thought it was a violin, but then I started to wonder whether it might be a viola. It has a deep tone for a higher string instrument, and does the job of putting across a feeling both unmistakably Russian and wonderfully epic, an interesting contrast ot he funny sub-techno music we have for Sydney's mission typically. Here she gets to summarise Vaughn's dilemma: 'How do you say thank you to the woman who killed your father?'. Vaughn's response is the classic block, 'You don't', and will work for him in his current situation. But it does the dual service of also indicating how difficult it is for Sydney to interact with this temptor.

-Almost thrown in as an after-thought is Dixon's discovery of Emily's signature at the bed and breakfast in California. This moment acts as your average cliffhanger for an episode, leaving us to ponder next week's resolution. Luckily, here we're given a centre to the episode that works better than your usual 'What happens next' conclusion.

-And the centre is Jack, who gets most of the best lines in this episode. Victor Garber does a better job here than I might have expected- I particularly enjoyed the moment he almost expresses genuine emotion and anger to his shrink, before pulling back from the moment, realising how much of himself he's flung into his speech, feeling faintly nauseous. He goes from trying to persuade Sydney in an informal meeting 'I've been watching you make the same mistakes I made with her', to pre-empting Vaughn's countermission to omit Irina's help. In the mean-time he interrogates Richter, hoping to avoid the necessity of going back to his old lover. All of this effort, to little express, leaves him deeply irked by the time he reaches his Time to Talk. When he's confronted by the question 'Is there any chance that all she wants if forgiveness?', he is inflamed, and loses as much control as he ever has in our company. Later on, he manages one of his most sincere moments- explaining that 'I'm afraid of losing my daughter'. Whether beyond this he's worried what Syd might think of him if she uncovers his secrets is idle speculation.

Finally we get the big denouement, as Jack rigs the house and lets both Kendall and Sydney believe they were wrong to attempt to extract information from 'the devil herself'. As a result of his sneakiness, we get two unbearable moments before the ends. Firstly, we are made to see the look of benign confusion (but what's it hiding) on Derevko's face as she's removed to a more secure location. But much more painfully, we're ripped apart when Jack, for the first time in a long old while, hugs Sydney. It's been worth the wait but how sad, (and dramatically perfect, kudos to the writers), that the first time Sydney needs that comfort, it is a comfort needed precisely because of the deceit practiced upon her by her father himself. Something significantly worse than any omission of fact has been before, because this time he's framed someone who was just establishing trust, just becoming useful again. This is perhaps done in Sydney's best interest, but for the first time, it is not merely blacking out windows in a house, but drawing a view of the outside on a four foot thick wall. He's not obscuring the truth, (something which can be overcome), but manipulating it.

It's one of those moments that, the viewer who has followed him down to hell knows for sure, he will live to regret.

TCH