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The Boston Phoenix
May 23, 2003
Beauty and the Feast
Nigella Lawson’s sensuous kitchen; plus grand finales from Alias and The Guardian
by Joyce Millman
THE TRADITIONAL TV SEASON has just ended in the usual blaze of
cliffhangers, stunts, and final chapters. Some thoughts on two of the
more memorable season enders:
Alias (ABC, May 4). The taut and stylish girl-spy show audaciously
transformed its original premise midway through this season (its
second), with heroine Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) leading a CIA
special-ops team in destroying " SD-6, " the nefarious rogue spy
organization that had been masquerading as a covert wing of the CIA.
Gone was the thorny double-agent stuff that had apparently confused
some viewers; Sydney was now just a CIA agent, not a CIA mole within
SD-6. And she and her CIA handler, Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan),
were now free to do something sexier than make goo-goo eyes at one
another (not that there are many things sexier than their smoldering
passion held in check).
The streamlining of Alias could have meant the dumbing-down of one of
the most brain-teasing shows on TV. It didn't. Alias version 2.0
capitalized on the post–September 11 world order with a couple of
plausibly vicious terrorist acts (a scene of a CIA agent turned into
a human bomb still gives me the willies). And an X-Files-y plot
concerning evil clones could have turned irredeemably dippy, but it
didn't. Instead, it echoed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that great
pop-cultural metaphor for the Red Scare of the 1950s, with Sydney not
knowing whether her best friends Will (Bradley Cooper) and Francie
(Merrin Dungey) are really Will and Francie or terrorists wearing
their bodies like costumes.
In the Alias season finale, creator/writer J.J. Abrams pulled off
another stunning transformation while remaining true to the show's
two main themes: divided loyalties and conflicted female desires.
Sydney's parents are both spies — dad Jack (Victor Garber) is a CIA
good guy and mom Irina (Lena Olin) a duplicitous ex-KGB bad girl. But
nothing on Alias is ever black or white, so all season, Sydney has
been pulled between her parents, who may not be what they seem. The
finale seemed to imply that Jack has gone over to the dark side with
his old SD-6 colleague, Sloane (Ron Rifkin); Irina, meanwhile, may be
in the midst of a staggering quadruple cross and actually be on
Sydney's side.
At least that's what I think is happening. It was hard to focus on
the finer points given that the homestretch of the show featured the
most spectacular girlfight in prime-time history between Sydney and
the evil Francie clone, as well as an indelible moment where Olin
dangled by a rope from a skyscraper like Bruce Willis in Die Hard,
machine-gun-blasting her way into the building through a plate-glass
window. Olin always looks a little crazed with pleasure when she's
called upon to do the tough stuff, and this scene was her most
pleasure-crazy yet. In Irina, who is definitely up to something yet
seems to be taking great pains to protect her daughter, Olin has
created a character who is at once ferociously ambitious and
ferociously maternal. She's the ultimate working mother.
© Phoenix Media Communications Group 2003
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