Question: Wow, it must be nice to take two weeks off! (Ha, just kidding.) Got any Alias scoop? — Dustin

Ausiello: That was a real knee-slapper, Dustin. ABC president Steve McPherson told me that it's 80 percent likely that this will be Alias' final season. He also said that despite her pregnancy, Jennifer Garner will appear in every episode this season — even if that means producing fewer episodes. Finally, McPherson expects her maternity leave will result in a longer-than-usual winter hiatus, with the show going off the air at the end of November and returning sometime in March or early April.

In test audiences, no one had any problem with her credibility. If you look at what we did initially and what we shot, it was my decision and my choice to do a story about a character that has no inside. The arc of the show is her trying to figure out who she is. It’s about identity and trying to become a person. She’s not this fully formed person. She’s emotionally retarded in some levels and that’s a choice. It may be a bad choice. People who have followed the show, a lot of people had that opinion and have revised that opinion and have seen her a little bit, and they’re like “oh, she’s doing that on purpose.” Her not making eye contact, her flat delivery sometimes, that’s all on purpose and when you see all 13 put together you’ll really notice it.

Can "Alias" survive without its leading lady, JENNIFER GARNER? Producers are hopeful. Source tells me that Garner has made it clear that she probably won't be returning to the show next year for a sixth season. Producers are apparently betting on this season's new co-star, RACHEL NICHOLS, to save the hit series. She plays a new spy being trained by Garner. If she's a hit, they're looking to make her the show's next star.

Source

Who's Who and New on Alias?

Sydney Bristow's team at APO will be getting bigger when Alias returns for its fifth season on Sept. 29 (the show's new time slot is Thursdays at 8 pm/ET). Producers are adding three new characters to the hit ABC spy series — and that's not counting star Jennifer Garner's soon-to-be-born child, who will also be written into the action. (Yes, Syd is pregnant with Vaughn's baby. That much is certain in the secret-filled, perpetually uncertain Alias world.)

For starters, French actress Élodie Bouchez has been tapped to play a cohort from Vaughn's shady past, which had been just barely hinted at prior to last season's horrific car-crash finale. "She and Vaughn share a history," says executive producer Jeff Pinkner, "and in our season finale we started to tease the audience with what that history is and what secrets Vaughn has been keeping from Sydney. We knew there would be another player in that story, and [Bouchez] plays that role."

Also coming on board is Balthazar Getty as Thomas Grace, an APO agent who is "a little rough around the edges," says his portrayer, and thus doesn't play well with others. "It's pretty cool how they introduce my character," hints Getty of his debut in the season's second episode. "I come in fighting."

As does Rachel Nichols, whose butt-kicking agent, Rachel Gibson, will become APO's youngest rep. "She joins the team early in the season, but they don't actively set out to recruit her," says Pinkner, "and if I were to tell you much more, it would give away the fun of meeting her character." The exec will say, though, that introducing this newbie will "show how you [create] a superagent like Sydney Bristow. She doesn't have the skills Sydney has, but she will need to acquire them over the course of the season."

Pinkner says the plan to spice up the cast with the aforementioned new arrivals developed "simultaneously" with Garner's announced pregnancy, and is not a calculated effort to cover for her understandably decreased on-screen fisticuffs. After all, Sydney still may find herself in a scrape or two. "We're not going to do anything that begs credibility anymore than we have in the past," he notes. "But if danger comes to her, she will absolutely fight it off."

And there will be danger in great supply as the new season picks up immediately after the car crash. The question of Vaughn's true identity and what else he was going to tell Syd "will be answered in the first episode — or most of it will be," allows Pinkner. "The consequences reveal a new enemy who is far more pervasive and dangerous and mysterious than any we have fought before."