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The Sun-Herald (Australia)
July 30, 2003
A taste for the spy life
by Brian Courtis
The trick with television's great spy and crime dramas is making sure we understand just enough of the intricacies of the plot to feel slightly smug and superior to our fellow viewers. The danger is making a show so complicated or unreal that the inadequacy sends us diving Jackie Chan-like for the remote.
Writer J.J.Abrams and director Ken Olin appear to know how to achieve the balance.
After introducing us to CIA super agent Sydney Bristow in the Seven Network's Alias last year they sent her from Rabat to Taipei picking up frequent flyer points, had her shot, lasered, dentally assaulted, threw her from buildings, tortured her hair, kept her running down endless corridors, parachuting, trying to finish a college essay, diving, struggling to keep boyfriends alive and looking for parents.
That was the easy, acceptable stuff. The really difficult bits for them and for us was when they tried to play around with good guys and bad guys. They mixed up those who knew what they were doing with SD-6, that criminal cabal posing as a department of the CIA, and those the White House could trust.
This could work, of course, in a show such as 24, where you're kept on your toes from incident to incident and not given a minute to pull aside to check out the logic. But not so easily in Alias.
The show started looking a little threadbare, a little too mole-in-the-hole, particularly when we started feeling sympathy for villainous boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin). It grew more complicated when we puzzled over Sydney's murderously dysfunctional family and tried to work out who was what in the deep-cover, double-identity, Rambaldi-protocol counterspy games.
Then, in the final hours of the first season, Sydney (Jennifer Garner) and patient viewers (you) learnt her mother, Laura Bristow (Lena Olin), supposedly killed in a car crash when her daughter was just six, was in fact still very much alive and still in the spy business.
They met in the final scene and now come face-to-face in the new series this week. "Tell me Sydney, who sent you here?" the deadly Laura asks. "What, I'm grounded?" asks Sydney. It earns her a bullet from mommy dearest.
But when Laura Bristow unexpectedly gives herself up to the CIA, the puzzling begins all over again. Is the true loyalty of Laura Bristow really resolved? All Agent Vaughn (Michael Vartan) will say is: "Once she got done with my father, he could only be identified by his dental records." Which doesn't sound too promising.
What is a winner for Abrams and Olin this week is they've realised that they need to explain where we may be heading. Show us the logic. And in a complex thriller-diller opening episode they have done both that and encouraged us to come back for more.
© The Sydney Morning Herald 2003
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