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The Vancouver Sun
May 3, 2003
Alias closes season with typical chaos
Cracking good thriller makes little sense, but does so with a style that draws stars
by Alex Strachan
Weird but true: Alias co-creator and chief manipulator J.J. Abrams told
Entertainment Weekly a year ago that he came up with the idea for the
college-grad-student-living-a-double-life-as-a-secret-agent scenario while
tossing out suggestions in the Felicity writers' room at the end of the
2000 season. Abrams' idea for a one-off Felicity that would end in a
revelation that It Was All a Dream was summarily dismissed, but Abrams kept
the idea in the back of his mind, as the seed for a whole other show.
Felicity, Abrams' first-born, died an early death, but Alias, a
white-knuckle roller-coaster ride that is doing for serial spy thrillers
what Melrose Place did for prime-time soaps, is still with us. It ends its
sophomore season Sunday with a typically chaotic two-hour outing, full of
twists and turns and double meanings and triple crosses, culminating in the
now obligatory Big Tease, in which uberheroine Sydney
Bristow (glossy-mag cover girl and Emmy-nominee Jennifer Garner) finds
herself in a heap of trouble, together with her loyal CIA bud and budding
love interest Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan).
In a medium that often promises more than it delivers, Alias is an anomaly
-- a cracking good thriller that promises a good time and delivers on a
dime, with a frenetic mix of killer gadgets, convoluted conspiracy theories
and weepy, thirtysomething confessionals. Alias makes little sense, and
what's more, it doesn't care! Style counts for a lot, though, in a show
like this, and Alias has style to burn. It also has more to say about
female empowerment than most other TV thrillers combined, thanks to a lead
character with bottomless reservoirs of courage and a burning desire to do
the right thing.
Abrams has said he wanted his central character to be a young woman who is
disenfranchised, who has no connection to either her pretend life, of
dedicated student and doting daughter, or her real life, of covert
operative and trained killer. Abrams has said, too, that he wanted to tell
a story about "the most [mess]ed-up family of all time." To that end, he
saddled Sydney with parents burdened by even more issues than she has, and
who hate each other into the bargain. It doesn't help Sydney's mental
well-being, either, that Mom and Dad are working for opposite sides, though
who exactly is working for whom in Alias is never entirely clear.
Late last season, it appeared Sydney's mom (Lena Olin, a career film
actress who appears to be having the time of her life as a villain so evil
she makes Cruella De Vil look like Snow White) might be working for the
Other Side. That notion was dispelled at the beginning of this season, when
it was revealed that she was actually a double agent who was working for
the Good Guys. Or was she? Two weeks ago, Abrams revealed that Mom could in
fact be a triple agent, working for the Other Side all along.
Sydney, meanwhile, bent over backward -- literally, in some episodes -- to
take down SD-6, the covert CIA branch that originally hired her, and expose
the evil doings of the nefarious Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin, a career
character actor who appears to be having the time of his life as the best
TV villain since, well, ever!).
The evil Sloane is still on the loose as Sunday's season finale begins, and
still scheming to get his hands on the Rambaldi artifact, a 15th-century
gadget that, as far as I can make out, causes people to spontaneously
combust, while leaving their surroundings intact. (Milo Rambaldi, for the
purposes of historical clarity, was a fictitious 15th-century architect and
scholar, equal parts Nostradamus and Leonardo da Vinci, who discovered the meaning of life and
created a weapon of mass destruction, long before WMDs became all the rage.)
Ethan Hawke turned up in a guest role one memorable post-Super Bowl episode
as a double agent working both sides against the middle. Hawke joined a
list that includes Roger Moore, Quentin Tarantino, Christian Slater,
Malcolm McDowell, Rutger Hauer and, last week, David Carradine as a
Buddhist monk ruminating about the end of the world atop a mountain in
Nepal. Because Alias doesn't take itself too seriously, seeing familiar
faces in unfamiliar roles isn't the distraction it would be in a more
grounded, realistic show like Law & Order. It's also a measure of the
respect Alias commands in the acting community that so many familiar names
want to sign on. Kiefer Sutherland told me earlier this year that he would
like nothing better than to do a guest shot on Alias, and not necessarily
as his 24 character, either. Then again, 24 is a rival show produced by a
rival production company for a rival network, so the chances of that
happening are about as likely as a genuine Rambaldi artifact turning up on
Antiques Roadshow. Or as likely as finding out in Alias's season-ender
exactly what the hell is going on. Of course, not knowing is half the fun.
That's just one of Alias's secrets.
Alias's season finale airs Sunday 7-9 p.m. on CTV, and 9-11 p.m. on
KOMO-ABC. A DVD boxed set of season 1 will be available in September. And,
yes, Alias will return for a third season.
© CanWest Interactive 2003
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