Worst spy ever
Emory and I trucked through the first 13 or so episodes of Alias over the weekend (no, my weekend wasn't very productive, thank you for asking). I am enjoying the show what with its spying and running and kicking dudes in the head, but it's certainly far from perfect. Emory's long-running joke has been that Sydney is constantly crying, and now that we're actually watching the episodes, it's sort of true. Emory's even been tallying the number of times she starts sobbing. That's all well and good, Emory loves his little pet projects, but the hilarious aspect of the show that no one ever told me about is that Sydney's a terrible spy. The show likes to make it seem like she is really competent, but what she is actually good at is getting her cover blown, kicking dudes in the head, and running like hell.
I think the show has a pretty fundamental problem at its core. On the one hand, JJ Abrams wants a Felicity-esque angsty young-people-in-their-20's soap opera sort of deal. But he also wants a show about spies, wherein our young heroine will go on super-important missions that involved elaborate disguises and deception, and she will very often be in very legitimate mortal danger. So we wind up with an agent who's had seven years of training but still has severe problems controlling her emotions, and will happily skip out in the middle of an important op to prevent her roommate from marrying a no-good cheater. I'm just saying if you're the type of person who deals with having your teeth forcibly extracted with a wink and a smile, you probably won't burst into tears when your dad stands you up for dinner. The show wants both aspects of Sydney's life to have equal weight, but that just ends up making Sydney a terrible spy. But I find that aspect really hilarious.
Mind you, I'm enjoying the show. Quite a bit, really. DVD is the perfect format for Alias, since it insists on that weird structure of having a cliffhanger ever episode, then resolving the plot at the 35-minute mark so they can set up for the next cliffhanger. But it's the perfect structure for trucking through several episodes in succession. We'll probably wrap up the season before the end of the week. I hope Gina Torres shows up some more!
I think the show has a pretty fundamental problem at its core. On the one hand, JJ Abrams wants a Felicity-esque angsty young-people-in-their-20's soap opera sort of deal. But he also wants a show about spies, wherein our young heroine will go on super-important missions that involved elaborate disguises and deception, and she will very often be in very legitimate mortal danger. So we wind up with an agent who's had seven years of training but still has severe problems controlling her emotions, and will happily skip out in the middle of an important op to prevent her roommate from marrying a no-good cheater. I'm just saying if you're the type of person who deals with having your teeth forcibly extracted with a wink and a smile, you probably won't burst into tears when your dad stands you up for dinner. The show wants both aspects of Sydney's life to have equal weight, but that just ends up making Sydney a terrible spy. But I find that aspect really hilarious.
Mind you, I'm enjoying the show. Quite a bit, really. DVD is the perfect format for Alias, since it insists on that weird structure of having a cliffhanger ever episode, then resolving the plot at the 35-minute mark so they can set up for the next cliffhanger. But it's the perfect structure for trucking through several episodes in succession. We'll probably wrap up the season before the end of the week. I hope Gina Torres shows up some more!
posted by Jeff at 10:08 AM
6 Comments:
Jenny's right. chicks cry, often (read: usually) for no good reason. I can't control it myself. The only thing I'm good at controlling is my rage. So I guess if I were a spy I'd also do a lot of crying, but then I'd unleash my pent up rage to get out of the near death experiences. So perhaps this show is a little TOO realistic.
No. probably not. I've never actually seen it. All I can think about it is why would she wear colorful wigs? What kind of spying does she do?
But she's a SPY. With SEVEN YEARS TRAINING. Her entire job consists of pretending to be someone else! I'm just saying that's the problem with the show. They want Sydney to be an average girl who responds to situations in ways an average girl would, except she's not an average girl. She's a damn spy. James Bond? Doesn't cry that much. Even when Bloefeld killed his fiance! I'm just saying that I wish her spy expertise more often won out over the generalization that "She's a girl and girls cry all the time even if they've been trained by the most dangerous intelligence organization in the world."
Or maybe SPECTRE would've taken over the world by now. You never know. That reminds me of that great scene in "Goldeneye" where his love interest asks him how he can be sol cold and he says "It's what keeps me alive." I'm sure that's true.
I just can't see how Sydney was a spy for so long and still seems so unused to violence and killing and so regularly lets her feelings get in the way of her ops. Like when she didn't realize Dixon set secondary charges and he ended up blowing up those CIA agents and Sydney couldn't move and guards caught up to them and Dixon had to fight them off alone because Sydney totally lost her shit. Not to mention the aforementioned "radio silence while I go stop my friend's wedding" mission. Both of those situations put not only herself but Dixon in danger as well. Oh, and telling her fiance she was a spy in the first place! She even admits later that she KNEW what would happen if she told him!
I think a more interesting angle to go with would be a woman who is immersed in her spy life, and slowly grows disillutioned with it. Perhaps she grows tired of the violence. Instead, rather than having a character who seems to have a growing distaste for what are the day-to-day aspects of her profession, we have a character who seems to have never seen someone get shot before. I would have absolutely no problem with any of this if she just started being a spy, or had only been a spy for like a year or something. But seven years experience is seven years experience. Surely someone she’s known at SD-6 has been killed? Suck it up and get the job done, Sydney. (All emotional reactions she had when her fiance was killed and she learned her whole spy life was a lie are exempt from this rant, because that was some heavy shit.)
I think the show wants to go more for the angle where she would like to believe her real life is the one she has as a student, and is simply unwilling to admit that her life at SD-6 is her true identity. But again, that seems like something she would have squared away years ago. It’s just a fundamental problem with the concept where she reacts to situations in a way that defies her given history.
Hell, Buffy pretty much covers that territory of coming into one’s own. At the beginning of the series she’s a relative neophyte, having only recently discovered she’s the Slayer. Over the course of the series, as she becomes more adept at her calling, she becomes more emotionally distant, and people start to notice. (Of course, she was a hardass by the end of season 2, where she drives a sword through her true love’s heart in order to save the world) Seasons six and particularly seven explore how Buffy becomes more and more divorced from her friends, despite the valid argument that they are what’s kept her going for so long. It’s just that the stakes in season 7 are so high that she must stop being their buddy and start being their general. And that doesn’t really sit well with them. It’s one of the more interesting aspects of that season.
Hell, Veronica Mars’s best friend was killed AND she got date-raped AND her mom ran off AND she lost all her old friends all in the space of the last year and she keeps it together. And both Buffy and Veronica are about as far from “unfeminine” as you can get.
Wow, I wrote a lot. Hope it doesn't sound like I'm berating you. I just get caught up in this stuff.
Certainly few things get me more riled up than talking about television and sexism!
I see your point now. Shitty spying for real.
Frank's roomate Jess just called me to tell me that tonight episode ridiculously rips off Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle." That'd be like some WWII epic ripping off plot points from "Catch-22." It's a satire, boys. Best leave it alone if you don't want to look stupid.
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