SPOILER ALERT!!! The following will discuss plot points from this last week's episode of Alias. If you don't want to read, the leave.
To be honest, this weeks Alias (that again I had to watch later) did really do anything for me. It was okay, but I thought it was one of the weaker episodes.
A confused man walks through a bazaar, repeating loudly "My bird is missing". After repeating this a couple of times Weiss walks up to him, looking irritated as only Weiss can do, and says "It's 'My canary is lost"", and points the man in the right direction. He ascends the stairs, sits across from Sydney and finally gets the phrase correct. He wants some money, but Sydney tells him no money until they get the weapon. This may take a while since the weapon is slowly working its way through his intestines. They realized they have been compromised, so Sydney grabs the man and they head for the exit, taking out a couple of people on the way. As one man crashes into the clueless one he seems abnormally shaken for just taking a fall. As Sydney helps him up. . .the lower half of one leg simply shatters off.
Um, what?
Weiss has pulled the van around, Syd and Vaughn grab the man by both arms and are carrying him (sans leg) to the van when one man fires a single shot. That shot hits the confused man and he shatters into thousands of pieces.
We were thoroughly confused by this point.
So they shed some light on the subject. Some bad guy we have never heard of before is manufacturing a biological weapon that, in Marshall's words, freeze dries people, crystallizing them pretty much instantly. Riiiiiiiiight. I have suspended my disbelief for this show before, but for some reason this one was just a bit much.
So Sydney heads to the hospital this is being created at in an undercover role. She quickly figures out where they are making the junk called Ice 5 and realizes they need to get a key card off the nurse who seems to be running the show. But how? Enter Vaughn, playing the role of a Catholic Priest. He starts working on her, realizing in the process that she is the big bad guy's sister. They dig up some info and find out she has a shady past as well. Vaughn discusses with her the pain of killing his wife and tries to convince her she can turn and make her life better. He thinks she is going to turn on her brother.
Nope. She rats him out, Vaughn gets caught, and Sydney saves the day just before Vaughn gets some Ice 5 injected into his eye. In the ensuing fight the bad guy (I can't recall names right now) ends up injecting his sister. As she lies in Vaughn's arms, crystallizing to death, she whispers to Vaughn "I forgive you." What did I miss? Does she forgive him for killing his wife, for trying to turn her, or what? That didn't really make sense to me.
There was some interesting moments as Vaughn expressed his pain at having killed Lauren in anger. He and Jack have that bond now, sort of a creepy one if you ask me. One other little side story was Nadia finding a photo of Irina holding a baby. She adamantly wants to know who the baby is and Jack finally says it was Irina's niece. He tells Nadia that the day after Irina had shown Jack that picture and talked about how much she wanted to have a baby of her own he had asked her to marry him. He then uses it to tell Nadia that she needs to get some closure on what happened. Truth or lies? Who knows, but Jack is such a pathologic liar that I wouldn't doubt it was just an attempt to get Nadia to stop obsessing about her mother.
Nadia's obsession with her mother is weird. She knows she was a double agent, she knows she betrayed Jack. But she still seems to want to think Irina was a good person. Another major gripe for me that really became apparent in this episode is the lack of a bad guy. We have now had three episodes with three nameless, forgettable villains. We need to go after the Covenant again. We need Sark. We need a bad guy who is hiding behind the scenes. We can still have the more self-contained episodes, but we need some cliff hangers and we need the menace of an evil that doesn't get caught at the end of every episode. Hopefully we will get that soon. I don't want to write more of these in which I was disappointed."