Alias: Almost Thirty Years (1.22)

And it comes full circle. With a bang, some teeth and a big red ball. Almost Thirty Years ties together the cacophony of plot strands that have been building up since the very beginning, while simultaneously introducing the drive and mystery that will anchor season two. It's a ridiculously satisfying finale, one that seizures with energy and successfully mirrors so much of the pilot that started it all. With that, it's a lot of fun seeing how much everybody has changed over the course of the year. New relationships have formed, secrets have been exposed and everyone has become extremely multifaceted. But the real evolution has occurred with Sydney and her perception of her family. She and her father are unrecognizable from the chilly, tension-dripping 'associates' they inhabited when the show began, while her mom... well, things have gotten a little screwy there.

Alias: Rendezvous (1.21)

For the first twenty minutes of this episode, a lot of mention is made of characters being flung off-track. Jack criticizes Sydney for losing sight of the bigger picture in pursuit of her mother, Vaughn is confronted by Weiss over his personal involvement with Syd, and Sloane is all about protecting his wife instead of keeping tabs on his SD-6 agenda. All of these arguments are valid, and it's no coincidence that the show exposes all of these home truths in the first episode to feature Sydney's espionage world aggressively colliding with her personal life, Will discovering her secret identity in a badass moment of 'holy goddamn crap did that just happen?!" histrionics.

Alias: The Solution (1.20)

One of Alias' neatest pleasures is its willingness to blur relationships and allegiances. What began as a show all about one woman's mission to bring down the organization responsible for her fiancee's murder has grown to be a show where ambiguity rules all. Recent weeks have seen Sydney utilizing SD-6 instead of trying to destroy it, and turning to others for help besides Vaughn. Jack has gone from this cold, mysterious enigma to a caring, compassionate father still wounded by betrayal. And, in The Solution, we see Sloane becoming as much a victim of the Alliance as he is a key member of it. It's just incredibly diverse writing, the show refusing to settle down for too long and allowing things to get complacent.

Alias: Snowman (1.19)

This and the preceding episode have been frustratingly standalone in spirit. While a lot of Snowman is concerned with Laura Bristow (or, as I'll now be referring to her, Irina Derevko), most of it is distracted by the titular assassin, an ambiguous hitman with a reputation for bloody carnage. The problem with this is that it's clear from the very first mention of his name that it'll turn out to be Noah Hicks behind the mask, both since he needs removing from the series, and because what he offers Sydney is too earth-shattering to permanently stick. So most of the episode feels like waiting for your train to hit its intended destination, and that's a little underwhelming.

Alias: Masquerade (1.18)

It doesn't quite stick an aggressive pause on the show's propulsion, but Masquerade does initially come off as a little jarring, as it so swiftly returns to the safe Alias equilibrium that had previously been put on the backburner. This is mostly a result of Peter Berg's Hicks character, a remnant from Sydney's past. The two of them were SD-6 agents around the same time, discreetly fell in love, and were torn apart by job promotions and various miscommunications. Hicks represents both Syd's pre-pilot past as well as her potentially romantic future and it's obviously an important story to tell -- her first nervous footsteps into post-Danny sexuality. But it doesn't have as much emotional pull as it probably could have done, and I'm not sure whose fault that is.

Alias: Q & A (1.17)

Over the years, Alias' issues as a series were frequently the fault of ABC. They wanted the show to evolve, and supported major changes in the show's second season, but they also wanted the show to revert back to what it used to be soon after, and that back and forth did nothing but harm the show in the long run. Whether it entirely killed it is a whole separate discussion. But Q & A, as dull an episode as it sometimes is, at least reminds you of a time in which ABC had so much faith in Alias that they demanded an episode like this one, to hopefully open up the Sydney Bristow universe to new viewers -- fearing they'd been driven away by the various hiatuses and the quickly elaborate storytelling.

Alias: The Prophecy (1.16)

It's interesting to suddenly spot the ideas percolating inside the head of J.J. Abrams, years before they're actually realized. Watching The Prophecy and the collection of mysterious secret branches within the government that are put on Syd's case instantly brings to mind Fringe, the Department of Special Research being investigators of extreme phenomena and 'fringe science'. It's this strange mash-up of procedural realism and elaborate genre smarts, investigators utilizing strange testing procedures and heat-vision generators to get inside Sydney's head, in the hopes of tying her to a centuries-old prophecy that pledges infinite destruction if it comes to fruition. It's so cleverly batshit at this point, but that constant merging of a character-driven narrative with science-fiction drama always keeps the show on the right track.

Alias: Page 47 (1.15)

Page 47 marks the moment when Alias really blew up. Every writer knows that the greatest way to grant life to a storyline is to make it truly personal for the story's protagonists, and here the writers give the Rambaldi arc something of a face... literally. Rambaldi has been this consistently intriguing but necessarily vague plot device throughout the season, full of shady theories and strange artifacts. With one shocking plot twist, not only does it become something grand and almost supernatural, but it places Sydney firmly at the center of the mystery. What was something mysterious and personally insignificant is suddenly all about her, and all Sydney can do is stare in complete disbelief at the image staring back at her.

Alias: The Coup (1.14)

It was inevitable that at some point down the line Sydney's path would cross with one of her friends during a mission. Surprisingly, The Coup doesn't actually exaggerate this to its fullest effect, instead using it to grant additional material for Francie. There's a little bit of fun with Syd dodging her best friend in Vegas, but generally it's a pretty non-espionage affair this week. A lot of people violently dislike Francie, and it's a given that she doesn't exactly need to have her own subplots, but I feel like her presence is welcome on Alias, a nice reminder of how mundane the real world is, where the only 'double lives' involve infidelity and cheating and not, you know, international spy hooey.

Alias: The Box Part 2 (1.13)

Alias is a show that is continually evolving over time, and it's clearest when it comes to its cast of players. The Box, superficially, is an elaborate Die Hard pastiche. It was referenced early on in Part 1 with that John McTiernan nod while Part 2 rapidly becomes this relentless melody of action adventure tropes, characters forced into terrifying situations to protect people they care about, and large hypodermic needles the weapon of choice for enthusiastic antagonists. But even if you remove the genre traditions, The Box is a radically important episode for the show's central characters.

Alias: The Box Part 1 (1.12)

As long-term fans know, Alias started off a series that was frequently sort of silly but nevertheless grounded in some semblance of reality, before becoming this tonally batshit espionage sci-fi show full of prophecies and clones and zombies and ice rays. If memory serves correct, they actually manage to pull most of that off... for real. But I always pinpoint The Box as the first push of insanity for this show, and that's primarily due to guest star Quentin Tarantino and his scenery-chewing archness. This isn't a nondescript vaguely-Middle Eastern antagonist, but a wacky, volatile character, naturally blessed (or arguably cursed) by Tarantino's assaulting vocal pattern, spitting out dialogue like a machine gun with an impossible number of bullets. But it works, crazy and all.

Alias: The Confession (1.11)

Just as Alias' narrative builds and builds, pushing through different episodes as missions blur into additional missions and so on, the characters are beginning to build on each other, too. The relationships between the ensemble are increasing in power so swiftly that The Confession constantly resembles a house of cards. Just when the whole thing is fixed together, something comes along to knock it right back down again. Parental angst has always been a trademark of J.J. Abrams, but one of Alias' major success stories so far has been its ability to constantly shift and evolve the source of that angst. Yes, it's still the conflict between child and parent, but there are these consistent game-changers that radically alter that theme. It's intense.

Alias: Spirit (1.10)

Every decision Jack makes ends up confusing his daughter. It's natural that a parent would do everything to protect their child, and Jack going that extra mile to ensure his daughter's safety is powerful and compassionate on its own. But, being Alias, that 'extra mile' involves orchestrating somebody's murder in order to protect Sydney. It's an act of fatherly warmth, but in this twisted, blood-drenched manner. And it ends up being nothing but more ammunition for Syd to use against him. It's how her mind works, though, instantly seeing the negativity in everything that he does. Despite Vaughn's insistence that Russek was a bad man destined to die horribly at some point, Syd doesn't waver.

Alias: Mea Culpa (1.9)

Mea Culpa is the first episode to truly utilize Ron Rifkin. Prior to this week, Sloane has very much been an 'idea' rather than an actual character, various CIA players speaking of his arch evilness, Sydney understandably only reacting with disgust at the events he's supposedly orchestrated -- from the murder of her fiancee, to the lies he forms to convince most of the innocents trapped in SD-6 that they're working for the good guys. Even so, it's evilness at arm's length, the show telling us about a man but withholding the man himself. But here we begin to see the person behind the image, and instantly he becomes a far greater character.

Alias: Time Will Tell (1.8)

Eight episodes in, and Alias resembles more than anything a well-oiled machine. It hasn't become annoying or anything, but the show is absolutely adhering to a strict set of instructions every week. Syd pursues some kind of device, there's a swanky gala to infiltrate, she fights with Anna, the retrieved device leads to someplace else, and a cliffhanger leaves Sydney's life in jeopardy. It's all very routine, and it's actually something of a blessing that this is Anna's last appearance for a couple of seasons. I dig the character a lot, particularly her ice-cold demeanor, but the show was risking falling into a generic pattern, and Anna was definitely a major symptom of that.

Alias: Color Blind (1.7)

There's a strong recurring theme here that writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman keep coming back to: characters bending their prerogatives over time, or reacting in surprising ways that seem to go against the feelings they may have had up until recently. It's present in Francie's acceptance of Charlie's proposal, as well as in Will's reluctance to investigate Danny's murder following the demise of Eloise Kurtz, but it's most present with Sydney, who expresses so much emotional growth here. We only met her six weeks ago, but she's already evolving as a person.

Alias: Reckoning (1.6)

Something that has set Alias apart from other series is the very thing I complimented it on just a couple of weeks ago, how the show is so forceful in its narrative that standalone missions blur into two separate episodes at a time. Reckoning, while still fun and absorbing, gets a little lost between the constant shuffling of various storylines, losing sight of where the focus should be. Last episode was more successful at that, especially as all the disparate stories were linked by one key theme. Reckoning, on the other hand, feels too disorienting at times to totally work.

Alias: Doppelgänger (1.5)

For its first four episodes, Alias was artificially all about disguises -- Sydney getting dolled up in ludicrous outfits to intercept, interrupt and infiltrate swanky parties or top-secret buildings. There was also the background theme of false identities, the one that Sydney uses as a cover inside SD-6, the person she is at the CIA, and the woman she is at home. But Doppelgänger is really the first episode to truly utilize the concept of disguises, the various secrets Sydney has been keeping of late all threatened by a mission that quickly spirals out of control. With so many balls in the air, it was inevitable that one of them would eventually drop...

Alias: A Broken Heart (1.4)

An all-together more low-key episode compared to the ones surrounding it, A Broken Heart takes a step back from the relentless spy hoodoo of the opening run and focuses deeper on the characters, extra attention granted to the ones less involved in SD-6 espionage. Now it's pretty easy to whine about Francie and her boyfriend troubles, especially when this is a show about a spy lady and her increasingly colorful collection of wigs and disguises... but I always liked the home-front stories, if only because they add a necessary sense of normality to the show. It's potentially damaging to push elaborate action hijinks at every juncture, so I grew to really love Syd's interaction with her non-spy friends, especially as it only helped humanize Miss Bristow herself.

Alias: Parity (1.3)

Already, Alias has settled into a winning formula. Every episode so far has been driven by a standalone mission in which Sydney is ordered to retrieve something for SD-6, while at the same time Syd is given a CIA counter-mission. It works like a charm. But what clearly separates the show from more conventional action dramas is that the standalone missions are literally blurring between episodes, something I haven't seen attempted since (network mandates probably explain why). Not only does this create an array of memorable cliffhanger endings (who doesn't remember the open-box-in-the-stadium moment this week?), but it also instantly develops a sense of aggressive momentum, the show running through stories at such a brisk speed that events are encroaching on whole separate episodes.