When Buffy ended, I went through serious withdrawl. I’ve managed to hook myself on Alias (oh, the cute outfits!), but I need an SMDB Alias thread. What did you all think of this season, with the new set up and all?
Personally I just cannot get into this show. I was turned off last season, and now…it’s whatever.
I’m glad they went back to the first season premise. Even if they did have to basically bend over backwards to do so.
They never should have gone down that mystical Rimbaldi/memory loss path.
I’ll keep watching. I have to admit I’m a sucker for Jennifer Garner.
I think Alias was a fantastic show in its first season. It was action packed, it had characters you genuinely cared about, it’s trademark cliffhangers were nail-bitingly suspenseful, and it had some of the best handling of the secret identity idea that I’ve ever seen. The show worked because it wasn’t Sydney Bristow: Super Spy, it was as much about Syd’s relationship with not only her father, but Will and Francie as well. Plus, Syd being a double agent for SD6 was great.
Season two was good, too. You lost some of the appeal of the show when Will started working for the CIA and Francie was killed and SD6 was shut down, but the plots were still suspenseful and there was plenty of intrigue with Evil Francie. Plus, Lena Olin was amazing as Irinia Derevko. Great season finale, too.
Season three? Blah! From here on out, the show is Syndey Bristow: Super Spy. She has no life outside of the CIA and she’s not even a double agent anymore. Lauren Reed adds a horrible, horrible love-triangle sub-plot to the whole series and Sloane, previously a great badguy, has been completely defanged. Awful season (I hate it more than I hate Buffy season 6, and that’s saying a lot).
Season four… well, it’s better than season three, so far. It’s good for what it is, I guess, but what it is isn’t Alias. It’s an above average spy show, though. Considering the huge blows that the show has taken to its cast, it could be worse. I thought last week’s episode was actually pretty good. But without Syd’s triple-identity and the cliffhangers, the show isn’t even close to being as interesting as it used to be.
I love Alias! Just started watching last spring so we got all three previous seasons on DVD and got “caught up” over the summer. I thought Season Three was kinda sucky. I’m loving this season so far. Last week’s Stepford-esque episode was great!
Season 1 and the pre-Super Bowl half of season 2 were good. After “Phase One,” the show really started to bottom out. Most of the episodes were either boring or stagnated the plot. The “Second Double/The Telling” finale was a head trip, sure, but it didn’t help the show’s lack of direction.
Season 3 was just sad. As Vaughn said in the S4 opener, “Last year sucked.” The big problem with last season was that Lauren’s introduction made no sense, plus J.J. was really not sure where the hell the show was going. Losing Lena Olin didn’t help either.
This season, so far, has been average at best. I though the formation of the new organization was very deus ex machina for the purposes of giving Ron Rifkin something to do while adding a hint of mystery (which they promptly wasted by bringing Weiss in.)
Without SD-6 and the Alliance, the show hasn’t had a defined enemy that was believable. They need some sort of Big Baddie that we don’t expect Syd and Vaughn to dismantle by the end of the episode. I think the best thing would be to try to get Gina Torres to reprise her role as Anna Espinosa and use her to introduce a serious threat.
Holy crap, I just checked IMDB and it looks like she is coming back for 2 episodes next month. Rumor has it Brad Cooper and David Anders are coming back too.
brianjedi, that’s awesome news.
[spoiler]Anna Espanosa was a great adversary for Syd, and I’ve been wanting her to show up for a long time now (during season 3, I often thought “this season will be saved for me if Anna turns out to be the leader of the Covenant”).
Happy that Bradley Cooper might be coming back for an episode. For reasons other than the fact that he’s outrageously hot. The episode with him from season 3 was decent, even though I absolutely hated the resolution to the Evil Francie thing (and no one will ever convince me that she’s actually dead. Nope.).[/spoiler]
I’m disappointed.
I’m new to Alias. I watched seasons 1, 2 and 3 within the last month, and thought I had incredily lucky timing watching those as a lead up to the new season.
I thought season 1 was compelling watching. Complex plots, interesting characters and actors. Jennifer Garner was interesting as the grieving fiancee on a mission who was only starting to figure out her relationship with her father and keep her friendships with Francie and Will alive while trying to protect them from her “other life”.
And she wasn’t the only cast member with a fascinting story line. I adored Victor Garber’s Jack; his awkward love for his daughter, his hatred for his dead or not so dead wife, and the relationship that he had with Ron Rifkin’s character. And Ron Rifkin who you just never knew quite what he would do; he was evil, evil, evil, but then he’d creepily do something to protect Sydney. And Bradley Cooper and Michael Vaughan - who I sometimes confused at first because they could look a lot alike. This quickly lead me on to season 2. The addition of Lena Olin added a whole other level to the series. I loved the episode where the Bristow “family” was off on a mission to Pakistan.
So the set up of season 3 was interesting; what happens when you’ve stepped out of life and it has gone on without you. I thought the payoff was weak, in large measure due to Lena Olin’s absence. What happened with her anyway? I’d understood she was going to come back.
They dragged out the Vaughn’s evil wife story far too long. And then in the season finale, when Sydney finds the safety deposit box and pulls out some more information that appeared to me to be further evidence of what her father did to her as a child as a means of programming her to be a super-spy suddenly morphs into evidence that Jack killed Irina at the opening of season 4. Huh?? This from the guy who had been exchanging, ahem, fond e-mails with Irina.
So in one month I’ve gone from a WOW reaction to a meh, I’ll watch it after Lost if there’s nothing else to do. Which leads me to that I wonder - how much of this is attributable to JJ Abrams having Lost to focus on?