Link, and more Alias

andrastewhite has some great thoughts on the unjustly neglected and ill-fated B5 spin-off, Crusade, here. It's not a main issue, but I got a special kick out of her analysis on why Galen, like Marcus Cole on B5, leaves her relatively indifferent. This is true for me as well and not true for the absolute majority of the fandom, but Andraste finally found an explanation on why Galen and Mr. Cole don't work for us. (Whereas Londo and Max Eilerson do.)

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Since Alias is TV fast food, I finished the second season already. Additional impressions:

1) The ending of SD-6 came just when it should have. Otherwise, the required suspension of disbelief about Sydney and Jack not getting caught OR managing the downfall of SD-6 would have been too much. As it was - perfect timing, Mr. Abrams. I'm happy on that score, though I'm going to miss the double agent thing.
2) Am I happy my fears for Dixon were proved to incorrect. Far from being killed off, he got huge drama this season, first by dealing with Sydney having lied to him and then with his wife's murder. More about that one later. Loved, loved, loved the scenes between him and Sydney in the later half of the season. One reason why I always appreciated the Syd 'n Dixon relationship is that it's one of these few female/male friendships on TV where sex isn't even a question - at no point do we get an inkling they're interested in each other. They're trusted colleagues and buddies, like Weiss and Vaughn, and the painful fall-out and rebuilding is just as intense and equal as any writing of an m/m relationship on tv.
3) The end of SD-6 also spelled the end of Sydney and Vaughn having to stay apart for professional reasons, and they consummate their passion, as a Harlequin novel would phrase it. Unfortunately, this does not make their relationship any more interesting, and not because of the UST versus RST thing. The very artificiality of the short-lived "does Vaughn deal in info?" subplot screams like an attempt to reintroduce angst in the relationship. If the writers were bored with Syd and Vaughn as a happy couple already at that point (and did not have a handy gypsy curse to inflict), I shudder to think what they'll come up with in the season which seems to be as universally derided as the second one is praised, season 3.
4) Meanwhile, the "fascinating love story of the season" award is firmly fought over by our two Middle-Aged Couples, Sloane & Emily and Jack & Irina. Thankfully, their arcs cover different aspects of that strange thing called sex, love, and passion. I've said the two couples are paralleled and contrasted before, and this continues. Of course, there are always third parties involved.

With Sloane and Emily, it's ambition as embodied by Rambaldi. In the first season finale, Sloane had to choose between love and ambition, and we were led to believe he chose ambition. In fact, he did not. He tried to have his cake and eat it, love and ambition both, through his long, clever and elaborate schemes. Of course, Sloane should have been aware he's living in a tragedy, and a tragedy does not allow cheating to achieve a happy ending. Having faked Emily's death so he and she could live and escape together, he would have had a chance… if ambition had not been as strong. Think about it: if Sloane, after the end of SD-6, had retired into comfortable moneyed anonymity with Emily, he could have had his happy ending, his past victims notwithstanding. But no, he had to continue the Rambaldi obsession as well, and thus was doomed to watch his wife die for real, in his arms, shot by a man who wanted to kill him, a man whom he had made into an agent (and thus killer) to begin with.

In ye olde BTVS days, there was a lot of debate as to whether the ability to love is somehow redemptive. Alias does not imply it is - if Sloane had retired with Emily from a life of crime, he would have done so unrepentant, and it certainly would not have been "just" in any legal or ethical sense - but love, both given and received, is allowing for mercy and grace. When Emily decides to turn away from her husband because she does not want to be the excuse for his crimes, she does so because love does not excuse everything. When she decides to come with him after all, she does so because love can be generous and merciful. Sloane, for his part, might or might not have been able to keep his new resolution of giving up Rambaldi to Irina and Sark in favour of a life with Emily, but he certainly demonstrated his own ability to forgive, and I'm saying this without irony. His instant acceptance of Emily's willingness to hand him over to the CIA (and he does not know she bargained for his life) without blaming her in the least, simply asking her to come with him one last time, was sublime. What am I saying - the entire kitchen scene was, and Amy Irving and Ron Rifkin were so incredibly good in it that you just had to cry along with them, both of them, cry for the tragedy and intensity of it all.

One of the big questions of the season is about the ability to love what is flawed. Sydney tends to see things in black and white. In the first season, her relationship with her father pained and confused her because Jack is shades of grey down to his clothes, but once the revelation about Irina came out, she settled for blaming her mother and loving her father. Plus I think that is where Sloane as the shadow father came in helpful for her. Just as Emily is the idealized mother, the one who is loyal and open and true and a victim, not a killer, Sloane is the dark father who can be resented and hated and blamed for everything wrong in her life, thus permitting her not to hate and blame her real father. (And Sydney has not been able to stay angry at Jack for long.) You can even construct a parallel to her attitudes towards the CIA and SD-6 respectively. The CIA with its elderly men at the top is the Überpatriarch, after all. Her natural instinct is to rebel. But the CIA is the good side, has to be, whereas SD-6, headed by Sloane, can be blamed for all the dirty aspects of the spy business. After SD-6 is gone, she needs another reason to continue as an agent, and who should it be but Sloane, the Bad Father as opposed to Jack's Good Father?

But then things go topsy turvy because the mother figures don't fit the pattern anymore. Irina comes back, and Sydney starts to love her again, which she permits herself doing telling herself that Irina repents, has given up her evil gains along with her freedom and is now A Good Parent, whom one can love without feeling guilty. Once Irina leaves, reassuming her freedom and power, Sydney instantly condemns her to the role of Bad Parent again. Like Irina, the Good Mother, Emily, comes back from the dead to turn herself in, but Emily brings more moral confusion, because Emily still loves the Bad Father, Sloane, even knowing exactly what he is. Emily, the one of her four parental figures whom she never did distrust, says that you can love a murderer. Like Sloane, Sydney hasn't been aware yet she's living in a tragedy, and that the gods listen to what you say in a malicious way. She says she wished her mother was dead, had been killed, two times this season, once early and once late. Sure enough, she gets to watch her mother die, getting killed, but it is her Good Mother, Emily, not her Bad Mother, Irina.

Irina, for her part, says that her love for Sydney and Jack is as real as her determination to trick the CIA, and from where I'm sitting, that doesn't look to be mutually exclusive. I never believed that Irina had the intention to spend the rest of her life behind proverbial bars. (No more than I could see Jack turning himself over to Russian authorities for anything but deceitful purposes.) But, as Jack himself acknowledges in the end, that does not mean she doesn't have feelings. She and Sydney inflict exactly the same physical damage on each other - a wound on the shoulder. There is some mutual life-saving going on. (Syd did save Irina from the death penalty earlier the season, Irina saves Sydney a couple of times with her gun.) The mutual emotional damage is arguable. As it is between Irina and Jack, who have a perfect symmetry of setting each other up going on throughout the season while getting simultaneously closer again. That this results in one more time of physical closeness as well was great because they really had incredible smouldering sexual tension.

Talking on the air plane about Arvin Sloane, Jack says to Irina that he and Sloane used to have an unsentimental patriotism and devotion to their wives in common. We heard in season one that being left by Irina the first time almost destroyed Jack. The second time, he's been expecting it, and on the surface takes it calmly, but when he lashes out at the hapless Elsa Kaplan when she's in Irina's cell, accusing her of "prostituting" herself and being a bad mother, you can see the anger with Irina that is there despite all precautions and expectations. I also think that the gibe by Irina's original KGB handler, that Jack should have seen a woman like Irina would never have fallen in love with someone like him, still stings. He seems to have decided that Irina does have feelings for Sydney after all, about isn't sure about himself.

Sloane and Emily are the lovers that manage to overcome betrayal but not death; Jack and Irina are the lovers who never quite trust each other or forgive each other enough not to betray each other again, yet have cheated death (so far). The life they created together, Sydney, both binds them together and divides them. They both are adept at manipulating her, they both are willing to kill for her. But Sydney isn't the only third party in the Jack and Irina constellation. Again, as with Sloane and Emily, there is Rambaldi. Which brings me to…

5.) The new bit of backstory revealed about Sloane. And Jack. In the afore mentioned conversation, Irina says she remembers Jack introducing Sloane to her, and how the two of them, Jack and Arvin Sloane, weren't just friends but true friends. Jack confirms this, and says Arvin changed because of Rambaldi. Several episodes later, Sloane asks Jack when their friendship ended. Jack says: "When you recruited Sydney into SD-6."

Now that's fascinating. Because unless Jack is lying to Sloane (and why should he? If he wanted to hurt Sloane, something like "I never was your friend" or "when you left the CIA" would be better choices), that would mean he still considered himself Sloane's friend until six years ago. Sloane's betrayal of the CIA and the US notwithstanding, not to mention SD-6. In short, everything Sydney hates Sloane for. (In fact, safe for the marriage, everything Irina did.) If Jack still felt friendship while simultaneously being a double agent in SD-6, regarding as the unforgivable act on Sloane's part not the death of however many people Sloane got killed but the recruitment of his daughter, it's hard to see a difference between, say, him and Irina, ethically speaking.

Sidenote: as we know from The Getaway onwards, Sloane was aware of Sydney and Jack being double agents. Just when did he find out? My guess is, in Sydney's case, probably from when he gave her that opportunity to be extracted onwards. Can't tell about Jack, though.

Sloane confirming that getting obsessed with Rambaldi was what turned him away from the CIA disappoints me a bit, because I so wanted him to have defected on the rationale that if he's killing, sabotaging and drug-dealing for the CIA, he might as well do it for himself. But I suppose I have to give up on the possibility of Alias ever intentionally presenting the CIA in a questionable light. This being said, I did like that good old Arvin was unpredictable again. When he told Sark he killed the wrong person, one assumes he'll go after Dixon himself next, but no, he's off to Nepal to kill Bill meet Conrad (Apocalypse Now associations ahoy!), apparently his original guru and seducer. What is it about Americans going to the Himalayas and coming back with fighting powers and mystical knowledge? I mean, The Shadow did it, too, and so did Dr. Strange. Clearly, Sloane was a fan as a child.

Anyway, while I'm getting frustrated about the way Abrams is playing coy with what these Rambaldi gizmos Sloane so faithfully collected actually do, or what the connection between Sloane and Rambaldi is, besides Bill Conrad (Incidentally, what I'd also like to know is how Rambaldi made it to Siberia and the Himalaya in the 16th century, among other things, but hey), I'm relieved that the death of Emily did not rob Sloane of his three dimensionality, since he spares Jack's life when it really would have been much safer to kill Mr. Bristow. Actually, I think he's even sincere when he says that he forgives him. Not, mind you, that Jack's reaction is a surprise. Still. What with Emily gone, Jack is probably the last person Sloane cares about, and not in a creepy way as with Sydney.

Once again, I bewail the fannish obsession with the young and pretty and the lack of Crafty Old Men fic. At least there is Tough Middle-Aged Woman fic, by Yahtzee, which I will read now, trying to console myself that Irina will probably not be back on the show. From what I've heard, her place as Morally Ambiguous Woman will be taken by some person named Lauren, but I doubt it can be fulfilled as ably.

6.) Poor, poor Will. Do they have to put him through hell each time a season ends? He was right, too: meeting Sydney really has destroyed his life. The ending of season 2 felt slightly of balance, because the big emotional climax of the two main seasonal arcs, Irina/Sydney/Jack on the one hand and Sloane/Emily on the other, came in A Darker Turn and Truth Takes Time, but the sheer agony of Will's suffering afterwards was great drama. Though I won't be able to rewatch it any time soon. Strange, I have no problem with watching Sloane and Emily suffer, or Jack and Irina smoulder and betray, but Will…

7.) And poor Syd. Losing two years of her life in the cliffhanger sucks. And yes, I did get the reference to Vaughn wearing a ring indicating he's now married, thank you. However, since I'm not into Syd/Vaughn and find Sydney/anyone else more interesting, this does not make me feel for anyone but Sydney. I know he's in season 3, but is there any hope we can get rid of Vaughn in season 4? I don't mean necessarily by killing him off. I mean in a Buffy/Angel way. Joss knew when Angel had done all he could as Buffy's love interest, which gave us a fabulous new series in its own right, yes, but I think he also would have written the character out if the WB hadn't greenlighted Angel the series. He just knew when enough was enough. And I really think there was enough of Vaughn as Sydney's love interest.

I'm debating on whether or not to get an Alias icon. I don't suppose there is one with Sloane, Jack and Irina? Saying OT3 or something like that? (Unfair towards Emily, I know, and I adore Sloane/Emily, but I only have so much icon space.)