Review:
TV Retrospective: Alias

With the shows Lost and Fringe both gracing our screens again, I feel it might be a good time to remind people about Alias, an earlier TV series also produced by J. J. Abrams and his company Bad Robot Productions. The show was ground-breaking in its style and execution and paved the way for the producer’s future efforts (including his role in directing Mission Impossible 3 in 2006). Alias was nominated for awards throughout its run and in 2002 the show’s lead Jennifer Garner won a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series.

Alias was essentially a show about modern espionage, although to dilute it into such simple terms would do it a great disservice. Like its spiritual successors Lost and Fringe, Alias was a highly ambitious and broad in scope, setting up a complex back-story and rich mythology with a story that kept the audience guessing all the way through to the last episode of the final season.

The opening pilot double-episode sets the bar high and hits the ground running. Jennifer Garner’s character Sydney Bristow moves quickly from being a CIA agent, to being a double agent infiltrating a shadowy intelligence organisation called SD6. It is quickly revealed that this organisation is interested not just in arms deals and dirty secrets, but in the lost knowledge of an Italian inventor from the Renaissance called Rambaldi. Although this interest initially seems quite bizarre, by the close of Sydney’s first mission it becomes clear why SD6 is so interested in him. The close of the pilot establishes the premise that Sydney must continue to perform missions for SD6, whilst simultaneously undermining them with the help of the CIA.

This, of course, is just the beginning. The show focuses not just on Sydney’s missions, but on her relationships with the people around her, and how they may or may not figure into the grand schemes being implemented by SD6’s head Arvin Sloane (played by Ron Rifkin), and by SD6’s many rivals and enemies. Sydney strives to maintain a double-life, studying at college and maintaining a group of friends outside of the espionage community. There are also a variety of mysteries surrounding the state of her family and her estrangement from her father Jack Bristow (played by Victor Garber). The plot concerning Rambaldi also thickens, providing a fantastic angle to what would otherwise be a very straight cloak-and-dagger drama.