Hello!

Wow, that was insincerely enthusiastic! In the vain of writing bits and pieces in brackets, I wonder what it would be like to write an entire post with exclamation marks! Pretty cool!!!

OK, I'm stopping now. We all know (ish) of 'Fool For Love', 'Once more, With Feeling', 'Angel', 'Lie To Me', 'Conversations with Dead People', 'Offspring' etc etc ad nauseam. Alias actually hasn't had as many Seasonal arc, big kick-offs at seventh up to date; I gave both 1.7 and 2.7 5 out of 10. This one, however, has all the trademarks of a Whedonesque number 7- not only is the episode good, but it also has that sense of mounting narrative, of things tumbling in cataclysmic confusion towards some kind of character melt-down or out and out civil war. Pretty cool!!!

3.7- 'Prelude'

This episode is written by J.R.Orci. I will admit to not noticing who writes the episodes usually. If its JJ Abrams, it goes up a notch in expectation because of his excellent 'Almost Thirty Years'/'The Enemy Walks In' turnaround from Season One to Season Two. I have a sneaking respect for John Eisendrath, and Orci and Kurtzmann have more training on the show than most others. But after this one, I checked back and noticed that the only other episode that JR Orci had written was the super 'Truth Takes Time', the best of the late Season Two episodes. So I have a new writer I'll be keeping tabs on, for surely they are excellent. Pretty cool!!!

Why is this episode any good? If the above is the overview, here are the annoying sub-clauses you find in those Fee Policy things people are always sending you to proof-check.

-We open straight on a montage prelude, before finding out that it's all Sydney's dream. This is unusual for Alias, a show with a good, solid grasp of reality, even if the events as they happen are tricking you later down the line. Here, the image Sydney sees is oddly similar to the statue on top of the grave in 'Prophecy Girl', but is notable enough that when we find out what it is later, we remember and feel pleased with ourselves. As a connection, it's pret[-cut for sanity purposes-].

-Also in Sydney's dream is the dream of finding wires invading her body, and then so much blood that you wonder if Bad Robot went to ABC and asked how many gallons, exactly, they could get away with it, trebled it, and then claimed they hadn't. I like programmes which push back the boundaries of family entertainment; I'm not sure how necessary this was, but it was at least memorable.

-The camera work in the teaser is frenetic; it's made very clear we're building towards something. The original something of many is Sloane's entry into the CIA. He's given the big build up, computers switched off and bag over head, and it's all worth it for the very, very long stare that he exchanges with Dixon, as they both meet face to face for the first time the man who killed his wife. The irony of the pattern being, (as I didn't notice at the time, but it occurred to me here), that Sloane didn't actually kill Dixon's wife, but was responsible, whereas Dixon really did kill Emily, but wasn't responsible in any wider sense.

-And so Sloane and Sydney are off jetsetting about together, which is a delightful happening and one made all the more complicated by the end of the next episode, about which more later. Here, Sydney's resentment is set to white hot, and Sloane's having a great time baiting it. He's never been one to be put off by intial or even continued mistrust- he'll always plug away until he has a better negotiating position. Here, he really wants to dance with Sydney, but he waits until he has an irresistable excuse before doing it. Electra would be spinning in her grave.

-Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, we get the B-plot of Vaughn and Lauren working together, hopefullly bringing Peres to find out who killed Lazarey. Unfortunately, it was Sydney who did, so Jack, getting nothing from Vaughn, has to do all the dirty work of capturing his colleagues and hanging the NSC's lead himself. In episodes where so much hangs on his resolve, his resolve face is comforting rather than ridiculous, as it looked at times in the over-gentle Dove soap warm up episodes of this Season. Luckily, this situation is pretty cool!!! [Evil Hand].

-Sloane's letter gives Sydney a reason to trust him that she is never going to take. In many ways, Sloane's game here is an exact parallel of Irina's last Season. We see him being built up, getting trust from more and more people, getting closer and closer to accidentally being powerful though officially being distrusted, (Sloane is more trusted by the authorities than Irina, which makes the whole thing that much more intriguing), before suddenly switching and galloping away to Evilsville. It's the delightful duplicity of the older characters in this show that oftentimes has it at its most compelling. I watch more for Irina or Sloane's motives than Sydney's or Vaughn's. At other times, I watch for Melissa George. Cos, she's, um, well, y'know. Pretty cool!!!

-I continue to be interested in the relationship between Jack and Vaughn, although I do hope they don't get interested in recurring characters and start giving carefully woven character arcs short shrift like they did last year. Over this patch, Vaughn starts pretty much from zero again with Jack. When Vaughn complains about having to safeguard his wife, Jack, late of Strangled a Guy for My Daughter fame, snaps back enticingly 'Perhaps now you understand the moral compromises you make when someone you love is in danger'. This is a genuinely excellent line. For it not only justifies, implicitly, Jack's action, (morally reprehensible though a rational audience still finds his means), but it also implies that Jack never believed Vaughn loved his daughter, and only that he might love Lauren. It derides the heartache of the Season, chopping it down under a ton of carefully disguised logic, dressed as emotion.

-This then bounces off the Sydney/Vaughn scene where Michael comes to the rather pat conclusion that 'Though everything's changed, some things don't'. This is a point where you have to ignore the dialogue and look at the plot for resonance. Vaughn's helping Syd escape to Rome, directly countermanding both professional and marital considerations. He does this to protect her life, but it is not at all clear from this that he still loves Sydney to the extent that it is comparable with Lauren, who he has just knowingly betrayed. The line captures absolutely none of the beautiful complexity of the moment.

-And if this wasn't about fathers and children before, (cf Jack on a mission, Lindsay as Lauren's bad father, Sloane as father to Sydney), a fourth non-patriotic, non-patriated character shows up, this time Sark, who lost his father to Sydney, and thus wants justice from Lauren. Resonance bells. They've been scant recently.

-Just when you thought it was a good episode, we get the clincher, as Dixon gets apparently shut down by bigwigs worried about Lindsay's White House connections, and takes it with compact, unperturbed politeness. Do not underestimate the determination of a Quiet Man. But if we had to have Marcus Dixon or Iain Duncan Smith as head of Britain, I know who I'd be voting for.

-Jennifer Garner foes some really good work as she gets to Rome and realises she's landed herself back in Julia Thorne's appartment. Did Sloane put her there deliberately, (considering the next episode, so he could save her?), or was it an unfortunate coincidence. We can see Sydney trying to work everything out as she notices that the flat has a replica of Rodin's 'The Thinker'. And this episode was certainly considering everything a little more carefully than this Season has to date. All in all, pretty cool!!!

3.8- 'Breaking Point

This is an episode that thinks it's very, very good, but actually could learn a thing or two about being clever instead of bombastic from its predecessor. We start off all fanfares and Special Episode lights; there's no teaser and the cuts in the first act are almost falling over themselves with forward momentum. We come up on the title sequence over Sydney's slow march to her cell, and no-one breathes a word until Daniel Attias, ('Angel' alum and Tim Minear device-stealer) has had his Directed By credit appear on the screen. What follows is very good, as long as you're happy with a plot which is basically 'Rescue Syd', and the fact that the fun of the episode is in the scrapes characters get into laying the groundwork for the plan, rather than the ultimately boring salvage operation itself.

-Civil War is joined as Dixon processes out of the office and Vaughn and Weiss look at Lindsay disbelieving when he claims that if they cooperate it needn't be nasty. He's back, the moron, and, unlike my prediction for his marginal intelligence, it appears he never did learn the crucial Axiom for the show; Sydney's the lead character, you don't cross her. He's back with torture and sneaky tactics, but since everyone else is going to be against him, he hasn't a hope in hell. The number '7' and the letter 'h', that should read...

-Lauren and Vaughn are symbolic of the rift inside the CIA. Broken organisation, breaking marriage, They can only reforge unity when the Lauren half agrees to support Sydney. NSC, read the thematic suggestions, and back off.

-We get the super-indulgent slo-mo of Jack looking at Lindsay. There's indulgent and there's distracting. (And then there's 'The Girl in Question', which transcends such considerations, before you ask, since it's pretty cool!!!)

-However, the directing in this episode is interesting. I liked the two sets of bars in the cell cutting up the supposed Campbell's face. We think it represents his insanity. We should have remembered the show's number one theme, Deceit. He's a plant, and Sydney (and I) fall for it. I got the strong impression that we were supposed to read Vaughn's father into him, whether as a misdirect or as a reveal, but I was glad to be surprised. In any case, the suggestion of a six year old son left behind does remind us of yet another father and child.

-Sloane and Vaughn work together. He's always, always got an ulterior motive, this man, this time working on Vaughn's love for his wife and tacitly overlooking the unresolved tension between Vaughn and Sydney. You can be sure it's deliberate. What's most interesting about Arvin in this episode is when he takes the bullet, and during his recovery claims to an unconvinced Jack 'You and Sydney are my absolution, my penance'. It's notable how the writers always give Ron Rifkin, all the Shakespeare stuff, (I don't know whether he does lots of theatre, or whether it's just how they see Sloane). We still don't believe his lies, but we really want to. Want to believe that he's trying to be friends with the Bristows. And dying to know just when he's next going to betray them.

-Lindsay's blackmail elevates him from unlikable to a genuine rogue within the system. Meanwhile, Lauren, at least temporarily, turns over a new leaf. The partnership is broken, for now.

-I liked the section where Sydney is told 'Your one major weakness is empathetic suffering'. It's so true, and it's also her greatest strength; her ability to understand people, their motivations and their pain, is what makes her so good at deceiving enemies and co-operating with friends. And sometimes the other way round in this topsy-turvy world. Sydney still isn't Jack, but her repeated fantasies of seeing Sloane killed this Season, along with similar threats to Lindsay, are, while understandable, threats that the difficulty of continuing to sanctify human life in such a position is growing on her. We think of Jack and of Peres hanging, unsuicidally, from the noose.

So the Season bursts into firework life, and you're already aware what I think of it. Pretty cool!!!

TCH!