The words slaughtered by Danny as he proposed to Sydney in the first episode are oddly relevant to this Season and these two episodes, in which we get the big pull out all stops show followed by something almost as lackluustre as last year's Ethan Hawke instalment. It makes me realise yet another thing I valued about the Whedonverse: even after an absolutely excellent episode, it was unusual there'd be real dross following it. 'Innocence' had 'Phases'. 'The Wish' had 'Amends'. 'The Prom' had 'Graduation Day'. 'The Body' had 'Forever'. Twice now, in the episode following the big twist for the Season, Alias has delivered an apology for an episode with the cheating inference: Yeah, but you enjoyed last weeks. Not good enough.

Any how, I'll grumble about the first episode of the second half of the Season in a minute. The first half ends in style.

3.11- 'Full Disclosure'

And that's basically what we get through the first three acts, as vast swathes of backstory and infill are completed with breathtaking ease and assurance. It's the kind of thing that makes you remember how talented some of these TV people are, no matter how much we bad mouth them. There's not one mis-step I found in the explanation, and the number of small details brought in from things we'd half forgotten is flabbergasting.

The master-stroke, though, is the 'Wuthering Heights' way it's all wrapped up. Up in the air, part dream, part nightmare, floating forward with neither foot firmly on the ground, the story is narrated by Sydney, to a past Kendall. This double degree of alienation from the actual events, just like the narrator listening to the local overhearing gossip in Emily Bronte's masterpiece, gives the episode that spooky Campfire tales edge. It's also nice to see Kendall back. He's an interesting man in the sense that he appears to have no ulterior motive, to be well-adjusted and merely good at his job. It is only when we compare him to others like him, (Sloane, Jack, Lindsey) we start to see how much his firm but assured presence is impressive.

This is an episode where it's difficult to review in any other way than cataloguing what's revealed, so I revert to it.

-The start's a little slow as Sydney noses around a house and then is poison darted. It has to be said that although the idea's perfectly plausible in isolation, the number of times one person has tried to shoot Sydney and she's avoided it makes it a little unlikely that Special Research would catch her with such ease. But it's necessary for the super episode structure, so I forgive them.

-Kendall explains that the reason he didn't tell Sydney of her plight, possibly the only reason she'll accept from him, is that she specifically asked him not to. This, however, brings up a raft more questions, which Kendall proceeds to answer in an excellently structured fashion. I think he was up late the night before planning.

-He starts with headline that we saw in 'The Telling', that Sydney died, and then backs gently away. He continues throughout his relation to make assertions that seem on the face of it to mean one thing but are revealed to mean another.

-Lazarey was behind Alison Doren, we find out, and also that they took pulp from her teeth so that the CIA believed it was genuinely Syd's body in her burning house. We think he's evil, but there's more to come.

-We are introduced to Oleg Matashzy, who attempted to wear Sydney down into Julia Thorne by slow degrees, but failed, and is the disturbing presence in the first episode of the Season. It's a credit to Abrams that a assumed his identity would be sorted in a couple of episodes initially, and then, like our heroine, forgot all about him until ten episodes later. Another query ticked off the list.

-A plot strand from Season Two that never went as far as I expected to is brought in; Jack's training of his daughter to withstand the slow torture, and Sydney's consequent continuing possession of her senses despite her treatment. This makes the twist where an off-screen Quentin Tarantino (or Cole, I should say), tells her to kill the man a little rougher edged; Sydney knew who she was an dwhat she was doing, but had no other choice. This is very reminiscent of her stabbing of Vaughn earlier in the Season; a necessary pain to avoid ultimate destruction, and fits together very well in the Season; Sydney tending to behave more like her father, Means to an End man, than Vaughn, the Easiest Path guy.

-Sydney sees Vaughn and Lauren in the middle of her two year cavity, and this may be why she sees Lauren in her dream memory despite her theoretically being absent. Either way, it must have been early in the two's relationship, and there's a whole disconcerting Jack/Irina Snowman/Sydney angle played out here, which will give a lot of mileage to Vaughn and Jack's relationship if and when th eyounger man is betrayed.

-It's deeply ironic that a year after finishing as a double agent, ostensibly for good, Sydney Bristow is a double agent again, this time even with her alternative name of Julia Thorne.

-Lazarey is revealed to be a Rambaldi disciple like Sloane. This adds an extra layer of resonance to Sark, another son of someone obsessed with the seer, like Syd with both Irina and Sloane, her surrogate father.

-One of those exquisite unlingered-on moments that reward the long time viewer:
Syd: I've never heard of Project Black Hole
Kendall: [with swelling professional pride nearly checked]
Thank you.

Lovely writing.

-Sydney is The Chosen One? Does that mean she alone will fight the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness?

-There's a whole 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' thing going on, which I'd usually use as an excuse to grumble on about how that film left me as bored the last Anthony Minghella film, but since here it's used quietly and quickly, I'll ease off. I will mention briefly that another loose end is tied up as we find out about Lazarey's hand.

-And it turns out that Sloane's envelope with co-ordinates led her to do the thing she desperately tried to make herself avoid before her amnesia: to find the Rambaldi cube. But did Sloane know, or was he, for once, merely a pawn of the Covenant?

-I think taking somebody's eggs to fertilise with a random man's DNA is more or less as much of a violation as you can get really. Sydney's revenge is satisfying but still painful. It's noticeable that the show uses the motif of frames in a sacred place again, much like the liquidation device of last Season. The idea being maybe, that Rambaldi, the enlightened seemed in Renaissance times like some kind of devil with his ingenuity, and perhaps still does.

-The episode then gains top marks for, on top of all else, adding in no fewer than three interesting character moments before the screen reverts to the three vowels and two consonants.

1) Marshall overcomes his fear of insubordination to help Sydney, and Syd can't resist blurting out 'I love you, Marshall'. Of course she does; he is her geeky side.

2) Dixon explains that he had to withhold Kendall's story from her for months- just like Sydney never told Dixon about SD-6. It's an elegant inversion which is not overplayed, and could be the whole twist of a lesser episode.

3) Evil Lauren. I'm annoyed by this. It means the Vaughn/Syd/Lauren triangle has been sapped of its original interesting nuance, as we revert to merely booing the 'English' woman.

But last ten seconds a side, compelling television.

3.12- 'Crossings'

And this is pretty hopeless. Not completely hopeless, but it has few things working for it. Let me start with the gripes.

-Alias has now officially traken the world record for gratuitous timeframe manipulation. I love timeframe manipulation, but this was a howler of a bad one. It left us on a cliffhanger under utterly false pretences, and didn't give even a smidgen of a reason for its own existence except to heighten the minimal tension that the story of Vaughn and Sydney in itself failed to deliver. Awful.

-There's no point amping up Vaughn's 'I only ever loved you Syd' plot-line now that we know Lauren is evil and manipulating Vaughn, (it may be me being naive about the twistiness of course!) But as it stands, it comes off as woefully contrived; Vaughn absolved of cheating on his wife because his wife is, after all, evil.

Most of the good stuff comes before the end of the teaser, which is never a good sign.

-We're left with the impression at the end of the teaser that Vaughn and Sydney are about to do something devilishly clever to get out of being executed. But no, they're just lucky.

-Lauren's trying to patch up her relationship with Sydney, even as Vaughn continues with Jack's advice to be cruel. This would have opened up an interesting dynamic if Lauren was merely an NSC agent.

-Sark, please, please don't say 'a [Dan] Rather large de-TAIL'. It drives me insane. Still the least interesting, illest fitting regular in the show's history.

-Much more intelligently and perceptively than all the other plot-lines, we have the section where Jack doesn't have to actually kill Sloane to lose his trust. This was a clever B-plot; Katya acts as God to Jack's Abram and Sloane's Isaac- only to withdraw the sacrificial lamb from the slaughter at the last moment.

-Isabella Rossellini does nicely in a role where she's really not an Irina clone, which is good. I liked the two kisses at the end- one for Irina and one herself, we assume. Jack seems utterly baffled.

-And meanwhile, Vaughn finds out that Sydney slept with Will, which seems totally bizarre as a full disclosure. Maybe it's to pad out the utterly negligible plot-line that Sydney and Vaughn have to deal with here.

So one good, one bad. The Season continues to hobble on its one good leg.

TCH