It's not often I admire the writing on 'Alias'. I mean, I have always admired it since the very beginning in the rather literal-minded plodding way of being impressed how all the plotlines fit together and that the twists are twisted to the points where the little Oliver Twist's fingers have twists in them. I always wonder whether JJ Abrams ever feels like The Tailor of Gloucester. But that may be a story for another day.

Whilst I can probably quote you a line per episode for Buffy, and probably at least a few dozen from Angel- (I mean y'know, 'If nothing we do matters'...'We live as if the world is what is should be'...'What we are informs all we become'...etc etc), I'm not sure I could have quoted a single line from Alias to date. Asides from generic and probably inaccurate lines like:

SYD: Good grief, this calls for a disguise, I'd imagine

VAUGHN: My complete lack of charisma is not sufficient to elbow anyone else into the front and centre of the show.

JACK: My breath is made of frost.

MARSHALL: Rerouting the defibrulators allows a maximal outtward flow that will recondition the primary ventricles, and you're looking incredibly hot

SLOANE: Mwahahaha

LAUREN: It's OK, I wear different Evil Sexy Lingerie later.

Goodness, I got quite off my point there. But yes, so it's perhaps not too much of a surprise that a line that really leapt out at me yesterday evening turned out to actually be stolen from the great speechmaker and all-round good guy Abraham Lincoln...

4.6- 'Nocturne'

DIXON (to Sloane)[ish for most part]: Are we supposed to imagine that your daughter has really put you in touch with the better angels of your nature?

I absolutely love the phrase, 'The better angels of your nature'. Coming from Dixon of course, he can be seen himself as an Angel- as the truly good man in a company full of the morally ambiguous. The word nature gives this idea of the primal psyche, the angel and the demon given to us by the fruit of the tree of knowledge. I love the fact that angels is plural- there's this idea of the various spiritual beings at war over Sloane's body. And finally, of course, we're left to consider precisely whom the 'worse angels' of Sloane's nature are. There's only one conclusion. Lucifer- God's fallen Angel- falling in flame.

So great work by Lincoln, and nicely picked up here at a powerful moment in the episode- the time when they give Carl Lumbly something to do and he delivers in spades. Of course, my grumble as a result of that scene is that exactly as in 'Ice' and 'Welcome to Liberty Village', we have to end on an anti-climactic and boring Syd and Vaughn scene rather than a big scene which just happens to be between two other characters.

Besides, that scene, which I'll return to, and that line in particular, there's some other fun to be had, though I must air my grumbles at the fact that the director, who had a difficult job doing the horror and the paranoia scenes, seems to have some really dodgy work in what should theoretically be the easier parts of the episode. I don't know if it's a case of bad editing, but some of the scenes looked as if they didn't have enough coverage or something, and the choppiness was accentuated by the very time-jumpy beginning of the episode where we kept being somewhere else in the world a few hours or days later.

So to specifics:

-Lots and lots of horror motifs in the episode. Spiders all over the place. A cup of blood. The suicide woman. People being chased breathlessly down alleys. Paranoia that your closest friends will turn on you. The music alternates between a usual 'Alias' score and some not over-done Hitchcock homage, which was a nice touch.

-I'm not all that interested, I have to say, in the dynamic of the Syd/Vaughn relationship whereby Vaughn wants to go full steam to the destination and Syd is almost involuntarily applying brakes. It's a bit simplistic and unrevealing. I gain a little bit of curiosity when it's brought up against the idea of Sydney's feelings of abandonment by Vaughn because of his marriage of Lauren. It also occurs to me, (particularly given the amount of footage shown of Jack and Vaughn apparently plotting against Syd while she's in her paranoid frenzy), as to whether Syd's trust issues in men, her reluctance to commit to Vaughn, also contains an element of inherited wariness of men because of her father's distance and apparent betrayal every other Wednesday. Like Buffy in Conversations With Dead People we may one day find out that Jack's relationship with Sydney is used as a kind of unhealthy template.

-Vampires, but we're not given as much hint that the supernatural might be real as I would have liked, since Jack almost immediately shoots the man who it turns out was just teething, (or some other uninteresting medical plot point). I would have liked the writers to string the audience out a little more- play with their suspension of disbelief. After this is a show where people can spontaneously dry-freeze into a million pieces. Given fifteen minutes to sweat, we would have enjoyed the game more.

-Dixon is right, both tactically and right to intervene, and the comments Sloane makes about Dixon never suspecting SD6 were renegade have absolutely nothing to do with Dixon's ability to manage personnel, in a piece of writing which like a lot of Jeff Pinkner's stuff isn't ever quite smooth or satisfying. We do get the pay-off later though, so it's a bit churlish to complain.

-I thought the 'Girl stuff?'/'People stuff' line was an interesting throwaway. Why would Nadia want to indicate to Vaughn that what she's talking about with Syd is not specifically feminine, and hence imply that Syd was keeping secrets of a more significant nature from Vaughn? The uncomfortable moment that follows suggests the writers have something in mind for Nadia here, though I'm still desperate for an episode to really showcase her relationship with Sydney.

-Sloane's betrayal speech in Sydney's head: lovely- beautifully played, understated, and even if we can wish away all Syd's other fears, we know this one to be a certainty. Sloane is plotting something or other. The cleverness of the paranoia in general though is that it showcases Syd's insecurities with each aspect of her life, and the fears are not all brush-awayable once the remedy is applied. It's like the night after someone got drunk and spilt what they really thought of the fusty old aunt with the collection of crinoline doilys- people try awkwardly to pretend it was all an aberration, but there was a lot more truth in the catastrophic moment than in the subsequent tip-toeing. So what of Syd's worries about what Jack and Vaughn discuss about her? By far the most interesting idea dreamt up by the writers is Mr Bristow's "What torments me now is that every time I see you I see your mother's face". The whole play on Irina Derevko, on how Sydney's steely, duplicitous side reminds Jack of his ex-wife, (rather than seeming like looking in the mirror, oddly), and the insistent references to Jack's killing of Sydney's mother are all interesting doubts to be developed.

-I like Dixon calling his naivety with regard to SD-6 'a failure of imagination'. A more slack-jawed, tractor-brained person might credit Dixon's failure to his trustworthiness, but he does no such thing, and in doing so finds both an insight into his weaknesses, and a way to grow out of it.

So oddly enough, I wasn't very impressed by the episode, and yet I thought it probably had the best scene of the Season thus far, and it also did a good job using the characters which had been under-utilised for a little longer. I suspect the Season will get its butterfly crawl leg-kick shortly, since it's just starting to feel inert in its set-up of APO. We need one of those big reveal episodes in the next three or four weeks, and I trust we'll get one.

Thanks for reading.

TCH