Alias: The Complete 2nd Season (DVD)

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I have a confession to make. My wife and I recently started attending AA. Never knew our problems would ever deteriorate this far but it got away from us before we realized it. Anyway, ever been to an AA-sponsored meeting? Well, let me describe to you how a typical meeting works as we recently held one at our home last Sunday evening. One by one or in pairs, the participants arrive and they are immediately gestured to the living room area where there are snacks and drinks at one end of the room and a row of comfortable chairs in front of the television on the other. Conversations are generally centered on a single subject and everyone seems excited about the planned events that night. There is a feeling of great anxiety in the room as it has been two weeks since the last meeting, which ended without the resolution of a tense issue. As 9pm approaches, everyone settles down on his or her chairs and the room slowly becomes quiet except for an isolated cough and some uneasy shifting. Suddenly, the television screen goes dark for a second and the image of CIA agent Sydney Bristow appears, bound and blindfolded as two burly men wearing U.S. military-issued uniforms drag her into a holding cell. By now, the audience in the room is totally hushed, some biting their fingernails, as their gaze is intensely focused on the screen in front of them. Forty-five minutes go by and every person in the room has had their emotions go through so many peaks and dips that I was afraid that many of them might just break down any moment. As Sydney´s father, Jack and her former beau, Vaughn charges into the military facility to break her out of prison, the room spontaneously erupts in loud cheers, hoots and all-round genuine relief.

If you don´t already know, I would like to welcome to a typical meeting of Alias-holics Anonymous (AA), a support group for the people who possibly care too much for a fictional television character! OK, OK, the account above may be exaggerated but I can finally understand why "Alias" is one of the most popular television series today. I am ashamed to admit that I never caught "Alias" during its past two season´s regular broadcast schedule. I never knew what the fuss was about. So I decided to find out. After receiving the review copy of the first season of the show from John, I went to work, with my wife tagging along for the ride. That was perhaps her biggest life-altering mistake. As we watched between two to three episodes per night (depending on the amount of free time we had), it became instantly clear to me why "Alias" is so popular. Just take my wife, for example. When not watching the show, she is incoherent and sometimes even babbling about Sydney for no apparent reason. In fact after finishing the first season of the show in what must be a record-breaking period of seven days (for us, anyway), both if us went into some sort of a withdrawal, like an addictive drug has been cruelly yanked away from our collective grasps. Not helping was the fact that it ended with a major cliffhanger that had Sydney´s previously thought dead mother, Laura being resurrected and confronting our beaten-up heroine. The excruciating pain of not able to find out the conclusion of that confrontation made us (yeah, you guessed it) incoherent and babbling. Luckily for us, our older kids thought we were imitating the baby and we managed to get away with it for a while! We had one consolation, though--Season 3 of the series is about to start and we can get our regular fix again! However, in some aspects, not watching the series in the correct sequence of order is probably worse than not watching at all. But we have to have our weekly fix of Agent Bristow and we caved in.

Which brings me to my review of "Alias: The Complete 2nd Season" DVD set. A total of twenty-two episodes are spread out over the six DVDs in the set with most of the extra features located on Disc 6. The episodes appear in the following order:

Disc 1: "The Enemy Walks In", "Trust Me", "Cipher", "Dead Drop"
Disc 2: "The Indicator", "Salvation", "The Counteragent", "Passage Part 1"
Disc 3: "Passage Part 2", "The Abduction", "A Higher Echelon", "The Getaway"
Disc 4: "Phase One", "Double Agent", "A Free Agent", "Firebomb"
Disc 5: "A Dark Turn", "Truth Takes Time", "Endgame", "Countdown"
Disc 6: "Second Double", "The Telling"

Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) works for SD-6, an international shadowy group dealing in arms, intelligence and espionage. However, she is actually a double agent in the employ of the CIA and working to bring down SD-6. Together with her father Jack (Victor Garber), who is also a double agent like her, they cooperate in undermining the efforts of SD-6 in acquiring what is known as the Rambaldi artifacts. Milo Rambaldi is a Nostrademus-like figure from the 15th century who created fascinating inventions that were way ahead of his time. Season One of "Alias" focused on the efforts of SD-6 in recovering these Rambaldi artifacts from around the world.

On a personal level, Sydney´s relationships with her CIA handler, Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), her friends, journalist Will Tippin (Bradley Cooper) and restaurateur Francie (Merrin Dungey), her colleague Dixon (Carl Lumbly) and especially her father Jack and SD-6´s boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin) fluctuates and changes--some dramatically--over the course of the entire season. The first season ended as remarkably as it started, with the revelation that Sydney´s mother is not dead but worse of all, she is in fact the brains behind another syndicate that is also in pursuit of the Rambaldi artifacts. So, the fact that the Bristow family has come full circle in one season is a delight to watch. With a cunning story that starts out with Sydney being a solitary SD-6 operative and slowly transforming into having her estranged father and her working for the CIA and finally ends spectacularly with her mother Laura (aka Irina Derevko, former KGB agent) (Lena Olin) exposed as the real identity behind "The Man", the mysterious head of the equally mysterious organization fighting with SD-6 and the CIA for the much sought after Rambaldi artifacts.

Season 2, of course, brings bigger and more profound surprises to the series. If there is a single word that can sum up Season 2 succinctly, it is "conflict". With the emergence of Sydney´s mother, the stable equation of her life has been dramatically altered. It used to be a simple scenario of the good guys against the bad guys, CIA against SD-6. Now Sydney has to fight her own inner demons when facing her mother, a known killer and confirmed traitor, who has just voluntarily turned herself in to the CIA. Sydney's sweet childhood memories of Laura Bristow has now been shattered and replaced by the horrible image of a cold-blooded killer that did not think twice about shooting her and betraying her family and her country. Now the CIA has to mine Derevko for valuable intelligence in fighting SD-6. Obviously, Derevko won´t talk to anyone but Sydney, which puts Sydney´s utter contempt for Derevko front and center. Trust is, unfortunately, a priceless commodity that is hard to gain in the spy business. Sydney´s initial lack of trust in the information provided by her mother is explicable but things get real messy when her father, Jack intervenes. Jack Bristow is perhaps the most conflicted one when it comes to dealing with his former wife. Trying to get everyone who would listen to subscribe to his view that Derevko has a hidden agenda and that she is not to be trusted, Jack, being Jack, gets real creative. To complicate things further, Agent Vaughn´s father, also a former CIA agent, was assassinated by Derevko years ago and he too has to deal with her in his own way. As you can see, conflict is everywhere and in every capacity, whether it is on a personal or professional level.