Arc-thoughts on Alias' fourth season
Jun. 8th, 2005 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakSomewhat lengthier thoughts on the Alias season 4 finale and the season 4 story in general, with particular attention to Sloane's arc (and everyone is so surprised; but I promise other characters will be talked about as well). You know, the only reason why I still hesitate to call season 4 my favourite is that SpyMommy was not a regular guest star. And I still loved it. In that Alias way (meaning one waves aside plot plausibilities and the like as long as the characters are treated well).
The finale itself wasn't the best episode of the season. It was somewhat like Grave by David Fury, the season 6 BTVS finale: good action, some good character scenes, perfectly servicable but not great in the way a finale can be, although not on Alias. In four seasons, I never ever loved the final episode best, and that includes season 2. You can keep The Telling, and I'll go with Truth Takes Time, thank you very much. Almost Thirty Years from season 1, the finale most obviously evoked by Before the Flood, is the only finale to make it among my Top 15 (or so) Alias episodes list, and I still haven't rewatched it as often as other season 1 eps. And the less said about the season 3 finale, the better.
However. The season 4 finale, while not great, rounded off many things big and small about the season, as a finale should, and completed what has been imo a good overall narrative. (And there were elements I loved to bits, more about those later.) There is the unfortunate agent who doesn't make it past the teaser, and whom we've met in the season 4 opener. Bringing him back isn't just neat, it illustrates something about Sydney which season 3 forgot but 4 brought back (just think of Sam the civilian): she might be harder now, but she is able to care about the inviduals in the line of fire. She hasn't stopped seeing them.
This has been a season full of mirrors, parallels and contrasts. There are Sydney and Nadia, the Chosen One and the Passenger, sisters, daughters of morally ambiguous fathers who love them. Nadia was what Lauren wasn't: a new character, well and consistently written, with several interesting relationships to the old regulars. Sydney had two sets of mothers, Irina and the late Emily Sloane; she went from idolizing Irina as long as she believed Irina was the dead Laura Bristow to hating her to finally accepting her in all her complexities, while Emily was the idealized mother of her choice. Nadia is Irina's daughter but only ever gets one moment with her; the mother figure who raised her until she ran away was Sophia/Elena, whom Nadia idealized and loved every bit as much as Sydney loved Emily. Nadia gets recruited - and I still think Elena had ties to Roberto as well and deliberately replicated Sydney's recruitment by Sloane through him -, finds out, as Sydney did, that the man who recruited her is really a bad guy, and acts. But it's a dark mirror: Emily might have been "the wife of the devil", as Will calls her in season 2, but she truly loved Sydney. Elena, as we see in the finale, might think she loves Nadia, but is not really capable of more than using Nadia. (More about Elena and whose mirror she is later.) Nadia does with Roberto what only ever remains subtextual and possible with Sydney and Sloane; she kisses and kills her mentor. (And there might have been sex in between when the camera discreetly withdrew.) Both Nadia and Sydney bring their fathers back from the underworld of their minds this season, but Nadia becomes what Sydney always managed to escape from: the sacrifice, the payment for the sins of the past.
Nadia and Sydney as the sisters who didn't know each other until a year ago but bonded and loved each other mirror and contrast Irina and Elena, the sisters who did grow up, knew each other too well and hated each other. It's Irina and Elena who are the sisters in deliberate lethal battle in the end, and Irina shooting Elena and then telling Sydney to cut the other wire was not just the perfect sumnation of why SpyMommy rules but also that lethal knowledge illustrated to perfection. Though Elena isn't really Irina's mirror otherwise. She's Sloane's.
Looking back, Arvin Sloane has thebest most clearly defined arc of the season. In season 2, when he picked Emily over Rambaldi a few hours before her death, we all wondered whether he could have stuck to his resolution if she had lift. But back then it was a choice between love and ambition; it did not touch on the question of redemption. The fact that Sloane has been capable of love from day 1 never made him less ruthless, less of a villain; it made him human. The question of redemption didn't come up until he told Nadia upon seeing her for the first time (unconscious, as she is now), in Blood Ties, that he was trying to become a better man for her sake, and given that he finished that episode by injecting her with the green Rambaldi fluid so he could finally have direct access to his idol, it seemed resolutely refuted. "Let's face it, Arvin," said Dixon in Nocturne re: Sloane's better angels, "you don't have any". He might not have better angels, but he has two doppelgangers this season illustrating what he isn't. There is the literal one, Cloane, aka the unfortunate Ned Bulger. Who has Sloane's memories grafted on him, but while you might be able to replicate thought patterns and obsessions, you cannot replicate emotions; Bulger breaks apart when confronted with Sloane's. As I said in my review of In Dreams, one reason why Cloane is so creepy is that he is Arvin Sloane without any of the humanizing touches Sloane exhibited even in season 1 when we saw him on the phone with Emily's doctor between ordering dastardly missions. He's consumed by the Rambaldi obsession.
As is Elena Derevko. She's the Dark Evil Overlord everyone (save Nadia) has always seen in Sloane, with all his traits exaggarated and pushed to the nth degree. Which starts with her making herself Nadia's de facto mother in place of her sister, hiding Nadia away. Sloane might have made himself Sydney's replacement father during those first seven years she worked for him, before she knew the truth and when Jack was emotionally unavailable, but he did not try to genuinenly take her away from Jack. (Possibly because competitiveness aside, he loves Jack as Elena does not love Irina.) At his most Rambaldi-obsessed, his word domination scheme looks for a population genetically altered into peaceful controlled drones; Elena's scheme is for a wipeout of most of the population altogether, to start anew. (On a flippant note, that's essentially the scheme Dr. Noah has going in the DS9 James Bond parody Our Man Bashir.) Both Elena and Sloane use Nadia for their Rambaldi belief, betray her and inject her with a mind-altering drug at the beginning and the end (so far) of Nadia's storyline. But faced the likelihood of Nadia's death in Legacy, Sloane stops (and this is where their relationship starts), whereas Elena, faced with Nadia's defiance, ends any relationship they had by committing the ultimate betrayal and turning Nadia into a mindless zombie - the thing she would have become if Sloane had continued in Legacy. What is Elena's speech to Nadia before that if not a repetition of Sloane's season 3join me and we'll rule the galaxy together (... sorry, wrong universe) "Nadia, this is your destiny" speech (repeated for our benefit in the new flashbacks we see in Descent)?
Elena, who is also the Irina of Jack's and Sydney's nightmares, the Derevko truly only out for death and herself, even uses Sloane's self-justifications when she tells Nadia she loves her, and that it was for her, too. "She'll make us proud", she tells Sloane about Nadia and in a truly bizarre fleeting moment you see the Elena/Nadia/Sloane triangle as a dark shadow of Irina/Sydney/Jack. This is why I didn't mind Elena herself being such a unrelentingly one-dimensional villain. She exists to mirror and contrast, and this she does beautifully.
For of course when Elena gets confronted with Nadia's rejection, the truth of her feelings, or lack of same, are revealed. Watching season 3, Andraste wrote to me that it was Arvin Sloane's curse to be betrayed and/or hated by every single person he loves, or maybe the curse was that he deserved it. But Sloane, as opposed to Elena, is able to accept that hatred and/or betrayal and continue the love nonetheless. All of which we knew. What the finale reveals about him, however, is something we didn't. During the Spike Wars that raged in Buffy fandom from season 5 onwards, one hotly debated point was whether Spike ever would do someting good not motivated by his need for Buffy. I was somewhat reminded of this argument during the climactic scene from Flood. In the third season 6 episode of BTVS, After Life, Spike tells Xander that the reason Willow didn't let him, Spike, know about the plan to ressurect Buffy was because Willow was aware something might go wrong, that Buffy might return damaged beyond repair and that Spike would never have allowed Willow to kill the result "if any of it was Buffy". Never mind that Buffy herself would have been horrified to walk around as a bloodthirsty zombie or whatever he had in mind when making that argument. Among other things, this is one of the reasons why the relationship in season 6 (not the rest of the show) was doomed, btw.
Anyway. Spike in early season 6 would have prioritized his love for Buffy and need for her existence over the fate of the world, or her own wishes. In another exchange with Andraste, talking about Nocturne, we idly speculated about a scenario which would make Jack kill Sydney, and came up with only the fate of the entire world or the Jossverse vampire option (a la Alonna or Spike's mother). We didn't dream - well, I certainly didn't - that Sloane would be in exactly this spot with Nadia. And how he'd decide.
Learning of Nadia's existence in late season 2 was a galvanizing moment for Sloane. Looking back, she truly was the agent of change for him. Not that it was a sudden and complete one, or one without steps back and falls from the wagon. The first time they met, he nearly sacrificed her to Rambaldi, using the self-flattering comparison of Abraham and Isaac. Arvin, Arvin, you should have remembered that you live in a Greek tragedy, and that when you faked Emily's death, you had to go through the real thing a year later because you could not let go of your obsession in time. So Sloane, as opposed to Abraham, pulls back at the last moment, though no angel has told him so (otoh, there is an impatient Julian Sark telling him to go ahead with the sacrifice already). The second turning point comes when she refuses to hand over the artifact and appeals to him to let go, and instead he turns his back on her and goes forward. As I wrote before, what follows is pure Hans Christian Andersen imagery. Rambaldi is the Snow Queen, and that piece of ice/glass which ended up in Sloane all those years ago when his and Emily's child died becomes a literal one in Siena. But Nadia finds him and pulls it out. This is probably the first time anyone other than Emily comes back to Sloane after he betrayed them.
So then he lets her go back to Argentina. But when he gets APO and the golden opportunity to get his two Bristows back, he must have his Nadia as well. The tragic beauty of the arc is that Nadia's fate really is Arvin Sloane's fault in nearly every way. He created the contaminated water to begin with; Elena couldn't have done it without him. And if he hadn't asked Nadia to return via Sydney, she'd have remained in Argentina, far away from Elena and the Russian showdown. "He gave it all up," says Elena in the security recording about Sloane, "and for what? For the girl?" But did he? That was the question throughout the season. We saw that the lure of Rambaldi was still potent to him, despite the months away from Rambaldism. It seemed things were headed for a Rambaldi versus Nadia showdown. But J.J. got inspired and made it far crueller for Sloane instead. In my guess that either Sloane or Nadia would die, I never imagined he'd be the one to kill her, who has to kill her to save Sydney and the world.
Though Nadia doesn't die. As opposed to Dixon's old mate not dying a few episodes earlier, I'm not feeling cheated regarding that. Laws of irony and narrative again; once, Sloane fancied himself a Abraham tested by his god. Now he actually has to go through with the sacrifice, and it's not for the sake of ego or Rambaldi or his own emotional needs, it's for something he turned his back to many years ago just as much as it is for Sydney. Sloane actually is in the Buffy position from Becoming here. And he does it, as she did. Does what Sydney couldn't do earlier. (Not that I don't sympathize with Sydney there; Sydney is also in a Buffy position, from The Gift, though, and for further thoughts on Sydney and Nadia, look at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monanotlisa's lj.) I've always hated the Abraham story, but I loved this. In season 3, Sloane couldn't have been Abraham, because Abraham did not know God would let Isaac live, that was the point. Yet God did. So Nadia's survival, in that comatose form beloved by TV makers when they want to keep their options open, makes narrative and mythic sense. Now that he made the sacrifice, grace can be given.
And arrives in the form of Sydney Bristow. How much did I love the last but one scen of the episode? To the nth degree. Sydney had moments where she was not hostile towards Sloane before (other than acting during her SD 6 days, I mean), but they were brief and few in between, usually involving Emily. This is the first time, though, when she's not just not hostile, or even understanding, but kind. The contrast to the scene where she visits him in prison in The Hourglass of season 3, after she has just learned of Nadia's existence, could not be greater. In The Index Sydney tells Nadia that she's not used to seeing the shades of grey where Sloane was concerned, that it was always black and white for her with him. Same with her mother, one might add. But as she learned to accept the shades of grey about Irina, she has now learned to do so with Arvin Sloane. In The Index it was open to debate whether or not Sydney meant it when she told Nadia and Dixon she hoped Sloane wasn't guilty; but I'd say this scene in the finale, with her telling him that she believes he was trying to do the right thing, and giving him the freedom (to visit Nadia) he had not asked her for (as opposed to season 3 again) supports that she did mean it. I don't think Sydney has abandoned all her issues with Sloane. But Nadia has been her agent of change, too. Loving Nadia, the daughter of Irina Derevko and Arvin Sloane, she has learned to accept these two are capable of love as well. I'd have loved that scene to have been the final one, because it closes a chapter not just for Sloane but for Sydney and opens a new one, but that would have been against the Alias cliffhanger tradition.
Speaking of cliffhangers: I'm neutral on the Vaughn revelation thing. Could be lame, like poor mishandled Lauren, or nifty, like Nadia. We'll see.
Oh, yes, and the farewell scene between the SpyParents was a classic: "No one can hold Irina Derevko for very long." And in one sentence Jack summs up all the longing and love and melancholy and... awwwwww. If I have a complaint about the use of Irina in the final eps, it's that she didn't get a conversation with Sloane, but that's just me being curious; it wasn't a narrative necessity.
Other tidbits:
- Marshall and Weiss and their "what would Jack do?" spiel were wonderful
- so Irina has her musical theme, and Sloane has his (I noticed it consciously for the first time in Breaking Point when he was talking to Jack in the post-operation scene); they're both gorgeous and oddly romantic for two (former?) Evil Overlords, and I cheer each time the score uses them
- "You really went through the looking glass"; Jack referencing Alice when talking to Irina was such a great continuity boon
- was amused by Jack decking Sloane, and would like to point out that it served the double purpose of making it clear who's in charge and making it clear Jack does actually believe him, because Jack truly angry with Sloane is Jack in Hourglass mode, all slow and deliberate sadism, not an impulsive punch
- there must be fanfic.
The finale itself wasn't the best episode of the season. It was somewhat like Grave by David Fury, the season 6 BTVS finale: good action, some good character scenes, perfectly servicable but not great in the way a finale can be, although not on Alias. In four seasons, I never ever loved the final episode best, and that includes season 2. You can keep The Telling, and I'll go with Truth Takes Time, thank you very much. Almost Thirty Years from season 1, the finale most obviously evoked by Before the Flood, is the only finale to make it among my Top 15 (or so) Alias episodes list, and I still haven't rewatched it as often as other season 1 eps. And the less said about the season 3 finale, the better.
However. The season 4 finale, while not great, rounded off many things big and small about the season, as a finale should, and completed what has been imo a good overall narrative. (And there were elements I loved to bits, more about those later.) There is the unfortunate agent who doesn't make it past the teaser, and whom we've met in the season 4 opener. Bringing him back isn't just neat, it illustrates something about Sydney which season 3 forgot but 4 brought back (just think of Sam the civilian): she might be harder now, but she is able to care about the inviduals in the line of fire. She hasn't stopped seeing them.
This has been a season full of mirrors, parallels and contrasts. There are Sydney and Nadia, the Chosen One and the Passenger, sisters, daughters of morally ambiguous fathers who love them. Nadia was what Lauren wasn't: a new character, well and consistently written, with several interesting relationships to the old regulars. Sydney had two sets of mothers, Irina and the late Emily Sloane; she went from idolizing Irina as long as she believed Irina was the dead Laura Bristow to hating her to finally accepting her in all her complexities, while Emily was the idealized mother of her choice. Nadia is Irina's daughter but only ever gets one moment with her; the mother figure who raised her until she ran away was Sophia/Elena, whom Nadia idealized and loved every bit as much as Sydney loved Emily. Nadia gets recruited - and I still think Elena had ties to Roberto as well and deliberately replicated Sydney's recruitment by Sloane through him -, finds out, as Sydney did, that the man who recruited her is really a bad guy, and acts. But it's a dark mirror: Emily might have been "the wife of the devil", as Will calls her in season 2, but she truly loved Sydney. Elena, as we see in the finale, might think she loves Nadia, but is not really capable of more than using Nadia. (More about Elena and whose mirror she is later.) Nadia does with Roberto what only ever remains subtextual and possible with Sydney and Sloane; she kisses and kills her mentor. (And there might have been sex in between when the camera discreetly withdrew.) Both Nadia and Sydney bring their fathers back from the underworld of their minds this season, but Nadia becomes what Sydney always managed to escape from: the sacrifice, the payment for the sins of the past.
Nadia and Sydney as the sisters who didn't know each other until a year ago but bonded and loved each other mirror and contrast Irina and Elena, the sisters who did grow up, knew each other too well and hated each other. It's Irina and Elena who are the sisters in deliberate lethal battle in the end, and Irina shooting Elena and then telling Sydney to cut the other wire was not just the perfect sumnation of why SpyMommy rules but also that lethal knowledge illustrated to perfection. Though Elena isn't really Irina's mirror otherwise. She's Sloane's.
Looking back, Arvin Sloane has the
As is Elena Derevko. She's the Dark Evil Overlord everyone (save Nadia) has always seen in Sloane, with all his traits exaggarated and pushed to the nth degree. Which starts with her making herself Nadia's de facto mother in place of her sister, hiding Nadia away. Sloane might have made himself Sydney's replacement father during those first seven years she worked for him, before she knew the truth and when Jack was emotionally unavailable, but he did not try to genuinenly take her away from Jack. (Possibly because competitiveness aside, he loves Jack as Elena does not love Irina.) At his most Rambaldi-obsessed, his word domination scheme looks for a population genetically altered into peaceful controlled drones; Elena's scheme is for a wipeout of most of the population altogether, to start anew. (On a flippant note, that's essentially the scheme Dr. Noah has going in the DS9 James Bond parody Our Man Bashir.) Both Elena and Sloane use Nadia for their Rambaldi belief, betray her and inject her with a mind-altering drug at the beginning and the end (so far) of Nadia's storyline. But faced the likelihood of Nadia's death in Legacy, Sloane stops (and this is where their relationship starts), whereas Elena, faced with Nadia's defiance, ends any relationship they had by committing the ultimate betrayal and turning Nadia into a mindless zombie - the thing she would have become if Sloane had continued in Legacy. What is Elena's speech to Nadia before that if not a repetition of Sloane's season 3
Elena, who is also the Irina of Jack's and Sydney's nightmares, the Derevko truly only out for death and herself, even uses Sloane's self-justifications when she tells Nadia she loves her, and that it was for her, too. "She'll make us proud", she tells Sloane about Nadia and in a truly bizarre fleeting moment you see the Elena/Nadia/Sloane triangle as a dark shadow of Irina/Sydney/Jack. This is why I didn't mind Elena herself being such a unrelentingly one-dimensional villain. She exists to mirror and contrast, and this she does beautifully.
For of course when Elena gets confronted with Nadia's rejection, the truth of her feelings, or lack of same, are revealed. Watching season 3, Andraste wrote to me that it was Arvin Sloane's curse to be betrayed and/or hated by every single person he loves, or maybe the curse was that he deserved it. But Sloane, as opposed to Elena, is able to accept that hatred and/or betrayal and continue the love nonetheless. All of which we knew. What the finale reveals about him, however, is something we didn't. During the Spike Wars that raged in Buffy fandom from season 5 onwards, one hotly debated point was whether Spike ever would do someting good not motivated by his need for Buffy. I was somewhat reminded of this argument during the climactic scene from Flood. In the third season 6 episode of BTVS, After Life, Spike tells Xander that the reason Willow didn't let him, Spike, know about the plan to ressurect Buffy was because Willow was aware something might go wrong, that Buffy might return damaged beyond repair and that Spike would never have allowed Willow to kill the result "if any of it was Buffy". Never mind that Buffy herself would have been horrified to walk around as a bloodthirsty zombie or whatever he had in mind when making that argument. Among other things, this is one of the reasons why the relationship in season 6 (not the rest of the show) was doomed, btw.
Anyway. Spike in early season 6 would have prioritized his love for Buffy and need for her existence over the fate of the world, or her own wishes. In another exchange with Andraste, talking about Nocturne, we idly speculated about a scenario which would make Jack kill Sydney, and came up with only the fate of the entire world or the Jossverse vampire option (a la Alonna or Spike's mother). We didn't dream - well, I certainly didn't - that Sloane would be in exactly this spot with Nadia. And how he'd decide.
Learning of Nadia's existence in late season 2 was a galvanizing moment for Sloane. Looking back, she truly was the agent of change for him. Not that it was a sudden and complete one, or one without steps back and falls from the wagon. The first time they met, he nearly sacrificed her to Rambaldi, using the self-flattering comparison of Abraham and Isaac. Arvin, Arvin, you should have remembered that you live in a Greek tragedy, and that when you faked Emily's death, you had to go through the real thing a year later because you could not let go of your obsession in time. So Sloane, as opposed to Abraham, pulls back at the last moment, though no angel has told him so (otoh, there is an impatient Julian Sark telling him to go ahead with the sacrifice already). The second turning point comes when she refuses to hand over the artifact and appeals to him to let go, and instead he turns his back on her and goes forward. As I wrote before, what follows is pure Hans Christian Andersen imagery. Rambaldi is the Snow Queen, and that piece of ice/glass which ended up in Sloane all those years ago when his and Emily's child died becomes a literal one in Siena. But Nadia finds him and pulls it out. This is probably the first time anyone other than Emily comes back to Sloane after he betrayed them.
So then he lets her go back to Argentina. But when he gets APO and the golden opportunity to get his two Bristows back, he must have his Nadia as well. The tragic beauty of the arc is that Nadia's fate really is Arvin Sloane's fault in nearly every way. He created the contaminated water to begin with; Elena couldn't have done it without him. And if he hadn't asked Nadia to return via Sydney, she'd have remained in Argentina, far away from Elena and the Russian showdown. "He gave it all up," says Elena in the security recording about Sloane, "and for what? For the girl?" But did he? That was the question throughout the season. We saw that the lure of Rambaldi was still potent to him, despite the months away from Rambaldism. It seemed things were headed for a Rambaldi versus Nadia showdown. But J.J. got inspired and made it far crueller for Sloane instead. In my guess that either Sloane or Nadia would die, I never imagined he'd be the one to kill her, who has to kill her to save Sydney and the world.
Though Nadia doesn't die. As opposed to Dixon's old mate not dying a few episodes earlier, I'm not feeling cheated regarding that. Laws of irony and narrative again; once, Sloane fancied himself a Abraham tested by his god. Now he actually has to go through with the sacrifice, and it's not for the sake of ego or Rambaldi or his own emotional needs, it's for something he turned his back to many years ago just as much as it is for Sydney. Sloane actually is in the Buffy position from Becoming here. And he does it, as she did. Does what Sydney couldn't do earlier. (Not that I don't sympathize with Sydney there; Sydney is also in a Buffy position, from The Gift, though, and for further thoughts on Sydney and Nadia, look at
monanotlisa's lj.) I've always hated the Abraham story, but I loved this. In season 3, Sloane couldn't have been Abraham, because Abraham did not know God would let Isaac live, that was the point. Yet God did. So Nadia's survival, in that comatose form beloved by TV makers when they want to keep their options open, makes narrative and mythic sense. Now that he made the sacrifice, grace can be given. And arrives in the form of Sydney Bristow. How much did I love the last but one scen of the episode? To the nth degree. Sydney had moments where she was not hostile towards Sloane before (other than acting during her SD 6 days, I mean), but they were brief and few in between, usually involving Emily. This is the first time, though, when she's not just not hostile, or even understanding, but kind. The contrast to the scene where she visits him in prison in The Hourglass of season 3, after she has just learned of Nadia's existence, could not be greater. In The Index Sydney tells Nadia that she's not used to seeing the shades of grey where Sloane was concerned, that it was always black and white for her with him. Same with her mother, one might add. But as she learned to accept the shades of grey about Irina, she has now learned to do so with Arvin Sloane. In The Index it was open to debate whether or not Sydney meant it when she told Nadia and Dixon she hoped Sloane wasn't guilty; but I'd say this scene in the finale, with her telling him that she believes he was trying to do the right thing, and giving him the freedom (to visit Nadia) he had not asked her for (as opposed to season 3 again) supports that she did mean it. I don't think Sydney has abandoned all her issues with Sloane. But Nadia has been her agent of change, too. Loving Nadia, the daughter of Irina Derevko and Arvin Sloane, she has learned to accept these two are capable of love as well. I'd have loved that scene to have been the final one, because it closes a chapter not just for Sloane but for Sydney and opens a new one, but that would have been against the Alias cliffhanger tradition.
Speaking of cliffhangers: I'm neutral on the Vaughn revelation thing. Could be lame, like poor mishandled Lauren, or nifty, like Nadia. We'll see.
Oh, yes, and the farewell scene between the SpyParents was a classic: "No one can hold Irina Derevko for very long." And in one sentence Jack summs up all the longing and love and melancholy and... awwwwww. If I have a complaint about the use of Irina in the final eps, it's that she didn't get a conversation with Sloane, but that's just me being curious; it wasn't a narrative necessity.
Other tidbits:
- Marshall and Weiss and their "what would Jack do?" spiel were wonderful
- so Irina has her musical theme, and Sloane has his (I noticed it consciously for the first time in Breaking Point when he was talking to Jack in the post-operation scene); they're both gorgeous and oddly romantic for two (former?) Evil Overlords, and I cheer each time the score uses them
- "You really went through the looking glass"; Jack referencing Alice when talking to Irina was such a great continuity boon
- was amused by Jack decking Sloane, and would like to point out that it served the double purpose of making it clear who's in charge and making it clear Jack does actually believe him, because Jack truly angry with Sloane is Jack in Hourglass mode, all slow and deliberate sadism, not an impulsive punch
- there must be fanfic.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 12:59 pm (UTC)(This won't mean anything to you if you don't watch Lost)
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Date: 2005-06-08 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-08 05:44 pm (UTC)Will return later to comment; must, sadly, return to my Law of Obligations for a bit.
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Date: 2006-05-18 02:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-21 06:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 05:01 pm (UTC)But I digress. . .
Great thoughts on the arc, especially the way that Elena and Irina parallel Nadia and Syd, and Elena's role as the nightmare parent. And agreed on Jack punching Sloane. One of the interesting things about season 5 is watching Jack be The Man at APO, and how he isn't entirely comfortable with it.
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Date: 2006-05-19 04:13 pm (UTC)No Will, of course -- but unlike 3, where I thought Syd NEEDED a Will in her life and that her characterization suffered because he wasn't there, other characters filled those emotional spaces (notably Nadia -- no, really; Will & Francie were friends who often filled the role of siblings, while Nadia's a sibling who's nonetheless something of a stranger).
Oh, I absolutely agree. And it's for this reason as well as more obvious ones that s4 will probably end up being my favourite as well.