Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Tuesday, May. 23, 2006 - 11:46 a.m.

Man. The series finale to Alias - which I stayed up to watch last night after it was over (I dvr'd it) lest someone spoil it for me today - sucked ass. I'm not kidding. It was the single worst finale of any sort ever conceived, so bad that I still feel like crying. Instead of finishing out the series with a full season and wrapping it all up in the 5 episodes left, they crammed all 5 - or at least 4 - into one 2-hour episode. So there was no time for anything. No exposition, no actual plot, very little exchange of dialogue, no real fight scenes, no explanation of anything Rambaldi or rationale for the Bad, and no time at all to savor what should have been the emotional pay-offs but instead left you going either "huh," "huh???" or "meh". I'd rather there'd been no finale at all, actually. It was, hands down, the WORST episode of the entire season and the worst written in the entire history of the show, and like Aliens 3, I wish I hadn't seen it. I wish I had just skipped the whole thing entirely and pretended the series just ended with Sloan on the lam and everyone in perpetual pursuit of him and his freakish Rambaldi obsession, because that would have been a lot more satisfying.

At this point, I feel compelled to tell you if you have not yet seen the the last episode of Alias, but you plan to, you really need to stop reading, because I can not adequately vent about the piece of crap that was the series finale without going into detail. Actually, reading might save you some grief, as it will lower your expectations, which, trust me, you really need to have happen if you are going to manage to curtail your bile and crushing disappointment that this is how what used to be a great show went out. I'd love to make this a lot more eloquent, but frankly, I'm soul-shattered at how truly horrendous it was, so I'm just incapable of really expressing all that was wrong with the thing. And now here we go.

SPOILER ALERT

I'M NOT KIDDING. STOP NOW IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW WHO LIVES, DIES, ETC. IF YOU DON'T CARE WHO LIVES OR DIES, READ ON, BECAUSE I'M REALLY NOT SPOILING ANYTHING ELSE. THIS EPISODE HAD VIRTUALLY NO ACTUAL PLOT.

Okay. First off, they killed Jack. I somehow knew this was coming, but it didn't make it any less hard to acknowledge. What made it REALLY HARD to acknowledge was the way they killed him and the fact that you got all of about 5 seconds to deal with his death and that they did it with really no emotion. No goodbye, nothing. Just the push of a button and goodbye Jack, hello, Irina. It was seriously more emotionally satsifying when they killed off Thomas/Getty, and he was a brand freaking new character, who was in all of like 12 episodes, just this season. Jack, whom we have had for 5 long years, and who is a freaking pop culture icon for crying out loud, Jack gets the television equivalent of so long and don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out. Since Jack Bristow RULES and is my favorite tv character EVER, this really pissed me off. I wanted the emotional pay off. I wanted to cry at the passing of Jack Bristow. Instead, I barely have time to suck it in before we are off to Hong Kong, where Sydney suddenly materializes, despite having just left her father alone in the middle of nowhere in the Mongolian desert. She basically throws down and challenges Irina to a duel, but instead of a (reasonably) prolonged - and therefore satisfying - showdown between Sydney and the mother who has betrayed her not once, not twice, but at least 3 times, we get about 10 seconds of I hit you, you hit me, a few weakass platitudes like "you'll have to go thru me" and "you know, I still love you," before Irina literally and passively falls thru a cracking glass skylight to her death in what can only be described as the second most anti-climactic moment EVER, right behind the death of Jack Bristow...and subsequent intombment of Arvin Sloan - who, by the way, has achieved eternal life. And not the biblical kind, either. The mystical Rambaldi kind.

That's right, Rambaldi's blood is magical and bestows eternal life. Even if Sydney Bristow has just plugged you full of holes, including a dead center shot to your forehead. If you fall backwards into a pool of Rambaldi's blood from a smallish version of Clifford the Big Red Ball, your wounds are magically healed and you become immortal. And then your dead daughter (whom you murdered) leaves you to rot in your cave under a big honkin' slab of rock your ex-best friend caused to rain down on you when he blew himself up in order to trap you in the tomb of your long-dead mystical obsession. But none of it has any kind of satisfying pay off at all or explanation/reaction of any kind. Why? Because JJ Abrams and his team of crack-addled season 5 hacks suck.

But Thomas Getty? Thomas Getty and Rachel - who have, in all of like, 5 scenes over 3 episodes (or something close to that), begun to have some sort of really lame thing, the two weakest characters in all of Alias World, those two lameasses get an emotional goodbye. God, I hate JJ Abrams.

Marshall, btw, can apparently be tortured but suffer no real ill-effects. The guy who folds under the steely eye of Jack Bristow like a house of cards on a windy day can totally come thru some sort of obscure maiming not only taunting Sloan but with a smile on his face and without really even breaking a sweat.

Riiiiight.

There were lots of lame flashbacks to Sydney as a girl and when she joined SD-6 that not only cut into the action and slowed everything down to a crawl, but were totally useless and did almost nothing to serve in the way of exposition or explanation. Of anything. We already knew pretty much all of it, and the sequences were handled so ham-handedly, they did nothing to evoke mood or stir emotion. They just served as a big ol' metaphorical stop sign during which everything else came to a screeching halt, since every single one of them came right in the middle of scenes and generally when something dramatic was finally trying to happen.

Vaughn let Sark go after shooting him in the leg all of one time. No drama, no long seething hatred, no you screwed my wife and tried to kill my girl friend, no you made Sydney's life hell for years, you son of a bitch, NOTHING. Just give me the codes. No. All right, I'll shoot you in the leg...bang. Oh, you mean this gate key. And, scene.

Mainly there was no emotional satisfaction in any scene. Even the ones where someone died or you were supposed to be all worried that when APO was blown up, Jack and Dixon and everyone else would go with it. Even Sydney looked pretty unconcerned at the prospect, and she was the one standing miles from nowhere in the middle of a glacial chasm, facing down Sloan, who had just told her everyone she loved had like 30 seconds to live. In fact, at one point in that scene, I actually said out loud, "Not again," when Sloan shot the ice out from underneath Sydney's feet so he could escape, a la Julian Sark in Season 2, lo, so many actually satisfying seasons and episodes ago.

I really hate JJ Abrams. What we ended up with was a series of vignettes, loosely strung together and tenuously connected pretty merely by virtue of having the same characters in them. The episode jumped from point a to point b to point c, from moment to moment, with no connecting elements - hardly any transitions to speak of, and no sense of the passage of time or element of danger/risk/adventure/urgency/whatever. It was literally here we are in Sydney, now we're in London, now we're in Minsk (or wherever), now LA, Mongolia, Hong Kong, the future. A handful of scenes had the transitions where you fly thru the letters, but by and large it just suddenly cut to a new scene, in a new place, at a new time on a different day. No trips by plane, no jostling jeep rides, no ohmigod, we have to get there first, nothing. Just the orb is in Hong Kong and now I am too. I can not stress enough how completely devoid of suspense, emotion, or pay off the whole thing was. It was like going to the fridge for a soda during a commercial break, only completely and utterly lacking in even that much pathos...will she get back from the fridge by the end of the commercial break? Yawn; who cares? It's tivo'd - she can just back it up.

Yes, it was actually that boring. And disappointing. I really wish I hadn't seen it. And I have missed maybe 5 episodes of this show in as many years, even this crap season, and I couldn't even do that for Buffy. I hate JJ Abrams for cheating on what should have been a really great, satisfying end to what used to be an incredibly fun, fairly inventive series.

Peace out,
Katie

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