This Season has taken a long, long time to get all its cogs lined up and to start to whirr, and although I give it credit for its lack of the Big Twist episode which were in themselves wonderful but weakened episodes around them in previous Seasons, (this Season seems to be a long, smooth arc), by the time everything started to come together in the second of these two episodes, I was quite ready to be told some answers. Intriguingly, it seems more or less everyone is developing nicely now; Marshall with his disobeying of Sloane, Nadia with her Katya plot-line, and will Dixon, as in Season One with Sydney, remember that it was Vaughn who shot him towards the Season finale, to amp up the tension, or was he really unconscious by the time Vaughn debalaclaved? Of course, as one would expect, Sydney, Jack and Sloane have some meaty character developments to deal with, leaving only the perpetually under-exposed Weiss to pasture, though even he had a semblance of a trust issue with Sydney in the latter episode. I leap ahead of myself again, though:

4.14- 'Nightingale'

So whereas the next episode begins with Vaughn actually shooting Dixon in the chest, only to flashback, this episode starts with an apparently plausible scene where Vaughn is visiting the star of his Father carved since he gave his life for his country, only to start scraping away and finding that there's something behind the whole facade, as we realise the disembodied voice doesn't quite fit anywhere and it seems all like a dream. Looking back over the whole of this arc now, I like the way that Vaughn's desire to meet his Father, and his belief that such an act was possible, slowly grew, and how easy it was, as a result, to follow him as he made slowly more horrible moral compromises until getting to the point where he could well have killed one of his closest colleagues. It's a nice touch that Vaughn and Dixon are sparring (literally, y'know, boxing), in this episode, only for the gloves to come off and the pistols to be drawn in the following instalment.

And although this isn't a very insistent or deliberate piece of directing, (as with the unspeakably elegant two Wesleys in late Season Five), the Vaughn we see in the mirror here is the deteriorated Vaughn, the one making rash decisions to get close to finding out about the thing that is most important to him. It would be dangerously obsessive if it wasn't so completely understandable.

Meantime, we find out that Jack and Sloane are in on Vaughn and Syd's little renegade project, and for the bulk of both these episodes, there's a classic Season One balance between Jack and Sloane outwitting the younger generation and vice versa. That uncomfortable equilibrium has always been one of the show's great strengths. Who is fooling whom? Who has the bonus 'm', which stands for manipulated?

Alias isn't very good at literary allusion, at best being heavy-handed and obvious with its moments of reference. But here it does extremely well when inside 'Through the Looking Glass' is the instruction, (recalling, to be really harsh, 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' but near enough), 'Inject me'. That bizarre resonance with the text, darkened by Alias' genre, is apposite and blackly comic. That it conjugates with the Die Hard treasure hunt of the episode is just gravy.

Watch Sloane's hidden delight as he tells Jack that though Mr Bristow may be happy with playing and manipulating his daughter, he would never do it to his. It's said in the bewitching tone of envy of Jack's professionalism, which makes it all the more brilliant and horrible. Score one for the Weasel, and not for the last time.

Elena Derevko, whose name was casually dropped and then promptly discarded sometime early in February sweeps, returns to be relevant to Jack and Sloane's plan. Given the delightful return of Isabella Rosselini in 'Pandora', one has to wonder if some beauteous trinity scene with Irina, Elena and Katya is being written as we meditate. I'd certainly like to see it.

Alias keeps up its success this Season in truly horrifying weapons and punishments. Goddard's burial of Syd alive in 'Tuesday' was really harrowing after a while, and here the floppy skin of the Nightingale weapon is similarly disquieting.

Though I realise that Marshall slows down the countdown while Syd is stuck in the room eventually, the length of time between the announcement of thirty and twenty seconds remaining, which occurs before Flinkman's handiwork, must be about two minutes, and is unusually implausible for Alias, which is usually exemplary in its noticing of such small details.

Marshall hugging Sloane had to be written, in the circumstances. Sloane's reaction is predictable but still amusing.

Though we later discover that Jack's worry is that he's been exposed to radiation, in the initial scene with Sloane we wonder if he's disappointed that Sydney's chosen to aid and abet Vaughn without coming clean to him. But any emotional vulnerability is quickly shovelled aside.

And we end on Marshall's secret, which I felt could have been extended for a little longer to see how Marshall and Jack would interact, but instead is concluded in

4.15- 'Pandora'

JR Orci strikes again, writing with Jeff Pinkner a cracking instalment here which really makes me anticipate the last seven episodes of the Season in a way that would have surprised me before this generally well-written run of four. It appears that rambling incessantly on about the next episode in my 'Nightingale' review, I've covered most of my points, so just a few brief words on this:

-There's a double quasi-impersonation going on in this episode. Firstly, Isabella Rossellini is allowed to play behind bars much like Lena Olin did in Season Two, and has that same ability to appear to be completely in control even when incarcerated that Irina did, albeit with, for me, a slightly less captivating face. Still, there's a definite resonance of Season Two with Sydney and Irina, which does the scene absolutely no harm. Then at the very end of the episode, Joel Gray delivers an absolutely dead-on impersonation, (or perhaps just variation on theme), of Ron Rifkin's Sloane in the last scene, leaving mouths to water at the prospect of more of him in future. As cjl has mentioned though, with Goddard, Bell, Doc, Ethan Rayne and Dreg writ large on these last four episodes, precisely which universe are we inhabiting?

-There's an element of fathers being a kind of destiny very much present in the interplay between Robbins and Vaughn, to the point where there appears to be the ring of truth hitting Vaughn when his accomplice explains that his father was a bad man, to leave his wife and children for 25 years and pretend to be dead. The success of the scene is that it perfectly prefigures and slots into place with the end of the episode, where it is revealed that Vaughn's inability to go rogue and leave the CIA himself implied that his father must be dead. The enemy wanted A implies B, but Vaughn got instead the contrapositive, not B implies not A. And if you didn't think there was symbolic logic on network television, think again.

-No-one is a single thing, says Sloane, in one of those aphorisms which sounds amazingly profound but when examined closely just shows how mutable he himself is. The look on his face as he tells Nadia that Irina loved her, however, is absolutely incredible. This man never ceases to amaze me with his acting ability.

-There's a neat concatenation of everyone's trouble as we find out that Sloane was responsible both for the renegade action going on with Vaughn, and for putting the death order on Sydney that was reputed to have come from Irina herself. He's getting himself into all sorts of dangerous hot water, the audience thinks to itself, before another Mr Sloane pops up and scatters all our careful notions.

And so up to date, just as the Season seems to be hitting full stride. I look forward to watching the end of the Season over the next six weeks.

TCH