Strange how mutable targets are, how irresponsibly changing targets are. If I write one thousand words for one of these things, I don't htink twice about it. In fact, I'd consider it a bit short, probably. I've written more than 2000 words for an episode of Angel, (I think 'Home' clocks in at something like 2,300), and I probably wrote it in an hour or two, thought thoughts were coalescing before that. So I shouldn't be particularly pleased that I wrote 1200 words of a maths essay today. Yet I am, in a way. In the back of my mind nags the Equaliser Logic, the great leveller, that suggests I should finish the essay at least today before I get any satisfaction out of my achievement. But for the moment, Alias reviews, Lie groups lectures, Wind Orchestra.

If anyone wondered why I didn't write over the weekend, it was an unplanned reaction to the weekend being much fuller than I'd fully understood. I knew I'd pencilled in Saturday to meet some friends and to go to see Britten's War Requiem at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, and I swam as usual. I knew I was going ot spend the bulk of Sunday in Northampton at the National Concert Band Festival (our happy band got a laudable silver, though the spectre of the Gold winning band from two years ago hangs unmentioned through the new conductor's tenure). That combined with my geometry reading snaffled up all active non-sleeping time. I'd like to grind the 'Alias' ship home over the next nine days if at all possible, since I don't want it hanging into December and I think if I lose momentum I might stop altogether. So here's today's offerings.

3.5- 'Repercussions'

An episode that crawls its way up to average after a start so slow that you wounder whether you haven't accidentally loaded the previous episode and are going over old ground. A few decent twists in the latter stages, although since this was from one of my favourite writers on 'Alias', I expected a little more.

-Vaughn's illness is treated rather understatedly as a further wedge between Lauren and Sydney. I don't see any subtlety in the handling of the three's situation so far, which is a shame since it is so obviously a theme of the Season in the way that the crackly parent issues were for last Season. Lauren asking Sydney to be transferred is reasonable given the circumstance. Lauren backing off later is reasonable given the circumstance. Sydney shocked as Vaughn! kisses! Lauren! is a dreary episode ending- we know they're husband and wife, we know Sydney doesn't like the fact. If I wanted guessable, unresonant schmaltz I'd watch 'Home and Away'. This isn't 'Home and Away', is it...?

-Jack is getting dull as well, which is a shame. As much as his support for Sydney at the moment is entirely organic to the series and believable in the circumstance, it kills his purpose- to be a man in whom resolve wins out over human warmth. I can cope with him growing towards that, but at the moment he's stuck as a disappointing cipher on the periphery of the action.

-The Vaughn dream with Sydney is the one piece of original thinking in the episode. It convinces the audience that it isn't real, and then that it's Sydney's dream. The delight is the double twist-back when it turns out to be Vaughn's dream. It's not that the audience didn't expect this to be a dream; it's that we didn't expect it to be his dream. He, the married man. There does seem to be a sneaking One True Pair counter-melody going on from some executive producer somewhere about Vaughn adn Sydney, which annoys me. I don't want to be told that the two of them were meant for each other and Lauren is an untimely inconvenience and nothing more. Tell me about human bafflement and the confusion of living. Tell me of battles fought without knowledge of victory, without knowledge of sanctity. Otherwise, it's just cliche spooling out like toilet roll onto a deserted bathroom floor.

-A character from the Stock Characters Box in Alias is not surprising, because they devote most of their meetings to the meanders in the bend of the plot, trying to make them as unlikely as possible. What's needed is the Stock Character done with some gravity or grace. And that's Sloane. The trickster continues to shuffle with no regard for narrative footholds. Here he becomes a double agent, and, like Tom Bombadil, completely ignores plot considerations like CIA clearance and his lack of trustworthiness, because, after all, everyone wants a piece of his ability to incite anarchy in their opponents.

-Marshall wins all those card games, bless him. But does every geek have to hint that their High School was dull and unrewarding? Maybe I'm in a tiny minority, but I really enjoyed my Sixth Form despite my unorthodoxy. Maybe I was just lucky.

-Justin Theroux, we'll miss you. Good actor, well-created character. There's some stylistic intelligence in the camera following him as he prepares to shoot Jack. The convention would be that the reason we're following him rather than the regular character is that he knows more, that we're privy to his private decisions. That it's a mislead and Jack's about to shoot him dead is a clever trick, also playing gently on Jack's Give Away Nothing face.

-And we end with the Weiss, Vaughn, Lauren, Sydney four-hander, with the intense discomfort in all their interrelationships just below the surface. This is what I'll remember as the end of the episode, not the sappy post 'I left my jacket' nonsense.

3.6- 'The Nemesis'

Still a gentle episode by Alias standards, though maybe the big revelations are being saved for November sweeps.

-I did like the teaser here, which is well-observed character recaps in the Buffy style. So we come straight in on Sloane talking about Sydney and their bond, about how he's lost what he considered a friendship with Jack. Then we get the ice hockey scene with Weiss and Vaughn, (why is ice hockey so repeated? The frostiness? the violence?) where Weiss plays little brother, but the writer knows the cliche and exploits it very amusingly. Then we get a touch more Sark- I find his plot-line too mired in intricate details that I can't keep up with, but going with the short-hand, Sark is evil and untrustworthy has served me well so far. We're being made to think about th eidea of a nemesis here though. Syd as Sloane's. Syd as Lauren's. Syd as Vaughn's in a funny way. Syd as Sark's. In a clever way, the teaser reminds us that the title of the episode is singular. It's only Syd, the centre of the wheel. Everyone else is going after her. But she has no-one to fixate on so entirely until she meets

-Alison Doren. The Rambaldi stuff in this episode isn't really earnt. We don't see what anyone went through to get the formula or the device. We don't see how Alison manages to kill a dozen medics. Hopefully this will be resolved soon, because a plot-based show with convenient Scytheian holes this large in perhaps nothing at all. Unless you're draining pasta.

-Questions raised include, did Alison Doren experience the same memory loss type thing as Syd did in those three weeks she didn't remember? And therefore, are things she doesn't remember during that time to be of importance?

-Lauren's 'We need to go away' is bittersweet for Vaughn, because as much as he'd like to get away from the business of the CIA, this is exactly what Sydney spent so much time saying to him throughout Season Two, and the fact they never did led to her exhaustion and two year absence, and the advent of Lauren herself. Right now, Vaughn desperately wants to be in the most confusing, worst place of all; with both Lauren and Sydney.

-There's the odd feeling of an ensemble show in the middle of this episode somewhere- the focus isn't as much on Sydney as usual, which is entertaining if unnerving.

-The way we circle up and out through the lift shaft, (a similar camera movement to the one we saw on Vaughn's lifeless body in 3.4, and deliberate? Spiralling plots?), is pretty. Alison's killing has supplanted the whole in Syd's heart where she kept Francie's memory. It is only when she kills Alison that she can deal completely with Francie's death. She thinks she has done it here, but is mistaken.

-No-one can resist Marshall on the drums, but some resolution to the proposal would have been nice.

-Alison Doren has a classic Ethan Rayne moment, where she feels the need to 'stay about and gloat' at Sydney where in any rational situation she'd just kill her. I don't know if this 'Dr No' type thing has gone far enough beyond cliche to become acceptable again now, but I found it offputting as a heavy handed way to lever in a section about when, exactly, the real Francie died.

-Alison's a werewolf -Weiss. Good on you, child. Perhaps the only character still treating the farce with the right sense of incredulity.

-The scene between Sydney and Sloane works because Jennifer Garner ratchets up her Status Level to a full ten, and Ron Rifkin meets her there unflinchingly. It's unusual to see a scene in which each character is powerful but neither has an edge over the other, but that's the point of Sloane; he encapsulates precisely Sydney's capacity for deceit, which is why making him a double agent is a perfect twist to maximise his character's interest.

-Sloane did the gene therpy, (I don't think we knew that, did we?), and this is revealed during his mission, showing the continuing ambiguity over just which master he's working for. St Paul weren't all wrong when he said you can't serve two.

-Dixon gets a touch more character this week as he remembers about his wife's killing. It's an odd moment where you go back and check through your tax returns to check what he's saying is right. In the flurry of deaths at the end of the second Season, their interest started to diminish.

I think these reviews are more highly critical than my watching of them was- I'm still enjoying it, I just think it's starting to fall apart in my hands when I pick it up and examine it. Maybe Alias is one of those programmes that is for looking and not for touching.

TCH