Dear Alias,

Don’t get mad, but I’m writing to break up with you. I don’t want you to get upset, but it’s probably fair if you do take it personally. After all, I’m fairly sure it’s not me, it’s you. It’s been a fun ride, but I feel the good times are over, and I’d like to outline a few points before I say goodbye to you forever.

Let’s start with the obvious things. Remember when we fell in love? I’d just come off a bad break-up with a show that treated me rough. Initially seductive, Buffy the Vampire Slayer had turned into a show that was all soap and no plot, and to make matters worse, had stopped focussing on all but a few of its ensemble cast. By contrast, you were the perfect match for me. Everyone got something to do, be they super spies, daggy friends, or nerds. And you had a strong plot focus, it seemed; when it became clear your super-arc was ready to finish up, you were quite happy to do so, mid-season.

What I didn’t realise then was that on a smaller level, you didn’t care about plots. I mean, sure, you acted like you did. But deep down, it wasn’t important to you. As long as you could get your jollies — with bikinis, or parachutes, or excessive violence — you weren’t fussed as to how that actually happened. But I was a blind fool, lured in by your quite cohesive and compelling ‘double-agent’ plotline.

When that ended, the cracks started to show. But I’ve talked about those. It’s unfair for me to criticise you for things you did ages ago, so let’s talk about last week.

I could tell you’d been concerned about the relationship for a while, but it became really obvious two weeks ago, when you took my vague mutterings about ‘the good old days’ to heart, and started acting exactly like you used to. But sweetie, that doesn’t really fly, does it? I was there too. We both did the ‘young girl works for baddies who say they’re the CIA’ thing years ago, and it was great. When you do it again, now, it just seems forced, and you keep rubbing it in my face by having Sydney call attention to the similarities.

It just makes it a little obvious that you’re out of ideas. Especially when you rehash yet again the old ‘let’s replay the opening scene in a new and interesting context’ with an astonishingly pointless twist. Looks like someone’s first edit came in a little short. By contrast, I can see that you’re trying hard with your arc this year. You’ve introduced a reasonable villain, and the campaign between him and APO has been surprisingly easy to follow, but I’m not fooled. Someone will mention Rambaldi in just a few episodes and suddenly no one will have any sort of believable motivation any more.

While we’re on the subject of villains, your foolish decision to have a baddie proclaim a few weeks back that our heroes “wouldn’t believe” who the super-duper bad guys are did not impress me. Who wouldn’t Sydney believe? After four long years of this crap, she should be expecting anything up to and including alien invaders.

Then, this week, you started trying to tempt Sloane to the dark side again. I cannot express just how pointless it would be if we went down that road again. But then, it seems with a lot of your characters, that you can’t think of much to do with them but run them through the same old crap. The most interesting thing to happen to Sydney in recent years, her pregnancy, was forced upon you, for heaven’s sake.

So it’s just as well that you’ve introduced a few new cast members. Probably. Maybe. Having been proved wrong by Victor Garber in the past, I’ll try not to judge Blandy McBlanderson. I mean, Balthazar Getty. I’m getting the feeling that you send him into each scene saying “Nice try, but don’t move so much. Stop emoting. Don’t be interesting.” Rachel Nichols, on the other hand, is hot. I can see what you’re trying to do. I used to tune in for a bit of Jennifer Garner hotness, and now that she’s all pregnant and such, you’re flipping someone new in. But you’ve been too blatant, too fast.

Don’t look at me like that. I know you used to show me plenty of Garner flesh in the past. But there’s a difference. When Jennifer comes out of a pool dripping and starts to undress in order to distract bad men, at least it works on a plot level too. Sometimes it’s even quite clever. When you dump Rachel Nichols in a car boot with a low-cut top and make the car jiggle about, that’s … not as clever. I know she has nice boobies. I could have waited until the plot and the boobies worked together. But no. You were too eager to please.

So I guess that’s why I’m leaving you. I don’t feel like you’re your own show any more. When I watch you I feel like I’m seeing a mathematical formula for THRILLS + BOOBS + SUSPENSE + ANGST resolve in front of my eyes. And you do all that well, separately. The scene where Blandy and Dixon are taking the bank’s quiz was very tense.m¹ But it never adds up to much more, and it doesn’t feel like you actually have anything to say any more. Perhaps there’s just nothing interesting left to do with spies. I don’t know. But crucially, I don’t care either.

I’ll miss you.

Tom.

1. Indeed, I fully expect Mission: Impossible 3 to be quite good due to your Dad J.J.’s influence, and will be watching it eagerly. Is it heartless to include footnotes in a letter that’s dumping someone?

Well, it looks like it’s time for my annual Alias review. Season Five, eh? What happened in Season Four after it’s promising start? Well… Sydney went into various night clubs, owned by various bad guys, and got various items of varying importance. Some of them were to do with Rimbaldi, who unfortunately still seems to be relevant to the series. Syd’s sister, daughter of the nefarious/reformed Arvin Sloane, joined the team and was doing quite well until she got infected by a nasty disease/thing and went psycho at the end of the year.¹

It turned out there was yet another Derevko sister (we’re up to three, now, for those playing at home). Even Syd’s mum came back. Everything was pretty exciting. There was a big glowing red ball in the sky and everything.

But this was Alias, and so they just couldn’t leave well enough alone. They added on an extra coda where Syd and her fiancee Vaughn were driving along in the country. Vaughn suddenly started to tell her about Alias‘s latest lame plot-twist, in which he wasn’t actually who he’d said he was for seven years.² At that moment, a huge truck smashed into the car, clearly driven by a frustrated fan who just wanted them to do something new and not keep digging for plotlines up their own arses.

And now, we return to the show to find that APO (Syd’s black ops section of the CIA, now run by her Dad) is so stupid that they’ll let dead CIA agents walk in and tell them that their own agents are evil without checking the guy out properly. And that Vaughn needs to find some book in order to… hmmm. I’ve forgotten. I’ll just go back and check. Talk amongst yourselves for a bit.

Ah. Here it is. Right. Vaughn’s father was a member of a special project to decipher 15th Century encoded manuscripts detailing genetic codes of some sort. The text was decrypted and the book is out there. I can’t imagine why that slipped past me the first time. I sometimes get the impression that the writers on this show have some huge random spinning wheel to determine their plots.

“There’s an ancient secret from the 15th Century tied to…” (spins, the wheel wanders through Derevko sisters, step-sisters, dead wives and CIA handlers)
“Vaughn’s Dad! It’s all detailed in a specific artefact, a…” (spins again, through items such as samurai swords, pages, crystals, hard drives, etc.)
“Book! To get it, Sydney and Vaughn will have to go to a…” (another spin, past night clubs, secure facilities, hospitals, boats and the like)
“Party! Brilliant!”

After all this faffing about, presumably the audience is supposed to feel vaguely satisfied that the ancient secrets hidden so carefully were found in 10 minutes of screen time. But it turns out that the book is barely the point of the episode anyhow, because when Vaughn turns it over, in a massively contrived situation he gets gunned down and killed while Sydney watches helplessly from the other side of a moving train. Is the death real? Is it faked? It’s a lot of trouble to go to, if things have been fabricated — we even get a sad funeral scene, complete with Sarah McLachlan. To make things excessively tragic, Syd is carrying Vaughn’s child, as she reveals to him in the best moment of the episode.

I continue to lose interest in Alias. The plots feel increasingly like exercises in algebra rather than emotional stories. The continuity is too complicated for me to even care whether things actually fit — though I suspect they don’t. There is some glimmer of hope though: in order to take the strain off the pregnant Jennifer Garner,³ a new character is being introduced, played by Rachel Nichols, who might hopefully have no connection to Rimbaldi at all.

Ah, who am I kidding. She’s probably his mum.

1. Sloane’s pretty upset about that. Her boyfriend Weiss appears to have forgotten all about her.
2. I’m pretty sure it’s seven. How long did Sydney skip at the end of Season Two? Damn, this show is confusing.
3. This episode is cunningly framed to keep Garner’s belly out of shot, which is quite amusing when you start looking for it. There’s a four month time-skip at the end which presumably allows them to forgo these shenanigans.