A Pilgrim’s Digression

The past few weeks, my wife and I have been watching the first season of the show Alias on DVD, at the same time that we have been watching shows from the current season on Wednesday nights (Alias is now in its fourth season, I believe). Alias is without a doubt the best show on television today. I know 24 has its boosters, but I am now an Alias fanatic all the way. I love this show.

It reminds me of how I felt when I began watching the X-Files in college. Finding the X-Files was a revelation. I never imagined something like that could survive on television. Discovering Alias has been like that. By the late nineties, however, I had grown cold towards the X-Files. Watching that show season after season, one felt that nothing was resolved, not even the tiniest bit. I quickly grew to hate that. I did not even watch the last two or three seasons of the X-Files. I have never even thought about renting it on DVD. Maybe one day I’ll feel differently, but I have developed a strong dislike for that show now, and I don’t see my opinion changing.

Alias is better than the X-Files. In the first season back in 2001, Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is a Graduate Student studying to be an English teacher at the same time that she is working as a Special Agent for what she believes to be the CIA. It turns out, she is in fact working for a vast, sophisticated terrorist organization posing as CIA, SD-6. The CIA recruits her to work for them as a double agent against SD-6. The plot mostly turns around the efforts of SD-6 to acquire information about something called the Rambaldi device, the invention of a sixteenth century inventor and prophet named Rambaldi who foresaw in amazing detail technology that would not be invented for hundreds of years. The Rambaldi device could be a weapon, and SD-6 sends its agents on missions to acquire information about it under the pretense of keeping the device out of the hands of terrorists.

Such is the gist of the plot. The thing that brings me back to this show every Wednesday night are the characters, however. Sydney’s father is a double agent for both the CIA and SD-6 as well, which is how Sydney was recruited, and her relationship with him is weird, to say the least. One of the mysteries somewhat cleared up in the first six episodes is what happened to Sydney’s mother. It turns out she was a KGB agent spying on Sydney’s father, and her life with him was a lie–right down to her own career as an English teacher (which Sydney has emulated in her private life). She was killed in a suspicious car crash, along with the FBI agent who was tracking her down.

The other great character in the show is Arvin Sloane, head of SD-6, who is played by Ron Rifkin. There are few characters in TV or film as deeply developed as this man. He has his diabolical side, but he is not a conventional bad guy in any sense of the word. No protagonist could ever just kill him and leave the audience feeling satisfied.

This is a fascinating show, which has the added plus of allowing us to see Jennifer Garner kick ass and take names, sometimes in skimpy clothing. The season four finale is a two hour special tonight on ABC, if anyone is interested in giving it a look. The ABC “Alias” website has a pretty good Episode Guide which provides plot summaries of every episode, if you watch it irregularly and need to catch up with what has been happening. What sets this show so much above aggravating crap like the X-Files is that mysteries are actually resolved intelligently and satisfyingly. It might take a whole season of episodes, but in the end, one is not left feeling more confused than before watching the program. Of course, Seasons one through three are available for rent at Netflix or Blockbuster or whereever you get your DVDs. I highly recommend this program.

Finally, I am also still watching Lost, though I sort of have begun to feel like it is heading down the X-Files road towards the city of Esoterica. I have been watching this show since the premiere. My frustrations with it stem from the constant re-runs, with only an occasional new episode thrown in. I know there is a need to bring new viewers up to speed, but I think Alias does this just fine by having a short segment of “what happened last time” at the beginning of the program.

Lost is about a plane crash on a remote Pacific island. Some fifty or so people survive, but the main cast is confined to maybe ten or fifteen people. Strange things start to happen from the moment they crash land—stranger even than the fact that some fifty people survive a plane crash. There is a monster in the forest, an SOS message from a Frenchwoman named Rousseau (gee, wonder if that name means anything!) that has been playing for sixteen years, a mysterious, metal hatch buried in the ground which seems impossible to open, and a sequence of numbers which appear again and again and bring tragedy with them wherever they are found. One of the characters won the lottery with the numbers, which he acquired from a patient in a mental hospital, but from the day he won the lottery only bad things have happened to him not the least of which is the plane crash. Are these people in some paralell dimension? Are they all in fact dead? Lots of mysteries here.

What brings me back to this show is, again, the characters. Through flashback, we learn about their lives before the plane crash. Everyone seems to have some trauma in their past. Sayeed was an officer and a torturer in Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard, who fled the country before the American invasion. Charlie, played by Dominic Monaghan of the LOTR trilogy, was a crack addict. He is still addicted to heroin when the plane crashes and goes through withdrawal on the island. Hurley is the fellow who won the lottery (no one believes him that he is a millionaire), but who has had nothing but bad luck ever since. People have accidents and injure themselves around him. Kate was a bank robber, possibly a murderer, being transported back to the United States before the plane crash. The marshall she was handcuffed to died, and she escaped, and she has been trying to keep her past secret from everyone. Locke was paralyzed before the plane crash, but when he woke up on the beach, he had use of his legs again, a miracle which has inspired him to stay on the island until he can uncover its mysteries. He tries to thwart every plan to escape.

There is a lot about Lost that draws the viewer back again and again. Again, I just hope it doesn’t become silly and overwrought like the X-Files.

I want to write about my viewing of the original Star Wars trilogy again, as well as post a few thoughts on Revenge of the Sith, which I hope to see on Friday night. But I have already extended this blog entry too far. I’ll post about Star Wars tonight or tomorrow, maybe.