Episode Report Card Erin: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Who's a Bad Mama Jamma?
By Erin | Season 2 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.28.2002
And thus it was that Wendy Kroy and I settled down to recap this, the premiere episode of the second season of the ass-kicking-est show around, Alias. The best part? Lena Olin. The worst part? The first fucking twenty minutes. Trust me on this.
Previously on Alias: There were twenty-two episodes. Sydney Bristow was a grad student recruited by the CIA but it was really SD-6 which was this totally evil secret agency run by this rodent of a man named Sloane and Sydney found out about it and turned rogue agent and wound up working for the CIA as a sort of double/triple agent, as it were, and so it is, and Syd's daddy is doing the same thing and then this hot CIA guy named Vaughn became her handler and Syd's idiot friends Will and Francie don't seem to realize that every time Syd gets a bruise or a cut or a limp, she didn't get them in a rambunctious company softball game, and then Will gets all Curious George on Sydney's ass and starts investigating her fiancé's death and then gets his ass kidnapped by the Sadistic Tooth Fairy and Spy Daddy breaks him out and Syd breaks a big red ball and it splooshes out all over the place and Vaughn gets trapped and presumably dies and Sydney gets conked and winds up clamped to a chair and "The Man" walks up only "The Man" is not a man after all. The Man is The Mom.
Already knew all that? Yeah. SO DID WE. That's why we WATCHED THE FIRST TWENTY-TWO EPISODES. But, in an effort to bring everyone up to date who hasn't seen the show, it would seem that J.J. and crew decided to make my job easier by recapping the whole first season in the first twenty minutes of the episode. They cleverly wound it all around some therapy session with Syd and Dr. Nancy, but it still amounted to a flashback episode. If there weren't some seriously hilarious lines peppered throughout, I wouldn't even bother recapping it. I really wouldn't.
But I'm all about the funny. So I'll offer a truncated version of the first twenty minutes in order to bring you the funny. Laugh, dammit.
Sydney. Basement. Chair. Khasinau. We've seen it all before. Except, this time, when The Mom enters, she's not some silhouetted actress. She's Lena Olin. And she is GORGEOUS. Seriously. I wanna look like her when I'm forty-six. Hell, I wanna BE her when I'm forty-six. Anyway, Spy Mommy kinda cocks her head at Sydney and says something about Sydney knowing this day would come. "I could have prevented all this, of course," continues Spy Mommy. "You were so small when you were born. It would have been so easy."