ALIAS – ‘A Dark Turn’ (2×17 – Review)
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…
If you really think about it, everything that happens in A Dark Turn has almost certainly been inevitable since the beginning of Season Two. It’s perhaps why the title of the episode is so heavy in foreshadowing.
The fact we probably just didn’t want to believe how A Dark Turn ends is a testament to how well both the writers and Lena Olin have crafted the character of Irina Derevko since she first truly appeared in The Enemy Walks In. The first third of Season Two was almost entirely devoted to Irina’s introduction, her relationship with both Sydney and Jack, and how her unexpected returns exposes and decrypts Alias’ exploration of the dysfunctional, nuclear American family. Irina is played ambiguously on the page but Olin, with some skill, drew out of her dialogue shades that Jennifer Garner and Victor Garber both played with, and likely influenced later scripts in the season. She could be mercurial and sinister on one hand, while sensitive, regretful and caring on the other.
This was, undoubtedly, in many senses a deliberate move on the part of J.J. Abrams and his staff. We were never supposed to know quite where Irina’s loyalties lay. She could never entirely be trusted, given she surrenders control of what appears to be a major global organised crime network to become a CIA prisoner. We knew she always had an agenda. Yet Season Two plays with the idea that maybe, on some level, Irina turned herself in because she *did* care about Jack, she did love Sydney, and she regretted many of the choices she made decades earlier when her KGB cover was blown. Season Two inevitably saw her character thaw the hearts of both Sydney and Jack, inveigling her way into their lives and emotions, to the point she was in danger of becoming not just an ally, but someone we might actually start rooting for.
A Dark Turn is the reminder we needed. Of course Irina is a villain. She was always a villain. She will always *be* a villain. Alias is just very good at the emotional long con because, over Season Two, we had almost talked ourselves out of this being true.
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