Hello everyone. A Red Admiral just flew across my path, left to right, on my way back from lunch. I don't know if it's that I don't notice these small things when I'm in exam mode, or if I just ignore them, but it was a wonderful moment.

In the same way, in the last three seconds of the Alias Season finale, a car comes across from left to right, hoping to cross the path of Syd and Vaughn as they head through Santa Barbara and towards the connubial beach. Unfortunately, unlike a butterfly, a big jeep type thing can't swing with controlled curvature and tempered torsion out of the way of a big lumbering thing like me or Syd and Vaughn's car and, this being a left hand drive car, (as you'd expect of course), it looks like the end of Vaughn as we know him. Which appears to be the end of Vaughn As We Know Him, Mark 2, after a revelation which hit Syd with the force of a car crash a couple of seconds earlier. "For a start, my name's not Michael Vaughn...". Well, yeah, we all knew that. That's the name of the English cricket captain. But hang on, you mean? What?

And blackout.

This episode is a re-imagining of 'Almost Thirty Years'. Unlike Abrams' masterpiece, however, there are not revelations for every character in this episode alongside a dizzying action drama plot. There's just an action drama plot. The plot points are in themselves tasty because of the character study episodes we've already had in this Season bring a whole heap of ideas into what is merely the shot of a gun, the twist of a knife or an expression which could be meditation or could be prayer. But it's not as good a finale all in all. It is, however, better than both the last two finales, which were unsatisfying because they weren't an organic climax to the previous 21. This one is, and then, with deference to Alias' Type 1 Episode Structure, does the corkscrew twist into the last two minutes. The return of the classic Alias Cliffhanger as Rhetorical Question, which, as I'd been primed by watching the whole of Season One, I really enjoyed.

We'll come back to that at the end, but let's start with the quotidian apocalypse of the first nine-tenths of the episode.

4.22- 'Before the Flood'

In 'Almost Thirty Years', the great flood, the purging away of all of the sin associated by the Mueller device, which floods the world for forty days, forty nights, and the rest of the season hiatus, was a metaphor for Syd's imminent meeting with her Mother. Here it's a metaphor for Syd's imminent first meeting with the cipher formally known as Michael Vaughn. The current biggest thing in her life appears to be drowned in the flood each time- the necessary re-baptism getting rid of all worldly connections- Noah's Ark meets Yodic Buddhism, (sic). In the first Season, it was Vaughn apparently literally drowning. This Season, Nadia is drowned in her own kind of 'tap water', the infected tap water which became possible as a result of Sloane's machinations with Omnifem. Both of the deaths are symbolic, and not literal in the sense of the narrative of the show; Vaughn didn't die, and Nadia won't either, at least if I have anything to do with it, (Keep Mia Maestro on Network TV, DAY 1).

So that'll do on the title symbolism, and the parallels to 'Almost Thirty Years'. What else happens? -Just before that, I wonder why Applebaum and Nemec were appointed as writers on the finale. They've written some solid episodes this year, but nothing startling. I suppose it's a bit like getting David Fury to write 'Grave' and with the same, occasionally brilliant, sometimes disappointing effect. -All the sections with Weiss and Marshall are fun, because it's nice to see the two characters who are designed especially to relieve the angst of the other characters be given some angst of their own, and to see them deal with it without dispensing with their wonderful quirkiness. My favourite scene was the deflation of an overly sincere, cloying moment. Marshall, to his wife, "I just want to say I love you. No, I haven't been drinking".

-Weiss' beautiful line of the episode, (aside from the 'Yes, OK, I am Rambaldi' scene, which was cut for length), was the WWJD proclamation. I never thought I'd see it on Alias, but 'What Would Jack Do' is a perfectly gothic twist on the old platitude, calling to mind such words of advice as 'It's like a soft-boiled egg', and pre-empting 'I'm trying to have more fun these days'- a line which links into the e-vite line towards the beginning of the season.

-What Jack would do is find someone who had what he wanted, torture or blackmail them and then use what he importuned mercilessly. So that's what Weiss and Marshall do. And yet they still don't get to be in the bunkers. 'It's like the cool kids are having a party'. Elsewhere in the world, the kind of party Syd, Nadia and Vaughn are at isn't the kind of thing Weiss or Marshall would enjoy. As ever with envying others, if you knew the whole picture you might be more content with your lot.

-Elena of Nadia to Sloane: "She's gonna make us proud". The best moments of Alias, which it has intermittently remembered this Season, is the twist of the family dynamic to espionage, and these are the kind of odd proclamations that do it best.

-The horse and the falling angels are all well and good as precursors of Nadia and Sydney's fun fight, (another parallel to 'Grave': the Buffy/Willow fight), would have been more effective if they'd been part of the passenger prophecies earlier in the Season. There's something less fatalistic and less epic about Nadia only mentioning the prophecy after she sees one of the omens. I did wonder for a second whether, rather like the wolves in 'Collateral' which appear for no apparent reason, the horse might just be an arresting visual image never explained, but no such luck.

-Brodine's back, though only for a few moments before he gets a metal stake through his chest. One of the problems of this episode before the Vaughn twist at the end is there's no sense that there's a price being paid. There's a criticism of the later Season of Angel and Buffy that death itself became cliche, (as a reaction to the No Regular Ever Dies habit of most network dramas), but this episode is a prime example of why without the possibility of the death of someone we know and love, we don't really care. It lacks tautness because Brodine, who we had fun with in 'Authorised Personnel Only' but haven't seen since, is not a character we're invested in. And just when you think there is going to be genuine heartache melodrama and Sloane is going to have to kill Nadia to save Sydney, but, like Dixon's reprieve a few episodes again, there's a fudge and Nadia survives. It's not quite urgent enough.

-And what of Dixon? I suppose at least it's honest to say "We don't have anything for him" rather than a few cursory exposition lines, but I miss Carl Lumbly, and he scoops the Most Underused Character award for the season.

-Nice bit of symbolism as the Passenger becomes literally other than a passenger- as she misses the train.

-The Irina/Vaughn scenes are the intriguing clue behind what Syd might have been about to hear. Presumably, in order that Irina knows about Vaughn's alliances, it's something to do with someone Russian. The Covenant, or K-directorate?

-Finally, someone decides Sloane has taken enough of everyone's trust, and we have another WWJD moment, this time answered by, sock him one and knock him out. Just in case Sloane didn't think he was serious, Jack starts work on a whole 'If you fail I will personally put a bullet through your skull' pitch.

-We get the old Inspiration versus Goodness diatribe from Sonia Braga, whose Elena unfortunately becomes rather too much of a cardboard villain in this episode. "I know it's not easy", she says, "Greatness never is". Again, this plot-line would have worked better if their was some question as to Nadia's motivation, a real Empire Strikes Back moment where she was tempted by the Derevko Side. But she's played as the perpetual innocent throughout this arc, and we can't really complain. There are enough morally ambiguous characters to watch. I've already mentioned the parallel to 'Almost Thirty Years', but it's sad that in a Season that Nadia has come from being injected by her cult-leader Father, to being injected by her cult-leader auntie. Sad in an intentional and well-written sense.

-The classic knowing Alias line, which sounds as if it's been deliberately written to play up the pulp fiction aspect of the series, (as is the cliffhanger): "Especially after you tricked him into killing me". Priceless.

-A moment of pure drama is when Jack gets his torture on, Elena spills which wire is which, Irina shoots her, and then immediately tells Sydney to cut the other one. Sisterly love and knowledge, at lightning speed.

-Jack lets Irina free, and I'm starting to wonder whether these two are destined for each other, or whether that's it for Irina's lovely return. She's not really used in this episode after being magnificent last time out, but it's all worth it for Jack's daring, besotted, (still), 'I'll tell them nothing they don't already know. That it's impossible to hold on to Irina Derevko for long'. One wonders whether this completes Irina's redemption- do we now know she is a good guy? At least nowadays? In the mean time, the money line of the episode is 'You may not see me on your wedding day, but I'll be there.' And noone doubts it, even when Vaughn and Syd start discussing their union being just the two of them.

-Sloane as a character is the Joker, the Spike, the eternal Trickster. The shot of him with his hands together before we see him locked up, his face cut up by the conflict represented by the prison bars, is ambiguous enough that it could be prayer. To whom? I wonder how much comfort he takes from the fact that for the first time in four years, Syd trusts him, enough to tell him 'I believe you were trying to do the right scene'. Here's the genius of Sloane's arc this Season- no-one believe that Syd and Dixon would work for Sloane, because they wouldn't be stupid enough to believe he had reformed when he clearly hadn't. The Season's final message is: the reason they trusted him is that he has reformed. There is no twist of his betrayal, not explicitly. This is not to say he won't turn again next Season, but it's a clever trick to nullify the major plot-hole of Season Four.

And then the ending, which I could feel wasn't going to last, as Giacchino and Abrams pick one of the sexiest songs in the history of popular music, ('Lay, Lady, Lay'), and everything seems bright and perfect. Cue the cliffhanger.

Authorized Personnel Only I/II: 7
The Awful Truth: 7
Ice: 8
Welcome to Liberty Village: 5
Nocturne: 5
Detente: 7
Echoes: 4
A Man of His Word: 6
The Index: 9
The Road Home: 5
The Orphan: 7
Tuesday: 10
Nightingale: 7
Pandora: 8
Another Mr. Sloane: 9
A Clean Conscience: 6
Mirage: 9
In Dreams: 8
The Descent: 8
Search and Rescue: 7
Before the Flood: 8

Which makes, on an episode by episode basis, this a better Season than my previous top-rated Season, that being 2, and slightly further ahead of 3 and 1, in that order.

Well, that wraps it up for Season Four, and this may well be my last Alias review. It is at least the last for a fair while, since there's no obvious way to get my hands on Season Five in the autumn, and to be completely honest I don't love it enough to seek it out obsessively. But it's been a good old ride, from the impossibly messy middle-late section of Season Three back to respectability. Thanks for reading.

TCH