Alias 4.18: "Mirage"
Written by Steven Kane
Directed by Jack Bender
In which Jack’s medical condition is discovered when he begins hallucinating, forcing Sydney to desperate means to find help, while Yelena continues to use Nadia to her own devices…
Status Report
While the series is clearly meant to be the trevails of Sydney Bristow, the writers have developed a few other characters equally complex and just as enjoyable. For some, the best thing about the series is Sydney’s father Jack, a man of complicated morality (to say the least) and played with absolute perfection by Victor Garber. Over the course of the past four seasons, it’s been very clear that Jack has done everything possible to protect his daughter, often failing miserably, and his many years of detachment from Sydney have left her with a lot of questions.
What makes Jack such a complicated character is his complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to his decisions regarding Sydney. He always considers what might be best for her, what will protect her from pain, yet he’s constantly misjudging her reactions to his actions. Jack has been dealing with the emotional fallout of Irina’s betrayal for so long that he’s taught himself that he can’t imagine someone wanting to understand all the horrible things that are happening in their world. His entire job, after all, has been about keeping the people of America relatively content, unaware of the massive terrorist plots threatening the world every other day.
This is an episode devoted to Jack and his complex psychology. Since it would be inappropriate for the writers to dump the entirety of Jack’s conflicted emotions into one hour, this episode is essentially about revealing depths that Sydney was previously unable to see. Very little comes as a shock or surprise to the audience, but for the other characters, it’s stunning to see Jack emote something other than annoyance, anger, or self-righteousness.
What this episode reveals is that on some level, Jack wants to be able to open up to people, to be “normal”. It’s not clear how long he’s been hallucinating Dr. Liddell, but it goes back at least to the previous episode, and in that context, Jack seemed to enjoy the idea that he could tell Dr. Liddell all the secrets he had been keeping over the years. Even discussing his critical condition, Jack felt a freedom that he never seems to enjoy in the real world.
The troubling thing is that Jack is essentially living in an extreme schizophrenic state, where his hallucinations are merging with information collected from the “real” world around him. Jack’s lucky that he didn’t inject himself with antifreeze or epoxy, all the while thinking he was curing himself. For that matter, the treatment that he was trying to give himself sounds an awful lot like the treatment for heavy metal poisoning; how it could cure genetic mutations is a bit hard to contemplate. But his symptoms are actually very similar to the dementia effects of that condition, where memories of past events are so much clearer than recent history, and that past information becomes so prominent that the person believes it to be a part of the present. (This is a gross simplification, but it could indicate where the writers got some of their ideas.)
A lot of time is spent, early in the episode, hunting down Jack and trying to understand where his damaged mental state is leading him. It’s very effective, because half the episode rushes by before the audience gets to take a breath. For some, it just might be the first time they realize how crucial Jack is to Sydney’s world and the stability of the series. Quite frankly, if Jack or Sloane were to disappear from Sydney’s life, it would destroy the key drama that has driven events since the very first episode. (And the absence of Sloane as a true main villain in the third season was markedly felt.)
This also provides a strong explanation for Sophia/Yelena’s ability to overcome APO’s defenses in such short order. As the previous episode indicated, Sophia is such a powerful presence in Nadia’s life that her friends and relatives are completely unable to consider her loyalties in an objective sense. When Sloane did ask questions, Sydney ripped him up one side and down the other for apparently betraying Nadia’s trust. Yelena has managed to place herself in a position to overcome any opposition, simply by slipping past their usually formidable defenses as if they weren’t even there.
This has always been the tried and true method of winning a test of willpower, and when it comes to who gets to control the fates of Sydney and Nadia (and thus, one imagines, the world), willpower is exactly the deciding factor. It takes a force of personality to work on a singular goal for more than 30 years, and when the final defense is scrambled with incomplete information at the last moment (a year is not that long in comparison), the chances are high that the defense will fail. In this case, the good guys are distracted by Jack’s condition, which was the result of a choice he made to save Sydney during a mission related to Yelena’s master plan. Yelena’s resources seem far more vast than anything APO can toss her way, regardless of how effective they’ve seemed from mission to mission.
Sonia Braga follows in the capable tradition of the other two Derekvo sisters, Lena Olin and Isabella Rossellini, demonstrating very well that substantial roles for older women can be creatively developed and widely appreciated. It doesn’t matter at all that these women are of drastically different nationalities, to the point of very different accents. Just the mystique that has surrounded the Derekvo name is enough to smooth over those little bumps. Sonia portrays Yelena as a woman who has been doing the spy thing for quite some time, but typically through indirect confrontation; she’s far more capable in the field than when dealing with the possibility of discovery by Nadia and Weiss.
That relationship, oddly enough, has a certain inevitability to it that has allowed it to happen off-screen in a relatively satisfying way. The two are very comfortable with each other, and it makes it easy to accept the fact that they forged a close relationship without it dominating everyone else’s life. If the plot does indeed turn to a deadly competition between sisters, Weiss must now be counted on Nadia’s side of the aisle. (And given the fact that the Greg Grunberg might be leaving for “The Catch”, should it be picked up, Weiss fans have cause to be worried.)
The heart of the episode, however, is Jack’s condition. Once he is found and the depth of his delusions understood, it’s great to see the team pull together to help Sydney save her father’s life (or at least give him a chance of survival). As usual, Sloane displays hidden depths of humanity in his scenes with Sydney, revealing his long history with the Bristows with a tinge of wistful regret for simpler days. The thing about Sloane is that he’s genuinely personable and likeable; he just happens to be obsessed to the point of extreme self-interest and immorality. He’s not all that different from Jack, and that never fails to confound Sydney and her desire to hate Sloane without reservation.
Some have quibbled already about how quickly APO was able to pull together a detailed facsimile of the old Bristow home, but that’s not a valid criticism. For one thing, it’s exactly what the crew of the series manages to do every single week! With the right people and the right resources, it’s definitely possible. Besides, not every detail was likely to be the same; only enough to allow Jack to slip into the proper delusional context.
That said, it had to be intense for Sydney to see her old world from her present perspective, thinking back on days when she was the happy daughter of an apparently happy and normal family. For most of her life, she remembered her mother as a typical woman who happened to die in a traffic accident. It’s not just resurrecting that image for her father’s sake that tears her apart; it’s the fact that she’s forced to remember how much innocence has been ripped out of her life. She’s essentially experiencing exactly what Jack has always wanted to shield from her.
It’s never been a secret that Jack told Irina information about his missions; he admitted as much earlier in the series. But what’s shocking to everyone is the matter-of-fact way that Jack spills information, happily telling Irina/Laura enough about his day-to-day activities that her inevitable follow-up questions were expected. Sloane was probably shocked to think that Jack, a man now so scarred that he conceals everything, ever felt so content that he could discuss classified information with his wife.
But at the same time, it reveals the depth of Jack’s pain. This is the kind of life that he thought he was living, sharing his every thought and feeling with a woman that made his sacrifices that much easier to endure. Laura was the cornerstone of his psychological coping mechanism. His still-intense emotions over that betrayal, more than 20 years later, make sense in light of how much he lost from his life. Jack always claimed that Irina had a superior skill for deception; what he was really saying to Sydney, in the second season, was that he knew all too well how easy it was to let Irina gain confidence. This episode ties in very nicely with Jack’s portrayal in the second season.
But it’s his deep regret over the time lost with Sydney that cuts her to the bone. It’s not just that she never understood how much he wanted to spend time with her; it’s how that turned into a need to put her at arm’s length once Laura was gone. Sydney was a constant reminder of what Jack had taken away from him, and he came to the conclusion that the best way to protect Sydney was from a distance. It never occurred to him that it left her wishing desperately for a father figure; for a time, that’s the role that Sloane happily owned.
Jack’s confession leaves Sydney emotionally spent, but it also provides everyone with the information necessary to locate the real Dr. Liddell. In a way, this feels like a waiting game, since there are a number of signs that the Nightingale device is still going to be necessary to save Jack’s life. An interesting scenario presents itself, in terms of what could set Sydney and Nadia in conflict. What if Nadia were to discover that Jack killed Irina, and decided to prevent Sydney from saving Jack in response? It would be the perfect way to pull many of the plot and character threads together in a logical manner. Nadia’s vow regarding Irina would finally be brought to fruition, and there would even be a neat parallel to Nadia’s wish for Sydney to forgive Sloane.
While this episode doesn’t quite advance the main plot as much as the past few episodes have, it brings the story several steps closer to the major events of the finale. Unlike “Nocturne”, which walked through similar delusional territory, Jack’s fantasy world and health status have direct impact on the characters and their relationships. And of course, any episode that focuses on Jack Bristow automatically has an advantage over the competition.
Final Analysis
Overall, this episode continued to advance the story incrementally while delving into the psychology of Jack Bristow. The tragedy of Jack and Sydney’s relationship as father and daughter is once again mined for some compelling drama, and in the process of aiding Sydney, Sloane displays more of his humanity. The second half of the season is, thus far, much stronger than the first.
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Rating: 8/10
Season Average (as of 4.18): 7.6
Directed by Jack Bender
In which Jack’s medical condition is discovered when he begins hallucinating, forcing Sydney to desperate means to find help, while Yelena continues to use Nadia to her own devices…
Status Report
While the series is clearly meant to be the trevails of Sydney Bristow, the writers have developed a few other characters equally complex and just as enjoyable. For some, the best thing about the series is Sydney’s father Jack, a man of complicated morality (to say the least) and played with absolute perfection by Victor Garber. Over the course of the past four seasons, it’s been very clear that Jack has done everything possible to protect his daughter, often failing miserably, and his many years of detachment from Sydney have left her with a lot of questions.
What makes Jack such a complicated character is his complete lack of self-awareness when it comes to his decisions regarding Sydney. He always considers what might be best for her, what will protect her from pain, yet he’s constantly misjudging her reactions to his actions. Jack has been dealing with the emotional fallout of Irina’s betrayal for so long that he’s taught himself that he can’t imagine someone wanting to understand all the horrible things that are happening in their world. His entire job, after all, has been about keeping the people of America relatively content, unaware of the massive terrorist plots threatening the world every other day.
This is an episode devoted to Jack and his complex psychology. Since it would be inappropriate for the writers to dump the entirety of Jack’s conflicted emotions into one hour, this episode is essentially about revealing depths that Sydney was previously unable to see. Very little comes as a shock or surprise to the audience, but for the other characters, it’s stunning to see Jack emote something other than annoyance, anger, or self-righteousness.
What this episode reveals is that on some level, Jack wants to be able to open up to people, to be “normal”. It’s not clear how long he’s been hallucinating Dr. Liddell, but it goes back at least to the previous episode, and in that context, Jack seemed to enjoy the idea that he could tell Dr. Liddell all the secrets he had been keeping over the years. Even discussing his critical condition, Jack felt a freedom that he never seems to enjoy in the real world.
The troubling thing is that Jack is essentially living in an extreme schizophrenic state, where his hallucinations are merging with information collected from the “real” world around him. Jack’s lucky that he didn’t inject himself with antifreeze or epoxy, all the while thinking he was curing himself. For that matter, the treatment that he was trying to give himself sounds an awful lot like the treatment for heavy metal poisoning; how it could cure genetic mutations is a bit hard to contemplate. But his symptoms are actually very similar to the dementia effects of that condition, where memories of past events are so much clearer than recent history, and that past information becomes so prominent that the person believes it to be a part of the present. (This is a gross simplification, but it could indicate where the writers got some of their ideas.)
A lot of time is spent, early in the episode, hunting down Jack and trying to understand where his damaged mental state is leading him. It’s very effective, because half the episode rushes by before the audience gets to take a breath. For some, it just might be the first time they realize how crucial Jack is to Sydney’s world and the stability of the series. Quite frankly, if Jack or Sloane were to disappear from Sydney’s life, it would destroy the key drama that has driven events since the very first episode. (And the absence of Sloane as a true main villain in the third season was markedly felt.)
This also provides a strong explanation for Sophia/Yelena’s ability to overcome APO’s defenses in such short order. As the previous episode indicated, Sophia is such a powerful presence in Nadia’s life that her friends and relatives are completely unable to consider her loyalties in an objective sense. When Sloane did ask questions, Sydney ripped him up one side and down the other for apparently betraying Nadia’s trust. Yelena has managed to place herself in a position to overcome any opposition, simply by slipping past their usually formidable defenses as if they weren’t even there.
This has always been the tried and true method of winning a test of willpower, and when it comes to who gets to control the fates of Sydney and Nadia (and thus, one imagines, the world), willpower is exactly the deciding factor. It takes a force of personality to work on a singular goal for more than 30 years, and when the final defense is scrambled with incomplete information at the last moment (a year is not that long in comparison), the chances are high that the defense will fail. In this case, the good guys are distracted by Jack’s condition, which was the result of a choice he made to save Sydney during a mission related to Yelena’s master plan. Yelena’s resources seem far more vast than anything APO can toss her way, regardless of how effective they’ve seemed from mission to mission.
Sonia Braga follows in the capable tradition of the other two Derekvo sisters, Lena Olin and Isabella Rossellini, demonstrating very well that substantial roles for older women can be creatively developed and widely appreciated. It doesn’t matter at all that these women are of drastically different nationalities, to the point of very different accents. Just the mystique that has surrounded the Derekvo name is enough to smooth over those little bumps. Sonia portrays Yelena as a woman who has been doing the spy thing for quite some time, but typically through indirect confrontation; she’s far more capable in the field than when dealing with the possibility of discovery by Nadia and Weiss.
That relationship, oddly enough, has a certain inevitability to it that has allowed it to happen off-screen in a relatively satisfying way. The two are very comfortable with each other, and it makes it easy to accept the fact that they forged a close relationship without it dominating everyone else’s life. If the plot does indeed turn to a deadly competition between sisters, Weiss must now be counted on Nadia’s side of the aisle. (And given the fact that the Greg Grunberg might be leaving for “The Catch”, should it be picked up, Weiss fans have cause to be worried.)
The heart of the episode, however, is Jack’s condition. Once he is found and the depth of his delusions understood, it’s great to see the team pull together to help Sydney save her father’s life (or at least give him a chance of survival). As usual, Sloane displays hidden depths of humanity in his scenes with Sydney, revealing his long history with the Bristows with a tinge of wistful regret for simpler days. The thing about Sloane is that he’s genuinely personable and likeable; he just happens to be obsessed to the point of extreme self-interest and immorality. He’s not all that different from Jack, and that never fails to confound Sydney and her desire to hate Sloane without reservation.
Some have quibbled already about how quickly APO was able to pull together a detailed facsimile of the old Bristow home, but that’s not a valid criticism. For one thing, it’s exactly what the crew of the series manages to do every single week! With the right people and the right resources, it’s definitely possible. Besides, not every detail was likely to be the same; only enough to allow Jack to slip into the proper delusional context.
That said, it had to be intense for Sydney to see her old world from her present perspective, thinking back on days when she was the happy daughter of an apparently happy and normal family. For most of her life, she remembered her mother as a typical woman who happened to die in a traffic accident. It’s not just resurrecting that image for her father’s sake that tears her apart; it’s the fact that she’s forced to remember how much innocence has been ripped out of her life. She’s essentially experiencing exactly what Jack has always wanted to shield from her.
It’s never been a secret that Jack told Irina information about his missions; he admitted as much earlier in the series. But what’s shocking to everyone is the matter-of-fact way that Jack spills information, happily telling Irina/Laura enough about his day-to-day activities that her inevitable follow-up questions were expected. Sloane was probably shocked to think that Jack, a man now so scarred that he conceals everything, ever felt so content that he could discuss classified information with his wife.
But at the same time, it reveals the depth of Jack’s pain. This is the kind of life that he thought he was living, sharing his every thought and feeling with a woman that made his sacrifices that much easier to endure. Laura was the cornerstone of his psychological coping mechanism. His still-intense emotions over that betrayal, more than 20 years later, make sense in light of how much he lost from his life. Jack always claimed that Irina had a superior skill for deception; what he was really saying to Sydney, in the second season, was that he knew all too well how easy it was to let Irina gain confidence. This episode ties in very nicely with Jack’s portrayal in the second season.
But it’s his deep regret over the time lost with Sydney that cuts her to the bone. It’s not just that she never understood how much he wanted to spend time with her; it’s how that turned into a need to put her at arm’s length once Laura was gone. Sydney was a constant reminder of what Jack had taken away from him, and he came to the conclusion that the best way to protect Sydney was from a distance. It never occurred to him that it left her wishing desperately for a father figure; for a time, that’s the role that Sloane happily owned.
Jack’s confession leaves Sydney emotionally spent, but it also provides everyone with the information necessary to locate the real Dr. Liddell. In a way, this feels like a waiting game, since there are a number of signs that the Nightingale device is still going to be necessary to save Jack’s life. An interesting scenario presents itself, in terms of what could set Sydney and Nadia in conflict. What if Nadia were to discover that Jack killed Irina, and decided to prevent Sydney from saving Jack in response? It would be the perfect way to pull many of the plot and character threads together in a logical manner. Nadia’s vow regarding Irina would finally be brought to fruition, and there would even be a neat parallel to Nadia’s wish for Sydney to forgive Sloane.
While this episode doesn’t quite advance the main plot as much as the past few episodes have, it brings the story several steps closer to the major events of the finale. Unlike “Nocturne”, which walked through similar delusional territory, Jack’s fantasy world and health status have direct impact on the characters and their relationships. And of course, any episode that focuses on Jack Bristow automatically has an advantage over the competition.
Final Analysis
Overall, this episode continued to advance the story incrementally while delving into the psychology of Jack Bristow. The tragedy of Jack and Sydney’s relationship as father and daughter is once again mined for some compelling drama, and in the process of aiding Sydney, Sloane displays more of his humanity. The second half of the season is, thus far, much stronger than the first.
Writing: 2/2
Acting: 2/2
Direction: 2/2
Style: 2/4
Final Rating: 8/10
Season Average (as of 4.18): 7.6
posted by John Keegan | 17:46
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