revisiting Alias

As some of you know, I still consider Alias to be my favorite show of all time.  Friday Night Lights is perhaps a better show.  However, I was never as invested in a show as I was in Alias.

This past week, I discovered that someone edited together many of Sydney (Jennifer Garner) and Vaughn's (Michael Vartan's) key moments and posted them on Youtube. Posted below is the first series of clips; if you're interested in more, they're pretty easy to find from there:

Anyway, this person did a pretty thorough job, though she left out some moments I really liked, including (but not limited to) Vaughn's description of how he would have proposed in the Liberty Village episode; all the stuff from the Season Two episode where Vaughn was being investigated and the CIA wanted Sydney to break into his computer; and Vaughn as an eyeliner-wearing goth in that one Season Three episode.  I also would have liked more from the two-part episode where Vaughn thought his father might still be alive.  I can't really complain, though, because altogether this person put together something like four to five HOURS of clips, which I watched over the course of a couple of days.  While I liked a lot of things about Alias, Vaughn and Sydney's relationship was what got and kept me hooked, so it was fun to revisit their key moments, what, seven years after the show went off the air?  Here are my thoughts:

I've had people tell me they stopped watching the show during the third season, and I will admit that things got pretty bad for awhile there.  You'll remember that at the end of the second season, Sydney woke up in an alley in Taipei with no memory of how she'd gotten there or how long she'd been there, only to find that she had been missing and presumed dead for almost two years and that Vaughn had married an NSA agent named Lauren Reed (Melissa George) in her absence. Now, okay: while I found this sudden two year shift ridiculous and Vaughn's marriage unfortunate, I did not find it unbelievable that he would do this.  He didn't break up with Alice, the girlfriend he had before Sydney, until the morning AFTER he and Sydney made out for the first time, indicating that the man cannot be alone for even one day.  Of course he found someone else while she was gone.  Also, he thought she was dead.  Sydney was serious with Vaughn less than two years after Danny's death and probably would have gotten serious with him even sooner if circumstances had permitted, so I don't think she can blame him for moving on.  In other words, while I wasn't exactly happy that this happened, I didn't necessarily think Vaughn had done anything that bad.  I was still okay when he gave Sydney the whole speech where he told her he needed her to know two things: "One: I was so in love with you, it nearly killed me, and two: I don't regret moving on with my life."  Fine.  Understandable.

Rewatching all of this, I didn't start to have that much of a problem with any of Vaughn's actions until he started following Jack's (Victor Garber's) horrible advice.  Vaughn and Sydney start going on missions together again, and of course all of the old feelings start to come back, and of course Jack notices before either Vaughn or Sydney acknowledge it.  This prompts Jack to give Vaughn this whole lecture about how "I will not allow my daughter to become your mistress," so Vaughn should "push her away.  Be cruel, if you have to.  Make her despise you.  Because your kindness TORTURES her.  And I won't have it."

What Vaughn should have taken away from this was that he needed to let Sydney move on.  There are a number of ways he could have done so.  He chooses the Worst Possible Way Ever, which is to just start acting like a dick for no apparent reason.  This lasts not even a whole episode, because Vaughn and Sydney soon find themselves in a near-death situation.  He quickly apologizes and says that he just doesn't know how to be with her anymore.  She says she understands.  The two of them are going to be put to death by firing squad.  He tells her, "Sydney, in my life, there is only one person--" She cuts him off: "We'll find each other.  We always find each other."  They kiss.

They do not die by firing squad.  And when they get back to CIA headquarters, he literally RUNS RIGHT INTO LAUREN'S ARMS WITH NO EXPLANATION TO SYDNEY WHATSOEVER.  The hell, Vaughn? 

He then proceeds to start acting wishy-washy about who he wants to be with.  Fortunately, neither Weiss nor Sydney will abide this nonsense.  Weiss (Greg Grunberg) flat out tells him, "I'm not going to tell you to stay in a loveless marriage, and I'm also not going to tell you to leave your wife for another woman." Vaughn asks him if he thinks it's possible to be in love with two women at the same time.  "No," Weiss says.  "You douche," I add.  Sydney also, at around this time in the season, tells him that she won't ever be the other woman.  In other words: make a decision. 

He finally decides to leave Lauren.  He tells Sydney this on a mission, and asks her if she wants to get a cup of coffee when they get back home.  She says yes.  They go home and find that Lauren's father has died.  Vaughn decides not to leave her just yet.  This is somewhat understandable.  However, when he calls Sydney to tell her this, she's all, "I guess we're not getting that cup of coffee, then."  Him: "No.  We're not."  No further explanation.

Basically, my whole problem with his behavior is that while it is understandable that Vaughn would feel conflicted in this scenario, the writers of the show don't really give him enough opportunities to explain his feelings, so he just comes across as indecisive.  I think it could have been handled better. 

Things get a little more interesting when Vaughn discovers that Lauren is evil, a double agent, and just married to him in order to play him.  Jack tells him that he can't let on that he knows.  "What's plan B, because that's not going to happen?" Vaughn responds. 

"I'm afraid you have no choice," Jack says.

"Why's that?"

"Because you're the one who married her."

This leads to a pretty awesome scene where Vaughn goes with Lauren to visit her mother, only he's really supposed to break into the safe and steal something, so Sydney and Marshall (Kevin Weisman) are listening on comms.  Lauren comes in and almost catches him.  He pretends he was just looking at their wedding pictures.  She says that their wedding day was the happiest of her life, and asks if they could ever be that happy again.  She kisses him, and he says that's a start.  She goes for his pants, and Vaughn gets this great look on his face (that she can't see) like, "I can't BELIEVE I have to do this." Sydney takes out her earpiece and storms off.  The reasons I like this scene are 1) great acting on Michael Vartan's part and 2) it's the first time we've seen Vaughn, who has been pretty squeaky clean up to this point in the series, do something kind of dirty.

That, I think, was one of the points of this horrible, horrible storyline: to give Vaughn some depth and draw a parallel between him and Jack, whose wife was also a double-agent who double-crossed him.  Vaughn is Jack before life beat Jack down; Vaughn doesn't become as cold and hard as Jack because he has Sydney to help him through everything.  So, I understand the point of Season Three.  I just feel like they could have done something more subtle to accomplish the same things.

That said, all of this leads to some great character-developing moments in Season Four.  Again, I know some people who stopped watching in Season Three, but if they did that, they missed the following awesomeness in Seasons Four and Five (in no particular order):

1) the episode where Vaughn goes undercover as a priest.  In the course of hearing a confession, he winds up indirectly telling the story of what happened with Lauren (for those who don't know, he kills her at the end of the third season.  It's basically to save Sydney-- she's holding Sydney at gunpoint at the time-- but at the same time, he fully knows that he could have found another way.  He wanted to kill her.  Understandably, he feels some guilt over this.)  It's super moving, and since Sydney is listening on comms during the whole thing, it helps her understand what he's been through.  It's great.

2) the Welcome to Liberty Village episode, where Vaughn and Sydney go undercover in a village where Russians are being trained to act like Americans.  They keep being told they aren't acting American enough.  Vaughn has occasion to tell the story of how he would have proposed to Sydney if things hadn't gone all to hell at the end of the second season.  Sydney falls in love with him all over again.  They make love in the shower.  Once again: it's great.

3) the episode where Sydney gets bitten and infected with a disease that makes her super paranoid.  Basically, it brings her worst fears-- that neither Vaughn nor Jack will ever really love her because she reminds them too much of her mother, plus her fear that she can't trust Vaughn since he married Lauren-- to the forefront.  Again: great.

4) the storyline where Vaughn thinks his father is still alive. 

5) an awesome Season Five episode where Sydney is kidnapped and scientists are tapping into her memories/fantasies to try to get information.  This leads to the re-creation of a number of key moments from the series. For example, they recreate the scene from Season One where Vaughn tells her that she can't let the darkness she sees every day drag her down.  This time, though, she tells Vaughn (who has had occasion to fake his own death, at this point) that it was he who saved her, and she doesn't know how to do this without him.  He very firmly tells her that he knows now that she was always the one who was saving him, not the other way around.  It's beautiful.

6) the end, when they flash forward several years.  Sydney and Vaughn are living on a beach in a remote location with their children, Isabelle and Jack.  Dixon shows up and enlists her to go on another mission.  Back in her bedroom, Isabelle is putting together a puzzle that we know Sydney could put together as a child, and that proved her abilities as a spy.  Isabelle completes the puzzle...and then knocks it down before anyone sees.  She could be a spy, but she's probably not going to be.

I was also just reminded, watching the series again even in this fragmented, bits-and-pieces way, how EXCITING this show could be.  For example: through much of Season Five, we are led to believe that Vaughn is dead; we learn near the end of the season that Jack helped him fake his death, and that Sydney was in on the secret.  Now, I suspected all along that Vaughn wasn't really dead, and obviously I knew this for sure when I rewatched the Sydney and Vaughn scenes.  And yet.  That moment where we see a man say, "There is good news.  You have a daughter," and they CUT TO VAUGHN, ALIVE AND WELL? Even rewatching, I gasped.  That's the end of that episode, and the credits come up: Special Guest Star, Michael Vartan as Agent Vaughn, and-- again, even rewatching-- I shouted, "Hell, yeah!"  This show was an emotional rollercoaster from beginning to end, and I loved it.

Bottom line: in spite of an extremely questionable third season and the addition of some stupid new characters in Season Five, I still think it was a really solid show.  When, at the end of the fifth season, it flashed on the screen, "Thank you for five incredible years," I was like, "No.  Thank you."  Good show, Alias.

P.S. I'm rewatching the Season Two episode with Ethan Hawke in it.  I had forgotten that he was ever even on this show, but rewatching it, I remember how they showed him and Sydney kissing in the preview for the episode and everyone was all up in arms, like, "What about Vaughn?!" I probably was, too. Then when you watch the actual episode, you see that Ethan Hawke is drunk when it happens and the kiss is completely one-sided. Oh, ABC! Getting everyone all worked up with your crafty advertising!

P.P.S. Hey, remember when Anna Espinosa "doubled" herself to look and sound like Sydney? And there was that awesome, awesome scene where Anna-as-Sydney and Sydney come face to face with each other (both are played by Jennifer Garner, of course), and Anna's all, "I have to go.  I have a date.  I don't know exactly what I'm going to do with your boyfriend, but it's sure going to be fun."  And then she throws a match into the wreckage of the car Sydney is trapped in and walks off, smirking as it catches fire.  AWESOME.  Later, Vaughn realizes that the woman he's with isn't really Sydney, and they beat the shit out of each other.  I shouldn't have found that so fun, but-- under what other circumstances would Vaughn and Syd ever physically fight? And it's not really Sydney, of course, but it's still Jennifer Garner, so-- I got a kick out of it.

thoughts on The To Do List (spoilers)

Aubrey Plaza plays Brandy Klark, a high school valedictorian who panics when she realizes, during a drunken graduation night make-out session, that she has no idea what she's doing when it comes to guys and sex.  This confuses her, since, as she tells her friends Wendy and Fiona (Sarah Steele and Alia Shawkat), she normally always knows what to do in her daily life.  She's an interesting character, this Brandy.  She's super studious and considered nerdy, but she doesn't lack confidence; on graduation night, she seems genuinely excited to attend an all-night graduation party hosted by Mormons (this movie takes place in Boise, Idaho, BTW), and is genuinely irritated when her friends take her to a kegger instead.  I'm always super impressed by confident characters in teen films and TV shows, because I certainly wasn't confident at that age; I wanted to fit in and be included and felt super left out if I didn't get invited to something fun I knew was going on. 

Anyway, following her embarrassing graduation night experience and a conversation in which her older sister, Amber (Rachel Bilson), convinces her that she needs to lose her virginity before going to college, Brandy puts together a "to do list" of sexual experiences she believes she must have over the summer.  The list ends with having sex with Rusty Waters (Scott Porter, a.k.a. Jason Street from Friday Night Lights, here with some longish blonde surfer hair), the hot older guy she made out with on graduation night.  She spends most of her time that summer working as a lifeguard at the pool, but her main priority is working on the list.

I mainly was interested in seeing this movie because of the cast, which includes two Friday Night Lights veterans (Porter and Connie Britton, who plays Brandy and Amber's mom), an O.C. veteran, and Bill Hader, who plays Brandy's boss at the pool.  I enjoyed all of the performances, as well as the '90s nostalgia; this movie is set in 1993, the year I turned 14, and I certainly wore the scrunchies and flowered dresses and had my Caboodle, just like the girls in this movie.  Wendy is moderately obsessed with the movie Beaches, and there is one scene where Brandy, Wendy, and Fiona make up from a fight by singing "Wind Beneath My Wings" to each other; we totally sang "Wind Beneath My Wings" in chorus when I was growing up.  So, all of that was fun.

The most interesting thing about the movie, though, is Brandy.  Let's talk about the to do list itself: no one does that.  No one makes a chart of what sexual experiences they think they should have and goes about accomplishing them like it's a homework assignment.  But Brandy does, surprisingly not at all timid about finding partners and performing the acts, but completely oblivious to the facts that 1) people's feelings might get hurt and 2) people might judge her harshly for what she is doing.  Both of these things happen; Cameron (Johnny Simmons), her high school lab partner and coworker at the pool, is heartbroken when he finds her chart-- he thought she liked him, and that they were actually dating.  Wendy is angry when Brandy accomplishes one of the acts with a guy she knows Wendy likes.  The lesson of the movie is that sex doesn't necessarily have to mean everything, but it does mean something, and shouldn't be treated as just a checklist to be completed. 

Though there is a lesson to be learned, here, I did appreciate that it wasn't overly heavy-handed, and that Brandy doesn't experience massive regrets about the entire experience.  As she says, teenagers don't have regrets.  She feels bad about hurting Cameron's feelings but doesn't suddenly decide that she's in love with him or that she should only have been fooling around with him.  Sex with Rusty Waters (which, yes, spoiler alert, she eventually has) isn't all she hoped it would be, but she doesn't think she will regret losing her virginity to him-- as she says, he's hot, and he plays the guitar, and it'll be a great story to tell her friends.  I liked that while she did mature a bit over the course of the movie, she didn't have some sudden turnaround at the end.

On a more minor note, I also enjoyed Connie Britton and Clark Gregg as Brandy and Amber's parents.  Their dad is completely freaked out about the idea of his daughters having sex but manages to keep walking in on them doing it; he has only ever had sex with his wife and is a little crushed to learn that she had sex with other people before him.  Their mom is open enough about talking about sex with her daughters to make me, personally-- and at times them-- a little uncomfortable. 

As is perhaps expected from a teen sex comedy, there is some gross-out humor involved.  I didn't mind most of it, but couldn't really deal with a scene where Brandy literally eats shit.  Seriously: this is something that I have seen happen at least three times in movies but have never heard of happening in real life.  Why?  Why do movies have to go there?

In spite of that one regrettable scene, though, I liked the movie as a whole.  Good performances, good characters, decent story.

Netflix update/Scandal Season One (spoilers)

After trying to watch Parks and Rec, which didn't really hold my interest, I decided to check out Scandal. The first season was only seven episodes long; I see that the second season is available on Hulu, so I may get to see it sooner rather than later.

I enjoyed the first season.  I didn't think it was great.

In the first episode, Quinn Perkins (Katie Lowes) is recruited to work for a place that she is told is not a law firm, although the people who work there are lawyers.  Basically, what the firm does is manage crises; for example, in one early episode, the President of the United States has a certain person in mind to be his Supreme Court nominee, only he knows that this person has slept with a prostitute.  The firm's job is to keep this information from coming out.  We also start to get to know the characters in the first episode; for example, Stephen (Henry Ian Cusick), one of Quinn's new co-workers, contemplates getting engaged, and his boss, Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) encourages him to do it: "Normal people get married."

"You don't even date," he reminds her.

"I'm not normal," she responds.  We find out by the end of the first episode that, in fact, she has recently had an affair with the President (Tony Goldwyn, who I mainly remember from Ghost).  They were (are?) in love, but she broke things off because of the obvious risks; she is very hurt to learn (also in the first episode) that he slept with a low-level staffer (Amanda Tanner, played by Liza Weil, a.k.a. Paris Gellar from Gilmore Girls).  The first season of the show revolves around the fallout of President Grant's discretion with Amanda.  First, Amanda says she's going to go public with what happened.  Later, she reveals that she's pregnant.  Eventually (big time spoiler alert!), she is murdered.  This opens up a host of questions: Who did it?  Did the President have anything to do with the murder?  If not, who is out to get the President?  Was the baby even his?  What will happen if (or when) the public learns of all of this? 

I liked the first season for a couple of reasons.  The first is simply the "naughty fun" factor; the very first episode had me gasping out loud, and that happened a lot throughout the first season.  The second reason is that the show does a pretty good job of developing the "good" characters throughout the first season; everyone who works for Olivia has some sort of past, and we learn the details about these pasts slowly, and only as necessary. 

There is also a fantastic episode ("The Trail") that flashes back to the beginning of President Grant and Olivia's affair and makes the whole thing seem very plausible and understandable.  We learn about the then-President-to-be's loveless marriage to Mellie (Bellamy Young), who is ambitious, smarter than him (first in her class at Harvard Law, where they met), and pretty much the personification of pure evil.  We see the INSANE chemistry between the President and Olivia.  Seriously: there is one moment before they have ever even slept together when he tells her that he just wants to have one minute where it's just the two of them, and they're literally just standing very close and looking at each other, and it is HOT.  On the night that they sleep together for the first time, he tells her that he wishes he'd met her sooner: "What kind of a coward was I to marry her and not wait for you to show up?" He asks her to call her by his first name (Fitz), which she tells him would be inappropriate; when, after an insanely long moment of silence, she eventually does, and they simply quietly reach for each other's hands, it feels explosive.  When they sleep together, it feels inevitable and unavoidable.  It is an extremely well-done episode, well-written and well-acted; up until that point, we haven't seen much of them together, and their relationship is an extremely tough sell, what with him being, you know, MARRIED AND THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES and all.  That episode, though, establishes how Olivia is different from Amanda; makes us stop feeling sorry for Mellie; and makes us kind of root for Olivia and Fitz in spite of ourselves.

In spite of fantastic episodes like this, here is why I don't think the show is great (or at least, wasn't by the end of the first season.  I reserve the right to change my mind).  Most of the "bad" characters-- for example, Mellie and Billy Chambers (Matt Letscher), the mastermind behind the Amanda scandal-- are just completely over-the-top evil.  Mellie is the type of person who doesn't really care if her husband is having an affair as long as he is discreet about it and who is capable of making up a pregnancy and miscarriage on the spot during a TV interview because she thinks it will make her and her husband look more sympathetic to voters.  Billy, meanwhile, literally stabs someone in the neck with a pair of scissors.  All of this *could* be believable; I could imagine Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey's characters on House of Cards doing the same things, actually.  But Mellie and Billy are so forthright about how evil they are, and give long speeches explaining everything they're doing and why.  I just think they could be written and played a bit more subtly.  Everyone, for that matter, talks a little bit too much about what they're doing, or what they're going to do; for example, a journalist actually tells Billy exactly what he knows about him and that he's going to reveal it.  Why would he do this?  So Billy can stab him in the neck, apparently.  I think that House of Cards set the bar pretty high for how to handle this type of stuff, but sometimes I'm just like, "You can do better than this, Show."

In spite of THAT, though, I did enjoy this show quite a bit, and I plan to keep watching it.  It's good, and I think it can be even better.