You can keep your Marxist ways,
For it's only just a stage
And money, money, money
Makes the world go round.
-Monty Python, 'Money'.

4.5- 'Welcome to Liberty Village'

Well, in the places I've been to there's been some confusion, so let's get the facts up first of all. From '3.12- Crossings':

JACK: Tell me, which of Irina's sisters are you, Elena or Yekaterina?
KATYA: I haven't been Yekaterina since I was a child. My sisters call me Katya. Which means Irina wasn't the one who told you about me.
JACK: Learning that your wife is actually a Russian spy drives you to learn all you can about her true identity.

Given that I see no reason to assume that Jack was misled in his research in this episode, the identity of Elena is not up in the air- she is the third sister alongside Irina and Katya. This in turn means that the niece, was she actually a niece, in 'Ice', could well have been the daughter of Elena, but is not Elena herself.

It's also pretty important that we know that Jack was talking about Elena and not Irina, since this means that he has still not been shown as lying to Sydney, regardless of what we might intuit about Irina's existence. What we do know for sure is that Jack and Sloane are plotting something, which is always a good thing.

I start off right at the end of the episode because that's the real excitement, that brief flicker of a minute scene at the end. I'm afraid I didn't really see the rest of the episode as a Drew Goddard classic- it seemed weak by comparison to last week's, and a less capable skewering of surburbia than 'Underneath', which also did it in double quick time. There was a half-formed idea about Sydney and Vaughn as agents whose lives are so invested in their jobs that they can't be the normal married couple that they would be seen as by society- they can't be Weiss and Nadia, and they have no energy left for spontaniety after hours. But it never really interconnects with the Liberty Village conceit, and thus leaves the episode seeming entirely pointless.

Some things I pulled out of the debris of surburbia:

-I had high hopes after the first scene with Weiss and Nadia, but then we don't see them again. It's only fair for me to say at this point in the season that the writing staff are not deploying the characters as well as they should be. Sydney and Vaughn are taking centre stage, and Jack is being interesting while Marshall functions as ever, but Sloane, Dixon, Weiss and Nadia's parts are all way too small, and it's frustrating to see Carl Lumbly elbowed right off the side of the screen after a few moments each week. There's no real logic behind Vaughn going on these missions rather than Dixon, for a start.

-It may just have been me, but it seemed like they were dressing up everyone in the Mandatory Briefing Scene as sharply as possible, to contrast with the later leisurewear. Sydney looks good in leather, and Dixon's suit was marvellous.

-Goddard manages to bring to the forefront one of the questions I've always had about covert operations, when he asks Sydney and Vaughn whether they can speak English without an accent, and they slip into their unmarked coastal patter. The point being, how on earth do these non-native speakers talk in the correct accent and dialect in the dozens of different languages over which they have a command?

-The three layer-casserole is an allusion to the episode structure itself. Sydney and Vaughn, playing Russian malcontents, who are themselves playing American civilians. It's never quite clear how undercover the Russian terrorist angle is supposed to be- 'Tom' drops it into the conversation and then leaves it to speak normally every so often. The conceit isn't quite sharp enough to make perfect logical sense.

-There's a fair point made about how for Sydney and Vaughn, normality itself is a disguise, and the extraordinary is the normal. We are so used to seeing Garner and Vartan ensconced in super-cool undercover wear, that seeing them prattle about casseroles whilst wearing cashmere sweaters seems bizarrely unorthodox in itself.

-The spectre of Irina hangs long over the episode as soon as we realise that this is the problem Jack has with Sloane's request. Whether Elena's arrival will signal some resolution to the story is a moot point, but Abrams and co have some work to do if they're to pull off a convincing plot-line without requiring the non-returning Lena Olin's presence.

-The Marshall/Jack moments are good without really being revelatory- I think even though Marshall had never gathered how different- how warm and manipulatable Jack was in t'olden days, the audience have by this stage got the memo.

-There's a moment of Drew Goddard's legendary continuity pornness when he suddenly references the conversation Syd and Vaughn had in 'The Telling' in the ice rink, just before they were supposedly about to go and get married in Santa Barberra. The fact that the giraffe with the crooked neck makes a re-appearance gives the scene an element of melancholy unmakable otherhow. Vaughn seems to be getting all the good speeches so far this year, which is a strange turn of events. It has to be said that the writers are putting all their time and effort into Sydney and Vaughn, and it's becoming more interesting than last Season's mess, if at the cost of several other characters.

-I'm pretty sure that the music when the pair kiss is being used as a kind of Syd/Vaughn love theme, and we've heard it before, though where eludes me for the moment- maybe at the end of 'Phase One'?

-When we find out that the infiltration plan is an 'aggressive Marxist' policy, cliches come raining down from the skies and it's time to put up the umbrella and walk away.

So yes, a pretty average episode, with an interesting tag for next time.

TCH

TCH