Irina Derevko was both the best thing and the worst thing to happen to Alias. So much of season two hinged on her moral complexity that having her go one way or the other would naturally be upsetting to certain parts of the show's fanbase. We get little more concrete evidence of her true allegiances in this finale, but what is made clear is that she loves Sydney and Jack, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep them safe. In one huge exposition scene at the start of The Telling, Irina explains her motivation this year, and it's revealed that she does have a keen interest in Rambaldi. It seems more of a curiosity than a full-blown obsession, but it goes some way to explaining her ambiguity. Her life is driven by two extremes: her pursuit of Rambaldi, and her love for her family. Her flip-flopping creates multitudes of problems in the future, the show relying on her character to create drama regardless of Lena Olin's actual availability, but The Telling at least signals those two extremes. So it's not a total failure that the show winds up exploiting one element of her character greater than the other. In the end, one of the shoes was bound to drop.
It came as a surprise during this re-watch that Will wasn't a huge factor in season two. I remembered things a little differently, thinking he became a CIA analyst far earlier than he did and had a larger presence in the agency scenes. Instead, he's drifted around a lot, only called on when necessary and spending most of Alias' post-Phase One era strapped to a bed being brainwashed. Considering the huge range Bradley Cooper has shown in recent years, becoming one of the (in my opinion) more interesting Hollywood leading men, it's unfortunate that the show sort of petered away his talents. Second Double at least allows him to anchor a story for a change, Will being framed for Fauxrancie's crimes and getting everybody all frantic about the possibility that he's a crazy clone hitman. God, this show.
Despite death being all over this show, grief has been an emotion rarely explored up till now, particularly when its external and volatile. Sure, Sydney had to deal with Danny's murder, but it had to be bottled up and insular because of her work with SD-6. Francie is someplace that's else (and I just had the horrible realization that we never find out what actually happened to her body, which is... ugh) and nobody emotionally connected to her actually knows about it. But the murder of Dixon's wife was intensely public, a shocking act of retribution done in the most crass way imaginable. So, understandably, Dixon experiences something of a slow-motion meltdown, becoming rapidly unhinged at how terribly his life has wound up.
A lot has been written about the restructuring of the Alias itself post-Phase One, but what's most interesting is seeing how the characters are shifting with each additional episode. While Irina's presence seemed to at one point bring Jack and Sydney closer together, here there's once again a strained tension between them -- Sydney bitter that her father lost sight of Irina's allegiances, and Jack angry that his daughter is going rogue on her own missions without his knowledge. Their encounters this season have all been motivated by Irina, and that hasn't changed, but the very fact remains that she's still this disquieting presence creating ripples of damage even when she's completely fallen off the radar.
Alias continues to be in a league of its own when it comes to building layer upon layer throughout its tight ensemble cast. It's never been more apparent than in Truth Takes Time, which takes Irina's elaborate complexity and shares it out through several other characters. I complained a couple of weeks ago that Sloane's agenda was becoming a little muddled, but this episode firmly set it back on track, at the same time as it did restore his moral ambiguity. Irina, Sydney and Emily are also allowed incredible emotional shading this week, each character granted a new sense of direction. This is another spectacular episode.
After a couple of weeks of meandering around, Alias kicks back into high gear with A Dark Turn, a richly-drawn episode all about the complexities of trust, and how it can be bent and manipulated at will. Irina's been fun locked in a cage for so long, but pulling her out and placing her in the field was an inspired decision. Like early season two, this episode hinges on Irina's ambiguity, pulling Jack deeper and deeper into her way of thinking, before a last minute bait-and-switch leaves everybody stranded and left to ponder what the hell just happened.
One of the unexpected side effects of Phase One has been Sloane's reinvention as something of a James Bond villain, somebody so driven by his obsession with Rambaldi and at total ease with mass carnage that he now more or less resembles a complete monster. But I'm finding it all a little difficult to enjoy. In the early days of Alias, Sloane was given a surprisingly small amount to do. He launched the missions, and we were told by other characters how duplicitous and scheming he was. Then he began to grow as an antagonist, humanized by the arrival of his dying wife, and later given additional shading with the revelations about Emily's survival and Sloane's elaborate plot to keep her safe. But with Emily gone for weeks, a lot of that shading has been diminished, leaving Sloane this arch criminal mastermind, and it's hard to swallow.
After last week's false start, this is Alias pushing forward with its new identity. A Free Agent instantly re-positions the ensemble cast, Sydney and Vaughn now partners both out in the field and between the sheets, Sloane the globe-trotting villain bouncing from scheme to scheme, Sark his lackey and Francie a clone. I can't help but feel the show has lost a little something in this restructuring, notably how Syd's strength has been diminished slightly by having a dude tag along with her on missions, but it's neat seeing Alias move forward, regardless of the sometimes awkward returns. One major distinction involves Sydney and Sloane being outwardly hostile towards each other for a change, both now so removed from their false identities that they can be as volatile as they'd like. It's something new.
Double Agent is an episode built entirely around Ethan Hawke. As a result, it feels strangely detached from what we know of Alias as a show, and isn't the most auspicious beginning to the post-SD-6 landscape. Barely any of the regulars appear, and there's an uneasy balancing act between real-world espionage horror and the goofier aspects of the cloning thing that popped up at the end of last week's episode. Here the fun gravitates from not knowing which Ethan Hawke is which; both Ethan's claiming to be the 'real' Ethan and one Ethan being a mad scientist (*gah*), but there's a sort of generic quality to most of this, lacking in normal Alias intensity. Which is unfortunate.
We've come to expect certain things from television. A series' basic premise will remain intact for several seasons. An endgame couple will experience numerous false starts before they finally get together. Token black friends will stay on the periphery of things, never doing anything of consequence. A heroic victory usually means the end for key villains. All of that is more or less true... and then there's Phase One. This is an episode that rapidly undoes everything we thought we knew about Alias, tearing down the series' narrative conventions with an unexpected explosion of surprises. Alias was always a show that seemed to have a handle on where it was going, but Phase One is that rare episode that switches things up to such an extent that you're left breathless and completely unsure of where they're going to go from here, more so than ever before.
This was all about crossing into unknown territory, and characters taking that next leap into the unknown. It's ridden with bullets and bodies and bad memories, but it's something that has to happen for anybody to be able to move forward. Sydney and Vaughn went to dinner, ignoring all the warning signs and intent on being happy and romantic for once; while Jack turned to Irina for help, not with any initial concern or worry over her allegiances, but because he needed her in the moment, and knew that her information is invaluable. Not only does this mark a real push forward in terms of Alias' season two narrative, but it also develops new character beats that are alien and strange at first, but only make these characters more human in the long-run.
If The Net taught me anything, and I think we all learned a lot from The Net, its that really-slow downloads don't make for great, visceral drama. That's a major stumbling block here, too much of the action revolving around the formation of a computer system; Marshall, Sloane and Irina all working separately to either build the Echelon device or break it down. Either way, there are far too many shots of people sat watching computer screens as a little black bar ticks from 75% complete to 76% complete. It's a little disappointing, too, since the Marshall action last episode was so effective. He gets a couple of moments of rousing sweetness here, notably his lack of terror in the face of the dentist dude, as well as his adorable rescue of Sydney, but it's a little lacking compared to last week.
It's easy to rag on Marshall Flinkman. He has a very specific schtick that's used in practically every episode and rarely develops beyond that base level of nerdy goodness, so it's not like he's really bringing anything new to the able nowadays. But I always loved the guy, Kevin Weisman coating his delivery in half-starts and awkward stumbling, conveying a man so excited by things that most people aren't, yet constantly embarrassed at the tracks he verbally goes down. He's just a fun character, and pushing him center stage in The Abduction only made him more adorable. We learn a lot about Marshall here, from his lack of exposure to the outside world, the fact that his best friend seems to be his mom, to the elaborate lie that he's crafted for her, implying that he's a big-shot doing great, positive work.
It makes sense that Jack would start to come around to Irina at the same time as we are. Man, it's hard to see Lena Olin as evil. She's just too precise in her movements and seductive with her voice. Here we began to see glimmers of Jack and Irina's old life together, the two of them reminiscing about funny incidents from years ago and not following it up with an abrupt turn-around in emotion, suddenly remembering how bad everything became. It's cute, naturally marred by the ambiguity, but a sign of where things could be headed. Sydney also called her "Mom" for the first time, something that made Irina cry. These feelings are certainly genuine, right? It can't just be an elaborate ruse, especially at this point in time. I can't remember how shit goes down, particularly towards the end of the entire series, but right now I've entirely fallen for Irina Derevko.
It goes without saying that Passage exploits the Bristow family dynamic for all its worth. This is crazily entertaining television, the three characters forced to work together on a mission to India, and behaving exactly how a complicated, dysfunctional family would behave while on vacation. With that in mind, there's a lot of juxtaposition here between regular family activity and the twisted Alias variations on it. It's normal for a husband to buy his wife jewelry and place it around her neck. On Alias, Jack gets his ex-wife a necklace, only its set to trigger a bomb if she ever misbehaves out in the field. Then there are the two parents warring over their daughter's love life, Sydney trying hard to not blush as her mom talks about the guy who is clearly interested her, Jack warning of the dangers it would entail. Only it's another wrinkle of complicated because the mom killed the love interest's dad a million years ago. And last-minute vacation bonding? Not a dinner or a day trip, but taking down an army of militants with a bunch of machine guns. This is batshit badassery at its finest.
When Sydney first became a double-agent, she was only truly motivated by revenge. Joining the real CIA, she wanted to fight back against Sloane because of her fiancee's murder, along with all the lies she had been told for so long. She was very much a lone wolf of sorts, the woman equals the mission. But it's interesting to see how much more stock Sydney now has in other people. While she was once so alone among a sea of traitors and betrayals, she now has her father's welfare to worry about, along with her personal investments in Vaughn and her friends at SD-6, the ones that are just as in the dark about their true motives as Sydney once was. This week we saw Sydney abandoning any form of protocol to save Vaughn's life, in one great moment being completely uncaring about telling Sark how she truly feels about Sloane, offering his head on a platter in exchange for a cure for Vaughn's ailment. It's just another example of how layered she's become.
One of the things that really struck me this week was how the writers managed to capitalize on the idea that so much of what we do could be considered emotionally manipulative. These early episodes of season two have been all about Sydney's swaying allegiances, what her mother represents to her and how that could be ambiguous, and her father's compassion versus his betrayals. Irina got in on the action this week, potentially pleading guilty purely to avoid a trial, and therefore force Sydney to delay her execution. It could all be Irina's own guilt that's at work here, or it could indeed be another act of game-play as Jack claims. But Jack isn't so easily cast as a hero, also indulging in his own form of manipulation here, telling the CIA inquiry of his love for his daughter, and how his recent actions were only done to protect her.
So much of this season has been about Sydney's unconscious desire to be an innocent again -- the gradual softening of all those walls she's put up. Her mother has played the most important part in that, Sydney slowly letting her back into her life, allowing herself to become "Irina's daughter", and not just this powerful double agent with a steely persona. But that was all wrecked last week by the revelations Syd was manipulated into believing, and The Indicator is another hour in which she is forced to call into question everything she thinks she knows about her own family. It's fitting for a season about childhood memories and the complexities of family that this episode gets straight to the root of Sydney as a spy, and whether or not it was all set in motion from an early age.
Jack Bristow has always been driven by impulse, very much a man moving at the beat of his own drum and orchestrating events in his own private ways. It's always somehow connected to Sydney, though, every one of his decisions designed to protect her best interests. But here we arrive at Dead Drop, a masterful exploration into emotional complexity, in which we witness Jack resorting to extreme methods to distance his daughter from Irina. Again, it’s a decision motivated for Sydney's welfare, but it's hard to entirely support him... right? Irina is an awful, awful person, but there does appear to be something compassionate there, and a real desire to connect with her daughter.
Doesn't everybody long to have perfect parents? Maybe because we so often don't, despite it being the one thing that we're supposed to have as human beings. If you're inclined to have children, you're meant to be nurturing and compassionate, and every child deserves that kind of treatment from the people they trust the most. There are obviously many of us who don't have that, or experience the crushing moment when you realize that your parents aren't as flawless as you once imagined. But what remains is a deep desire to have them be good, wishing they could remain that picture-perfect image that you remember from your childhood. Alias' second season is already tapping into that idea, Syd struggling to shake her last memories of Laura Bristow and slowly coming around to the woman she now knows as Irina Derevko.
