random blog on Alias Season Three/Lauren Reed/Melissa George

Today I'd like to talk about Melissa George as Lauren Reed, a.k.a. Vaughn's wife in Season Three of Alias.  Here's a Season Three promotional picture of her in case you are unfamiliar:

You will notice that she is sitting on some boxes that say "Fireworks."

Anyway, so after the Sydney/Vaughn YouTube binge I told you all about recently, I went back and watched some full episodes-- not in any particular order, just the ones I felt like watching.  The thing I keep puzzling over is whether or not the producers always intended for Lauren to be evil, or whether they either a) decided to make her evil because she was so hated by fans, or b) perhaps *did* intend for her to *eventually* reveal herself as evil, but rushed to this a bit more quickly than they might have because, again, fans just wanted Sydney and Vaughn back together.  Don't get me wrong; I was one of those fans.  But here's the thing:

Vaughn is DESTROYED when he learns the truth about Lauren.  He basically goes completely insane in the last two episodes of Season Three.  He freaking pours acid on someone at one point during an interrogation.  He leaves Sydney with no back-up to run after Lauren on one mission.  Let me repeat: He puts Sydney at risk for a shot at revenge on Lauren.  He actively plots Lauren's murder (with Jack's help and encouragement).  When he eventually does kill her, it's more of a self-defense type scenario, but he shoots her a ridiculous number of times.  He fully wants to do it, which haunts him well into Season Four.  There is one Season Four episode where he has to exhume her corpse and where Sydney has to pretend to be Lauren for the purposes of a mission (I don't remember the exact details surrounding this, but trust me: it happened), and this is unbearably painful for him.  In another Season Four episode, he confesses to Jack that he can't sleep and that he sees her everywhere.  He eventually forgives himself for what he's done (in an episode where he goes undercover as a hot priest, by the way).  However, we are led to believe that what happened with Lauren may very well have ruined his life had Sydney not been there to pull him back from the dark side.  In order for us to buy any of this, we have to believe that Vaughn was completely and totally in love with Lauren.

Vaughn and Lauren in a Season Three promo pic.

This was always going to be a hard sell.  For one thing, we are positioned to identify with Sydney in this narrative, meaning that when Sydney lost two years at the end of Season Two, we lost them with her.  We didn't see Vaughn and Lauren meet and fall in love.  For us, like for Sydney, it was like Vaughn had been with Sydney just earlier that day, planning a romantic vacation for the two of them, and...what now?  He's married to someone else?  He tells Sydney that he's moved on with his life, and in the first couple of episodes of Season Three, he seems like he has; he seems primarily concerned with making sure that Lauren doesn't feel threatened by Sydney's reappearance in his life, meaning that 1) Sydney doesn't have him, even as a friend, to help her through her transition back to a life where everyone has moved on without her and 2) he sometimes appears a bit insensitive to Sydney, being openly affectionate with Lauren right in front of her.  He's not intentionally being mean; he just honestly doesn't seem to care that much about Sydney anymore.  Again: hard sell for the audience, who saw Vaughn in love with Sydney at the end of the very last season.

Vaughn and Lauren getting annoyed with Sydney during a meeting.

Add to that the fact that his indifference to Sydney doesn't last terribly long.  Within maybe three or four episodes, we see him having a post-stabbing dream where he wakes in the hospital to find Sydney sitting next to him crying about how much she misses him.  He confesses that he misses her, too, and they kiss.  We figure out that it's a dream when she stabs him (again) and asks, "How could you do this to me?"  He wakes up and seems a bit shaken, if not a little disappointed, to see Lauren sitting by his bedside.  It's not much longer before he is actively lying to/hiding things from Lauren to protect Sydney.  It takes him awhile to realize that he still has feelings for Sydney and to make any sort of move to leave his marriage, but...the feelings for Sydney are clearly there, early on.  In other words: he was in love enough with Lauren for her betrayal to destroy him?  Really?

Also: not even two full years had passed since Sydney's "death," which means that Vaughn either married Lauren roughly five minutes after Sydney disappeared, which doesn't seem overly plausible, or that he had only been married to Lauren for roughly five minutes at the time of Sydney's return, in which case...who cares about Lauren?  It doesn't really help that the show doesn't really give us a clear timeline for all of this.  I have this Alias companion book that states that Vaughn and Lauren met and began dating nine months after Sydney's "death."  At one point, Lauren mentions something about not hearing from her handlers for more than two years after she was assigned to marry Vaughn.  At another point, Vaughn makes a comment about how they've been talking about taking a vacation for over a year.  When the heck did all of this happen?  How long have these people even known each other?  When did they have time to fall in love, plan a wedding, and get married?  The whole thing makes not one goddamn bit of sense, is what I'm saying.

And yet.  The producers of the show did seem to put a fair amount of effort into both casting Lauren and (at least initially) creating a character that Vaughn might realistically marry.  Melissa George is very pretty, and in a more va-va-voom type way than Jennifer Garner:

Her role on Friends back in the day was the "hot nanny." On Grey's Anatomy, she played Meredith's wild college friend who allows the other interns to freaking take out her appendix *for practice.*  In other words: I haven't seen her in a ton of things (though her IMDB page indicates that she gets fairly regular work, particularly on TV, and I'm kind of excited about the fact that she will apparently be "tempting" Peter Florrick on the upcoming season of The Good Wife), but in the stuff I *have* seen her in, she seems to get brought out when they need someone hot and/or wild and/or shady.  Okay, I guess I've just answered my own question.  Maybe they totally planned for her to be evil all along.

Melissa George on Grey's Anatomy, possibly trying to convince the other interns to remove her appendix.

But beyond her appearance, they gave her character a backstory and independent storylines the likes of which characters other than Sydney rarely got on Alias.  In  a nutshell, she was a NSC agent/liaison to Sydney and Vaughn's task force at the CIA.  Her father, a United States senator, had managed to keep her from being trained as a field agent.  That's the thing: we met her parents.  They factored into a couple of fairly major storylines.  There were a handful of scenes shot at her parents' house.  We did not even see Jack's apartment until Season Four.  We never saw Vaughn's house until he married Lauren.  I'm just saying: why go to all of this trouble with her if they were just going to reveal her to be evil in like half a season, and kill her off by the end of that same season?  I feel like when we were originally introduced to her, we were supposed to view her as a legitimate professional and personal rival for Sydney.  I also feel like, given the fact that they later added Mia Maestro to the cast in late Season Three, then Rachel Nichols in Season Five, the producers/network were planning for the possibility that the show might last for a long time, that Jennifer Garner might want to leave someday, and that they should have some sort of back-up female character ready in that event.  None of them really stuck, and the show ended after five seasons.

The interesting thing was, as unpleasant as it was for me personally to watch Sydney and Vaughn be apart in Season Three, I came away from all of this with mildly positive feelings toward Melissa George.  Like, when she shows up on something I'm watching, my reaction is usually, "Oh!  I'll bet this is going to be fun!" I actually just watched a couple of her Grey's Anatomy episodes last night; she was pretty fun and entertaining.  I feel like maybe Season Three Alias could have been more okay if they'd taken more time to play out the whole Vaughn/Lauren storyline...but even I, at the time it was actually on, pretty much just wanted it to be over with.  So, they wrapped it up, they moved on, and, what, eight years after Lauren's last appearance on the show, I found myself puzzling over it.  I guess the show wins, then =).