"You never should have betrayed me."
Ouch! Double ouch! This is one of my favorite scenes in season 3. Sydney is deep undercover as Julia Thorne. She's in the midst of convincing Simon Walker and his gang that she can be tursted when her "supplier" is discovered to be a CIA agent- Michael Vaughn. In order to save Vaughn from a gunshot to the head, Sydney offers to off the agent. She gathers Vaughn's collar in her fists, pulls him close and says one of the most amazing line. Oooh, the double meaning! Oh the sheer symbolic nuance of this scene. I LOVE ALIAS!
I miss it. I will admit it. I thought I was over it. I thought I was okay with it being over and done. I'm not. COME BACK! JJ are you listening to me? Are you listening to your fans? We can't handle it...
Perhaps Alias is just missing. Like Sydney was. I give it two years...before it's back and then our lives will never be the same again. GAWD, I hope Vaughn's not married... well, as least to anyone other than Syd.
PS. Don't forget to vote for your favorite season 3 moments and send them to me by tomorrow!
12 comments:
This is one of the top season three moments in my opinion. It not only gives Sydney a chance to share her feelings, but it's a chance for fans to divulge, too. I mean after all, would didn't feel the same betrayal as Syd?
So true- it was almost like revenge, like we had been thinking "Vaughn, how could you?" but we didn't know we felt that way until she said that and then stabbed him. We want him to hurt as much as she did.
GS, remind me never to get on your bad side.
May I take this opportunity to tell what direction I would have taken Alias to avoid the pitfalls of season 5?
Shower thinking:
I would have avoided the sci-fi-ness of the Rambaldi storyline altogether by making him a complete hoax perpetraited by Prophet 5, a "black-ops" group originally funded by the government. The began the "Rambaldi project" as a distraction for the terrorist groups of the world, and it worked so well that P5 began to wield tremendous power in every government of the world. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." P5 went rogue, and enter Sydney Bristow in season 1, and by season 5, Irena figured out the hoax and was on course to revealing P5 to the world, thus saving Syd from being a pawn in thier game of world domination.
What do you all think?
-R.
OOOHH, Robby! I love it! You know, for as much as Rambaldi was a apart of Alias, I really had a distaste for that storyline. It was the part of Alias that made it hard to suspend disbelief. I think the writer's could have come up with someone or something a little for real for the gang to be chasing after. It was interesting and very creative, but I think it is what got Alias in trouble.
We had these powerful relationships- complex and details (Syd/Jack, Syd/Sloane, Syd/Vaughn, Jack/Vaughn) We believed in every inch of those relationships. I think the writers should have stayed focus on those relationships instead of the weird and fabricated relationships of Rambaldi/Sloane, Rambaldi/Sydney, Rambaldi/Nadia, Rambaldi/Irina. The sci-fi aspect is what really threw a stick in the wheel. I do like the idea of a group like P5 setting up a conspiracy to distract certain terrorist groups.
Ah, I am thinking about Irina again in the finale. What a blow off that was! We are supposed to believe that everything she has been trying to accomplish, all the times she saved her daughter, was all to kill her in order to get some life juice? COME ON!
Yep, that is why I tried to come up with a more believable story that would allow all of the characters to maintain thier development, allow us to maintain 95% of the stories in the series, and allow all of us some closure to the series.
ABC should-a hired me! :D
-R
I know! I have been saying this since the season opener this year. They need to hire people like us who know the show, who know the characters, who know how to satisfy!
I had lunch at an Applebees today and a promotional pic of JG was hanging on the wall from season 2. I just miss is so much!
Wow - you guys are good! I love that ending too. I just finished watching the finale for the umteenth time and I was thinking at the end that the floating-horizon-ball-in-the-air-full-of-eternal-life-juice was really stupid! When watching it for the first time, I didn't even question it - I might have even had a "wow" moment for a second. But then, I just remember feeling really unfulfilled that Sloane and Irina did everything they did and were as mysterious as they were all for eternal life and world domination? I mean come on!!! Is this supposed to be a holy grail parallel? Isn't the holy grail way more interesting because it has never been found? It just made them seem so silly to traipse all over the world for 30 years looking for Rimbaldi stuff for this. What a waste!
Anyway, I guess eternal life and world domination would be attractive to maniacal power hungry criminals, but does the eternal life part belong in a series that has so much more to offer in it's rich relationships and awesome spy stories? Just agreeing with you here!
I love this scene cap. I was pretty shocked, happy and horrified all at the same time by this scene. I was happy Syd got to stick it to Vaughn because he did betray her - I still think the almost 2 years timeline is way too fast for him to move on (wrap up the investigation, meet Lauren, fall in love, get engaged, married, and back to work all in under 2 years after losing the love of your life???). Anyway, once she stabbed Vaughn and he rolled down the hill, I started worrying and loving him again : )
robetron, GS, kellie:
Add my name to the list of those who felt the outrageous sci-fi aspect of Rambaldi shortened the life of Alias. I'm definitley not anti-Rambaldi, but I think the writers had time to consider a more realistic (if anything about Alias is realistic) direction for that whole affair.
It seems to me that when you have brilliant characters (who also happen to be brilliantly cast), you shortchange them and your audience when you reduce their storyline to the level of a Saturday morning cartoon, which is what I believe happened with the Rambaldi story, accelerating at the end of Season 4, with the whole "Night of the Living Dead" thing in Svogda.
These Alias characters were capable of telling lots more complex, exciting stories and were not given the chance. Instead they were hustled off the stage looking buffoonish at the end.
Rambaldi was part of the whole fabric of Alias, but I think it was allowed to spin out of control and roll down the embankment. I think it could have contributed to the storyline instead of being the storyline. I think by allowing Rambaldi to be the most important aspect of the storyline, the writers painted themselves into a corner and we all saw the result on May 22.
At the end of the day, as GS and Kellie mentioned, Alias came down to the appeal of the characters and their relationships. With all their twists and turns, with all the lies and deception, with all the shifting loyalties and double-dealing, the characters are what brought us back every week, not Rambaldi.
Rambaldi gave eternal life to Sloane, but unfortunately, sent Alias to an early grave.
Bummer!
Great points Page48 - that was nicely put.
I was thinking about that Holy Grail angle again. They could have done a Raiders of the Lost Arc ending and had someone steal the Horizon from Irina/Sloane in an amazing sting operation and put it in a crate and store it in a facility somewhere unlabeled and hidden amongst 10,000 other similar crates, leaving Sloane and Irina frustrated and unfulfilled (can a man live trapped between a bunch of boulders without food or water for an eternity living on Rimbaldi juice alone?)
Letting Sloane and Irina fulfill their endgame by "activating" the Horizon, even if only for a day or so forced the writers to actually show the Horizon. Same thing with Anna and the doubling process and the giant Meuller device at the end of Season 4. Actually showing these events/things took the mystery out of it. I actually drank the coolaid on the Horizon and Meuller devise at first (subsequent viewings made me change my mind), but I was laughing pretty hard when doubled Anna from the getgo. That was just silly - immersing a person in red goo with another person's DNA can't change you from a 6 foot black woman with a Russian accent into a 5'7?" white woman with an American accent.
Anyway, it is just a TV show we all love, so we have to forgive them and as Lhaaheim says, they did the best they could with the time and people they had left. I guess we have to fill in the blanks here and hope for some more crumbs when the DVD set for S5 comes out. I am still watching all the episodes over and over because this show is so awesome, in spite of Rimbaldi's curse!
Well,
I have to be at odds with most on Rambaldi, but then my personality type is less than 1% of the population, so what's new?
The Rambaldi storyline was a mystery multiplier. The show was good without it, but it wouldn't have been what it was without it. It was the constant mystery that tied the series together from 1st to last episode. Otherwise you would have seen more self-contained episodes. And, look at lost- same scifi-ish quasi-religious unsloved mystery. That's just JJ's vision for it. Didn't I hear that ABC kept him from taking Alias into even deeper religious areas?
Anyway, Rambaldi was big in the pilot, even if we didn't know who it was. Mueller and the floating red ball was there in S1/E1 and in seasons 4 and 5 finales with sprinkles of it between. There are a dozen shows that are more law and order/spy fight-the-bad-guys- we-know in battle after battle with no chance of ever really ending the war. Alias stood apart from them in it's feel and action because there was a suspend-disbelief, worldwide, centuries- spanning mystery/antagonist in the form of Rambaldi/Rambaldi pursuers.
The problem was not the Rambaldi storyline. The show would have been flater without it. The problem was that they 1) didn't develop a well thought out Rambaldi mythology, and 2)they had the series pulled out from under them and had to come up with an ending for the Rambaldi mystery without the understructure of the mythology.
As I've said before, the Rambaldi storyline became fully half the show for me. I'm just not interested in another gritty reality detective show. But add a huge mystery to solve and my mind is drawn to it.
I want add this tag to this thread.
Julia Thorn was by far the best alias Sydney ever had in all seasons. I wish they would have had Sydney missing for a few more years so we could have a minor spin-off of the adventures of Julia Thorn. Or they could have extended this part of her missing two years to discover what she had been doing as Julia.
It was cool that there was this set of people who only knew her as Julia, and she had, in a very short time, gained a bit of a reputation among the underworld. Sydney, knowing full well who she was, managed to have quite a little fling with a master thief. I wonder what her agenda was at the time?
-R.
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