4.4- 'Ice'

There may be an element of me wanting to like Jeff Bell's 'Ice', but is it just me or was this a different kind of episode from an average 'Alias' episode? We have our fun pre-teaser mission destroyed by somebody shattering into a million pieces, and then the rest of the episode is motivated by ideas of confession, forgiveness, reconciliation and belief. This makes rather a notable change from the stolid latter part of Season Three where everything seemed to be motivated by getting Melissa George in lingerie and allowing Sark to be brutal.

-The leg thing completely confused me, and at the end of the teaser I was wondering whether the scared bloke was supposed to be a robot or something. Luckily that ambiguity was quickly cleared up- technological weapon, dry-freezing of innards, shattering like, well, ice on a frozen lake, I suppose.

-The rather cliched hint in the teaser where Vaughn sees SomeOneWhoCouldBeLauren shows us that this episode will be focussed around him. Considering several miscalculations with his character last Season, (the biggest by miles being his adultery excused on the account that Lauren was, unbeknown to him or Syd, Eevil), this worried me, but the writing was sharp enough to pull it off.

-'For reasons more pecuniary than patriotic'. Hmmm, nicely done; the obligatory briefing done with an original style.

-We're reminded with our customary Big Alias Pointy Arrow of Character Development, that Syd is still deeply suspicious of Sloane, with her line 'Seems to be all the rage amongst Evil Geniuses'. It was the evil genius bit that got me- such an apt description of Sloane.

-The Sahara desert claims it's dry, but put it up next to Victor Garber's line reading of 'Do I have visions of Lauren?', and it starts to look like a temperate clime populated by all manner of small, burrowing mammals, currently hibernating in fear of the lashing, persistent rain.

-Oooh, Kelly McDonald. The whole Scots/Irish, let's not worry too much thing amused me, but it's nice to see the very impressive actress of 'Gosford Park' and 'Trainspotting' put in a good full-bodied performance here.

-I love the idea of a Weiss/Nadia/Marshall triangle, largely because it's such a ridiculous thought. Weiss' mouthing of 'You're married' seems to be more about protecting his own personal interest than safe-guarding Marshall's connubial bliss, on this occasion. It probably need not be said that part of the reason Weiss and Marshall jostle with each other so much on the show is that since the disestablishment of SD-6, they've both been occupying a similar role, that of comic relief- in Weiss' case, mostly intentional and snarky, in Marshall's, mostly unintentional and situational.

-I liked the gentle sarcasm behind Vaughn's comment to Dixon about him having an opportunity to do some work on the operation- it's also meta on Season One of course. What is more intriguing in the scenes between the two is Vaughn's commandment to Dixon to hit him harder- this is the first suggestion that he still feels a guilt for which he is trying to absolve himself- there's an element of punishment in his request-cum-demand to Marcus that one can tell is to do with how uncomfortable he still feels within himself about killing his wife, and so an element of self-injury-by-cop creeps in.

-There's so much stuff going on with Vaughn as a priest in this episode that it's difficult to keep track of it all. I have to say that asides from the occasional references to hellfire and damnation in the Rambaldi sections of the show, this is really the first time that religion has been brought in as a counterpoint to people's guilts and feelings about their past acts, and Vaughn's clawing to be right with himself against this Catholic backdrop really does have a sheen of Angel about it, I think above and beyond what I'm projecting from my knowledge of the writer.

-There's an element of Sydney and Nadia about Keene and MacLaine- he drags her into a situation where she can get harmed, where she is worried about the consequences of actions which she doesn't fully understand since it isn't fully disclosed to her, (see, Nadia's brutal killing of the Master Thief last week). In the end, the elder sibling accidentally kills the younger one in the heat of battle, and ends up losing, (do we think?), maybe the one thing in life he actually valued. It will be interesting to see how Nadia's relationship to Sydney is informed or reflected by the one in this episode- Nadia has so far mostly been used with Jack and Sloane, and Sydney with Vaughn, so it hasn't been touched upon as extensively as I might have hoped. I was going for a Season 5 Buffy/Dawn vibe.

-The whole slow-boiling scene between Maclaine and Vaughn is a real pleasure. We get to see that Vaughn is using genuine pain in his own life, a real story that plays in to the discussion that they are having about the medic's difficulties, to help his mission. We start to wonder whether he's going to lose his tactical nous in recounting the story, and indeed, Sydney and Dixon are visibly moved. This is a clever kind of not-acting though- channeling one's genuine hang-ups in order to connect with somebody, though under false pretences. It's a little reminiscent of how Sydney would try to connect with Will and Francie in the first Season by telling them emotional truths devoid of their accurate background details.

-In the process, we see that the traditional metaphor, the frail woman being allowed to confess to the strong man, who would absolve her sins and allow her pardon for her natural but undiscinplined urges, is turned on its head. To start with, it is obviously Vaughn's confession. His confession of killing Lauren. His confession that though Lauren deserved death, it was a miscalculation to kill her. Many who die deserve life, and some who live deserve death. Can you give it to them? His confession that he is still unbalanced over the whole issue, still grieving. That he has not reached Jack's position of acceptance of his grief, (or is it emotional shutdown for a not-complete grieving process), and that he is still recovering. I have to say that, coming from a badly-executed plotline that I detested, this is powerful, considered stuff.

-'Even God won't forgive you if you won't let him'. Eventually, despite our ideas of a larger, personal God, in the secular environment of Alias, the idea of divine forgiveness is about inner personal transformation. About letting your past self-doubt clear, about accepting what you did wrongly and no longer punishing yourself. About atoning by attempting to live a better life in future. And that is what Vaughn has to attempt to do.

-The sister's death is a kind of Cain and Abel moment- mankind looks upon what he has destroyed; each man kills the thing he loves. It is his choice that has condemned him. But in the act of forgiving Vaughn with her final words and breaths, Maclaine also forgives her brother by inference. Maclaine is not forgiving Vaughn for the wrong that she has been done, but for the wrong that he has done to the world- she is taking his guilt and forgiving it much like the Catholic Priest- on behalf of God, and on behalf of mankind. But in understanding this, she also forgives her brother for all the ill he has caused her. In a third, more literal, (although, y'know, literal=dull) way, of course, she forgives him for trying to rescue her and getting her killed in the process.

-When Jack says, in a plot-wise unconnected scene, 'I choose to believe', everything connects up.

-Meanwhile in the other story, Nadia is trying to work out who the baby is. Could it be herself? Is it maybe Sydney? In the end, the idea that it is Irina's niece, (and, for all we know, Katya's daughter), presents us with a more complex resolution than we could have hoped for. It is neither Sydney's future nor Nadia's future that lies behind Irina's smile, but instead the potential of both. In the picture, Irina's belief and delight in the idea that she could one day have children, is encapsulated, thereby bringing Nadia and Sydney together into one entity- as Irina's progeny. That Jack should choose to tell Nadia the truth is interesting in that he may well have seen that- and he makes the conscious choice to bring together Sydney and Nadia as parallels by talking about the way Irina held them as babies, and not just Sydney, whom he saw, but also Nadia. What Jack's gameplan is can be speculated upon until we find out, but for the moment his apparent honesty with Nadia shows more human warmth than Sloane, who refuses to give Nadia information despite the fact that he clearly knows more than he's saying.

So yes, this was a very good, thematically strong episode for me. Now who says I'm biased? ;-)

TCH