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Alias
Episode 1.22, "Almost 30 Years"
Written and directed by J.J. Abrams
All right, kids...this cliffhanger's taking us through the summer. Buckle up and try not to explode with anticipation.
So Pill, it turns out, is not dead, merely tranquilized. Sark carts him off to Scary Teeth Puller from the series premiere (oooh, full circle), and STP grills Pill on the mysterious "circumference" Daddy B. brought up in the last ep. Pill, as usual, really doesn't know anything, so he basically just gets some questionable dental work out of the deal.
Desperate to save Pill, Syd enlists help from Daddy B. -- they decide to exchange Pill for the blank Rambaldi page and the Vial O' Stuff that will reveal it. They are later joined by Vaughn, who puts his career on the line to help Syd. The Tremendous Trio ventures to Tapei, where Syd and Vaughn go undercover at an S&M club (!) and discover the circumference: a giant red golf ball that is apparently some Rambaldi doomsday device. The Man has constructed it. Syd, naturally, blows it up good, triggering a massive flood. She escapes just in time, but Vaughn appears to drown...gulp.
Meanwhile, Sloane tells Saint Emily the truth about his work, Dixon furrows his brow suspiciously, and Pill's paper publishes his story on SD-6. Things roar to a finish with a bushel of unresolved issues: Did Sloane really just poison Saint Emily? Is Vaughn really a goner? And what of Syd's mom? Oh, right. She's introduced to the world as...The Man. Dum dum DUM!
A lot of this is deliciously satisfying -- the emotional, carefully calibrated scenes between Sloane and Saint Emily are really wonderful, sad and sweet and probably full of deeper meaning than we're aware of. I can't help but continue to think that there's more to Saint Emily than meets the eye...like, we come back next year and Sloane is all sitting there smugly, and then, suddenly, his eyes widen and he falls over, a la Wallace Shawn in The Princess Bride, and Saint Emily just smiles cunningly and takes over SD-6.
I also loved the further development of Syd/Vaughn -- they're heart-to-heart at the train station is a really lovely scene, replete with subtext and poignance. Of course, then Alias yanks our heartstrings just a wee bit harder by implying that Vaughn perishes whilst assisting his would-be lady love. The scene wherein Syd desperately watches as he is engulfed by water is a corker, and of course his fate is left dangling. Naturally, it's hard to imagine that Alias would off Vaughn with out so much as a final kiss...let's hope Mr. Resourceful found a way to breathe through a straw or something. At least he and Syd got another fun dress-up scene together -- I am loving the Syd blue hair, but if they're really casing a big leather hang-out, they should have Syd leading Vaughn around by a chain or something. Or maybe Daddy B. leading both of them around.
There's also some wonderful ambigousness for Daddy B., who shoots snarky mole Haladki without a second thought, and some wonderful character quirks for Agent Greg Grunberg, who suddenly develops a backbone and tells Vaughn to stop with the Syd obsession, already.
Despite all this coolness, this ain't quite a perfect ep -- the Big Revelations, which are usually Alias' stock-in-trade, are kinda shrug-worthy. Oh, Haladki is the mole? Gee, I never woulda suspected, considering that he just happens to pop back up in this episode and everyone hates him. Oh, Syd's mom is The Man? Wow, whoulda thunkit, considering that the search for Mommy B. is a major element this season, yet isn't mentioned for most of the ep? I was kind of hoping for something that would really salt my pepper, and these little twists don't quite do it.
The ep also slows occasionally, particularly during the Pill torture scenes. We've seen all the teeth pulling and the screaming and the saucy retorts...Syd basically did a version of this scene in ep #1, and seeing it again with Pill just slows down the action. And the Dixon sub-plot, though potentially fascinating, doesn't really go anywhere.
All this aside, this ep is still enough to get the juices flowin' for next season. I'm already planning lots of fun-filled Alias games for the summer (The Alias Death Pool, anyone? Or how 'bout Guess Season 2's Hair Colors?), as well as constructing my shrine to Vaughn (live, damn you!). Let's hope season 2 gives us more good Alias -- high-flyin' kicks, killer cliffhangers, and flashy costumes o' the week.
Episode Rating: 8 out of 10
Sarah Kuhn is a little worried about Vaughn. You can read more of her nerd-centric insights over at Entertainment Geekly.
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