![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakJ.J. loves me.
But before I get to the meat of the episode, which even if you're not prejudiced like me are the Sydney and Sloane scenes, some thoughts on the other goings on. Firstly, to get that out of the way, the Rachel and Grace subplot by itself wasn't bad, and in, say, a mid-season episode I would even have enjoyed watching it, because I do like the new kids on the block, but here, it just felt, well, wrong. Not to mention taking screen time away that could have been used for more Syd 'n Sloane, or Sloane calling Jack re: Sydney's demise, or more Syd and Peyton, or... you get the idea. Once season 5 comes out on DVD I'll probably fast forward through those scenes.
Everything else in the episode? Made Selena a happy fangirl, more or less. Including the Vaughn-Dixon scene, which was quiet and subtle, and the touch of humour when Vaughn says Jack dosing him with sodium penthetol to fake his death made him feel like Jack finally accepted him was must right. (Also, I want fanfic on the apothecary who supplies Jack with that stuff, because this is the same drug he used on Sloane for Hourglass. It's probably even the same supplier Sloane has when he fakes Emily's death in the s1 finale. Let's call him Lawrence, shall we?) Grandpa Jack was adorable, and as opposed to a certain dreadfully over the top scene in s3 of AtS involving Angel, Cordy and baby Connor, the scene with Sydney, Vaughn and Isabelle at the end was warm without feeling syrupy. (Sydney rubbing her neck and thinking of Sloane helped.*g* No, seriously, it worked for me.)
Mid-way through the episode, a dreadful realization struck me: it's five minutes before Alias ends, and after five years, I finally like Julian Sark. Not just "tolerate" and/or think "he's a useful character with some good lines" but "like" as "enjoy every moment he's on the screen". This is most disconcerting. I might be starting to read Sarkney next. (Or more likely complain that there is hardly any fanfic - or none at all - that investigates his relationship with Sloane.) Anyway, Sark was fun, both with Syd and in prison. I just about died with laughter at "the beautiful man is dying". Best use of subtitles on tv since the opening sequence of Selfless. (Which made me check again who wrote No Hard Feelings, but it wasn't Drew Goddard.) Julian, now actually hope you'll make it out of the finale alive as opposed to speculating on Peyton killing you. How did you do that?
Much like on the issue whether or not Sloane recognized Sydney, I went back and forth on whether or not the old man in prison was Rambaldi himself. First I thought "yes", then "no", then "yes". Though whoever he was, it's clear that like the s1 Rambaldi confederate she met he's supposed to be immortal courtesy of a Rambaldi discovery, and it appears obvious that Rambaldi's "curse and gift" is immortality. Which is likely what Prophet Five wants, though I still don't think Sloane does, due to his s4 memorable "dilettante" outburst. (What does he want the whatever-it-is-for then?![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eirena told me last night in chat she guesses he might try to bring back the dead. Which has never occured to me before but you know, that would make sense. Err, in an Alias way.) At the moment, I tend to go with "it was Rambaldi, but he didn't want to spell it out for Sydney", though that might change.
And now, enough restraint. Did I mention JJ must love me? Oh, the Sloane and Sydney of it. The air was crackling each time they met. I'm torn whether or not I would have preferred it if Sloane had recognized her on sight, which is what I assumed he did until the air plane scene, but then he wouldn't have gone through with the Syd-avenging strangling, and I loved that as well. Solving my dilemma, I committed fanfic (see below). At any rate, kudos to the actors (once again), because that was a very different vibe from the scene with Anna-as-Sydney from last week from the start. Mind you, Sydney can't help herself. "Does that mean you're sending me to my room?" was utterly a Sydney thing to say to Sloane, not something Anna would say, and not recalling Anna was a follower of Rambaldi's was a serious slip (though I'm glad the writing staff remembered), though it gave her the opportunity for the pointed "perversion of faith" comment to Sloane.
"Not a martyr or a legend": I think Sydney is thinking of Nadia here, and of the way Sloane's feelings for either of them are intermingled with his Rambaldi obsession so his inability to separate them caused Nadia's death, and she's punishing him for it by describing her own "death". That was Sydney at her most angry, and not in the way she tends to be usually, when it's either mixed with yellings or tears or both. Far more fundamental than that.
And of course he chooses to strangle her/her killer. No white sheet for this daughter. For more thought on that, see the fanfic. Considering he tasers her before, I did believe that she wasn't in a condition to fight him back at once. (Or maybe I watched s4 of AtS too often....) Anyway, "I don't die that easily" was the perfect way to let him know (not that I think she intended that at this moment) the truth. And it gave us the phone call at the end, which harks back to him calling her after she graduates. Oh, such a happy fangirl I.
Is it Monday yet?
The proper way to show fannish gratitude is, of course, fanfic. The episode inspired the ficlet for this week's![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
fandom_muses challenge.
Revenant
When he sees her looking at him with that familiar expression, the one she wore striding in his office, accusing him of murdering her fiance, he thinks: Sydney. Hardly, Nadia says. You want her to be here, too. Of course you do.
“We can celebrate, Arvin,” the woman looking at him with Sydney’s eyes says. “Sydney Bristow is dead.”
After all, Nadia comments, you got her killed, too. You knew Anna was on her way, and you didn’t even try to warn Sydney, or Jack. You found a way to contact Sark to further your own agenda, but not to save Sydney.
She never called him Arvin. “Mr. Sloane” in the office, naturally, and though he offered her the use of his first name in private one time she was visiting him and Emily, she did not take him up on it, years before she had any reason to resent him. It made her uncomfortable, she confessed, blushing somewhat, and Emily later said it was because she saw him as a father figure. He did not insist on a change, either.
“Does this mean you’re sending me to my room?” she asks and is so utterly Sydney in it that he almost reaches out to touch her shoulder. Next to her, her sister stands, the wound at her throat still raw. Dad, Nadia says, You’re talking to ghosts. Let’s face it, your judgment isn’t stellar right now. But you know, you could at least acknowledge what you’ve done instead of trying to avoid it. She’s dead. We’re both dead. Thanks to you. This is merely another bloody shard, dressed up in her clothes.
****
“Despite everything,” Sydney once asked him, when he told her Anna Espinosa would not be Nadia’s death, “you still believe?”
“I have nothing left but my faith,” he replied. It was not quite true then, though he did not know it. Then, he still had Nadia, and Jack, and even Sydney herself. But it is true now. And yet, Sydney’s life is protected by prophecies as surely as Nadia’s ever was. Anna should not have been able to kill her, either.
Anna didn’t, Nadia says as he sits down opposite of who has to be Anna. You know who got both of us killed, Dad. He was chosen, too.
“How did it happen?” he asks out loud, and the woman uses Sydney’s voice, cool and precise, to tell him.
“Sydney wasn’t a martyr or a legend. She was just a person. Who deserved nothing more than to be shot in the back. And so she was. The Chosen One. She died, just as easy as anyone.”
His judgment is impaired, but not utterly broken. It is time to stop wishing. If this is true, if this can happen, then this counterfeit will be able to retrieve what faith tells him only Sydney could. But then, her purpose will be over. Before she went on her mission to Nepal, he had vague ideas of how to use Anna Espinosa. He had already started by bringing the doubt in her heart about Prophet Five’s future plans with her out in the open. Now he doesn’t have the patience for mind games any more, especially if they involve puppets staring at him with Sydney’s tilted lips and her murder on their hands. The world has changed, his world at least, and his time is running out.
There isn’t even a question of method. He knows exactly how he’ll kill her.
****
Bringing death to Nadia at the hospital, when he believed it would be just for half a minute, so that the conditions for the cure would be met, he had a white cloth to protect her face from his direct touch. Not for Sydney.
“Sydney deserved better,” he says after having tasered her killer and feels her throat under his bare hands. Strangulation was really Jack’s favourite method, not his. Given that most of the death he dealt out was for business reasons, CIA business, Alliance business, his own, it felt far too personal. But this is different. Maybe he would have dealt with Anna through a bullet or poison if she had not worn Sydney’s shape, would not look at him with Sydney’s eyes even now. There is a nakedness in strangling someone, an intimacy that removes any pretensions about the nature of the act.
Nothing less would do.
The alarm interrupts them. It feels like blasphemy. “I don’t die that easily,” she says, and the alchemy of revelation changes his rage into wonder. They regard each other for a moment when the guard comes in, and he knows.
“Sydney,” he thinks, and this time there is no shape of daughters dead or alive to tell him otherwise.
But before I get to the meat of the episode, which even if you're not prejudiced like me are the Sydney and Sloane scenes, some thoughts on the other goings on. Firstly, to get that out of the way, the Rachel and Grace subplot by itself wasn't bad, and in, say, a mid-season episode I would even have enjoyed watching it, because I do like the new kids on the block, but here, it just felt, well, wrong. Not to mention taking screen time away that could have been used for more Syd 'n Sloane, or Sloane calling Jack re: Sydney's demise, or more Syd and Peyton, or... you get the idea. Once season 5 comes out on DVD I'll probably fast forward through those scenes.
Everything else in the episode? Made Selena a happy fangirl, more or less. Including the Vaughn-Dixon scene, which was quiet and subtle, and the touch of humour when Vaughn says Jack dosing him with sodium penthetol to fake his death made him feel like Jack finally accepted him was must right. (Also, I want fanfic on the apothecary who supplies Jack with that stuff, because this is the same drug he used on Sloane for Hourglass. It's probably even the same supplier Sloane has when he fakes Emily's death in the s1 finale. Let's call him Lawrence, shall we?) Grandpa Jack was adorable, and as opposed to a certain dreadfully over the top scene in s3 of AtS involving Angel, Cordy and baby Connor, the scene with Sydney, Vaughn and Isabelle at the end was warm without feeling syrupy. (Sydney rubbing her neck and thinking of Sloane helped.*g* No, seriously, it worked for me.)
Mid-way through the episode, a dreadful realization struck me: it's five minutes before Alias ends, and after five years, I finally like Julian Sark. Not just "tolerate" and/or think "he's a useful character with some good lines" but "like" as "enjoy every moment he's on the screen". This is most disconcerting. I might be starting to read Sarkney next. (Or more likely complain that there is hardly any fanfic - or none at all - that investigates his relationship with Sloane.) Anyway, Sark was fun, both with Syd and in prison. I just about died with laughter at "the beautiful man is dying". Best use of subtitles on tv since the opening sequence of Selfless. (Which made me check again who wrote No Hard Feelings, but it wasn't Drew Goddard.) Julian, now actually hope you'll make it out of the finale alive as opposed to speculating on Peyton killing you. How did you do that?
Much like on the issue whether or not Sloane recognized Sydney, I went back and forth on whether or not the old man in prison was Rambaldi himself. First I thought "yes", then "no", then "yes". Though whoever he was, it's clear that like the s1 Rambaldi confederate she met he's supposed to be immortal courtesy of a Rambaldi discovery, and it appears obvious that Rambaldi's "curse and gift" is immortality. Which is likely what Prophet Five wants, though I still don't think Sloane does, due to his s4 memorable "dilettante" outburst. (What does he want the whatever-it-is-for then?
eirena told me last night in chat she guesses he might try to bring back the dead. Which has never occured to me before but you know, that would make sense. Err, in an Alias way.) At the moment, I tend to go with "it was Rambaldi, but he didn't want to spell it out for Sydney", though that might change. And now, enough restraint. Did I mention JJ must love me? Oh, the Sloane and Sydney of it. The air was crackling each time they met. I'm torn whether or not I would have preferred it if Sloane had recognized her on sight, which is what I assumed he did until the air plane scene, but then he wouldn't have gone through with the Syd-avenging strangling, and I loved that as well. Solving my dilemma, I committed fanfic (see below). At any rate, kudos to the actors (once again), because that was a very different vibe from the scene with Anna-as-Sydney from last week from the start. Mind you, Sydney can't help herself. "Does that mean you're sending me to my room?" was utterly a Sydney thing to say to Sloane, not something Anna would say, and not recalling Anna was a follower of Rambaldi's was a serious slip (though I'm glad the writing staff remembered), though it gave her the opportunity for the pointed "perversion of faith" comment to Sloane.
"Not a martyr or a legend": I think Sydney is thinking of Nadia here, and of the way Sloane's feelings for either of them are intermingled with his Rambaldi obsession so his inability to separate them caused Nadia's death, and she's punishing him for it by describing her own "death". That was Sydney at her most angry, and not in the way she tends to be usually, when it's either mixed with yellings or tears or both. Far more fundamental than that.
And of course he chooses to strangle her/her killer. No white sheet for this daughter. For more thought on that, see the fanfic. Considering he tasers her before, I did believe that she wasn't in a condition to fight him back at once. (Or maybe I watched s4 of AtS too often....) Anyway, "I don't die that easily" was the perfect way to let him know (not that I think she intended that at this moment) the truth. And it gave us the phone call at the end, which harks back to him calling her after she graduates. Oh, such a happy fangirl I.
Is it Monday yet?
The proper way to show fannish gratitude is, of course, fanfic. The episode inspired the ficlet for this week's
fandom_muses challenge. Revenant
When he sees her looking at him with that familiar expression, the one she wore striding in his office, accusing him of murdering her fiance, he thinks: Sydney. Hardly, Nadia says. You want her to be here, too. Of course you do.
“We can celebrate, Arvin,” the woman looking at him with Sydney’s eyes says. “Sydney Bristow is dead.”
After all, Nadia comments, you got her killed, too. You knew Anna was on her way, and you didn’t even try to warn Sydney, or Jack. You found a way to contact Sark to further your own agenda, but not to save Sydney.
She never called him Arvin. “Mr. Sloane” in the office, naturally, and though he offered her the use of his first name in private one time she was visiting him and Emily, she did not take him up on it, years before she had any reason to resent him. It made her uncomfortable, she confessed, blushing somewhat, and Emily later said it was because she saw him as a father figure. He did not insist on a change, either.
“Does this mean you’re sending me to my room?” she asks and is so utterly Sydney in it that he almost reaches out to touch her shoulder. Next to her, her sister stands, the wound at her throat still raw. Dad, Nadia says, You’re talking to ghosts. Let’s face it, your judgment isn’t stellar right now. But you know, you could at least acknowledge what you’ve done instead of trying to avoid it. She’s dead. We’re both dead. Thanks to you. This is merely another bloody shard, dressed up in her clothes.
****
“Despite everything,” Sydney once asked him, when he told her Anna Espinosa would not be Nadia’s death, “you still believe?”
“I have nothing left but my faith,” he replied. It was not quite true then, though he did not know it. Then, he still had Nadia, and Jack, and even Sydney herself. But it is true now. And yet, Sydney’s life is protected by prophecies as surely as Nadia’s ever was. Anna should not have been able to kill her, either.
Anna didn’t, Nadia says as he sits down opposite of who has to be Anna. You know who got both of us killed, Dad. He was chosen, too.
“How did it happen?” he asks out loud, and the woman uses Sydney’s voice, cool and precise, to tell him.
“Sydney wasn’t a martyr or a legend. She was just a person. Who deserved nothing more than to be shot in the back. And so she was. The Chosen One. She died, just as easy as anyone.”
His judgment is impaired, but not utterly broken. It is time to stop wishing. If this is true, if this can happen, then this counterfeit will be able to retrieve what faith tells him only Sydney could. But then, her purpose will be over. Before she went on her mission to Nepal, he had vague ideas of how to use Anna Espinosa. He had already started by bringing the doubt in her heart about Prophet Five’s future plans with her out in the open. Now he doesn’t have the patience for mind games any more, especially if they involve puppets staring at him with Sydney’s tilted lips and her murder on their hands. The world has changed, his world at least, and his time is running out.
There isn’t even a question of method. He knows exactly how he’ll kill her.
****
Bringing death to Nadia at the hospital, when he believed it would be just for half a minute, so that the conditions for the cure would be met, he had a white cloth to protect her face from his direct touch. Not for Sydney.
“Sydney deserved better,” he says after having tasered her killer and feels her throat under his bare hands. Strangulation was really Jack’s favourite method, not his. Given that most of the death he dealt out was for business reasons, CIA business, Alliance business, his own, it felt far too personal. But this is different. Maybe he would have dealt with Anna through a bullet or poison if she had not worn Sydney’s shape, would not look at him with Sydney’s eyes even now. There is a nakedness in strangling someone, an intimacy that removes any pretensions about the nature of the act.
Nothing less would do.
The alarm interrupts them. It feels like blasphemy. “I don’t die that easily,” she says, and the alchemy of revelation changes his rage into wonder. They regard each other for a moment when the guard comes in, and he knows.
“Sydney,” he thinks, and this time there is no shape of daughters dead or alive to tell him otherwise.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 06:53 am (UTC)Yes, I was about to say. . .if it made sense, would it be on this show?
Absolutely on all things Sloane and Sydney -- I also note that there's no subjective Sloane-POV in the ep, so it's quite possible he is seeing Nadia and the scenes in your fic dovetail nicely with that possibility.
Re: Sark. . .I've gotten so much mileage out of hating Sark that I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that this ep made me like him -- but he was well-used here, and I like the idea of him and Peyton riding off into the sunset. She absolutely fits his profile (Alyson & Lauren, to say nothing of Sydney) and that whole "I am in total charge of him" or whatever she says is perfection. Also, I'm going to make the call that Ultimate Drew, in his producer capacity, was responsible for that subtitled line, and I'll be on the lookout for the interview that confirms this.
On a tangential note re: Sydney slipping up about Anna -- I have a new respect for even the bad spies after going to the museum today because, when you come through the exhibit, they ask you to pick a "legend" and memorize the details, then quiz you on it later and, while I've always considered myself to have a good memory, I pretty much forgot all of it. Playing make-believe is HARD stuff!
Really going to bed now. . .
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 06:54 am (UTC)Definitely going to bed now.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 01:02 pm (UTC)Mid-way through the episode, a dreadful realization struck me: it's five minutes before Alias ends, and after five years, I finally like Julian Sark. Not just "tolerate" and/or think "he's a useful character with some good lines" but "like" as "enjoy every moment he's on the screen".
I will not mock you for this, at this late date. Well, maybe a little.
I completely missed the point about Sloane's choice to strange her -- of course he would. Hands on, staring her in the face, killing her to make up for the death of two daughters (because SLoane will never stop thinking of Sydney as his daughter as much as she's Jack's), and at the same time it's a punishment to himself, to make himself kill a woman who looks just like Sydney, because he failed to protect her.
Excellent analysis, as always.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:01 pm (UTC)At first I was sure it was him, but then I talked myself out of it. But I really want it to be him.
The way you are with Sark? I feel about Vaughn. I am, at the end, starting to see some good in him, where before I didn't see much. Maybe it's the nostalgia.
Excellent fic.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:46 pm (UTC)It's so odd, starting to feel different so late in the game, isn't it?
And thank you!
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:49 pm (UTC)Yes, exactly!
And mock away. Then tell me whether there are any stories exploring Sark's relationship with Sloane.*g*
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:54 pm (UTC)Indeed. We're either in Sydney's pov or objective, so I had leeway.
Playing make-believe is HARD stuff!
We done them wrong....
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 10:53 pm (UTC)I do vaguely remember at least one (although not with a huge amount of pleasure.) The problem, I think, is that the big Alias archive crashed about a year ago and doesn't seem to be coming back. Ever. I don't think anything has taken it's place, which makes the fandom a bit hard to get a handle on.
(I don't think that Sloane is all that important to Sark, necessarily; he's an impediment to Sark's relationship with Irina, for one thing. And yet they've worked together more than once. It strikes me as a purely professional relationship on both sides; I'm not sure either cares if the other lives or dies.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 05:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-20 06:20 am (UTC)