First Alias

I'm shotgunning my way through Alias. Why? Because I haven't seen it before. Well, that's not exactly true. I did see the first few episodes back when it came out, but the slow drop feeding of information as to what's really going on just annoyed me too much to keep up with weekly progression. But when I can run through multiple episodes at a time...

The first episode sets up the premise: Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Gardner) is an agent for SD-6, a branch of the CIA... only, it's not! It's actually a cover for the bad guys, known as The Alliance, and she goes to the real CIA to become a double agent. So each episode is then getting a mission from SD-6, and doing the CIA's counter mission. She ends the first episode by getting some macguffin SD-6 wants, and saying she's in.

Getting an item the bad guys want and getting in that way is a beat that will recur in other episodes. And various groups being The Noun will also happen again. But that's in the future. Here we have the ongoing threat of Sydney's double agent status being under threat, and the slow uncovering of her history and finding out there was more going on than you thought. However that's doled out slowly, although it's not too crazy yet.

The other big set up is the idea that Milo Rimbaldi, a 15th century philosopher who somehow predicted current era technology and set up all sorts of devices and such to be uncovered for a ... thing. This isn't explained in the first season, and I have no idea why it's even in here, this ancient world tech going against the spy world scenario the rest of the series is working on. Hopefully it will be well paid off in the future (spoiler: it's not).

One big schtick they have to keep people watching is ending each episode on a cliffhanger, which is usually resolved in five minutes in the next episode. While it seemed exciting at first, that quickly wears thin.

So, a decent beginning all up, but there's a lot of pieces yet to be placed.

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