Alias

I tend to feel that the entire reason for the creation of Alias was to put Jennifer Garner in as many skimpy outfits as possible, then make her blow shit up to sate the writers' hot chicks and explosives fantasies. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Still, at its best, Alias was an adrenaline rush of espionage, double-crossing, ass-kicking, hot chicks, and well-crafted family drama.

This is another one I caught on late; the only season I watched live was its last, Season 5, which ended in May. After the end of Buffy and Angel, and between waiting for the next set of West Wing DVDs to come out, I wanted more tv in my life. So I gave Alias a shot. The first season hooked me immediately; it was like one massive spy movie stretched over a full season. Unlike most shows, single episodes didn't present one conflict and resolve it at the end, then present a new conflict the next episode; this created a new conflict halfway through each episode, and left it at a cliffhanger point between the next one. A dirty trick, to be sure, but effective at compelling me to watch the next, and the next, and the next.

The series sagged a bit in Season 3, season 4 was hit or miss (and changed the format to the traditional episodic mode, for better or worse), and season 5 started poorly, then went on hiatus for months, then got shortened, then came back with a vengeance and went out with a bang. But the first two seasons were incredibly good. The basic premise was Sydney was recruited by the CIA as part of a black ops team thwarting international terrorists. Then, after she told her fiancee about her job, he ended up killed. Turns out she was working for a terrorist organization posing as the CIA, and her father was one of her supervisors. Then she became a double-agent for the real CIA, and found out her father was also a double agent. (Plausible, no?) This provided plenty of high-octane action and suspense, and Jennifer Garner was a great lead, but what kept me hooked was the family conflicts and endless secrets. Garner's Sydney Bristow was a bad-ass spy, but her father, Jack (played by Victor Garber), was my favorite character - - an absolutely ruthless, secretive bastard who would do anything to protect his daughter.

Then there's Sloane, Sydney's old boss who pretends to be a CIA figure, and manipulates everyone who works for him into thinking they're protecting the country, when really they're the ones facilitating the terrorist cells. (this is pre-9/11, so most of them are not Arabic - good old Ruskies, Chinamen, and the like.) Sydney has to pretend to work for him. And oh yeah, he had her fiancee killed. Still, he's a sympathetic character, which makes the conflict all the more compelling. Then there's Sydney's mother...let's not even go there.

Yeah, at times the show became ridiculous. It ventured into sci-fi, which I didn't mind, except that it had every single terrorist plot on earth tied to some 500 year old prophet. That got annoying. But if you looked past that, and took quite a bit on faith (like the fact that they seemed able to criss-cross the globe in 30 minute plane rides to get to places in the nick of time), it's good clean fun.

- This is the last of the shows no longer on the air, everything after this will be current -

Next in the series: Veronica Mars