Alias S01E12-13: That was one of the worst things ever. And not just on TV.

(Full disclosure: I watched these episodes weeks ago but haven’t been able to bring myself to think about them. At this point, I can’t read my own handwriting and I may have filled in some of the gaps my notes left creatively. Please accept my apologies for any inaccuracies in this post, but there is just no way I’m watching these episodes again for at least a decade.)

OK, so I couldn’t avoid it any longer. I watched the Quentin Tarantino episodes. I’d been dreading it since I started re-watching, but I powered through. And I think, if it weren’t for the absolute awfulness of QT’s acting, these 2 would be some of my favorite episodes. They explore a really interesting idea: what happens when one of the spies you deem disposable, who works for your secret evil agency and doesn’t know they don’t work for the CIA, gets in a bad situation? Well, if you won’t help them out of it, because you view them as disposable, they might just call the CIA for help. And that could come back around someday to bite you in the ass cut your finger off.

S01E12-13 Recap

But before we get into that interesting situation, we need to wrap up where we left off last episode, with Jack having revealed to Sydney that her mother was not a kind, loving teacher who was the unfortunate victim of Jack’s nefarious KGB activities, but was in fact a super-evil KGB agent who exploited her unwitting husband’s displays of affection in ways that allowed her to engage in maximum amounts of killing CIA agents. This is revealed to Sydney in a CIA conference room, in front of the director of the agency and several other very important people. And Sydney runs out into the hall to have a little meltdown, because of course she does. Ten minutes ago she was all stone-faced, ready to volunteer her father for whatever it is they do to traitorous CIA agents who murder their fellow agents. Now she’s a pouty mess in the hallway who apparently doesn’t care how she just made herself look to her boss, her boss’s boss, and her dad’s boss.

Jack tells her she “can’t lose control” over this, but of course he means “shouldn’t,” because she totally can and she will. In fact, she will go home and tear up old pictures of her mom and toss them into the fire while pouting the poutiest pout that ever was pouted.

Hey, get me, remembering to grab some screenshots so I don’t just keep saying things like “and then Sydney makes a face” and leaving you to imagine it for yourselves.

Sydney meets with Vaughn in whatever that chain link fence room is they always go to so they can talk about how her mom killed his dad and stuff. She cries, because of course she does, and he has his usual, “Are we sleeping together yet? Am I listening to her? God, is she crying again? What the hell is with all the crying?” face on. Then they share the world’s most awkward hug.

“God, I hope she doesn’t cry this much during sex.” –Vaughn, who apparently learned nothing about proper hugging in spy school. “Just slap your hand against the back of her head, and manage to look like you’re not actually touching her in any way” is NOT a valid hug technique, buddy!

Sydney decides she’s going to quit SD-6, because everything’s a lie or something. She also wants to go out with Vaughn once she quits so that he can be the one “real” thing she has in her life. Now, this is everything Vaughn’s been pining for, and Sydney’s ready to just hand it to him, so of course he decides he wants the opposite and tells her she can’t quit. Jesus Christ, these two. I swear. He does rightly point out that Sloane will kill her if she quits and doesn’t go into witness protection, so points to Vaughn on that one, because Sydney just…doesn’t think he will. Sure, he killed her fiancé a few short months ago and then tried to have her killed when she tried to quit over that, but he’s been so sweet lately, so he’ll probably be totally cool with her quitting this time.

Anyway. Over at the fake bank, a Mystery Van has arrived, and hiding inside is Quentin Tarantino’s desperate need to inflict his “acting” on audiences and say “behbeh” a lot. Like, a LOT a lot. Shit’s about to get grating as hell around this place, folks. You may want to go pour yourself a drink.

“Punch the ceiling. Knee yourself in the chin. Never blink.” — The QT approach to “believable” running.

Will is having a minor crisis because everyone he talks to gets mad at him for being such an intrusive ass. He’s decided that, since so many people – like, 90 of them by this point – have told him to back the fuck off the Danny/Eloise Kurtz/SD-6 story, maybe he really should. It seriously takes Sydney getting mad at him, Francie getting mad at him, his (female) boss getting mad at him, Eloise Kurtz getting mad at him and then ending up dead because of him, the secret voice on the other end of the brooch communicator terrifying him, and the guy from thirtysomething getting mad at him for potentially putting his daughter in grave danger before Will thinks maybe he’s dealing with something dangerous and should back off. Considering he got into this whole thing thinking he was doing something to help Sydney, Sydney telling him to leave it alone should have been enough. But, no, it takes until Will sees how his actions might negatively affect a man before he realizes things might be getting out of hand.

Sydney storms into SD-6 ready to quit. On her way in, she passes the van and the driver QT left behind to keep watch. He tells her to smile and she gives him such hate face as I couldn’t even capture in a screenshot. As soon as she has her back to him, he points a gun at her head. And I can’t think of anything that’s happened on this show so far that was this realistic.

Jack shows up to talk Sydney out of quitting SD-6, pointing out quite reasonably that even if Sloane let Sydney go without a fight, Sloane is not the top of the organization, so the first thing Sloane’s bosses would do is kill Francie and Will. Again, I say bring it on, but Sydney is really invested in keeping her friends alive for some reason.

In the end, she never gets her chance to quit, because QT has taken over the SD-6 offices and Sloane has initiated emergency lockdown procedures. Sydney and Jack are stuck in the elevator while QT gasses everyone else in the building. I guess the ventilation system in the elevators is completely separate? Because Sydney and Jack stay conscious. Conscious but on their way to the main floor due to the emergency protocol elevator override something or other. They crawl out through the roof and climb down the elevator shaft because they know when the elevator doors open someone will be waiting there to kill them. I don’t believe they needed to worry about this, myself, because this is the guy that was waiting for them:

If someone could explain this hair to me, please?

I just don’t buy that guy as someone who could take down either Jack or Sydney, let alone the 2 together. (Although, by the end of this arc, we will see QT knock out Sydney while droning on about how “kickboxehz” can’t take a punch, so the vast unbelievability of these episodes probably can’t be overstated and shouldn’t surprise me anymore.)

While Sydney and Jack are crawling around in the SD-6 ductwork, over at the CIA, Vaughn’s taking a moment to deal with the truth about his father’s murder. Don’t worry, though, we’re not going to waste too much time letting one of our main characters feel sad and conflicted over one of the defining facts of his life; that’s mostly Sydney’s deal and the writers know it, so no one else ever really gets much screen time for their inner turmoil. Weiss tries to cheer Vaughn up, and this is when I realize Greg Grunberg should have played Vaughn, because he can act more just by walking through a door than Michael Vartan can mourning the loss of his father.

Then Joey Slotnick shows up as basically Minimoose. We’ve never seen him before but Weiss and Vaughn totally hate him and he seems to have it in for Vaughn for no obvious reason. He’s reported Vaughn for his inappropriate feelings for Sydney, so Vaughn has to see the CIA therapist. I guess this is supposed to make him evil, and everyone certainly plays it that way, but Vaughn actually is way more emotionally attached to Sydney than is appropriate for (a) an agent whose case he handles and (b) someone he’s known for, like, 3 months max. Also he just found out her mother killed his father, which at the very least is going to be awkward to explain to the grandkids, so maybe therapy would actually be a good idea for Vaughn? But when you get Joey Slotnick you’re basically signaling to the audience they should hate him, so hate him we shall.

Back at SD-6, Jack and Sydney are tapping into the closed circuit cameras and sneaking around gathering up Marshall’s spare spy tech and such. QT has tied up all the SD-6 employees and is just speechifying all over the place. We learn that he works for someone called “The Man” now. He used to be a lowly little SD-6 operative, but his last mission went wrong and Sloane essentially left him for dead. When he was captured and tortured he claimed to be a CIA agent but the CIA said they’d never heard of him. So he was tortured some more. He’s a little miffed about all this and so he’s come to drink champagne and spew outdated slang all over Sloane while the rest of his team does some actual work and steals a Rambaldi artifact from the SD-6 vault.

While QT is distracted by his love for the sound of his own voice, Jack uses one of the CCTV cameras to tap out Morse code instructions to Marshall and Dixon, who are the only 2 people at SD-6 with a tendency to sometimes seem actually too smart to have been tricked into working at SD-6. Marshall tries to provide a distraction but it goes badly. Jack ends up having to reveal himself so Sydney can keep crawling around in the ductwork. Dixon tells Jack he wants to contact the CIA and Jack can’t quite come up with a good enough explanation of why that’s a terrible fucking plan, so Dixon does it.

Vaughn, Weiss and Minimoose review Dixon’s message and Vaughn immediately decides it’s true and Sydney’s in trouble and he’s gotta break, like, so many rules to get over there and check it out. He goes to the Credit Dauphine parking garage, where his first order of business is to shoot the “smile” guy in the [dick? do my notes actually say he shoots him in the dick? was that wishful thinking on my part or did it really go down like that?]. He then contacts Minimoose to let him know that Dixon was telling the truth, and Minimoose fulfills his purpose as guy-who-is-on-the-show-so-he-can-be-mean-and-we-can-hate-him by doing fuck all about it.

(Here, my notes utterly fail me. I think the rest of this is correct, but feel free to steer my straight in comments if it’s not.)

Sydney and Vaughn meet up, find all the bombs and defuse them. They meet up with QT’s girlfriend along the way and it turns out she’s a double-agent who apparently drew the short straw on Somebody Here Has to Sleep With Tarantino to Get Closer to The Man day.

Sydney turns herself in to QT to keep him from shooting people. He tells a big story about how he asked her out once and she was too cool for him, then he makes her drink champagne from the same bottle he drank from as some sort of you-made-a-huge-mistake-behbeh revenge thing and I become convinced that J J Abrams let him write his own part for this because everything about it is so out of step with the rest of the show.

QT tortures Sloane for information. It doesn’t work, because Sloane is a fucking badass.

QT’s team is about to break into the vault and there’s a fight scene where we’re supposed to believe he’s tougher than Sydney, who we saw take a guy twice his size back in episode 4.

Jack gets to Sloane and Sloane explains that he gave QT the wrong vault codes and that as soon as his team breaks in the whole place is going to blow up. The only way to override the code is with Sloane’s finger print but he’s stuck in the torture chair, so Jack has to take his finger print. Seriously. Sloane’s all, “Take it, Jack. Take. my. finger. print.” and then Jack just straight-up grabs some, like, bolt cutters or some shit and cuts Sloane’s finger off and carries it back to his office and saves the day with it.

Anyway. Let’s see how I felt about this one, won’t we?

Yay-Boo Analysis

Yay!	Boo!
	Jack explains to Sydney that his marriage to Sydney’s mother was basically her mother’s KGB assignment. Nothing her mother claimed she felt at the time was real. “Including wanting to have a family?” asks Sydney, all pouty still. And I want to be, like, “Hey, Sydney, plenty of us weren’t wanted, and you know what we do? We fuckin’ deal.” And I know, I know, that this is more about my own personal feelings and I suppose it really is jarring for someone who always assumed they were a wanted baby to realize the opposite. But whatever. I have also run out of fucks to give on this subject for lots of reasons that have nothing to do with this blog, so Boo it is.
	SD-6 has facial recognition software scanning everyone in the building constantly, but Jack is able to bypass bugs to talk openly with Sydney just using his spy pen? That seems like a gap in SD-6’s technological capabilities to me.
	Why is Sydney’s spy shit always makeup?
the tiny little fuck yeah Vaughn moment where he defends giving Sydney a Christmas present
	QT’s “behbeh” is another example of a not-white spy who does sexy stuff to get her spying done. Meanwhile, in this episode we see that even when all her friends are under attack the show won’t let Sydney flat-out kill anyone, only put them on a path that leads to someone else killing them.
“I can’t be the first person to have difficulty taking you seriously, can I?” This is the episode where we really start to see what a fucking badass Sloane is.
	Do we ever see QT blink? Like, does it happen even once?
	J J Abrams entire musical style consists of just speeding up or slowing down that one sample off his old Casio.
	retroactive Boo!: Mythbusters has taught us that C4 is just not as terrifyingly sensitive as all that. Sydney and Vaughn could have lit it on fire and made s’mores to fortify themselves before defusing the bombs and everything would have been fine.
	QT has a bad-ass hot chick spy of a girlfriend but acts all surprised that a girl was trying to sabotage his plans the whole time?
Will goes on and on at Francie about all the trouble his inexcusable nosiness is getting him into, and Francie laughs at him! Three times! Francie is sort of alright, for the moment.
“I’m not scared of you.” “Well, you should start being scared of me.”
Fuck yeah Sloane! totally breaking QT
	But fucking seriously! it pushes QT to murder his girlfriend
Hands-tied-behind-backs kicky fights!
Sloane’s finger!
	We’re supposed to believe QT can fight?
	WHY DOES HE TALK LIKE THAT THO

Total These Episodes: 7 Yays & 11 Boos

Total So Far: 48 Yays & 56 Boos