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Alias
The Orphan
original air-date: 03-23-05
Be
Kind. Rewind: Vaughn discovered that daddy dearest
might have been a little more heroic than golden boy had originally
thought.
Oh good,
flashbacks. Don’t get me wrong; flashbacks are useful
in series television from time to time. They allow viewers
to recall important details that they might not have remembered
from episodes past, or they can give us insight into a character’s
past that we might not have otherwise gotten a chance to
see before.
So,
yeah, I can see why we might like to use the flashback gimmick
every so often to help out the story or even the viewer.
However, Alias seems to be perpetually stuck on
the flashback as one of its most important devices. This
is understandable considering the fact that viewers of the
spy-drama are often forced to recall minute details from
previous seasons that suddenly pop up in a new episode,
but when an episode seems to use the flashback as its focus,
then one has to question the use of it.
This
is not to say that I didn’t enjoy learning more about
Nadia and her past. It was interesting to see how she got
involved in the spy world, but wasn’t there a better
way to do this? If memory serves me right, shows like The
X-Files would set whole episodes in the past as opposed
to using the flashback mechanism every five minutes. Because
of the movement in between the past and the present, the
episode had a more disjointed feel to it than Alias
usually does.
Aside
from my vehement dislike of this technique of episode making,
the episode wasn’t terrible. It allowed the viewer
to connect more with Nadia in a way that we hadn’t
had an opportunity to before.
Of course,
it seems that the Nadia of the past and the present Nadia
are two very different people, and the transition between
these two was not made explicitly clear. We’re led
to believe that the current Nadia is a result of finding
out that she wasn’t working for the government after
all and that she was really employed by a criminal, (sound
familiar to anyone else?), but the passion and anger that
she used to have is only hinted at now and she’d be
more believable if it came to the surface more often.
Nadia
wasn’t the only focus of this episode; Vaughn’s
quest to learn the truth about his father was a subplot
of the episode, pretty lackluster until the end. It was
only then that we learned that the address that Boy Scout
had found in his dad’s journal actually led to the
orphanage where Nadia had been brought up.
The
headmistress explained that Vaughn Senior had arrived one
day at the orphanage, covered in blood, with the baby Nadia
in his arms. The only other bit of information that the
woman was able to give Vaughn was that his father had said
the word “nightingale” in a phone conversation.
This
is all very interesting, but right now there’s very
little for us to ponder over. Obviously Vaughn’s father
was still alive after he had supposedly died and he had
some involvement with Irina or some of her associates (how
else did he get his hands on Nadia?), but other than that
we are just as lost and confused as Vaughn is about exactly
what’s going on there.
This
episode wasn’t a standout, at all, but it moved things
along a bit so I guess I can’t totally hate it. But
I’m still mad about the flashback thing. It’s
all too much for one episode, guys. Time to get a new gimmick.
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