Tag: Merrin Dungey

Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 3×10: ‘Remnants’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone, as the saying goes, and Remnants is perhaps the chief example of that with Alias up to this point.

The return of Will Tippin, as played by Bradley Cooper, is an unexpected boon to an episode that arrives right in the middle of one of Alias’ most rollercoaster, knotty and complicated story arc resolutions, as Sydney’s lost time begins to unfurl itself as weaved closely into the advancing stages of the Rambaldi mythology. Will did not need to exist within the tapestry of Remnants; from a narrative point of view, another character could have logically filled the position Will does here, either another guest character or one of the main cast. Yet the manner in which writer Jeff Pinkner finds a way to reintroduce Will, provide details of how his life has changed in the ensuing two years, and tether him to the ongoing plot of Syd’s missing time, the ‘death’ of Andrian Lazarey, and ultimately the Rambaldi mythos, is surprisingly adept. It’s a reach but it’s not a crowbar.

The title itself doubles down on what Remnants essentially concerns: Alias coming to terms, finally, with the consequences and fallout from Season Two. The Nemesis sets the scene for this by reintroducing Allison Doren, and Remnants pays it all off by adding Will to the concoction. Will becomes not just the key to unlocking Syd’s lost two years, but the emotional mechanism for her to break down and come to terms with the trauma of being transformed into her dark reflection. In Conscious she kills that id, destroys the idea of Julia Thorne, the sinister double, in order to ultimately access and re-connect with Will, and he serves a function beyond exposition or narrative connectivity to what the Covenant are planning to provide both a balm, a hint of salvation, and indeed a moment of pause and reflection. Will allows her, for the first time in a long time, to briefly be just ‘Sydney’.

Remnants is all about Alias’ continuing mission, one it has been engaging with on some level since Phase One, to let go of both its own past and, more generally, the 1990s it was born from.

Continue reading “ALIAS 3×10: ‘Remnants’ (TV Review)” →
TV, Writing

TV Review: ALIAS – ‘The Nemesis’ (3×06)

A J. Black

In 2018, we began a deep-dive TV review series looking at J.J. Abrams’ Alias, which ran from 2001-2006. Over the next year, we’ll be looking at Season Three’s 22-episode run in detail…

The Nemesis reminded me of Double Agent, from Alias’ second season. Partly for picking up on threads established in that episode, but also in how it straddles serialisation and stand-alone storytelling.

While in some respects, The Nemesis diverges from the ongoing character arc for Sydney and the mythology around her missing time, in other ways it is central to everything we’ve experienced in the previous five episodes. Repercussions suggested Sydney needed to face the consequences of the two years we skipped, and the climactic beat of The Telling, after A Missing Link placed significant moral compromise in our mind about what Syd might have become, or had to become, in those missing years.

The Nemesis contextualises this by framing an episode almost entirely around the lingering elements of Season Two. Crystal Nix Hines’ script is almost a sequel to both The Telling and the relentless final third of the second season as a whole, pulling us back into that paradigm after Season Three launched into a new direction. Even the final scenes of the episode contain the same music and tempo as the end of the previous year.

Yet simultaneously, it takes broader steps to what is now an inevitable confrontation between Sydney and the NSC, with Lauren’s investigation into the Lazarey murder taking significant strides in the sub-plot of this episode. Strip that away and The Nemesis could have been, for all intents and purposes, a relatively stand-alone episode that simply works at those Season Two threads, but Nix Hines does an admirable job of tying the stylistics of these two different seasons together across this hour, even if the constituent parts of Syd’s reunion with the villainous Allison Doren struggle to live up to their promise. The Nemesis is designed to serve as, essentially, the concluding beat of the season’s first act before Prelude sends us thundering into the next one.

It’s a strange balance, overall, and one that is only partially successful.
Continue reading “TV Review: ALIAS – ‘The Nemesis’ (3×06)” →

Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 3×06: ‘The Nemesis’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

The Nemesis reminded me of Double Agent, from Alias’ second season. Partly for picking up on threads established in that episode, but also in how it straddles serialisation and stand-alone storytelling.

While in some respects, The Nemesis diverges from the ongoing character arc for Sydney and the mythology around her missing time, in other ways it is central to everything we’ve experienced in the previous five episodes. Repercussions suggested Sydney needed to face the consequences of the two years we skipped, and the climactic beat of The Telling, after A Missing Link placed significant moral compromise in our mind about what Syd might have become, or had to become, in those missing years. The Nemesis contextualises this by framing an episode almost entirely around the lingering elements of Season Two. Crystal Nix Hines’ script is almost a sequel to both The Telling and the relentless final third of the second season as a whole, pulling us back into that paradigm after Season Three launched into a new direction. Even the final scenes of the episode contain the same music and tempo as the end of the previous year.

Yet simultaneously, it takes broader steps to what is now an inevitable confrontation between Sydney and the NSC, with Lauren’s investigation into the Lazarey murder taking significant strides in the sub-plot of this episode. Strip that away and The Nemesis could have been, for all intents and purposes, a relatively stand-alone episode that simply works at those Season Two threads, but Nix Hines does an admirable job of tying the stylistics of these two different seasons together across this hour, even if the constituent parts of Syd’s reunion with the villainous Allison Doren struggle to live up to their promise. The Nemesis is designed to serve as, essentially, the concluding beat of the season’s first act before Prelude sends us thundering into the next one.

It’s a strange balance, overall, and one that is only partially successful.

Continue reading “ALIAS 3×06: ‘The Nemesis’ (TV Review)” →
Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 2×22: ‘The Telling’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

In 2018, I began my first deep-dive TV review series looking at JJ Abrams’ Alias, which ran from 2001-2006. This year, I’ll be looking at Season Two’s 22-episode run in detail…

The title of the Season Two finale of Alias is something of a coy misdirect. The Telling promises much in the way of answers to a series filled with questions and, ultimately, simply piles more questions on top of the pile.

This is, however, as it should be. Alias was built on mystery box storytelling. J.J. Abrams, who returns to write and direct this episode, the first time in that double role since the series pilot Truth Be Told (and his last as show runner of the series), constructed Alias atop a house of cards in terms of narrative enigma and steadily unfurling character dynamics which, particularly in the second half of this season, have begun to fall to pieces as the series contracted and morphed into something new. The Telling serves as the conclusion of that transitory process and the beginning of an entirely new one.

Abrams’ script and story are extremely confident in not just picking up from where Second Double left off, as all of the character and story threads across the season begin coming together, but delivering a series of conclusive beats which are incredibly rewarding as a viewer. The tantalising mystery of Sloane’s Rambaldi device and the arcane mythology behind Syd’s ultimate confrontation with Irina; the climactic revelation and supremely cathartic fight between Syd and Evil Francie as the most personal truth of the season is revealed, and finally what has to rank as one of the most stunning and brazen cliffhangers, and one of the best examples of mystery box storytelling, that genre television has ever delivered.

The Telling might not quite live up to the tease of its title. It might not lay bare all of the secrets Alias has to offer. But it does reward the audience as the capstone to a remarkably successful twenty two episodes of storytelling, given how different the show looks from where we began in The Enemy Walks In.

Continue reading “ALIAS 2×22: ‘The Telling’ (TV Review)” →

Alias, Season Reviews, TV

ALIAS (Season 1) – Overview

A J. Black

The first season of Alias, the show that put superstar producer-director J.J. Abrams on the map, has aged remarkably well.

Airing in 2001, a matter of weeks in the wake of the traumatic September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers in New York, Alias had the unenviable task of providing overblown, B-movie, pulp escapism to an audience reeling from the most existentially terrifying attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Abrams, fresh off his first TV series Felicity (starring the later-to-be-famous Keri Russell) and a career penning screenplays across the 1990’s for major Hollywood blockbusters, had to try and sell a show which captured the retro, cult aesthetics of 1960’s adventure shows and movies he had grown up with – Mission: Impossible, I Spy, the James Bond series – shot through with a stylish, slick, modern action sensibility.

It was a hard sell. Audiences gravitated far more to the intense, dour, revenge fantasy of 24 and all-American hero Jack Bauer, who steadily across a decade in which Americans and Western Europe turned their gaze toward Islamic fundamentalism and the threat of the Middle East became more of the superhero Americans wanted. If he was The Punisher, a man of dubious morals ready to compromise his soul for the greater good, then Alias’ hero Sydney Bristow was Captain America; virtuous, homely, and a reflection of wholesome American values, wrapped up inside familial and emotional angst that recalled Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Audiences never truly took Sydney to their breast, to their heart, and almost immediately Alias became a cult genre hit, never to explode fully into the global mainstream.

The sad thing about this is just how well executed Alias’ first season is, one of those rare shows that arrives almost fully formed and very quickly steps into a unique tone and rhythm, only building on that start to deliver twenty two episodes which provide a real sense of payoff.

Continue reading “ALIAS (Season 1) – Overview” →
Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 1×19: ‘Snowman’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

If Masquerade was a busy episode of Alias that needed to function as both ostensibly the beginning of a two-part episode, and deal with the reverberations from the mid-section of the run, then Snowman ranks as one of the most disposable outings in Alias’ debut season.

Snowman in any other series would have been a two-part episode expressly designed for our protagonist Sydney Bristow to enjoy a brief romantic attachment that would in no way impinge on the formula of the show. As discussed in Masquerade, this kind of plot device would often be deployed in TV shows across the 1990’s which balanced stand-alone storytelling with a level of narrative serialisation; any number of Star Trek characters across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager or Enterprise for example as one of the worst offenders for this trope. The problem with the character who serves this function in Alias, Noah Hicks, and the problem with Snowman in general, is that it has to function within a broader ongoing serialised narrative that is ramping up for the climactic beats of the season.

By this point in the twenty-two episode season, Sydney is simultaneously balancing her role as a double agent for the CIA inside the sinister SD-6, reeling from the revelations that her mother was secretly a KGB agent but is also in fact still alive, now aware she is central to an arcane, esoteric prophecy by a 15th century genius who predicted she could be some kind of human weapon of mass destruction and she is having to keep all of this secret from her two best friends, plus has steadily been developing an attachment to her CIA handler which goes beyond professional concern. Where exactly could any kind of meaningful love story fit amidst such a dense stack of open and ongoing plot lines? Especially when each episode has to service the majority of them at once.

Snowman ends up being an episode which focuses on the one story element that, in the long run, is never going to matter.

Continue reading “ALIAS 1×19: ‘Snowman’ (TV Review)” →
Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 1×11: ‘The Confession’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

The halfway point of the first season of Alias also feels, appropriately, like the point of no return.

The Confession is an episode which essentially concludes the beginning of J.J. Abrams’ series. It serves as a marker between two distinct periods, in a different way to how Season 2’s Phase One will mark the show, but in an important manner nonetheless. The Confession marks Alias as being defined as ‘pre’ Sydney knowing the truth about her mother, and ‘post’ Sydney knowing the truth about her mother, because that revelation completely and utterly changes Alias forever.

It is the key to Syd’s entire life – her past, her present and her future, and for all of the revelations and twists Alias will deploy over the five years of its existence, Sydney learning her beloved, venerated mother Laura who died when she was a little girl was in fact a KGB double agent, is the most powerful. 

It’s the revelation we should have seen coming all along.

Continue reading “ALIAS 1×11: ‘The Confession’ (TV Review)” →
Alias, Episode Reviews, TV

ALIAS 1×06: ‘Reckoning’ (TV Review)

A J. Black

Alias is steadily building toward a larger point of revelation across its first season, as the title of Reckoning alludes to. Thematically, the journey of super-spy double agent Sydney Bristow continues to be about her own understanding of the bigger picture, and her place within it.

The complexities of the narrative inside J.J. Abrams show even facilitate, starting with Reckoning, a change to the recap preamble of the series’ concept. I’ve talked about how Alias doesn’t just employ a ‘previously’ recap akin to many other TV shows, but starts with a bigger explanation and contextualisation of the broader story the serialised narrative is telling. Here, Alias expands that recap by weaving the scene-setting around the four key characters at the outset of the series – Syd, her handler Michael Vaughn, her boss Arvin Sloane and her father Jack Bristow, the recap showing their faces and names just in case the people at the back AREN’T QUITE GETTING IT. I can’t recall another show which ever quite felt the need to prime the audience week by week with so much detail before even the previously recap.

Perhaps the choice was made because even just six episodes in, Alias is already starting to grow quite knotty and dense, and the show hasn’t even scratched the surface yet in many ways. Reckoning has a multitude of narratives bubbling away – Syd’s suspicion that Jack may have been working for the KGB, Vaughn and the CIA’s slow-burning backdoor hack into SD-6 established in the previous episode Doppleganger, Francie’s uncertainty about her boyfriend Charlie, Will’s investigation into the Kate Jones mystery. That’s just for starters, before any of the main episodic missions for Sydney are even covered, though really so far they have largely just been window-dressing around which the series can delve into these deeper storylines and building character arcs.

Reckoning, if anything, feels like the first example of what would have been a traditional two-part episode of a more conventional network TV show version of Alias.

Continue reading “ALIAS 1×06: ‘Reckoning’ (TV Review)” →
Alias, Books

ALIAS: ‘Recruited’ (Book Review)

A J. Black

Though written after Alias aired, ABC launched a 12-book series of tie-in novels set before the pilot episode, Truth Be Told, which explore Sydney Bristow’s life before the series. I’ll be looking at them one by one as we move through exploring the series itself…

There are several reasons why developing a tie-in book series for Alias aimed at the young adult market makes a lot of sense. For a start, with Sydney Bristow, you have a defined heroine for, specifically, a female market who will find the struggles of a nineteen year old girl on the one hand being a dork around boys, and on the other obsessing whether she is capable enough to become a CIA super-spy, fairly relatable – which is precisely what author Lynn Mason puts her through in Recruited. Secondly, there is a very clear narrative black spot in the Alias backstory open for further exploration.

When we first meet Syd, in the Alias pilot episode Truth Be Told, she is a fully-fledged super-spy. She is still young, around her early-mid twenties, but we get the impression of a woman who has been working for SD-6 for quite some time. She’s travelled the world, fought bad guys. She has friends, a fiancee and is thinking of marriage. She has grown into a persona where she can become someone else at the drop of a hat. We will see the origin story of that on screen with the Rachel Gibson character in Season 5 much much later on, but Alias’ tale begins with Syd already there.

The conflict that drives her in the series, which the pilot establishes, is in learning SD-6 is, in reality, a sinister crime syndicate pretending to be the CIA. The show, therefore, skips Syd’s origin story.

Continue reading “ALIAS: ‘Recruited’ (Book Review)” →