Today was the day when I lost all restraint...

I got interested towards the end of the second episode, adn then got sucked into the end of Season vortex. This, it must be made absolutely clear first up, does not mean I thought the end of the Season was magnificent or surprisingly crafted or anything. I thought the finale, for example, was a bit leaden-footed and confusing, possibly sufferinf from the fact that Abrams didn't script it. However, I got caught up in the Sloane sweep, and the seeming final revelation of what Rambaldi was all about. I really shouldn't have fallen for the latter, which seems to be a confusing chimera which is always further away than you think it is.

3.17- 3.22; 'The Frame', 'Unveiled', 'Hourglass', 'Blood Ties', 'Legacy', 'Resurrection'

I have a lot of notes for all these bunged together, so I'm not going to expand on each one at great length, or I'll be here until Christmas. I do want to mention most of hte things I was thinking about though, but obviously since I've now seen the end of the Season, I'll lay off my convention of talking about each episode in isolation before the next one, and may skip between episodes at times.

17

This episode starts to explore what I was expecting in the one before it; the corruption of Senator Reed and the disbelief in his daughter being a traitor. Credit must be given to the writers for coming up with a plot twist which wasn't obvious; that Lauren's mother should be in on the operation. Must be a little grumpy with the director however, who lingers on Olivia for way too long in the first scene of her, making us wonder why such attention is being lavished upon her.

-As Hitler was obsessed with the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones, so Stalin is obsessed with Rambaldi. I supposed the point is that these men were looking around them for other examples of the exceptional, examples that they could use to consolidate their power. Though considering the monomaniacal tilt of the head and the gnashing of ego necessary to inherit their possession, it surprises me that these dictators should have any time left for geniuses other than themselves.

-I suspect we're supposed to see Sloane's request for the Iliad in the original Greek as a suggestion of his latest plan; he is to become the man inside the Greek Trojan horse, waiting to be rewarded for the other side's belief of their honour and dignity.

-Lauren and Vaughn break up. I can't stand the implication in this episode that Vaughn is a dog to be treated in a Pavlovian way. Hey, a father dying pulled him back to Alice last time, this time doing the same thing will have the same result. While I can imagine the manipulators Lauren and Sark thinking it, I can't believe Vaughn actually doing it.

-I like the fact that Marshall continues to give honest assessments of others' achievements, regardless of their affiliation, as when in this episode he calls Sloane's call on oceanic topography 'genius'. We are also given the assurance that Marshall is not as a result of this flimsy or morally corruptible, (as is often linked to the perceived immaturity arising from technological obsession), but instead 'actually quite likes working for the good guys'. And yes, that is understatement.

-I thought it was an interesting lead that never really went anywhere, (except to show Lauren's dunderheadedness, perhaps), that she in this episode claims 'I believe the cause I'm working for is just'. Yes, because Sark is the kind of man you can really believe in.

-I think the mother killing Senator Reed was a genuine 'Gah' moment, while also reinforcing that George's character is not entirely unredeemable- there are things she is uncomfortable with doing, as she keeps protesting to anyone who'll listen. As her tactic for self-preservation runs into more and more trouble with the CIA, it becomes clear that her desire for justification of her actions is more a distant dream than an achievable reality.

-'You remind me of your mother', says Bormani of Syd, thus raising the spectre of the character over much of the remainder of the Season. Though we assume the renegade Katya is carrying out Irina's orders, her complete lack of appearance, while other lead characters are popping up like next door neighbours all over the place, while inevitable, is annoying and unbalances some of the plot-lines.

-I don't really like Jennifer Garner's new fringe. I didn't like Sarah Michelle Gellar's similar one in Buffy's seventh Season either, just to underline my consistency, a crucial quality in this area, I'm sure you'll agree.

-Lauren does a good job attempting to hand in her letter of resignation, though it irks me that Dixon continues to be characterised as a man so good he can never imagine anyone else double crossing him. He always seems to defer to Jack when anything gets remotely twisty.

-Vaughn dithering at the end of the episode is unforgivably lilly-livered, by any standards, and when we see the high angle shot of Syd alone in her apartment, on the verge of tears, I felt I was being manipulated rather than confronted with any real pathos.

Another so-so episode end.

18

However, I thought Vaughn's character was presented a whole lot less infuriatingly in this episode, where he gives Sydney the vital line 'Do you think she's the mole, or do you just want her to be?' Like Jack when he says he has no reason to doubt Lauren's loyalty, Sydney is now getting the intuitive feeling of Lauren's evilness, like some kind of aura. This often seems to happen in Alias, when the audience starts feeling uncomfortable at someone's actions in totality, a character who hasn't seen half of our evidence starts doubting them themselves. It's good for sense of identification with the leads if occasionally mystifying in terms of the logic of the situation.

-Marshall actually uses my little phrase Pretty cool!!! when discussing the glasses which will take photographs. Top marks, sir. I liked Marshall through this Season end, thinking for once that his character managed to be both interesting and consistent whilst most of the others changed at th ebehest of whatever plot was dished up week by week.

-One of the key points in realising that Sloane's endgame is not with the CIA lies in his assertion in this episode that 'I was serving my country'. Back in Season One, he claimed not to feel as if he belonged to any specific country. While love can change a man, a bloke working in Zurich giving such a patriotic outburst doesn't tally with what we already know of him, and from my point of view this rumbled him.

-It didn't seem likely that anyone would go to Dover to bury their husband or father, but it all turned out to be a pretext anyway, so that was OK.

-I liked the scene between Jack and Vaughn where Bristow talks about the impulsive kiss Irina used to give her. It was a telling moment of emotional honesty. The crime was that the creators would then be so as obvious as to have Lauren repeat the exact same act, rather than an analagous one, at th eend of the episode. The ladies and gentlemen of the audience consider the sledgehammer not to be required in this instance, Mr Abrams.

A lot of the end of the episode runs on plot tension rather than character revelation, as Syd is on a mission, Vaughn tries to wangle falsehoods out of his wife, and we have Irina as a possible candidate to be The Passenger. One of the only good scenes in the second half is Jack and Sloane having a discussion where it becomes completely clear that Jack's reason for not saving Sloane from execution, from not bringing the work on The Trust to light, is the affair that went on between Irina and Arvin. This continues to be the only aspect where Jack, the wily old fox, is emotionally impaired in his ability to make Vulcan decisions on issues 19 and is only finally outfoxed when Sydney plays a Giles 'Faith, Hope and Trick' type game with her father, pretending she's found evidence of Sloane's innocence in order that he vow to save him from execution.

-The double twist that proceeds form this is one of the most satisfying moments of the show's twisty plotting this Season. I was starting to wonder whether the reason Sloane didn't die would have something to do with the capabilities of the Azkaban hourglass; that it could glide time back an hour or something. However, since we've never been shown explicitly that Rambaldi can do supernatural things, (rather than merely scientifically advanced stuff), the writers go for the simpler option of having Jack revive Sloane post-wine. It was a moment that I genuinely didn't see coming and thought was excellent. It's this moment that is primarily the reason why I consider this episode the best of the last bunch, although also counting are:

-The return of David Carradine, who shows wondrous stillness even suring the action scenes. I enjoyed his smackdown of the over-cocky Sark, though I thought his death was premature: I would like to have seen him back to figure out more Rambaldi mysteries before Season's end.

-You can't argue with the rather terse accusation to Vaughn 'Buy you're the one who married her'. Stop whining and get on with it, boy.

-Another twist I really hadn't envisaged 'The passenger in your sister'. This is neat, allowing the writers to finally wrap up the slow-burning myth that Sydney is Sloane's son, transporting many of her concerns over to a seemingly innocent victim, and adding a whole new dimension to the spy family.

-We flashback to 2.20, (which, by this stage, I think even the hardiest viewer might have forgotten had a massive cliffhanger), to show that the reason we had that dizzying pull-back in Nepal, and the reason why the world was to change at midnight on that evening, according to Rambaldi, is that that was the exact moment that Sloane realised that he had a daughter, and that his daughter was instrumental in solving Rambaldi's mysteries.

-The whole 'I want to protect my child' line here is particularly affecting, given the fact that Sydney and Jack have to believe that he may be speaking the truth- Sloane did love Emily after all. This makes his apparent sacrifice of Nadia, stopped only at the very last moment, all the more painful to watch. We, like the leads, were apparently the more deceived about Sloane's humanity.

-I enjoyed the use of Bartlett to sneak Vaughn into the house in Richmond. She shows she has uses after all, even if Arvin Sloane was a little out of her league.

-'Sloane deserves to die' says Jack, correctly. 'But not for this reason', says Sydney, correctly. Y'know, it's very like the Iraq war when you think about it. In Britain's case, many accept Saddam Hussein to be a dictator worthy of being deposed, (similarly with Robert Mugabe, the Tajikistani President, and George W Bush), but fewer believe he should have his country invaded on false pretences of violation.

-One of the most chilling things in the whole run of the show to date, I reckon, is the bit where Jack tells Sloane that Sloane brought Sydney into the CIA merely out of jealousy at what Irina and Jack had, and that if Jack ever finds Sloane's daughter, he will do the best to collect his vengeance on her life. This could be seen merely as an elaborate smokescreen to befuddle Sloane into believing he was going ot his Juliet death, and hence arousing no suspicions from Dixon, Reed et al. But it sets up an intriguing potential plot-line for next Season- seeing how far the determined Jack really would destroy the life of someone who has sinned only by association with her father.

-Dixon's prayer for Sloane's soul was really moving, given the vendetta the two have had to each other.

-Sloane's final speech is great, though what did you expect. I particularly like the way he starts from an incontrovertible fact: Many of you think this is as it should be, and uses it to weld an extraordinary indictment on them for this, suggesting they're killing someone merely for acting on love towards his daughter. It also adds weight to the falsification of the story, the twisted words.

20

Another Orci episode, and hence a goodun, though perhaps surpassed by its predecessor.

The teaser gives us the section where we find out more about Vaughn's father, that he was a follower of Rambaldi and that he removed Nadia fromthe Russian authorities in order that she could live a better life. It's interesting that the interceder in the lift tells Vaughn that Bill was 'the best man I ever knew'. Perhaps this is some kind of nod to the fact that sane, sensible people can trust in Rambaldi as well as obsessives who compromise all their other values. This revelation, however, certainly clashes with the spare, elegant picture that Vaughn weaved of him in 'Almost Thirty Years', and hence we feel a little of his disinclination to believe the revelation.

-Sloane seems to be a walking, mutable literary archetype in this episode. He starts off waking up after a fake sleep like Juliet. He then spends a lot of time haunting the men like Banquo in Macbeth. Later again, he turns up at their meeting, like a resurrection Jesus showing them the result of their actions on a good man. The effect of all this is to heighten the stakes when we find out he wasn't serving two masters, the Covenant and the CIA, but no master other than his own ambition.

-Of all the silliest pieces of science in the Season, I think the winner has to be the idea of 'remote encepalopathy', or, as Sydney amusingly simplifies it for the baffled audience, 'reading brain waves from space'. This is truly 50's B-movie territory.

-Lauren again shows her non-commital to the side of EVIL, when releasing Vaughn from further unnecessary beating at the hands of the, apparently genuinely psychotic, Julian Sark.

-We meet Syd's half-sister, and she's not a character we've already met. This was relieving for me since so many people have popped up in unexpected guises this year round that I'd had my fill. I did wonder briefly whether we might meet Alison Doren, who Will never killed and turns out to be Syd's sister stuck in Francie's body, but that must have been rejected as being slightly too weird even for 'Alias' and its interlinking families of spies.

-Weiss saves Vaughn. I think the two of them are becoming the relationship I'm most invested in in the show; if only for the sake of, 'Go on Weiss, reel the idiot in again with your amusing wordplay and puncturing of pomposity'. Obviously Sloane/Sloane is my next favourite.

-There's really not a lot of sisterly bonding here- Sydney is even shot down when she promises Sloane won't get his hands on Nadia again when she replies bitterly that he rescued and protected her. Jack's suggestion of not expecting Nadia to be a Platonic ideal plays out to the letter.

-It was thoughtful, in that exchange, to use Will's sister, a character only used briefly and superificially in the first Season, as a counterpoint to Syd as a supposed Einzelkind. I'm impressed by the continuity the show gives with small details. In this respect, I think it can be considered at least the equal of the Whedonverse, which is often much more haphazard.

-Of course 'Sloane betrayed' you, you morons. That's the whole point of the character! Mwahahaha!

-A whole new prophecy, (wedged in and a touch artificial) arrives with the prophecy 'The Passnger and the Chosen one shall battle, and none shall survive'. I suspect this is another important cog in Season Four's wheel, but who knows?

21

By this stage, I really wanted to see what Sloane's mad quest would lead him to, (the fact that we leave Don Quixote and his daughter Sancho Panza before they arrive really wound me up- there's no thematic or character reason to do this, it merely strings out the plot), and have Lauren, who has been hanging around immune in the corner of episodes, killed off or escape for good, rather than continue to buzz around like an annoying hornet.

-Nadia being brought up in an orphanage but becoming an Argentine agent anyway brings up the age-old question of nature and nurture and whether Sydney might have found her way to the CIA even without Sloane's intercession. Unfortunately, this idea is never really expanded upon in the maelstrom of the rest of the episode.

-In one episode, Rambaldi's endgame is explicitly mentioned, and in the next, Sloane's endgame is namechecked in the same phrase by Director Dixon. Since we never find out who Rambaldi is or was, I, until I see direct evidence to the contrary in the show, will continue to consider it is undoubtedly Sloane, just because the idea makes me so happy.

-The Abraham/Isaac raving of Sloane is definitely that of a not entirely sane man, and his glimmer of delight when Nadia claims she understands him, (only to, understandably, rebel completely), again shows the disturbing side of that most manipulative of Bible texts. "The Angel isn't coming", like "Of course, caveman wins", in 'The Hole in the World', is an excellent use of an earlier metaphor to heighten a dramatic moment.

-Spy-aunt! Isabella Rossellini does a good job here, particularly showcasing Jack's vulnerability, his eventual tiredness under the strain of such a difficult job, (sort of deputy-running a department under someone much younger who really knows you are the brains of the machine).

-I thought Nadia's story about how she would make herself deliberately undesirable as a child because she knew her father would come and rescue her was touching and organic, the only problem being I can't imagine her as being anything other than a little girl you'd want to spontaneously adopt regardless of her state. Those big, pleading eyes.

21/22

-Plot twist number 20,000: we find in the backstory that Katya only joined the army to help find Nadia, which adds a whole extra twist to her loyalties that we never fully get clarified by the end of the Season. While previous episode 22s have cleared up a lot of our questions and posed a whole raft more, this one seemed to leave loose ends hanging all over the place, which was more than a little unsatisfying.

-The nasty Chinese torture man returns; I was rather hoping he wouldn't, since in the pilot it made me really doubt the show, one where anyone that sadistic must of course be Asian. Here he's used to redress the balance, as Vaughn starts to lose the calm cleverness which was the thing that attracted me to his character in the first season for good. A substantial retooling needs to be undergone before we can see him recalibrated as someone you can really like- this Season his arc has been a disaster.

-There's a real puzzle as to whether it is most healthy to kill Lauren, such a scourge on Vaughn when he keeps not killing her out of mercy, or whether her being locked up indefinitely is the right way to go. I'm disturbed to report that the eventual killing of Lauren is so gratifying, brings at least one plot-line to the end so convincingly and finally, that the effect on the audience is to see Vaughn as being good and right to kill and wrap things up so he can get back to His Soul Mate. I find this a simple, nay simplistic, solution to a complex question, one on which neither Jack nor Syd were totally wrong.

-The big fight at the end of Episode 21 left me totally brain-addled, though if you're watching for pure action, I imagine it's pretty cool!!!

-One non-obvious parallel brought to attention by the dialogue is that of Sydney when she wanted Sloane dead at all costs compared to Vaughn wanting Lauren dead, and the parallel of Vaughn holding Sydney back and now Sydney holding Vaughn back. The fact that the conclusion rejects this parallel is another reason I think it's simplistic.

22

The first tracking shot in this episode keys us in that something unusual is happening, though I don't think the resolve on Syd's face made it that obvious she was Lauren until she started shooting people and stuff. By this stage, characters twisting 180 degrees when you think there's no organic reason has become second nature.

This is one of the weaker finales of a television show I've seen in a while- for the first half the same tired old plots continue in the same ways, and then at the end we get what I've already explained I find an annoying end to Lauren followed by the hook for the next Season which is unrelated to all that has gone before. In the midst of all this, Nadia and Sloane are back together but none of that important resolution is shown to us.

-We originally think the storyline for Vaughn and Lauren is going to be 'I hate you, but I love Sydney more', a powerful enough dramatic line. When we find out that it was Katya who was in league with Lauren, if we care, any intelligence evoked by that line disappears in a puff of smoke.

-I was interested as to whether when Jack claims 'I did have the chance, I just didn't take it', he was talking about the 1970's, or any point in Season Two. It wasn't made explicitly clear, and perhaps doesn't need to be for his point to hold.

-Was it not transcendent? Was it not divine? The high priest of Rambaldism continues to ensnare new hopefuls.

-I don't really no what we're supposed to gather from the two Nietzsche quotes bandied idly about here- 'God is dead' seems to be antithetical to Sloane, but is perhaps perfect for Sark, whereas 'Woman was God's second mistake' seems nothing more than a sleight aimed at Sark to make us think he's even more deplorable, that by this stage is surely unnecessary.

-The Syd/Lauren fight, the fight where Sydney has finally been worn down into physical violence by Lauren's duplicity, has definite resonances of Buffy and Faith duelling it out in 'Graduation Day', but with none of the intelligent conclusion of the Buffy/Faith dream in the closing part.

-We get the echo of that line, this time said with suicidal glee by Lauren: 'If you love her, you will put the gun down'. Once again it works, once again Lauren is made to realise her secondary-ness in Vaughn's heart. We're past caring much about her by this stage, but the triangel which promised so much subtlety and intrigue disappears under the darkness and tedium of one of its vertices. It needn't have been like this.

And thence to Wittenberg, for a revelation that is undoubtedly good for the show, if a bit of a curveball for the end of the Season; having little to do with the expected end scene I had in my head of Nadia and Sloane finally finding Rambaldi. I shall enjoy the crevace dug in Syd and Jack's relationship by his shady dealings as revealed here, and hopefully it can be used to create a much more interesting platform for the spy high-jinks than this Season. Because the Lauren/Sydney situation could have been great, but, as I suspected form that last shot of 'Full Disclosure' it was fumbled by the desire to make Lauren unambiguously evil. At the same time, much of the Season fell down around it, making it lumpy and confusing. Of course it had moments where the stability of the first two Seasons, the genius of its creator showed through, but I think all in all this is the least satisfying of the three Seasons to date.

Which is not to say that I don't have absurdly high hopes for the show when Jeff Bell and Drew Goddard take up the reigns to help 'fallen in love again' JJ Abrams.

It's a shame to conclude this Himalayan trek on quite such a downer, so let me say that there have been moments in Abrams' universe where I wouldn't have rather been anywhere else. The fact that these moments creep up to you unawares, and that you can go many episodes without feeling it all, demonstrates its gap in quality from the really magnificent shows on US television recently. But that's not to say this hasn't been a fun experience. Here's the final set of ratings. Until January...

The Two: 7
Succession: 6
Reunion: 5
A Missing Link: 7
Repercussions: 5
The Nemesis: 6
Prelude: 8
Breaking Point: 6
Conscious: 8
Remnants: 6
Full Disclosure: 9
Crossings: 3
After Six: 5
Blowback: 6
Facade: 4
Taken: 7
The Frame: 5
Unveiled: 5
Hourglass: 8
Blood Ties: 7
Legacy: 6
Resurrection: 6

Total rating:
135/220
By comparison
Season Two: 138
Season One: 131


I think the dream episode, the twist episode, and a couple of early promisers before Evil!Lauren remind me that this Season had a very good first half, which is what lifts it above the rule-setting Season despite its disappointing ending.

TCH