Alias: Fait Accompli (5.7)

Even with an influx of new characters, a show can only be sustained by its story, and whether or not it has anything particularly fresh or interesting to say. Rachel, Renée and Tom are all being smoothed into the show's foundations with considerable finesse, picking up the leg work vacated by the pregnant Syd and working well alongside the long-standing cast members. Tyrees Allen and Amy Acker are similarly charismatic actors doing strong work with a perpetually vague criminal subplot. But Fait Accompli exposes how little creative juice is honestly left in Alias, leaving its writers to merely cover old ground, even if it's populated by new players.

A lot of this episode feels like a greatest hits hour. There's an exchange of goods at a race-track, Dixon dressed in some incongruous ethnic ensemble, Sydney assuming a cartoonish, comedic secret identity while undercover (I kind of miss the days when they just had her dress in a tight leather outfit), Sloane again coming to APO with the truth about his recent evilness, hoping to use it for their long-term benefit. It's just a very plot-heavy episode, but with every new juncture of the script feeling like a rehashed version of events we've already seen. The show seems to be saying, "yeah, we know this is all a little familiar", both by the reappearance of Professor Choi in the episode's teaser sequence and later Syd noticing the parallels between Prophet Five and the Alliance, but constantly acknowledging narrative repetition doesn't mean it's somehow fine.

This is Andi Bushell's first script for the show, and maybe she was a fan before she was hired and she's encountering the problems that lie with writing for a show that you've watched for years. Like how the work winds up feeling like fan-fiction instead of just another chapter of a serialized story. I don't want to lay the blame at her feet, but this week's events seem to be so important to the season and where it will seemingly go from here -- Gordon Dean is taken out before we get to the real bones of his character, and the arrival of Angus Macfadyen's boss-man puts Sloane in the exact same position he was in just two episodes ago. Kelly Peyton's promotion is intriguing, and both the LSD scene and Jack later helping Syd build a crib are fun, but this is Alias generally slowing down whatever momentum the year previously had, exhuming old gimmicks instead of pushing forward. C-

Credits
Guest stars Mia Maestro (Nadia Santos); Angus Macfadyen (Joseph Ehrmann); Amy Acker (Kelly Peyton); Tyrees Allen (Gordon Dean); Jay Huguley (Dr. Peter Marks); Keone Young (Professor Choi)
Writer Andi Bushell Director Richard Coad