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Alias: Season 2
SAI81 from from Tonbridge,
30th May, 2007
At the end of Season One Sydney Bristow’s (Garner) Mother re-entered the picture. Irina Derevko (Olin) is a KGB agent who married Sydney’s father (Garber) as a part of her mission. Early in Season Two Derevko surrenders herself to the CIA saying that she will help Sydney, Jack and Syd’s handler Michael Vaughn (Vartan) in their mission to bring down SD-6. You can’t really just pick up Alias. The mythology of the show is so dense and convoluted that you need to start from the top. Once you do though it will very likely get its hooks into you in short order. Alias is, it has to be said, completely ludicrous. The central conceit of Father and Daughter double agents and the Mother of the family being ex KGB will inspire incredulity in any audience, even one that likes the show but this ceases to matter pretty fast as, as with shows like Buffy and Angel, this isn’t a show about realism, it’s an escapist fantasy. On that level it absolutely works. The storylines are always exciting and the show is structured to make every episode end with a cliffhanger, often midway through a mission. The action sequences are fantastic with Jennifer Garner and the rest of the cast evidently doing a lot of their own work and such luminaries as Benny ‘The Jet’ Urquidez aiding in the stunt training. Garner clearly works very hard to execute the fights and her dance training pays off in spades as it allows her to mimic motion accurately (this is something that’s often true of female screen fighters, Michelle Yeoh and Zhang Ziyi among them). Outside of the action there’s also some solid writing and character work. Garner is excellent as Sydney and there’s a lot of emotion for her to play, most notably relating to her shifting relationship with Lena Olin’s character. She’s got an admirably natural style that helps ground the events of the story in some sort of reality. Sadly Michael Vartan is still a rather bland presence as Vaughn. There are attempts to bring some darkness to the character in this season but they don’t really work as he looks too much like Vaughn’s call sign ‘Boy Scout’ Victor Garber is often restricted to expositing, particularly in the second half of the season but he manages to get information out without it being too dry. He’s also got a moral ambiguity in his performance that is very effective. Among the rest of the cast the producers finally find something for Merrin Dungey to do as Francie (leading to the best fight of the whole series so far), Kevin Weisman is hysterical as Marshall and it’s great to see him go on a couple of missions and get a love interest (who, frankly, is far too hot to be into Marshall) and Carl Lumbly gives one of the best performances in the series when the plot twists and changes Dixon’s role. The real gift of this season though is Lena Olin. She’s perfect casting as Garner’s Mother. In her late 40’s Olin is still a stunning beauty and looks enough like Garner that the relationship immediately works on a physical level. Her performance is fantastic, always hinting that there’s something she’s not telling us, always suggesting that she’s manipulating events, but never winking to the audience or the characters. I really hope we get to see more of Olin in later series as she makes Derevko one of the most interesting characters in the show. Silly though Alias is, and annoying as its constant re-explaining of its incredibly convoluted plot can be, it is one of the most out and out fun pieces of television I’ve seen in some time and for that reason alone I’m going to keep watching.
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