Once there was a way, to get back homeward,
Once there was a way, to get back home
Sleep pretty darling do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby
-"Lennon/" McCartney- 'Golden Slumbers'

4.11- 'The Road Home'

An inconsequential episode, in the bigger scheme of things. One can usually gauge the importance of the episode in the main arc of Season by the number of Sloane scenes, and since we don't see him at all in the second half of the episode, this is pretty much a stand-alone. However, the episode does suddenly pull on the regular viewer a rather interesting little tie-up of the three storylines at the end, and a nice moment of real connection, thematic and familial, between Jack and Sydney.

It's symptomatic that I have virtually no ntes for this episode whatsoever; my envelope is only one-third full.

-When we see the man cutting his own throat at the beginning, we are given a hint of what the episode's up to- it wants us to consider the price of espionage and double-dealing as a career. Introducing the man that Jack must later hunt down just by his water-freezing reputation, (that a man would rather slit his own throat than risk his boss's knowledge of his failure), the moment is quite brutal for network television, and the cut away at the vital moment may reduce the literal gore, but in making the viewer imagine the outcome, perhaps makes the act even more terrifying.

-The three plots in this episode are hermetically sealed after the necessary set-ups and before the final scene.

In Vaughn's plot-line, we get confirmation that Bill survived at least until the Falkland's War, but we're starting to worry whether the old lie, (that he died as a man of dignity in the late 70's), may almost be more comfortable than, to coin Jack's earlier-season phrase, 'the awful truth'. Just what kind of a man is Bill Vaughn? We want to believe he is a good man because his son is, but looking at Sydney's parents, we know that this is a shot in the dark. Also a nice little nuance in the Weiss/Vaughn relationship where Vaughn asks Eric if he's told Nadia and Weiss just looks at him, as if it to say: 'Doesn't male solidarity count for anything this day?'. I nodded along.

In Jack's plot-line, we're given an interesting perspective on what kind of a man Jack is. The plotting pulls out all the stops to make Jack's protege seem sympathetic, despite his all round bad angel-ness and his apparent betrayal of Jack. We see the charming wife, we hear of the child to come, and the man attempts to ingratiate himself to Jack. And we know, ultimately, that we're not getting any change out of these superficialities, (as Jack must, does and has for a while seen it), because in the interests of what is right, and what is for the greater good, he must put aside what is emotionally appealing or soft. All of which is thoughtful in itself, but given greater depth by

Sydney's storyline, in which she gets an unwanted Jar Jar Binks of a hanger-on, but the writers use him well to play off the idea of how Sydney's hardening, how turning herself into a copy of Jack, makes her look to someone completely unfamiliar with APO or anything else. This is almost a successful wool-over-eyes trick at this point of the season, because so much of it has been spent with people conversant in the language of spydom, that we've started to forget just how strange a lot of the hard-nosed, soft-handed decisions would seem to us, on a visceral level, if applied in our every day life.

For this reason, Sam is very effective. He uses his gun when directly threatened, but without any real skill, (this in turn goes to heighten the skill-levels of someone like Weiss or Nadia, which is a welcome by-product). He has second thoughts about Syd's goodness after seeing her doing the classically unpleasant and apparently effective act, (I suppose no-one I know would be able to confirm or deny this, which is the point of the episode, really), of jamming a bad guy's head between a car and its door, and repeatedly closing it. He thinks of his family first, and was looking for adventure when he came to Austria, but having found this kind is not sure he wants it.

A couple of lovely miscellaneous moments in the Sydney plot: before she sets out, with Marshall and Mitchell's rocket, we get the magnificently meta line: 'What is it with these guys and nightclubs?' Excellent question. And even the hardest, most disinterested of hearts, (read: me), is not going to have failed to be delighted by perhaps the most effervescently faux-Bondian of all Alias' gadgetry to date: the Evil Mini Helicopter of Doom. It raised what was really a rather prosaic action plot staple into a cracking conclusion. Also, because we kept getting the camera-eye view, the viewer really oddly started getting a sense of sympathy with the Evil Mini Helicopter Guy. Because when it said it had lost its target, I instinctively thought: alas, the Helicopter is having an existential crisis, would that it could find its target again. And then remembered it was trying to shoot Syd.

In the final moment, both Jack and Sydney have realised the lives that they have forfeited. Sydney, in the rather heavy-handed final scene with Sam where he says how difficult it must be to go round the world but never to be able to share details with people. This is a much less ocnvincing argument than in Season One with Will and Francie, since nowadays, all her friends and family appear to be in APO. On Jack's side, we get the realisation, (which, does he realise, so long has he been doing it?), that in needing to carry out the killing of his former colleague, he routinely denies himself the opportunity to connect, to see how life is going for other people. His genuine three-quarters-smile when Syd offers dinneris nicely performed, and strengthened by the simple eloquence of Michael Giacchino's closing piano chords, with classically full cadences.

I doubt you'd miss anything if you missed this episode, but it was a time-passer. My Alias reviews now go on hiatus while I'm home for Easter, but will return with a brief catch-up marathon towards the end of April, before returning to the weekly Thursday slot for the climax of the Season.

Thanks for reading.