tonight's "Alias" -- aieeee!
Well, I was totally with that until the last act-and-a-half --
"30 Seconds"
STUFF I LIKED:
1) Nadia! At least we got to spend some quality time with her (and she got to spend quality time with the entire SpyFam) before she went. Nadia, always will I love you.
2) And yes, at least she got to DATE JACK before she died. I don't care what you say, lalalalala I can't hear you, Jack would totally consider surveillance a date, plus he was wearing black, and my fantasy life will make what use of that it will, dammit. I made little swirly happy hands with Nadia and Jack first met up, and I'm glad that they took the time in the episode to remind us that Nadia and Jack did have a bond (WowWrongBadHot or not), one they both acknowledged openly here for the first (and, sadly, the last) time. The scene where he was the one to discover her body just gutted me.
3) OK, I really thought that Nadia would be our last death for the hour, so Renee's death shocked me big time. Even next week, it wouldn't have, but it did this time -- and it was sadly apt that it happened because she really did trust Syd. And a great Renee episode, to boot: she had some great spy hijinks in this one, from impromptu robbery ("I saw a watch I liked!") to blonde wig.
4) For a whole five minutes, I honestly thought the Page 47 we'd been dealing with since S1 was a fake, and I liked the fact that I went through about eight different ways of thinking about it in this episode. I also like that there's still another message lurking inside, though its revelation was a bit One Ring.
5) Thank you, Jack, for finally being the glorious suspicious bastard I've always loved you for being. Kudos within this for correctly choosing Dixon as the man who would conspire happily against Sloane at the drop of a hat.
6) And yay for supersneaky Sloane, who KNEW Jack was onto him and used the opportunity to exculpate himself.
7) I liked the bit where Sloane talked about needing Nadia so much more than she needed him. It echoed what Jack said all the way back in "Salvation."
8) Nice international color in this one. The India call center was good (and Sydney's alias very funny -- I LOLed at "I don't want people listenin' to 10 minutes of pan flute when they want to place an order!"), and Ghana looked good too.
STUFF I DIDN'T:
1) Nadia! They killed my Nadia! I don't know that I necessarily consider this an inherently bad story choice, it might even be a very good one, but THEY KILLED MY NADIA!
2) Fuckers.
3) OK, aside from any feelings I might have about her death, the scene in which she died was a clunker. I mean, a big-thud belly-flop of a scene as Alias has rarely offered, and it was not a moment that needed to be anything less than superb, so the THUD was even louder and harder than it would have been. Every bit of it -- from the finding of Page 47 to the ubiquitous deadly glass-topped coffee table (did K'Ehlar teach us nothing?) -- was awkward and clumsy. If asked to choose between Rambaldi and Nadia in an instant like that, the Sloane they've shown us for the past two and a half years would instantly choose Nadia. He might be LYING about that choice, or go back on it later, but there would be none of this "don't make me choose!" nonsense. (The one good thing about that sequence was Nadia's choice to drop it in the fire, the lone absolute rebellion against Rambaldi in the entire show.) I didn't believe a second of it, and I so, so needed to believe it. The low point of the season, absolutely.
4) A lot of the dialogue was less than sterling. Some was good -- Jack and Nadia's conversation in the SUV, for instance, which was touching and suspicious and canon-wise in its sly reference to her birthday party -- but more of it was merely adequate, and some really flat. "I love being surrounded by so much life!" -- Mia, I feel for you having to deliver that, and I don't blame you for not being able to sell it.
5) Marshall's loopy, but he's generally not unprofessional, so I didn't buy the toys thing. I call reaching.
6) Weird pacing. Long sections of it flowed very well, but then there would be a couple scenes that didn't seem to fit exactly.
STUFF THAT MAKES ME GO HMMM:
If I thought that Sloane had genuinely, 100% gone over to Prophet Five at this point, I would think the transition had been poorly handled. Yes, I can buy the motivations -- he's been powerless too long, and Nadia was always the only shield he had against his Rambaldi obsession -- but the choice to betray Sydney and Jack and to side with people he's always been shown to loathe? I don't buy it. But as I say -- I'm not at all sure I'm supposed to. I think Sloane means to take Prophet Five down, even if it costs him everything. Now, whether he is doing this wholly to help APO (as in "Before the Flood") or whether he means to wrest Rambaldi's knowledge away from them and claim it for his own -- that I don't know. But I am positive that his motivations are not as simple as he claimed to Ehrmann at the end. With Sloane, when are they ever?
Grade = B- // But for the clunker Nadia death scene, might've been an A-.
Gruesome day at work. Remedied somewhat by seeing a truly fantastic rainbow on the way home: vibrant and close, a full semicircle. I could see both ends and was sort of tempted to seek one.
ETA: Hell, I even forgot "Lost" was on at all. Well, that's why we have the DVR.
AETA: And now I've seen "Lost"! Yowza!
"Two For The Road"
The moral of the story is DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE, girls.
STUFF I LIKED:
1) SHIT. What an ending. Now THAT'S good character death -- senseless, but senseless on purpose and shocking as hell. And it was paced out BEAUTIFULLY.
2) Henry Gale IS an Other -- okay, he's not Dharma, I was wrong -- and Michael is under his orders. Damn.
3) I liked the reason that Ana-Lucia was in Sydney, and her interaction with Christian Shephard. They were edgy, difficult and believable. I wonder if Christian had other reasons for fearing for his safety, though?
4) I liked that Jack apologized to Locke and began the first steps of working with him, instead of against him. Locke wasn't very gracious in accepting his apology -- but he quickly knew when he had to tell Jack the truth later in the episode, and he did so. I like that quite a lot, as the rivalry's gone on long enough without going somewhere.
5) "This is our beach! That's Jin!" I LOLed, particularly when Jin echoed Hurley's thumbs-up from earlier this season.
6) Still I love Rachel Ticotin as Ana-Lucia's mother, and the simple act of her writing down the flight number really made it hit home to me, for the first time in a long time, how many people's hearts were ripped out by the news of the crash.
7) It was sweet that Sayid offered Hurley the use of the beach where he had made a love nest for Shannon.
8) It's too bad that they killed Ana-Lucia in the very episode where I came to like her, because she was one smart, ruthless cookie when it came to getting that gun (and other things) from Sawyer. Can cookies be ruthless?
STUFF I DIDN'T:
1) At this point, I'd think they'd try a new approach with Sawyer. Not that I much care -- he was an ass to steal the guns and think that would make him King Poobah of the Island -- but the old approach never does work, at least not without taking more time than it's worth.
2) No Eko.
STUFF THAT MAKES ME GO HMMM:
Am I wrong, or is Claire going to turn out to be Jack's younger sister?
"30 Seconds"
STUFF I LIKED:
1) Nadia! At least we got to spend some quality time with her (and she got to spend quality time with the entire SpyFam) before she went. Nadia, always will I love you.
2) And yes, at least she got to DATE JACK before she died. I don't care what you say, lalalalala I can't hear you, Jack would totally consider surveillance a date, plus he was wearing black, and my fantasy life will make what use of that it will, dammit. I made little swirly happy hands with Nadia and Jack first met up, and I'm glad that they took the time in the episode to remind us that Nadia and Jack did have a bond (WowWrongBadHot or not), one they both acknowledged openly here for the first (and, sadly, the last) time. The scene where he was the one to discover her body just gutted me.
3) OK, I really thought that Nadia would be our last death for the hour, so Renee's death shocked me big time. Even next week, it wouldn't have, but it did this time -- and it was sadly apt that it happened because she really did trust Syd. And a great Renee episode, to boot: she had some great spy hijinks in this one, from impromptu robbery ("I saw a watch I liked!") to blonde wig.
4) For a whole five minutes, I honestly thought the Page 47 we'd been dealing with since S1 was a fake, and I liked the fact that I went through about eight different ways of thinking about it in this episode. I also like that there's still another message lurking inside, though its revelation was a bit One Ring.
5) Thank you, Jack, for finally being the glorious suspicious bastard I've always loved you for being. Kudos within this for correctly choosing Dixon as the man who would conspire happily against Sloane at the drop of a hat.
6) And yay for supersneaky Sloane, who KNEW Jack was onto him and used the opportunity to exculpate himself.
7) I liked the bit where Sloane talked about needing Nadia so much more than she needed him. It echoed what Jack said all the way back in "Salvation."
8) Nice international color in this one. The India call center was good (and Sydney's alias very funny -- I LOLed at "I don't want people listenin' to 10 minutes of pan flute when they want to place an order!"), and Ghana looked good too.
STUFF I DIDN'T:
1) Nadia! They killed my Nadia! I don't know that I necessarily consider this an inherently bad story choice, it might even be a very good one, but THEY KILLED MY NADIA!
2) Fuckers.
3) OK, aside from any feelings I might have about her death, the scene in which she died was a clunker. I mean, a big-thud belly-flop of a scene as Alias has rarely offered, and it was not a moment that needed to be anything less than superb, so the THUD was even louder and harder than it would have been. Every bit of it -- from the finding of Page 47 to the ubiquitous deadly glass-topped coffee table (did K'Ehlar teach us nothing?) -- was awkward and clumsy. If asked to choose between Rambaldi and Nadia in an instant like that, the Sloane they've shown us for the past two and a half years would instantly choose Nadia. He might be LYING about that choice, or go back on it later, but there would be none of this "don't make me choose!" nonsense. (The one good thing about that sequence was Nadia's choice to drop it in the fire, the lone absolute rebellion against Rambaldi in the entire show.) I didn't believe a second of it, and I so, so needed to believe it. The low point of the season, absolutely.
4) A lot of the dialogue was less than sterling. Some was good -- Jack and Nadia's conversation in the SUV, for instance, which was touching and suspicious and canon-wise in its sly reference to her birthday party -- but more of it was merely adequate, and some really flat. "I love being surrounded by so much life!" -- Mia, I feel for you having to deliver that, and I don't blame you for not being able to sell it.
5) Marshall's loopy, but he's generally not unprofessional, so I didn't buy the toys thing. I call reaching.
6) Weird pacing. Long sections of it flowed very well, but then there would be a couple scenes that didn't seem to fit exactly.
STUFF THAT MAKES ME GO HMMM:
If I thought that Sloane had genuinely, 100% gone over to Prophet Five at this point, I would think the transition had been poorly handled. Yes, I can buy the motivations -- he's been powerless too long, and Nadia was always the only shield he had against his Rambaldi obsession -- but the choice to betray Sydney and Jack and to side with people he's always been shown to loathe? I don't buy it. But as I say -- I'm not at all sure I'm supposed to. I think Sloane means to take Prophet Five down, even if it costs him everything. Now, whether he is doing this wholly to help APO (as in "Before the Flood") or whether he means to wrest Rambaldi's knowledge away from them and claim it for his own -- that I don't know. But I am positive that his motivations are not as simple as he claimed to Ehrmann at the end. With Sloane, when are they ever?
Grade = B- // But for the clunker Nadia death scene, might've been an A-.
Gruesome day at work. Remedied somewhat by seeing a truly fantastic rainbow on the way home: vibrant and close, a full semicircle. I could see both ends and was sort of tempted to seek one.
ETA: Hell, I even forgot "Lost" was on at all. Well, that's why we have the DVR.
AETA: And now I've seen "Lost"! Yowza!
"Two For The Road"
The moral of the story is DON'T DRINK AND DRIVE, girls.
STUFF I LIKED:
1) SHIT. What an ending. Now THAT'S good character death -- senseless, but senseless on purpose and shocking as hell. And it was paced out BEAUTIFULLY.
2) Henry Gale IS an Other -- okay, he's not Dharma, I was wrong -- and Michael is under his orders. Damn.
3) I liked the reason that Ana-Lucia was in Sydney, and her interaction with Christian Shephard. They were edgy, difficult and believable. I wonder if Christian had other reasons for fearing for his safety, though?
4) I liked that Jack apologized to Locke and began the first steps of working with him, instead of against him. Locke wasn't very gracious in accepting his apology -- but he quickly knew when he had to tell Jack the truth later in the episode, and he did so. I like that quite a lot, as the rivalry's gone on long enough without going somewhere.
5) "This is our beach! That's Jin!" I LOLed, particularly when Jin echoed Hurley's thumbs-up from earlier this season.
6) Still I love Rachel Ticotin as Ana-Lucia's mother, and the simple act of her writing down the flight number really made it hit home to me, for the first time in a long time, how many people's hearts were ripped out by the news of the crash.
7) It was sweet that Sayid offered Hurley the use of the beach where he had made a love nest for Shannon.
8) It's too bad that they killed Ana-Lucia in the very episode where I came to like her, because she was one smart, ruthless cookie when it came to getting that gun (and other things) from Sawyer. Can cookies be ruthless?
STUFF I DIDN'T:
1) At this point, I'd think they'd try a new approach with Sawyer. Not that I much care -- he was an ass to steal the guns and think that would make him King Poobah of the Island -- but the old approach never does work, at least not without taking more time than it's worth.
2) No Eko.
STUFF THAT MAKES ME GO HMMM:
Am I wrong, or is Claire going to turn out to be Jack's younger sister?