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December Talking Meme: Arvin Sloane and the Bristows
My favourite Evil Overlord and two of his four favourite people in the world.
I haven’t watched the tv show Alias for years, and if the days had more hours, I certainly would be driven to a rewatch by this request, because it’s been too long, and I do have the Alias dvds (of four seasons. The fifth, well, three guesses how I feel about it). So, based on rusty memory and old entries, here are a few thoughts on the relationship Arvin Sloane has with Jack and Sydney Bristow, which I would argue is second only to the Sydney and Jack relationship in its importance to the show as a whole. (Well, there is that Vaughn fellow, but you can keep him.)
Arvin Sloane, CIA Agent turned founding member of supervillain organization turned rogue evil overlord turned rogue shady consultant turned CIA agent (it’s complicated) turned supervillain has a few constants through his helter skelter of a life. One is the struggle between his increasing obsession with (fictional) Renaissance inventor and prophet Rambaldi on the one hand and love (symbolized first by his wife Emily and then by his daughter Nadia) on the other. The other two constants in Sloane’s life are Jack and Sydney Bristow, and his relationships with them, while also involving affection (and anger, and hate, and then some on their part) are deliciously complicated and layered. While the Sloane and Emily scenes make me cry (it’s a rare evil middle aged overlord who gets presented that uxorious towards his wife of the same age, though mind you, the show never suggests he’s less of a bastard because of that) and the Sloane and Nadia scenes are fascinating and heartbreaking and eventually infuriating, the scenes involving him and one of the two Bristows (or both!) make me feel as if touching a humming electric wire, if that makes any sense.
In season 1, Arvin Sloane seems clearly defined as the main villain and antagonist. He, more than any other individual character, symbolizes the organization Sydney is resolved to destroy. On one level, he inhabits the position of the traditional Bond villain, Blofeld, ordering various infamous deeds on a regular basis and foiled and tricked by the hero(ine) on a regular basis. But even in season 1, nothing is ever as simple as that, because Alias as a show gains its depth from the slowly unfolding backstory and from its structure as a twisted family romance. As early as the pilot, there is a hint that Sloane has a connection to both Sydney and her father Jack that isn’t just about their professional relationships. We see him informing Jack – with whom he is shown to be on first name basis – of the order to kill Sydney’s fiance Danny ahead of time. If you watch this the first time, you assume it might be a test of Jack’s loyalties. If you rewatch it, with the entire complicated story of Sloane and the Bristows in mind, you wonder whether he doesn’t deliberately tip Jack off (indeed we later find out that Jack, vainly, tried to rescue Danny after hearing about the order from Sloane). And then again, it could be both. What we do find out in the first season is that Sloane’s association with Jack goes back decades, starting shortly after they both joined the CIA, and that in the seven years preceding Sydney’s discovery of the truth, he assumed a semi-paternal role with her. She was a visitor at his house on a regular basis, befriending his wife Emily whom she repeatedly calls a mother figure. After another SD-6 employee suspects Sydney of being a double agent, the episode Mea Culpa sees Sloane testing this assumption in a set up that would allow Sydney to be extracted by the CIA alive. (Which is a startling contrast to his reaction when he – wrongly – suspects another old friend, Jean Briault, of being a double. He simply assassinates him.) Season 1 presents us with Sloane ordering other people to be tortured at various points, and it presents us with Sloane himself being tortured (and showing remarkable endurance during the process). We see Sloane callously sacrificing other people’s lives, and we see him not hesitating to sacrifice his finger when speed is of the essence after Jack tells him Sydney is still in the about-to-be-blown-up building in The Box. (Indeed, Sloane’s order to just cut is one of the few moments where we see the unflappable Jack Bristow hesitating and stunned by someone other than his daughter.)
Just when Sloane figures out that both Jack and Sydney are in fact double agents and working against him, the show never clarifies, though I’ve seen the plausible suggestion he finds out via Sark (who knows via Irina) when Sark makes contact with him on Irina’s behalf in early s2. Either way, he definitely knows a third into s2 (without letting the Bristows notice) and uses that fact for his own exit strategy from SD-6, where he manages to pull off a complicated con on both heroes and villains alike, extracts a lot of money in the process and could retire to a happily ever after with his wife Emily (whose life he also saved via said complicated con). But does he leave well enough alone? He does not. After all, Rambaldi and the Bristows are still out there. At the end of s2, Sloane tells a disbelieving Jack that they would work together again. This becomes true in more than one sense. In fact, the third season sees Sloane repairing his relationship with Jack to arguably the best state it ever was in since Sloane recruited Sydney into SD-6. It says something about both characters that their closest moment comes after Jack nearly killed Sloane and obliquely tries to apologize for that fact. Given that Sloane has an unmatched talent for self-sabotage, it’s not surprising that this relatively harmonious period finds its end thanks to the revelation that Sloane had an affair with Jack’s wife Irina back in the day, the affair that produced Nadia. It’s also only not surprising that this still doesn’t finish the relationship, any more than Jack’s retaliation (letting Sloane go through being executed by the state, then reviving him courtesy of a similar drug Sloane must have used on Emily) does. Sloane had an affair with Jack’s wife, Jack spied on Sloane for years, Sloane recruited Jack’s daughter, Jack traded Sloane’s life in on at least two occasions (in s2 and in s3); and then again, they keep saving each other’s lives (and Sydney’s) and know each other a little better than anyone else knows them. You can trace Jack’s fluctuating feelings towards Sloane by his mode of address (“Arvin” usually is the Jack Bristow equivalent of a hug). For his part, Sloane’s feelings are probably summed up by his actions in s3’s Breaking Point when he protects Jack by catching a bullet for him and later, when Jack grumbles that there just has to be an ulterior motive for said deed, returns: “Ah, Jack, now you’re in danger of outsmarting yourself.”
Meanwhile, Sydney clings to her hatred but gets saved by Sloane on a couple of occasions and finds that when she believes him to be dead, something she has longed for ever since Danny, there is no sense of peace and resolution involved. On one level, Sloane is the bad father to Jack’s good father for Sydney, as Emily was the good mother to Irina’s bad mother, but in either case, nothing is ever so simple. Her hatred for Sloane is what keeps her in the business he recruited her into quite often. When he tells her in the opening episode of s3 that she used to look at him, quite often, as if he were her father, she slams him against a desk, but she doesn’t deny it. At the same time, Sloane’s behaviour towards Sydney is never purely paternal. When he arranges for the two of them to go on a mission together in Prelude, she’s cast as his mistress by the Chinese official who observes them, and when we get a look into Sydney’s subconscious a few episodes later, her estranged lover, Vaughn, turns into Sloane mid-kiss before opening a door for her and kicking her out on the road/life. (In s4, it will be Jack whom Sydney’s mind sees melting into one person with Sloane.) Whatever else he is, he’s her third parent, the mentor who recruited her and later by becoming the enemy formed her as much as Jack and Irina ever did, in terms of archetype the gatekeeper who brought her into another life. What Sydney is for Sloane is equally complicated. A replacement daughter, most certainly; when we find out in season 4 that his interest in Rambaldi originally awoke after he and Emily lost their child, a daughter who was either born dead or died soon after birth, it fits with both his relationships with both Sydney and his actual daughter, Nadia, and the way both are interlaced with Rambaldi, for Sydney, as it turns out in s1, is a central figure in Rambaldi’s prophecies. (As fitting is the name of the dead daughter; of course he named her Jacquelyn.) So Sydney is also a part of his Rambaldi belief system to him, though it’s unclear just when Sloane finds out Sydney’s role in the predictions. Lastly, as mentioned earlier, there is an occasional erotic subtext in his behaviour towards her, though he never does more than touch her shoulder (and on one occasion kiss her hand). While the daughter aspect has been verbalized by both of them quite often, the closest either party has come to acknowledging the other subtext was in s4’s Another Mr. Sloane when discussing Sloane’s doppelganger:
Sydney: The way he looks at me, it’s the way you look at me.
Sloane: And what way is that, Sydney?
Sydney: Let’s just say it’s equally disturbing.
As far as Sloane is concerned, s3 is a period of transition. The fourth season in more than one way echoes the first, only this time with changed roles, parallels and contrasts. Sloane is again the head of a shadowy organization Sydney and Jack are working for, but this time, it actually does belong to the government. He is expected by everyone to betray them but in fact is sincere in his efforts to become a good father to Nadia. But the consequences of all his previous actions keep catching up with him. The Rambaldi-related scheme to change humanity’s genetic structure, something Sloane carried out via world wide water supplies during the same time he kept searching for Nadia in 3, that plan to eliminate human agression (thus making sense of the word “peace” Sloane received as a result of assembling Il Dire in s2) gets twisted into a scenario for universal slaughter by Elena Derevko and ultimately claims Nadia as its victim. Sloane is haunted by more than one alter ego this season – there is the literal one, a man named Ned Bulger who was imprinted with Sloane’s thought patterns, courtesty of Elena, and then there is Elena herself, who does to Nadia what Sloane did a year earlier, inject her with a Rambaldi derived fluid while claiming to love her, but as opposed to Sloane does not stop to sacrifice her for her own ambition. In s3 Sloane, in the throes of self-justification, used a comparison to Abraham, something which implicitly assumes he will not truly have to sacrifice his child; fate, though, never is that indulgent. Throughout s4, Nadia keeps winning, barely, over Rambaldi, though scenes like Sloane’s homicidal rage at the end of Another Mr. Sloane make it clear he hasn’t given up his faith, only stopped pursuing it actively. It’s a tragic culmination that Nadia’s faith in her father – and she is the only one who has it that season – is ultimately rewarded by the fact that he shoots her – after Elena has infected her and rendered her temporarily insane - to stop her from killing her sister, and to stop the variation of Rambaldi’s endgame Elena has set into motion. As opposed to a well familiar figure of pop culture whose initials he shares, Anakin Sykwalker/Darth Vader, Sloane does not get to redeem himself by saving his child’s life; he takes it to save the world, and the consequences will trigger the next and final act of his tragedy.
Nadia does not die from the bullets or the poison inside her; s4 ends with her in a coma. Finding a cure becomes the goal that starts Sloane on his arc and downfall in s5. Now for me, the end of s4 would have been the perfect ending for the show, not solely because of Sloane, I swear. (It’s also Sydney having made peace with both her parents, her parents having made peace with each other, and Jack letting Irina go. If Sloane gets a rough deal out of re-villainized in s5, Irina gets an even worse one, because with Sloane at least the show bothered to show the renewed fall.) But he’s certainly an important reason. He ends s4 in prison (certainly deserved by several decades of deeds), but as close in a state of grace as Sloane was ever going to get on this show, with Sydney, who held out far longer than her father, giving him hitherto impossible: an assurance of her belief and trust. Not unlimited, of course, but there it is, given when he stopped expecting it, and the image of his cell door opening because of her has that same completely unexpected and yet fitting stunningness.
In s5, the writers seemingly couldn’t decide whether fallen-again-to the-Dark-Side Sloane should be killed by Sydney or Jack in the finale and so ended up with both and neither (since he’s already immortal when they get around to doing it), which, well, is actually my least issue with s5 because I can see their problem. I couldn’t have decided which one it ought to be, either. Just that it should be a Bristow. Arvin Sloane, who was terribly possessive of them to the last (late s5 had him attempt to kill a woman who he thought was Sydney’s murderer; this being Sloane, it was in fact Sydney herself, who was stunned both by the attempt and its reason and then by his delighted reaction when he found it she was in fact alive and herself), wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
I haven’t watched the tv show Alias for years, and if the days had more hours, I certainly would be driven to a rewatch by this request, because it’s been too long, and I do have the Alias dvds (of four seasons. The fifth, well, three guesses how I feel about it). So, based on rusty memory and old entries, here are a few thoughts on the relationship Arvin Sloane has with Jack and Sydney Bristow, which I would argue is second only to the Sydney and Jack relationship in its importance to the show as a whole. (Well, there is that Vaughn fellow, but you can keep him.)
Arvin Sloane, CIA Agent turned founding member of supervillain organization turned rogue evil overlord turned rogue shady consultant turned CIA agent (it’s complicated) turned supervillain has a few constants through his helter skelter of a life. One is the struggle between his increasing obsession with (fictional) Renaissance inventor and prophet Rambaldi on the one hand and love (symbolized first by his wife Emily and then by his daughter Nadia) on the other. The other two constants in Sloane’s life are Jack and Sydney Bristow, and his relationships with them, while also involving affection (and anger, and hate, and then some on their part) are deliciously complicated and layered. While the Sloane and Emily scenes make me cry (it’s a rare evil middle aged overlord who gets presented that uxorious towards his wife of the same age, though mind you, the show never suggests he’s less of a bastard because of that) and the Sloane and Nadia scenes are fascinating and heartbreaking and eventually infuriating, the scenes involving him and one of the two Bristows (or both!) make me feel as if touching a humming electric wire, if that makes any sense.
In season 1, Arvin Sloane seems clearly defined as the main villain and antagonist. He, more than any other individual character, symbolizes the organization Sydney is resolved to destroy. On one level, he inhabits the position of the traditional Bond villain, Blofeld, ordering various infamous deeds on a regular basis and foiled and tricked by the hero(ine) on a regular basis. But even in season 1, nothing is ever as simple as that, because Alias as a show gains its depth from the slowly unfolding backstory and from its structure as a twisted family romance. As early as the pilot, there is a hint that Sloane has a connection to both Sydney and her father Jack that isn’t just about their professional relationships. We see him informing Jack – with whom he is shown to be on first name basis – of the order to kill Sydney’s fiance Danny ahead of time. If you watch this the first time, you assume it might be a test of Jack’s loyalties. If you rewatch it, with the entire complicated story of Sloane and the Bristows in mind, you wonder whether he doesn’t deliberately tip Jack off (indeed we later find out that Jack, vainly, tried to rescue Danny after hearing about the order from Sloane). And then again, it could be both. What we do find out in the first season is that Sloane’s association with Jack goes back decades, starting shortly after they both joined the CIA, and that in the seven years preceding Sydney’s discovery of the truth, he assumed a semi-paternal role with her. She was a visitor at his house on a regular basis, befriending his wife Emily whom she repeatedly calls a mother figure. After another SD-6 employee suspects Sydney of being a double agent, the episode Mea Culpa sees Sloane testing this assumption in a set up that would allow Sydney to be extracted by the CIA alive. (Which is a startling contrast to his reaction when he – wrongly – suspects another old friend, Jean Briault, of being a double. He simply assassinates him.) Season 1 presents us with Sloane ordering other people to be tortured at various points, and it presents us with Sloane himself being tortured (and showing remarkable endurance during the process). We see Sloane callously sacrificing other people’s lives, and we see him not hesitating to sacrifice his finger when speed is of the essence after Jack tells him Sydney is still in the about-to-be-blown-up building in The Box. (Indeed, Sloane’s order to just cut is one of the few moments where we see the unflappable Jack Bristow hesitating and stunned by someone other than his daughter.)
Just when Sloane figures out that both Jack and Sydney are in fact double agents and working against him, the show never clarifies, though I’ve seen the plausible suggestion he finds out via Sark (who knows via Irina) when Sark makes contact with him on Irina’s behalf in early s2. Either way, he definitely knows a third into s2 (without letting the Bristows notice) and uses that fact for his own exit strategy from SD-6, where he manages to pull off a complicated con on both heroes and villains alike, extracts a lot of money in the process and could retire to a happily ever after with his wife Emily (whose life he also saved via said complicated con). But does he leave well enough alone? He does not. After all, Rambaldi and the Bristows are still out there. At the end of s2, Sloane tells a disbelieving Jack that they would work together again. This becomes true in more than one sense. In fact, the third season sees Sloane repairing his relationship with Jack to arguably the best state it ever was in since Sloane recruited Sydney into SD-6. It says something about both characters that their closest moment comes after Jack nearly killed Sloane and obliquely tries to apologize for that fact. Given that Sloane has an unmatched talent for self-sabotage, it’s not surprising that this relatively harmonious period finds its end thanks to the revelation that Sloane had an affair with Jack’s wife Irina back in the day, the affair that produced Nadia. It’s also only not surprising that this still doesn’t finish the relationship, any more than Jack’s retaliation (letting Sloane go through being executed by the state, then reviving him courtesy of a similar drug Sloane must have used on Emily) does. Sloane had an affair with Jack’s wife, Jack spied on Sloane for years, Sloane recruited Jack’s daughter, Jack traded Sloane’s life in on at least two occasions (in s2 and in s3); and then again, they keep saving each other’s lives (and Sydney’s) and know each other a little better than anyone else knows them. You can trace Jack’s fluctuating feelings towards Sloane by his mode of address (“Arvin” usually is the Jack Bristow equivalent of a hug). For his part, Sloane’s feelings are probably summed up by his actions in s3’s Breaking Point when he protects Jack by catching a bullet for him and later, when Jack grumbles that there just has to be an ulterior motive for said deed, returns: “Ah, Jack, now you’re in danger of outsmarting yourself.”
Meanwhile, Sydney clings to her hatred but gets saved by Sloane on a couple of occasions and finds that when she believes him to be dead, something she has longed for ever since Danny, there is no sense of peace and resolution involved. On one level, Sloane is the bad father to Jack’s good father for Sydney, as Emily was the good mother to Irina’s bad mother, but in either case, nothing is ever so simple. Her hatred for Sloane is what keeps her in the business he recruited her into quite often. When he tells her in the opening episode of s3 that she used to look at him, quite often, as if he were her father, she slams him against a desk, but she doesn’t deny it. At the same time, Sloane’s behaviour towards Sydney is never purely paternal. When he arranges for the two of them to go on a mission together in Prelude, she’s cast as his mistress by the Chinese official who observes them, and when we get a look into Sydney’s subconscious a few episodes later, her estranged lover, Vaughn, turns into Sloane mid-kiss before opening a door for her and kicking her out on the road/life. (In s4, it will be Jack whom Sydney’s mind sees melting into one person with Sloane.) Whatever else he is, he’s her third parent, the mentor who recruited her and later by becoming the enemy formed her as much as Jack and Irina ever did, in terms of archetype the gatekeeper who brought her into another life. What Sydney is for Sloane is equally complicated. A replacement daughter, most certainly; when we find out in season 4 that his interest in Rambaldi originally awoke after he and Emily lost their child, a daughter who was either born dead or died soon after birth, it fits with both his relationships with both Sydney and his actual daughter, Nadia, and the way both are interlaced with Rambaldi, for Sydney, as it turns out in s1, is a central figure in Rambaldi’s prophecies. (As fitting is the name of the dead daughter; of course he named her Jacquelyn.) So Sydney is also a part of his Rambaldi belief system to him, though it’s unclear just when Sloane finds out Sydney’s role in the predictions. Lastly, as mentioned earlier, there is an occasional erotic subtext in his behaviour towards her, though he never does more than touch her shoulder (and on one occasion kiss her hand). While the daughter aspect has been verbalized by both of them quite often, the closest either party has come to acknowledging the other subtext was in s4’s Another Mr. Sloane when discussing Sloane’s doppelganger:
Sydney: The way he looks at me, it’s the way you look at me.
Sloane: And what way is that, Sydney?
Sydney: Let’s just say it’s equally disturbing.
As far as Sloane is concerned, s3 is a period of transition. The fourth season in more than one way echoes the first, only this time with changed roles, parallels and contrasts. Sloane is again the head of a shadowy organization Sydney and Jack are working for, but this time, it actually does belong to the government. He is expected by everyone to betray them but in fact is sincere in his efforts to become a good father to Nadia. But the consequences of all his previous actions keep catching up with him. The Rambaldi-related scheme to change humanity’s genetic structure, something Sloane carried out via world wide water supplies during the same time he kept searching for Nadia in 3, that plan to eliminate human agression (thus making sense of the word “peace” Sloane received as a result of assembling Il Dire in s2) gets twisted into a scenario for universal slaughter by Elena Derevko and ultimately claims Nadia as its victim. Sloane is haunted by more than one alter ego this season – there is the literal one, a man named Ned Bulger who was imprinted with Sloane’s thought patterns, courtesty of Elena, and then there is Elena herself, who does to Nadia what Sloane did a year earlier, inject her with a Rambaldi derived fluid while claiming to love her, but as opposed to Sloane does not stop to sacrifice her for her own ambition. In s3 Sloane, in the throes of self-justification, used a comparison to Abraham, something which implicitly assumes he will not truly have to sacrifice his child; fate, though, never is that indulgent. Throughout s4, Nadia keeps winning, barely, over Rambaldi, though scenes like Sloane’s homicidal rage at the end of Another Mr. Sloane make it clear he hasn’t given up his faith, only stopped pursuing it actively. It’s a tragic culmination that Nadia’s faith in her father – and she is the only one who has it that season – is ultimately rewarded by the fact that he shoots her – after Elena has infected her and rendered her temporarily insane - to stop her from killing her sister, and to stop the variation of Rambaldi’s endgame Elena has set into motion. As opposed to a well familiar figure of pop culture whose initials he shares, Anakin Sykwalker/Darth Vader, Sloane does not get to redeem himself by saving his child’s life; he takes it to save the world, and the consequences will trigger the next and final act of his tragedy.
Nadia does not die from the bullets or the poison inside her; s4 ends with her in a coma. Finding a cure becomes the goal that starts Sloane on his arc and downfall in s5. Now for me, the end of s4 would have been the perfect ending for the show, not solely because of Sloane, I swear. (It’s also Sydney having made peace with both her parents, her parents having made peace with each other, and Jack letting Irina go. If Sloane gets a rough deal out of re-villainized in s5, Irina gets an even worse one, because with Sloane at least the show bothered to show the renewed fall.) But he’s certainly an important reason. He ends s4 in prison (certainly deserved by several decades of deeds), but as close in a state of grace as Sloane was ever going to get on this show, with Sydney, who held out far longer than her father, giving him hitherto impossible: an assurance of her belief and trust. Not unlimited, of course, but there it is, given when he stopped expecting it, and the image of his cell door opening because of her has that same completely unexpected and yet fitting stunningness.
In s5, the writers seemingly couldn’t decide whether fallen-again-to the-Dark-Side Sloane should be killed by Sydney or Jack in the finale and so ended up with both and neither (since he’s already immortal when they get around to doing it), which, well, is actually my least issue with s5 because I can see their problem. I couldn’t have decided which one it ought to be, either. Just that it should be a Bristow. Arvin Sloane, who was terribly possessive of them to the last (late s5 had him attempt to kill a woman who he thought was Sydney’s murderer; this being Sloane, it was in fact Sydney herself, who was stunned both by the attempt and its reason and then by his delighted reaction when he found it she was in fact alive and herself), wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.