|
New York Times
April 25, 2004
The Episode: Cracking the Code of "Alias"
By Robert Levine
The master plot lines of the serial spy drama "Alias" are kept on a
corkboard in the writers' room, on index cards that track the
progress of every character at each point in the season.
The show, broadcast Sundays on ABC, is the soap opera of spy series,
tangling international espionage with tortured familial relationships.
Sydney Bristow, for example, the CIA agent played by the show's star,
Jennifer Garner, began the third season by waking up two years after
the second season ended.
She had been presumed dead, she learned, and had no memory of how she
had spent the lost time. Sydney spent many of the ensuing episodes
caught in a love triangle with her ex-boyfriend (a fellow spy named
Michael Vaughn) and the woman he married while Bristow was gone. Her
emotionally distant father (Victor Garber) is a colleague, her mother
is a threat to national security, and she may or may not be the
subject of a doomsday prophecy by a 16th-century sage named Milo
Rambaldi.
One could see why it might be helpful to map things out on paper.
The cards, however, get the writers only so far. "I look at them
now," said J.R. Orci, who has been with the show since it began, "and
none of them are relevant. We use that as a road map but at some
point we end up ditching it."
In the writers' room, as in the fictional Los Angeles CIA office in
which much of the show takes place, "Alias" is a giant puzzle. "You
put in all these random pieces," said Monica Breen, who began writing
for the show this year, "and then you have to fill it in."
This season, before the first episode was shot, J.J. Abrams (the
show's creator) decided on one of its big story lines: that Sydney's
mother had an affair decades ago with the show's main villain, Arvin
Sloane.
Abrams and his fellow writers dropped hints into several scripts that
Sloane, played by Ron Rifkin, might be Sydney's biological father.
They eventually decided against following through on those hints,
because they didn't want to change the relationship between Sydney
and her father, which is essential to the emotional dynamic of the
show.
Since so much had been made of the affair, though, the writers agreed
that it needed some big payoff -- and that's how Sydney got a
previously unknown half-sister who goes by the name Nadia and who
makes her debut on Sunday night's episode.
Nadia (Mia Maestro), also in the spy game, has her own role in the
Rambaldi prophecy. According to previous episodes, this (fictitious)
Renaissance savant was so far ahead of his time that his work is
invaluable to intelligence agencies and international evildoers. The
Rambaldi mythology on "Alias" is almost comically complex, allowing
the writers to conceive of plots about world domination in exciting,
playful, nearly nonsensical ways that sharply contrast with the
depressing doings of the real-life CIA.
The writers decided that Sydney's half-sister would be "the
passenger" -- the person who has the ability to channel Rambaldi. "She
was potentially going to be a catatonic visionary," said Breen, who
wrote Sunday night's episode with Alison Shapker and Orci. "And then
no one was really satisfied with that because it really limits what
you can do with her." Characters had been dropping references to this
vague entity for months, but according to Orci, "we didn't know what
the passenger was. We've mastered the art of having the characters
say things that are vague and open-ended because we don't know what's
happening next."
So while, on screen, Sydney and her fellow CIA agents were trying to
figure out who or what the passenger might be, behind the scenes the
show's writers were doing the same thing. That was part of the appeal
of the passenger plan, in fact: As Orci says with an eye toward the
fourth season, "we want to leave our options open."
Nadia's introduction neatly ties up plot threads about the affair, as
well as the passenger, that diehard fans have been trying to piece
together. But what about casual viewers who don't have their own set
of index cards to rely on? To keep them engaged, each episode
includes a briefing scene, which recounts the story thus far. And to
ensure that each installment works on its own, as an entertaining
hour of television, every one also has an undercover mission -- for
which Garner dons one of her trademark sexy disguises -- as well as an
action mission. "Even if you don't understand the intricacies of the
character plot," Orci said, "you can still watch people getting blown
away."
In Sunday night's episode, the 20th of a 22-show season, Sydney and
her father must find her half-sister. The undercover mission involves
stealing a Rambaldi artifact from the Smithsonian. Once they track
the half-sister to a prison in Chechnya -- in "Alias," no one is ever
tracked to a mall in New Jersey -- their attempt to break her out
provides the episode's action mission.
The spy drama provides the setting, but what Sydney's really fighting
for is the chance to connect with her sister. One of the questions
the writers ask themselves is, "What is this episode about for
Sydney?," said John Eisendrath, an executive producer.
Despite its spy versus spy setting, "Alias" is ultimately a show
about family and loyalty, just as "The Sopranos" is, and much of the
conflict and suspense flow from interpersonal relationships the
audience can relate to rather than a world of espionage they can't.
As "Alias" accumulates unlikely plot twists -- a faked death here, an
evil doppelganger there -- the writers hope the more personal aspects
of the show will help it avoid the fate of elaborately plotted
serials like "The X-Files" and "Twin Peaks" that went awry and lost
their audiences. " "Alias' has this fantastical spy world but we try
to ground it emotionally," Schapker said.
Sunday night's secondary plot also plays out in a way the writing
team didn't originally plan: During Sydney's lost two years, Michael
Vaughn (Michael Vartan) married Lauren Reed (Melissa George), an
intelligence agent who was originally conceived as Sydney's romantic
rival.
"We wrote to that direction for 11 episodes and then decided it would
be much more exciting if she were evil," Breen said. So viewers
discovered months ago, as Vaughn did only recently, that his wife is
a double agent for a terrorist organization called the Covenant.
Here, too, the main impact is emotional. "We thought of Lauren
working for the Covenant just like a woman having an affair,"
Schapker said. The evidence of her betrayal consists of a false
passport, and her confrontation with her husband takes place as he's
being interrogated. "But it's still relatable, the idea of being lied
to in a marriage," Schapker added.
Surprise is part of the appeal of "Alias" -- the show's tagline
is "Expect the unexpected." At the same time, Schapker said, "it
isn't just what we can do to shock the audience. It has to come out
of character and motivation." Especially in the case of its lead
character. "Sydney is always the same person," Breen said. "She
grounds the story, which spins around her."
© New York Times News Service
|
|
