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On TV Today's Date:

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.



Rebecca Sparling

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