Alias

 _****

When Sydney Bristow's boyfriend proposes, he unwittingly instigates a sudden series of events that puts both of their lives in jeopardy. Sydney then goes off the grid to complete an unauthorized mission in order to secure her own safety.

My mother had been a big fan of Alias, and I would sometimes sit with her while she was watching it, but I had never really paid much attention. The only season of the show that I had actively watched while it aired live was the fourth, so I'm still a little clueless on what came in the three years prior, and I have no idea what happened in the final run of the series.

J. J. Abrams presents us with a fully-realized world in this first outing, and the characters are all so well-defined that it's completely immersive and believable from the first minutes of the show. The introductory phase of any pilot episode can be awkward, but Alias manages to side-step that in a way that makes the audience feel as though we've been watching these characters for quite some time already, and despite the fact that I've only just met these people, I already have a relatively tangible grasp on who everyone is both individually and in relation to one another.

The chemistry that these actors have is amazing; they all seem to understand the people they're portraying, and it's amazing that this is the first time that many of them have worked together.

As Sydney Bristow, Jennifer Garner has many fight scenes, and there are many more to come in the following episodes. My issue is that she can't seem to exert the smallest amount of energy without making guttural noises, which really only worked against her character during the first hour, alerting her enemies to exactly where she was at all times. Subtlety should be the name of the game, here.

I could be mistaken, but since this briefly took me out of the episode, I thought it might be worth complaining about: considering how large the slab of marble they used as Danny's headstone is, shouldn't it have taken a bit longer for it to have been installed? I'm aware that some time has passed between Sydney's meeting with the CIA and her visit to the grave site, but I'm not sure that that would have been processed and prepared so quickly.

Michael Vartan's portrayal of Agent Vaughn is the weak link in this first episode, though I suspect that's due to the limited amount of screen-time allotted to his character, although the character of Kevin Weisman, playing tech geek Marshall Flinkman, appears in only one short scene and manages to convey a far greater sense of his character than Vartan. The rest of the cast, Jennifer Garner in particular, give outstanding performances, each so comfortable in their character's skins that I would have thought they had been playing these roles for years.

Abrams directs this episode through a non-sequential series of flashbacks and flash forwards which build the mystery of the show as the hour progresses, and it's a very satisfying experience when the two timelines finally meet up bringing everything together. Abrams only ever shows us what he wants us to know, what he feels we should know, as evidenced through his refusal to use subtitles during a foreign-language sequence that might otherwise clue us in to the action surrounding the characters. Created here is an experience that the viewer can take part in, building suspense in a manner that truly makes us worry for the people on our screens.

Written also by Abrams, we are treated to a solid script that has come together with every other element of the show to make real J. J.'s vision of what this series should be. A high point is Jack Bristow's (Victor Garber) monologue to Danny about how his being asked for Sydney's hand in marriage would not be the cute anecdote told at the wedding, thus becoming an anecdote Danny would have told due to Jack's massive jackassery. The only character moments that seemed out of place to me were those when Sydney was wise-cracking at the expense of the villains, or gloating about something that she had managed to pull off; it just didn't wring true to who I imagine the character is, and while I'm sure Sydney has every opportunity to be funny in her personal life, I just don't picture her as the Spider-Man type on mission.

Suspenseful, fun, exciting, charming, this show is anything that it needs to be at any given time, and it's no surprise to me that it grew to be as popular as it did. There are any number of stories that can be told in this universe, and these are most definitely the actors to bring those stories to life.

Alias is in the running to become the feature for Wednesdays. The series ran from 2001 to 2006 on ABC with a total of 105 episodes.