|
Alias
Salvation
original air-date: 11-10-02
Be
Kind. Rewind:
Sloane came across more evidence that led him to believe that
Emily might not be so very dead after all, Sydney learned
that her father set up her mother to take the fall for the
explosives in Madagascar that he set up and a hypnotic regression
session reveals that Daddy Dearest started training Syd to
be a spy when she was six.
It almost
seems unfair to review "Salvation" in the wake of
such a solid episode like "The Indicator." Whereas
"The Indicator" deals with betrayals being revealed
and long guarded secrets being discovered, "Salvation"
deals with the fallout of it all and is, by and large, less
entertaining to watch. It's not that this is a bad episode
(it's really not), it's just that by the end of the hour you
feel as if nothing much really happened.
It starts
out with Sydney and Jack being sent on a mission to Geneva
posing as, what else, a father and daughter going in for a
kidney transplant that will save the father's life. Now, I
like irony. I'm all for it, but usually there is a certain
amount of subtlety that is employed when using it, but in
this episode the writers decided to blatantly throw it in
the viewers' faces by forcing the feuding father and daughter
to pretend to be extremely loving.
Thanks
for the example; but even high school English students were
probably rolling their eyes at how obvious this one was.
 So,
as Spy Daddy and Daughter work to secure a sample of blood
from a patient infected with a strange virus, the underlying
tension between the two could be cut with a knife. Sydney
confesses that she feels that whenever Jack looks at her he
sees his greatest mistake. She believes that her father feels
that if he had been a better agent, if he had been smarter,
then he never would have been tricked into marrying Derevko
and Sydney would never have been born and that every time
he lays eyes on her he is reminded of his folly.
Ah ha!
Now we're getting into the nitty gritty of it all. Sydney's
sadness about being a "mistake" and Jack's guilt
over making her feel like one are crucial to the episode as
well as the series as a whole. The complicated emotions that
surround the Bristow family's situation are a driving force
that allows the viewer to care about these characters and
they are well employed in this episode.
Syd and
Jack have obvious flaws: she never takes her father's advice
even if it's good and he will never be on the short list for
any father of the year award. If they were real people we
would be suggesting that they both get some industrial strength
therapy as soon as humanly possible, but, as far as TV characters
go, one could not ask for a more fleshed out or almost annoyingly
complex father daughter duo.
 Besides
Sydney lying and risking her neck to assure that her father
doesn't go to jail and that her mother doesn't get the death
penalty, nothing much else happens in this episode. Yes, Syd
and Vaughn were quarantined together because the CIA feared
that they were infected with this much talked about virus
and, yes, they shared a longing gaze from their respective
cots, but despite the cuteness, it wasn't all that exciting.
They've done things extremely similar to this before. I can
hear the Syd/Vaughn shippers scoffing now.
Sloane's
scenes were slightly more interesting with him going a bit
nuts about the possibility of Emily being alive and none too
happy about him killing her. But the whole bit with him seeing
her across the street and then following her into a church
was a bit overly dramatic.
As Jack
says in the episode, a church is a place to confess your sins
and Sloane's following the wife that he essentially murdered
into such a place just feels like another lame attempt at
irony on behalf of the writers. Wonder if they had heard that
Alanis Morrisette song one too many times before penning this
episode?
Speaking
of irony, how was that little twist, and when I say little
I mean lame again, at the end where Vaughn, who had just been
given the doctor's seal of approval, turns out to be infected
with the virus after all?
"Salvation"
isn't a complete waste (the Jack-Syd stuff makes up for a
lot of the crap), but it could have been a whole hell of a
lot better.
|
