Repentance and More Alias

I am sorry if my prediction of a Green Bay - Tennessee Super Bowl led you to make any bad bets. If its any consolation, you shouldn't be betting anyway and this is God's way of telling you that. Actually, it's only my way of telling you that. I failed. I'll do better next year.

Ok, I'm now 4 episodes into Season 3 of Alias, and when you watch them all in a row like that, you realize just how fast the show moves. I am referring specifically to the fact that in like 50 episodes or so the show has radically reinvented itself 4 times, and minorly reinvented itself about 20 more times. When the show started, it was:

1) about unknown and very physically fit Jennifer Garner as Syd, whose fiance' was killed by the leader (Arvin Sloane) of the spy organization she worked for, which she thought was part of the CIA but figured out it wasn't. She and her father (whom she barely knew) were working as double agents in this organization (the now long-forgotten SD6) for the CIA. Her handler (literally -- j/k) was Michael Vaughn.

this lasted about 10 episodes, with Syd going on missions for SD6 and doing countermissions for the CIA and fighting Anna from K-Directorate and being really stylish all of the time. And then Quentin Tarantino showed up, and:

2) SD6's parent company, known as the Alliance of 12, plays a larger role in things as Sloane obsesses about his wife and a 500-year-old inventor (Rambaldi). The main opponent of the Alliance is now The Man (the idea well ran a little dry on that one), Alexasandr Kasineau (sp?), and his gang of really well-funded thugs such as baby-faced Brit-punk Sark. Syd still goes on missions and counter-missions, but she finds out her mom is still alive. Also, her friend Will goes from being an intrepid reporter to a torture victim who knows Syd's secret identity.

This lasted until the end of Season one, where all the loose ends of the season are tied up, and the Red Rambaldi Water Ball kills Vaughn and Syd's mom shows up and shoots her and Syd's dad gets Will away from the torture and the whole thing has this end-of-the-first-season-of- Twin-Peaks-let's-throw-every-cliffhanger-we-can-think-of-in-there. Anyway, the next year it's all about:

3) Syd's evil hot Mom who killed a bunch of CIA agents in the past turns herself in to the CIA and reconnects with Syd and Dad. They fight SD6 for a while together, with Mom in custody.

Then the big re-invention happens, as:

4) Sloane dissolves the Alliance and SD6 and allies with the former Organization headed by The Man (who, as it seems to turn out, was Syd's evil Mom). So now Syd and all her former "good" SD6 cohorts now work in the CIA office and chase Sloane around the globe looking for things by Rambaldi. Oh, and Syd's best friend Francie is an evil doppelganger, a bit borrowed from a thousand other shows, and one that just never ends (ugh).

Finally, at the end of Season Two, all the plot ends are tied up, and we get the biggest reinvention of all: Syd falls asleep for two years and wakes up in Hong Kong to find Sloane married and her Dad in jail looking like Osama Bin Smallmouth. So Season 3 is about 2 things so far: Syd trying to find out what happened to her; and, the CIA fighting a brutal organization filled with more of those evil former Russian KGB guys known as "The Covenant." But I'm sure by episode 10 The Covenant will be forgotten and Sloane will be a woman. Or something.

My point is, when you watch the shows in rapid succession you get a good idea of how ridiculous things are and how the show manipulates you constantly into thinking that one thing is true when really the exact opposite is. The entire reason the bad guys existed in seasons 1-2 was to find and assemble Rambaldi artifacts. Let's see: several characters and many more extras died because the bad guys wanted these artifacts. The CIA thought they would constitute some sort of doomsday device when assembled. After all the CIA's work and Syd's double-agent victories, the bad guys still manage to get their hands on all the Rambaldi artifacts. And when they assemble them, we learn at the beginning of season 3 that they just gave a message of "peace". When you have a few months in between season to stew, this may be ok. But if you watch it all in a row you get the sinking feeling that you have been duped, and that they are probably duping you again right now as we speak. The Rambaldi thing was merely one example of the tendency the show has to pull the rug out from under the audience. Littler rug-pullings happen every week.

That's why the show sucks, although I do love it.