dertwonshuw-51350
Sydney Bristow. The Girl Next Door. A smile as wide as the sky and dimples deep enough to get lost in. All the boys love her. (Vaughn, Tippin, even Sark.)The acting in the series is very well done: Garner, Garber, Rifkin, Cooper. The writing is just okay. the Rambaldi mystery/prophecy is a distraction, but it facilitates the intrigue and the action. And the action is good! The contemporary soundtrack is also a huge plus.A couple of years ago I watched half of the first season and then stopped. I got tired of the constant flashbacks to Sydney's fiancé and the continual jeopardy of her friends Will and Francie. I picked the series up again recently and watched the end of Season 1 and all of Season 2.But the series (in my opinion) jumped the shark in Season 3. After the cliff hanger at the end of Season 2, Season 3 started with a totally preposterous and unbelievable story line.
Ben Smith
What is the most pedestrian spy show on the planet? Alias. What has the most unanimously terrible acting, with the most unanimously terrible cast, and the most unanimously terrible writing? Alias. And its not like its even the sharknado kind of bad, making fun of this show puts a bad taste in my mouth because its not even comical bad, its just pathetically bad. Like the fact that this even had a budget makes me lose faith in humanity. Jennifer garner is just a terrible person, inside and out. Thats the impression i got. No one could possibly be that bad of an actor unless they didn't actually even understand human emotion. The entire show alternates between the whiny "WAHHHH, SPY FEELINGS ARE SO HARD." and "damn that Sloane, he's such a monster, oh, whoops, i accidentally trusted him again for the 80 billionth time, how could i have done that?" OH I Don't KNOW, MAYBE BECAUSE EVERY GODDAMN PERSON IN THIS SHOW IS A GODDAMN MORON. Fool you once, shame on Sloane, fool you twice, shame on you, fool you 80 billion times and i think your IQ must be in the negative. I don't even know if its possible to have a negative IQ, but they pulled it off. Trusting Sloane again only serves as a reusable plot device with no motivation, no reasoning, no explanation whatsoever as to how or why or on what planet its even possible for him to trick them AGAIN, but he still does it. And he's an unbelievable moron as well. Everyone in this show is a moron.I haven't even gotten started about the pedestrian comprehension of spy craft, the ridiculousness of how they actually believe it works. Its like that completely awful scene from CSI where there's two hackers typing on one keyboard because somehow having more hands on more keyboards makes you a better hacker only its ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME. 5 whole seasons of that. And nothing else. You think, maybe, just maybe, ONE interesting character will come along. ONE episode that doesn't feel like its raping my eyeballs and mind. But no. Not a single one. They even made Bradley cooper look bad. Marshall was the only mediocre character on the show, out of all of them he sucked the least, and they had moments where EVERYONE ELSE was like, Marshall, shut up, because they thought he was talking too much. I had to scream at my television, NO, YOU SHUT UP. YOU SHUT UP AND YOU DIE. ALL OF YOU. DIE. THAT YOU EVEN MADE IT THIS FAR WITHOUT A BULLET IN EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR HEADS IS A FLUKE, A MIRACLE OF NATURE, AND MARSHALL IS THE ONLY ONE OF YOU PEOPLE WHO HAS ANYTHING INTERESTING TO SAY AND **HES** SOMEHOW THE AWKWARD ONE. Might i add the fact that i don't believe for a second that Jennifer garner could seduce ANYONE, EVER. the fact that shes even the main character and people are always complimenting her on her beauty, her brains, her ability, none of which she even has, and the fact that they change the intro after season one to a bunch of moany sex noises and shots of her looking like a transsexual in different skimpy outfits, like they somehow think THAT is their selling point, shows just how out of touch they are. And i have to add, i'm usually a J.J. Abrams fan. Lost was pretty cool for a while, but they made some mistakes. Fringe was a masterpiece. Alias isn't worth a single glance. It is without a doubt, the worst thing i've seen, and that includes the room, bad lifetime movies, two girls one cup. OK, fine, i haven't seen two girls one cup but i still bet its better than this. The only way i got through it was by watching it along sides of NTSF:SD:SUV, most of the jokes in which are clearly referencing alias, and how bad it was. There is one scene where they spoof the whole flashback to college being approached by the thing piper is wearing that awful red wig Sydney had and she gets her eyebrows shaved off and Sam is like, wow, i really don't find you attractive anymore. My sentiments exactly.Even with all of the good stuff JJ Abrams has directed since then he has a LONG way to go to make up for how terrible this show was. If he knows whats good for him, he will pay someone to create a super virus to wipe alias from the internet entirely, and raid peoples homes burning their ancient DVD collections. That would be the best episode of alias ever.
Patrick Axnos
Let me state my general opinion on Alias first: I pretty much love the show. Also, I'm not going much into depth but scratch on the problems I think they had while still having a great show. So, check it out, you'll probably know within the first few episodes if this is your type of show or not. Trust me, though, there is quite a bit of mythology coming up along the run (similar to Fringe and Person of Interest, who both started slow on that aspect).In my opinion, Season 1 & 2 were pretty much perfect in every aspect. While Season 3 felt a bit slowed down and struggling a little with how to move forward, Season 4A was a bit disappointment.A big plot point was dropped and kind of retconned between Seasons 3 and 4 - and it's the network's interference that almost killed the show. Not only did they make the writers go almost completely procedural in the first half on the season - no, the network also decided to air episodes COMPLETELY out of order, which lead to incredible inconsistent characterization. Do yourself a favor and research the production order of Season 4 and watch it in that exact order. It improves it a lot. Still, 4A has some nice procedural episodes but really lacks the overall story. They kind of salvaged it in 4B and in my opinion, Season 5 was nice, even though for some reason the core mythology was banned a little - again.This is actually today's textbook on why networks have to give writers the freedom to keep a show a show serialized if they intent to and not to try to make it a little more mainstream.Overall, I'd definitely recommend Alias. Others will disagree, but for me it was one of the most enjoyable TV rides I've watched.
