Alias: The Season 4 that should have been (long)
 

When I heard that Alias was being retooled to get back to the show's roots I thought that they could pull it off. Afterall, the initial conflict of the show was intensely personal and Season 3 drifted away from that in a big way. What made Alias so good was the conflict between Sydney's two and even three different lives: Her personal life, her SD-6 life, and her CIA life. Season 2 added the mother conflict, which was great, but in 3 it just got lame. The specific machinations of the missions were boring and unoriginal and Sydney's private life was basically dead; The show became a weak Mission: Impossible clone. Bringing Will back was a brief vacation from the lameness, but the other developments (Sydney's sister, more Rambaldi nonsense) were uninteresting.

So the supposed return to the show's roots in Season 4 sounded great. Except that Abrams apparently took that to mean just shoving Syd, daddy, Vaughn, Sloane, Dixon, Marshall, and Weiss back together again in a super-secret organization. Except that now every character on the show is in the club and the missions are still boring and they're still all there is to the show. The fact that they work for Sloane at all at this point is enough to make me want to put a boot through the TV.

Now, is it possible to retool the show the way I wanted at this point? Has too much happened in the meantime? I thought of one potential plotline that it so perfect and so personal to the show that it's almost too obvious. It would be tricky and risky, but way more interesting than the vampire nonsense epsiodes they're giving us.

Here it is: Perhaps leading from the Lauren/project Christmas stuff at the end of last year, perhaps for some totally new reason, Sydney is in a pickle. The CIA wants to reassign her to radically different duties and she doesn't have much of a leg to stand on. Her new long-term mission: Infiltrate K-Directorate or some other super secret foreign spy organization. She must do this by, you guessed it, going DEEP undercover and getting some agent there to fall for her and marry her. This could be the real purpose of the project christmas program: to groom her for this.

She refuses at first, of course. This hits way too close to home, what with her mom and with Lauren. She says no and takes off but something happens that brings her back. Maybe they make an implicit threat against her dad or something that makes her finally agree. It could be a couple of great, conflicted episodes just to get to this point.

Off she goes. The guy she's supposed to infiltrate is a handsome, dapper guy; great opportunity to cast someone cool and bring fresh talent to the show. Vaughn could be her operations contact (which in itself could be part mindgame by the CIA to keep her on her toes) and Syd would be conflicted between Vaughn and this new job.

Then, she could slowly actually develop feelings for the other guy. Remember, she's got big secrets she needs to keep from him and, spying aside, he's actually a very sympathetic character. She actually feels sorry for him, since she's lying to him, plus she has to hide her feelings for him from Vaughn. Double conflict! Plus we'd see the bad guys as more than just mustache-twirling villains. Dynamics!

And, to keep things cooking, Syd would be given side missions that take advantage of her new locale. She would have to perform them without her new fiance finding out about them but that would create cool one-off episodes that still fit into the emotional arc of the season.

Obviously the main cast would have to be reconfigured. Vaughn is obviously still in, the Dad would have to figure in somehow. Dixon would be out but he'd make a cameo return where he's on some other mission and Syd and Dixon cross paths and have to hide the fact that they know each other. Maybe they'd have conflicting mission objectives but find some way to work together briefly. That would bring back more of their S1 field chemistry than all the BS in the current season. Marshall could still do OpTech for those who love him but Sloane would finally have to be out.

I love this idea! It's where the show has been heading and would bring the story full-circle in a lot of ways. It relates to the mom situation, to the Vaughn situation, to the fiance situation, to the hiding-things-from-Will-and-Francie situation, and more. What do you think?

That would be good. I have 4 shows on tap that I haven't watch yet, simlply because I got bored. Your concept would indeed be interesting. Bring back the cliff hangers.

Oh yeah, think of the cliffhangers that my idea would create!

I realize that this is coming dangerously close to fanfic, but really I think that my storyline would have been so much better than what they appear to be up to. JJ! Are you listening?

Dear JJ,

This year's season of Alias is boring!

Pls listen to Gil as his idea is sounding so much better than what we have already seen.

Big fan of the show, but the only thing that i'm enjoying now is the intro with the many faces of Sydney.

Yeah, outside of the premiere the show has sucked this season...a few cool moments but nothing special. I like the above idea, but I can see why network executives wouldnt go for it...its already established what a horrible thing it was for Irina to fake a romance with Jack, so the hero of the show cant participate in the same activity....cant see the network going for it. Like I said, its a great idea, Id love to see it, but unfortunately people whose only focus is ratings numbers would probably shoot it down.

My lord!!!

This almost inspires me to write a "Star Wars: the prequels that should have been" thread. But I won't, because in the whole scheme of things, the people in charge are gonna do what they're gonna do, and can't nothing stop them.

I find it interesting that now that the show is the ratings success it deserves to be, people want to bash it.

Hence the drama! There's no drama in what they are doing, however.

Someone send this thread to BoatDrinks pronto!

In order to make Alias better, the writers should watch MI-5 ("Spooks") and copy as many storylines as possible. It is a great show, and if it was made in the US with US actors, I think that it would easily surpass Alias and 24 in the ratings and with critics. Alias, and 24, are just running out of steam collectively. It happens.

Eh. Ripping off other shows for ideas is not the way to go. Alias has its own unique set up and they should be working off that. This is a show that should be personal to the main character, not just random spy missions.

Yeah, that's it. -ohbfrank-

How 'bout we want it to be what it was during the first season? Interesting. Dramatic. Plots given more thought than they were in season three.

I first had a problem with the show during/after the Superbowl ep. From there, it was all downhill. So, I didn't have to wait for it to become a "ratings success" to bash it.

Oh, and ending a couple episodes with a cliffhanger wouldn't hurt.

BTW...good idea Gil.

Thanks. And yeah, this isn't a case of "hatin'." The show is creatively dead. Longtime fans who claimed that Buffy season 7 or X-Files season 9 were as good as those shows ever got really confuse me. It's so clearly not the case. I mean, opinions, yada yada yada, but that's just wrong. And Alias S4 is a similar case. Just bad.

Your ideas are better than what they're doing now. There seems to be no direction, no goal they're working toward, save perhaps waiting for Sloane to be evil again so they can take him down.

People bashed Season 3, but I didn't think it was so bad, especially now that I've seen what Season 4 has become. Give me Lauren and Sark and Rambaldi any day over this uninspired adventure-of-the-week tedium. There has to be a more interesting overriding theme than this season has to drive the show.

It's long past time for Sloane to go for good. They need new bad guys with longer, more involved story arcs that keep the "personal" element but with the backdrop of a larger crisis.

Kinda sounds like someone on the Enterprise board. Always thinking of excuses why the show is not good except the real one which is, it is not being written well.
The show is more popular now but at the expense of the all the fans that liked it when it was a Smart show.

I know I seem like I'm threadcrapping, but the truth is unlike some series on WB, Fox, UPN, or Sci-fi, this is one that is on the big three, and one that is finally rising after a long dry spell. While I haven't seen the current run of Alias and would most likely agree with you were I watching, the bottomline is it's becoming successful and the fact that the hardcore fans are being ignored means little to the execs.

In short, like it or not, the network and writers probably won't make any changes until the ratings drop significantly. Griping about the show won't make any difference, and , sadly, the only way to make an impact is to quit watching. :(

I'm so glad to hear that since Netflix shipped the first three discs of this to me today. :D I hadn't heard anything about it, but I watched The Reckoning and thought Matthew Macfayden had a sexy voice (sort of a random reason to pick a show).

I've kind of given up on Alias since it hasn't been interesting to me in over a year. Finally took it off my Tivo last week.

tasha