And how very much I enjoyed Lena Olin in this episode. I knew she was good- I spent all last early November raving on about how well she can act and about how sheerly elegant the woman is. But she just explodes scenes. It's not for nothing that the rather insubstantial scene between Ron Rifkin and Lena Olin is one of my favourites on Alias. It's like watching Pete Sampras play Andre Agassi, or John MacEnroe against Bjorn Borg, Michael Atherton against Allan Donald. Once more, I pre-empt myseld.

4.20-4.21 'The Descent' and 'Search and Rescue'

Despite not having more than a glimpse of Irina, this episode, written and directed by Jeffrey Bell with all the confidence of someone who has plotted (co-plotted) an arc carefully and now is playing a part in bringing the vision to fruition. It's got lots of apposite and interesting lines, (if none of the iconic ones of which Alias is in short supply). It also shows a commendable grasp of previous episodes considering, regardless of how good a writer he is, it is Bell's first Season. The implied, (and explicit) back-references to small events have been rather meagre during the hired writers' period of this Season, regardless of the superb episodes.

'For you, anything' lies Elena Derevko to Nadia, and with Sydney in tow. Although I somehow suspect we may not get the Isabella Rossellini in the same scene as Olin and Braga, the idea of it delights me because all three are very talented actresses. The scenes between Olin, Maestro and Garner in the second half of this double-dose were wonderful.

Vaughn's proposal is set up to very explicitly reference the pilot episode of the series, where Danny rings up to talk to Jack in Jack's first lines of the show. Of course, at this point we know absolutely nothing about him, and wonder if it is necessary that he be so cold and distant. This is almost a reimagining of that scene, (were some of the lines taken word for word?) with two characters we have seen develop over 86 episodes, and as a result, it takes on significant added resonance. Of course, it doesn't take a diehard fan of the show to remember what happened to Danny, and if we're made to parallel the two so distinctly here, one wonders what the point would be of not killing Vaughn off. Of course, I often wonder that, but only out of personal prejudice. Also, as was being discussed by others yesterday, the only dramatic reason to have Sydney tell Vaughn to propose to him on the beach is if Syd is to lose Vaughn in the style of Buffy and Angel at the end of Season Two. Of course, while I'm making my weekly, weakly allusion to Whedonland, I ought to say that in many ways, the more apposite parallel is the lovely Xander/Anya scene in 'The Gift', just before an apparent apocalypse, where Anya tells Xander to give her the ring 'when the world doesn't end'. In a sense it's the same game- Anya doesn't want to think that Xander is only brave enough to become a fiance and never a husband, (as, tragically, is eventually true), and Sydney doesn't want her moment of specific love lasting to eternity defined by the stuttering of the helicopter's orisons. Horizons, she wants, I suppose, not just the fall from an aeroplane, Bond style, with no consequence.

-It's symptomatic of Nadia's unfortunate lack of fulfilment as a character from a position where she could have been corking that noone seriously wonders whether Nadia betrayed the CIA. Of course, there's the possibility that in the finale we find out she was working in like with Elena all along, in which case the Pie in my mouth will be apple and humbleness, but so much more could have been done with the scene if Nadia had been angstier in the rest of the Season- to the point where, say, Dixon and Vaughn, and Syd in her blackest moments, didn't completely trust her.

-And, just in case you were worrying about previous loose ends, two more are tied up here ultra-professionally. We see the Siena scene- the elegance of a stained-glass floor as an indicator that the metaphor of Rambaldi is all about organised, chaperoned belief, and that its basis is glass pane thin and yet alluring because of its beauty, is palpable. In the second half, Nadia reaps the inevitable consequences of telling Jack 'I want the truth'; the truth. Though this is a tiny moment plotwise, it's a good suggestion of Jack's character- if someone asks for something that could hurt them, he will tell them if he does not believe the outcome will be professionally detrimental, regardless of personal feelings. I was impressed they remembered to tie up the Bishop clause; I certainly would have forgotten.

-There's a wonderful ambiguity about Laszlo Drake telling Nadia 'It's like meeting the Virgin Mary'. That sort of half-child half-perfect-woman person. Do you tell her this as a patriarchal overseer or as a courter, a courtier? Is Nadia the Madonna or the courtesan? To be fair to Alias, despite Drake's simplification, there's never any sense that sex defines female characters adversely- what Nadia and Weiss get up to is none of our business. My grumbles come with the objectification, but I've been through this wood of words plenty.

-"She was like family", says Nadia of Elena. Nadia, watch the last four Seasons, and then explain how this is sufficient reason for surprise. The syllogism 'She was like family', 'Families do not betray us' therefore... has one rather obvious flaw.

-Dixon/Chase is reasonable enough, though the ghettoisation of race, ("Ooh, look, another black character. Hang on, that means Dixon can kiss her!") irks me a little.

-The best line of the episode is Katya's to Jack, which plays on several levels, (as they say in mediocre A-level English essays). 'If you pulled the trigger,' she says of his termination of 'Irina', 'part of you wanted to be manipulated'. Quite right, not only because of Jack's utter lack of manipulatibility since Irina's betrayal, but also because Jack already knows it himself- knows that it wasn't the only way if he had thought about it, and knows, before Irina tells him, with a punch and then less elegantly but more eloquently with words 'I would have found another way'.

-Can we trust her, says Syd of Katya? She's a Derevko, says Jack. End story. Good example of how a well-characterised bunch of people can lead to tasteful short-cuts in scriptwriting. It didn't need more.

-'I suppose I've been born again' Sloane again the fundamentalist. The edge of our not knowing whether Sloane is playing Elena or not is the oldest one in the book- is he doing it all for Nadia, (in previous Seasons, read Emily), or does, as the incredible breakdown in that 'Jacqueline' guarded warehouse suggests, belief still lurk and leak beneath?

-Jack's tendency to see too much of the old, credent him in Vaughn is played on fairly enough at the end of this episode, where he gives the French one his blessing, but it's a shame this is a theme dredged up from so much earlier in the Season and indeed the Lauren plot line of last Season, because the resonance loses its immediacy as a result.

-The Marshall interruption of Vaughn's first attempt at a proposal is too cliche. Don't have the bumbling bloke do it. Particularly as we credit Marshall with no intelligence as a result, since he already knows that Vaughn's going to propose after Vaughn is exasperated with him earlier, and they are at the moment he intrudes standing together with their hands in each others' palms.

-Though it devalues Syd and Vaughn's intelligence, (even by their fairly shaky standards this Season), the 'roughness' scene is an instant classic. Yes, it makes no sense that they wouldn't know they had comms on. No, it doesn't matter.

-One of the interesting questions of the second Season which has been dropped until it faintly reappears here- does Sydney, when she is personally involved in a mission, tend to take her torturing of people in the firing line that inch further than she should? It reminds me a little of Hamlet declaring Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are 'not near my conscience' and that it's to be expected if they come between 'such fell and mighty opposites [approx]'.

-If the trick where a 2D rendering of distance discounts altitude and confuses people is brought up one more time I'm going to shoot someone. How many times has a tracking device been put into a sewer system, or someone gone underground? Insulting to the viewer.

-Lena Olin's sudden recognition of Nadia's identity, all done wordlessly with her eyes, but mostly her mouth, which she acts with as well as anyone I've ever watched, is stunning and beautiful.

-I started wondering other than in terms of plot mechanics, why such a large section of the second episode is spent in an aeroplane, and came to the conclusion that it must be because everything's up in the air.

-I like Jack's line to Irina about Nadia: 'She's exceptional'. It's giving and unnecessary and not relevant to him in itself, and it suggests (does it, or am I being suckered?) that his vow to Sloane that he'd do to Nadia what Sloane did to Sydney, (selenak's suggestion that Jack seduce Nadia never came to fruition, predictably though disappointingly), may have been idle threatage.

-Michael Vartan gets some of the most truly awful lines of tawdry, lovey-dovey nonsense I've ever heard in the scene where he proposes to Sydney. It's gut-wrenchingly bad. The best way to describe it is: like a George Lucas romance scene.

And there we have it, still heading for the best finale since the first Season, and possibly, depending on next week, of all.

TCH