At the beginning of the season, Alias was coming off a fantastic second season. I have a hard time imagining it wasn't one of the best shows on television at the time (The Wire just began and The Sopranos was in the middle of its run so not THE best). It ended on a hell of a cliffhanger, with Sydney waking up two years later in a foreign country.
The crazy thing is that I didn't immediately watch the next episode. In fact, when I watched the first episode of season three, a year and a half had passed. What is really interesting about the third season is that it has a lot of great ideas. On a storyboard, how they ended up responding to the cliffhanger - which I'm sure they wrote without actually knowing the next step - is strong. She lost her memory because she was abducted by the Covenant, became a double agent (again), and then when she held valuable information, wanted to make sure nobody would be able to learn it by volunteering to erase her memory.
All strong ideas and it led to a few great, gripping episodes. Just like the second season, they set up a season-long arc only to dismantle it halfway through the season. Granted, it wasn't the same, but I wasn't expecting to get concrete answers on what happened to Sydney so soon. Then they made Lauren Reed a secret agent and emphasized the love story between Vaughn and Sydney.
Look, Michael Vartan is a perfectly capable fourth supporting character who gets his one episode to shine in a 22 episode season, but the man has no range. There used to be a time when television actor was an insult. Vartan is the epitome of that. He's just so out of his depth in this season. He needs to navigate so many emotions between finding his original love back from the dead, his current love, and then finding out his current love is actually a traitor. And he pretty much acts the same way for all of these situations. This is some MEATY material for an actor. Why the fuck did they think he was a better option than Bradley Cooper for this part?
Worse yet, Cooper, who asked to be written out of the show he was so unhappy with where his character went despite having no job offers at the time, gets an episode feature and it's probably the best episode of the season. WHAT A MISSED OPPORTUNITY. I'm not even a person who thinks Cooper is a fantastic actor or anything. I have no idea how the hell he has three best actor nominations to be honest. But he brought a lot to Will and I missed him in this season.
There was one episode which was the perfect distillation of the worst parts of Alias, combining three awful elements that made it the worst episode of the series so far and the only episode I outright hated. "Crossings," which ruins what is an otherwise perfectly good Isabella Rosselini appearance, is just bad television. First off, the episode ruins any tension by showing the ending first. Vaughn and Sydney kiss in a prison, get taken outside, are set up to be put down by a firing squad, and the camera focuses on one gun which starts firing bullets. *72 hours earlier* WOW I WONDER IF ANYONE FELL FOR THAT. The worst part is that it turns out it was a gun from an inside man who works as a guard. It was literally a random person. That's legitimately the worst deus ex machina I've ever seen. It was just lazy writing and the forced romance of Sydney and Michael made it worse.
Funny enough, the next episode almost made me quit the show, but I didn't hate it. The problem was that it repeated like six minutes of the same footage over a 42 minute episode. It was showing it from different perspectives, which is an interesting idea. But when they went back in time and repeated it, they showed far too much of the same exact scene before going to something original. It might cut to the point of view of the character we are supposed to be watching more, but otherwise it seems like we rewinded the episode.
This season created all the interesting dynamics that season two did. Arvine Sloane, who is now a humanitarian, could be good or bad now. Ron Rifkin is so damn good that he just makes the show ten times better when he's on screen. While I appreciate the way they kept him in the show and how they made him thematically interesting, he just wasn't on screen enough. I'm not even complaining, because they wrote him in as best as they could after he was the clear villain last year, but he was the most consistent part of the season. The revelation that he could be Sydney's father makes sense. He's always seem to have a fatherly instinct for her to an unhealthy degree and the only way that makes sense is if he thinks he's the father - which he does.
What I didn't love about this season was Lauren Reed. She was fine. I liked her a lot more before she turned out to be evil though. I don't think Melissa George could quite pull off what the show needed her to in order to make her character work. She's just too many different things at once, playing whatever character the plot needs her to be. She plays a character who is no way morally conflicted, which is fine, but she doesn't project any menace (perhaps because she's not capable of it as an actress). She works for an evil organization. You kind of need to be able to be menacing. Plus she seems like Sark to me in that she's not necessarily beholden to any organization, but then before she attempts to kill her father, she says she really believes in what she is doing. So she really believes in... Rambaldi? Or was she just saying that to appease her father? She never comes across as a crazy Rambaldi fanatic in the way Arvin Sloane does. Or at all really. (At least the mother is also a double agent, which answers why she's a double agent.)
The third season of Alias was like a big dumb and fun summer blockbuster movie. Unfortunately, the things you can easily ignore in a 2 hour film tend to come to the surface in a season with 22 episodes. The writers took some shortcuts, the actors didn't quite work as well as they probably hoped when they wrote it down, and the end product was an entertaining season, but not much depth to it. Plus, the suspension of disbelief tends to get removed when every other episode Sydney and team member get bombarded by freaking machine guns and nobody ever dies. I feel like the show was more realistic before about that type of thing. This season? Machine guns all the time with minimal casualties to the good guys.
In essence, there was no Lena Olin and there was no Bradley Cooper. There was more for Michael Vartan to do, which he responded to by playing everything the same. Marshall seems to get more unbearable with his fumbling of words and annoying tendencies (which the characters do NOT have time for in this season. Holy shit they all look ready to punch him in every scene with him.)
I could list every problem I have with this season and yet I enjoyed this way more than this post would probably make you think. It just went from a critically sound, engaging show to a basically 24. It does it better than 24 in most seasons actually. I just think I had higher expectations because this was attempting to be something else, while 24 is not.
Grade - B-
The third season of Alias was like a big dumb and fun summer blockbuster movie. Unfortunately, the things you can easily ignore in a 2 hour film tend to come to the surface in a season with 22 episodes. The writers took some shortcuts, the actors didn't quite work as well as they probably hoped when they wrote it down, and the end product was an entertaining season, but not much depth to it. Plus, the suspension of disbelief tends to get removed when every other episode Sydney and team member get bombarded by freaking machine guns and nobody ever dies. I feel like the show was more realistic before about that type of thing. This season? Machine guns all the time with minimal casualties to the good guys.
In essence, there was no Lena Olin and there was no Bradley Cooper. There was more for Michael Vartan to do, which he responded to by playing everything the same. Marshall seems to get more unbearable with his fumbling of words and annoying tendencies (which the characters do NOT have time for in this season. Holy shit they all look ready to punch him in every scene with him.)
I could list every problem I have with this season and yet I enjoyed this way more than this post would probably make you think. It just went from a critically sound, engaging show to a basically 24. It does it better than 24 in most seasons actually. I just think I had higher expectations because this was attempting to be something else, while 24 is not.
Grade - B-
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