Alias, Season 2

I got through Alias, Season 2. Like a lot of shows that last about five seasons, the second season is where it got really popular.

My notes —

  • It’s darker. Sydney is less of an innocent this time around, and some really unpleasant things happen to people.
  • Sydney’s mother looms very large in this season. She’s played by Swedish actress Lena Olin, which is a stroke of genius because she and Jennifer Garner absolutely look like mother and daughter (though she has no relation to the show’s director and producer Ken Olin). Her loyalties are very much up in the air. The big arc of the season is how she regains Sydney’s trust, then loses it, but maybe just temporarily?
  • The plot “resets” halfway through the season by getting rid of the whole SD-6/Alliance angle. In the second half of the season, everyone is working directly for the CIA, and Sloane is the main bad guy. This is good, because the old plot was getting confusing and a little silly.
  • The Rambaldi plotline continues. A lot is made of Sloane’s lifelong obsession with Rambaldi and his mania at “finishing” his work. Things occasionally get mystical. The entire show has been about collecting “artifacts,” and this comes to a head in the final episode.
  • Sydney and Vaughn predictably strike up a romance.
  • Terry O’Quinn is in almost every episode as the head of the CIA unit, though he’s always listed in the credits as a “Guest Star,” so I don’t know how much further in the show he goes.
  • The show has a very weird view of the NSA. Lots of NSA agents doing stuff that NSA agents wouldn’t do (do they even have agents?).
  • Lot of one-shot guests this season: Rutger Hauer, Christian Slater, Danny Trejo, Faye Dunaway, Ethan Hawke, etc. I remember Alias was the “it” show of this TV season, which is sure to draw a lot of guest stars.
  • Ford evidently paid a lot of money for product placement this season. It’s like no other car company even exists.

Finally, the season ends on one of the all-time great TV cliffhangers —

After a fight to the death in her Los Angeles apartment, Sydney passes out and wakes up in an alley in Hong Kong with no memory of how she got there.

She reports in, and when Vaughn arrives at the safe house, he’s wearing a wedding ring. He tells Sydney she went missing after the fight in her apartment, and she’s been gone without a trace for almost two years.

The picture on this post is Sydney’s reaction, on which the season ends.