Episode Report Card Erin: C | 0 USERS: N/A YOU GRADE IT Can I get mustard with that?
By Erin | Season 3 | Episode 21 | Aired on 2004.05.02
Previously on Alias: Syd had a sister, until that evil bad Sloane-man took her. And Vaughn was shirtless. That is all.
Kyoto, Japan. Home of the Geisha. And teahouses. And little umbrellas with bases made of tightly rolled newspaper. And some other stuff. Like a slightly comatose Spy Skipper and the Daddy who's torturing her. Nadia's in the chair where we left her at the end of the last episode, only now she's not writhing in pain; she's scrawling something onto parchment with an ink pen. And Sloane is watching her. And totally squicking me out. Back at Oops Center, Syd's informing Jack, Dix, and Marshall that they have no leads on Sloane or Nadia's whereabouts. Huh. That's funny. Because, if I'm not mistaken, Syd and Jack and Sloane managed to locate Nadia in Chechnya with an ancient brainwave reader and a big ol' satellite in the sky designed specifically for the purpose of, um, reading brainwaves. Where's your ancient brainwave reader NOW, huh? Whip that baby out and about twenty minutes of this mess just disappears! Poof! Like most of my brain cells on ANY GIVEN SUNDAY NIGHT.
Dix asks if Syd's been in contact with Argentine intelligence, and a voice that sounds vaguely like Sydney speaking from the bottom of a phone booth that's been dropped into Lake Pontchartrain says that she has, but they could only provide the CIA with background. It's a seriously phoned-in voice-over, dudes. The difference between her voice in the voice-over and her voice immediately after, spoken onscreen, is totally noticeable. And a prime indicator that this episode can only get more irritating.
Syd blah blahs about how Nadia was recruited six years ago, trained in language and trade craft, and the assignment in Chechnya was her first field assignment. Prior to her recruitment, she was confined to an orphanage in Buenos Aires. So what? We're supposed to feel sorry for her because she's an orphan? Well, boo-fuckin'-hoo, okay? Annie was an orphan, and you didn't see HER crying about it! Especially after that fat bald guy gave her all those clothes and that nice big 'fro. Syd's Pontchartrain doppelganger speaks up again and voice-overs that whole thing about the Rambaldi elixir making Nadia channel the daffy old inventor, you know, in case we missed last week's episode AND the previouslys, and we see Nadia, still in her chair of coma-ness, channeling the dead guy and scrawling some weird language onto the parchment. She stops and passes out.
Her creepier-than-ever father walks over, removes the pen from her hand, and slides the paper from the writing table. "This is his endgame," says Pontchartrain Doppelganger. "We have to believe that he will kill Nadia to achieve it." Sloane takes the piece of paper to a wall across the room and pins it into place. As the camera slides back, we see that whatever Nadia's writing is actually forming a pattern that is revealed as the Rambaldi eye. Wow. She's not only channeling Rambaldi, she's channeling the guy in our studio department who makes all those lame banners out of 11 x 17 paper that he then has to tape together so that they'll make sense, and then he hangs them up on the wall of the conference room and no one even notices them because we're too busy drinking all the free beer and talking about how much we hate the new girl. Man. Nadia's obviously got a lot of other people in there with her and Rambaldi. And some of them are really big geeks.