Watching Alias...

[Chrisisall]

I'm lookin' at the final season of Alias for the first time (it was $17 at Buymore), and I have to say, WAAAAY better than I expected. Maybe the pregnancy thing was a bad reason to avoid it after all...

 

[Warp Coil]

Season 5 was an improvement over season 4, which I considered to be a massive disappointment. Although the 5th and final season is shorter, it returned to a more serialized arc that had been lacking for a while. Still, the show doesn't recover fully and never returns to the same quality that it had in seasons 1-2.

 

[Christopher]

The final season is definitely the best since the mid-S2 revamp. In year 5, they finally remembered to make the show fun rather than being ultra-grim and angsty all the time. And bringing in Rachel Nichols was a breath of fresh air -- and reducing Jennifer Garner's presence didn't hurt much.

 

[Bob The Skutter]

I never thought Alias got as bad as was made out by a lot of people. I wish more shows had the balls to tell their story and then tell a new one if they feel the show can carry it off rather then stretch out the story till it's stale and boring... Not that it really worked out that way with Alias, but still they seemed to at least try.

 

[Yoda]

I bailed on Alias after season 4, and it's very rare for me to bail on a show. It might be more surprising that I abandoned Jennifer Garner, as she's always been a favorite from an eye-candy perspective, and the Aliases kept the eye candy nice and versatile.

I've thought about going back to watch S5 at some point, but I forgot more or less everything about the show... they talk about a guy named Rambaldi a lot..... that's all I got.

 

[ancientone51]

Glad to hear you're on board.

I never thought it was that bad at its worst and 5 did brig it back in line.

The penultimate scene had me in tears.

 

[Christopher]

I never thought Alias got as bad as was made out by a lot of people. I wish more shows had the balls to tell their story and then tell a new one if they feel the show can carry it off rather then stretch out the story till it's stale and boring... Not that it really worked out that way with Alias, but still they seemed to at least try.

I think they were right to wrap up the initial storyline, because it had gotten stretched past all credibility by that point. Okay, so Sydney finds out she's working for an eevill organization and she has to pretend to keep working for them while actually subverting their efforts on behalf of the CIA. Sure, fine. But what that means is, every single time she was sent on a mission for SD-6, she arranged for it to fail in some way, or to substitute a fake McGuffin for the real one so SD-6 wouldn't get any useful tech or information. So from Arvin Sloane's perspective, every single mission she went on was a failure. So why the hell did he keep sending her on missions???? After a few months of this, tops, he should've decided that she was either a mole or a complete incompetent. It had just become impossible to sustain the original concept any longer. If anything, they dragged it out longer than they should have.

The problem is, they were kind of forced to switch gears midstream by network dictate -- a rare instance where the network's notes were dead on the money -- and since it happened so abruptly, they weren't really able to come up with anything really good to replace the original storyline with. So while ending it was the right thing to do, they were unable to follow it up effectively.

I felt the biggest mistake they made was abandoning the half of the show that was about Sydney trying to live a normal life, having friends and a social life and a facade of normality to balance out the wild, over-the-top spy stuff. I think that was another thing they brought back in season 5, that element of normality to give the show an anchor and provide respite from the larger-than-life action and intrigue.

 

[DarthPipes]

While I can understand the need to wrap up the initial storyline, I think that was ultimately the biggest mistake the show made. It worked in the short-term, they followed up the fall of SD-6 with the search for Sloane and Evil Francine storyline. But beginning in Season 3, that great storyline (Sydney working behind enemy lines to take down SD-6) was gone and just couldn't be replicated again. I rather would have had three seasons focusing on this storyline than the last three we got. Not that I didn't enjoy the show after Season 2 but it was just never the same.

Writing out Will was another mistake although it worked out great for Bradley Cooper. The two times Will returned to the show, it felt like old times again.

 

[Chrisisall]

Glad to hear you're on board.

Honestly, it's because of MI3 & Trek that I'm giving the last season a shot, and so far, I'm Lovin' It (with all due respect to McDonald's copyright).

 

[captcalhoun]

i like all seasons of Alias.

i love Jen.

and it doesn't hurt that Melissa, Mia and Rachel are hot too...

 

[Chrisisall]

i like all seasons of Alias.

Which are best?

 

[captcalhoun]

1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

 

[Worf2DS9]

All this Alias talk has prompted me to start watching the series from the beginning again. Watched the pilot last night and will watch a few more tonight. Maybe by the time I get to the end of Season 4, I'll feel the urge to buy Season 5, which I never really felt compelled to do before.

On a side note, I recently saw the re-packaged Season 1 set and was surprised that it was about a third of the size of the original S1 box!

 

[Chrisisall]

Maybe by the time I get to the end of Season 4, I'll feel the urge to buy Season 5, which I never really felt compelled to do before.

As a dude that never fully got into the series as a whole, I have to say that after 6 eps of season five, I'm fascinated.
*off to watch another*

 

[CaptainCanada]

I found season three disappointing (though it has some really great episodes, particularly early on). Four I really liked; five was surprisingly good, though I missed Nadia as a regular presence. The finale mostly managed to wrap things up well (particularly with Jack and Sloane).

 

[kalysto]

I would say my biggest disappointment with Alias was Sydney's disappearance. I wanted season 3 to focus on her on the other side of the fence, working her new alias. It would have kept the theme of the show, while being new and not still yanking Sloane's chain. I stopped watching after the end of season 3, they just messed up Mr. Sark too much.

 

[Warp Coil]

I would say my biggest disappointments with the series have to do with the Rambaldi mythology and the fact that it really didn't go anywhere interesting. They kept bringing it up, and kept referencing all of these things, but in the end, I don't think any of it made sense and I never felt that Sydney got to accomplish something major as her destiny as "the chosen one". There were a lot of things introduced or mentioned that never got fully addressed or followed-up on. Obviously, the writers didn't really know what to do with Rambaldi.

 

[DarthPipes]

Yeah, Rambaldi got completely out of hand. Especially in Season 3 where they were looking for a Rambaldi artifact a week. I was expecting them to start looking for Rambaldi's left nut by the end of it.

The episode in season three where Ricky Gervais played an IRA bomber was great and stands with the best of the first two seasons.

 

[CaptainCanada]

While they never really explained (or even attempted to) a lot of the individual devices that Rambaldi built, the final resolution of Sydney's plot I thought made sense. She did indeed render the greatest power unto utter desolation.

 

[Christopher]

She did indeed render the greatest power unto utter desolation.

I think that phrase gets the grammar wrong. "Render unto" means to give to: "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's" means "give the Romans what they're entitled to." Rearrange that and you get "Render [what is Caesar's] unto Caesar." So "render A unto B" means "give A to B." How do you give the greatest power to utter desolation? I think the writers intended it to mean that she would use the greatest power to cause utter desolation, but "render... unto" is decidedly not the correct construction to use for that. They were just trying to sound all fancy and archaic and didn't think it through.