Days of the future past
Sep. 29th, 2003 11:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynI’ll probably run the risk of pissing off my fellow Alias fans with my comments about last night’s episode, but I guess that’s always the chance you take when you feel strongly about something. I enjoyed last night’s episode a lot on its own as just a rocking good episode of a familiar show, but as a signpost for what’s to come, I’m still more than a little dubious.
I spent the summer getting more and more pissed about this two years missing thing — the more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. It seemed like the worst kind of desperate, deus ex machina, skip the hard part style of writing. As if they got so enamored by the possibilities father along the line than the compelling stories of the present, so Abrams had to move the show forward two years (also borne out in what he said about having stories he wanted to tell farther into the future). It felt cheap, like a writer who has no control over a story, like he needed a cheap and easy way to throw out some of the characters, rearrange the chess pieces on the board, and introduce hardship into the Syd/Vaughn relationship.
I’m all for thwartedness. I just want it to come with some expectation of reasonableness. So that ending left a great deal to be desired, for me, and I went into The Two with pretty low expectations and a chip on my shoulder. For the most part, they did a great job of chipping away the chip. The action was solid, the over the topness of the show was back into full play in a way it hadn’t really been since they reinvented the show with that post-Super Bowl episode, and there seemed to be consequences and stakes for a lot of the characters, stakes they were worried about losing. I loved that guy-whose-name-I-can-never-remember (WHY can’t I remember his name? Vaughn’s bud? Weiss??) has taken a little of the buffoony shine off and seems like a competent, capable team leader who also understands and cares about Syd’s unique problems; it was great to see Marshall being Marshall, and his tenuous relationship with his girlfriend was wonderful — but the poem was truly a highlight; and most of all, while I miss Terry O’Quinn, it was good to see Dixon in a supervisory role, particularly since there would have been little else for him to do if he hadn’t done that. I’m glad spy dad was back at the end, because the show without spy dad would be just... bleh. I missed Willage and Sark, but I have faith we’ll see them again soon.
And I loved the way Syd browbeat Vaughn at the end, calling him on his lack of faith, because that’s really what it came down to. Jack didn’t in any way take the evidence that his daughter was dead on face value. He even went to the lengths of working with spy mom in order to get information. So Syd’s right in that it shows a level of disingenuousness to insist that he had “proof,” that he really had tried to verify what happened to her. Jack is right in that, in this case, Vaughn really wasn’t good enough for Syd; he didn’t have the faith necessary to keep looking for clues as her own estranged and emotionally distant father did. Whatever happens for them in the future — the real future — she’s always going to be faced with the reality that they way she believed in love, in a relationship, was far different than what Michael Vaughn believed, and that by her standards, he didn’t care enough.
Which I guess is what bothers me, deep down, that I can’t shake from last year’s ending. As much as I love roadblocks being thrown up in front of the couples, this one never felt real. Vaughn was willing to risk a great deal to be with Syd. He also had a lot at stake, personally, in terms of being in love with the daughter of the woman who killed his father (phew!). He did have a huge investment in that relationship, and to hurl the plot two years into the future so you can tell different stories than the ones you didn’t know how to get out of in the middle just seems... cheap, for me. I don’t know that I necessarily believe these things about Vaughn — Syd’s right in what she’s saying about the character as he’s represented right now, after having abandoned her memory, her life, but I don’t now that that’s really true of the Vaughn we knew from the first two seasons.
So I’m cautious, because I’m not sure I enjoy the direction the show’s going, but they did do a bang-up job on the premiere. I’m not sure how or whether they can sustain it, but I’ll keep watching to see. Alias frequently loses my attention for stretches at a time, so I’m hoping they won’t fall victim to the third-year curse and my attention will really stray. A lot of shows have their strongest seasons in their second year, and by third start to disintegrate a bit. There’s a bounce-back effect for dramas that last into a fifth year, but few can sustain superior quality past four seasons. I’m curious to see if Alias will fall into this pattern or not, whether this third season will be a little lackluster because of Abrams’s choice to do this wacky, zany jump into the future. But hell, if he brings spy mom back for a little action with spy dad, I won’t be able to complain too much. Spy mom was the best character they’ve ever had on the show, and she made last year just smoke. It will be interesting to see if anything the showrunners have come up with can compare to that great second season storyline; I’m hoping the melodrama of the relationship won’t detract from the possibilities. But hey, at least they used a favorite Rickie Lee Jones song!
And on a totally different note, would anyone know where I can get some pics of Lilo and Stitch (the movie) that I could use for icons? I've spent way too much time in a fruitless search for decent screen caps; if I'm lucky I find ones that are too tiny or have type or other things on them. If anyone knows of a place, I'd be grateful for a direction.
I spent the summer getting more and more pissed about this two years missing thing — the more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. It seemed like the worst kind of desperate, deus ex machina, skip the hard part style of writing. As if they got so enamored by the possibilities father along the line than the compelling stories of the present, so Abrams had to move the show forward two years (also borne out in what he said about having stories he wanted to tell farther into the future). It felt cheap, like a writer who has no control over a story, like he needed a cheap and easy way to throw out some of the characters, rearrange the chess pieces on the board, and introduce hardship into the Syd/Vaughn relationship.
I’m all for thwartedness. I just want it to come with some expectation of reasonableness. So that ending left a great deal to be desired, for me, and I went into The Two with pretty low expectations and a chip on my shoulder. For the most part, they did a great job of chipping away the chip. The action was solid, the over the topness of the show was back into full play in a way it hadn’t really been since they reinvented the show with that post-Super Bowl episode, and there seemed to be consequences and stakes for a lot of the characters, stakes they were worried about losing. I loved that guy-whose-name-I-can-never-remember (WHY can’t I remember his name? Vaughn’s bud? Weiss??) has taken a little of the buffoony shine off and seems like a competent, capable team leader who also understands and cares about Syd’s unique problems; it was great to see Marshall being Marshall, and his tenuous relationship with his girlfriend was wonderful — but the poem was truly a highlight; and most of all, while I miss Terry O’Quinn, it was good to see Dixon in a supervisory role, particularly since there would have been little else for him to do if he hadn’t done that. I’m glad spy dad was back at the end, because the show without spy dad would be just... bleh. I missed Willage and Sark, but I have faith we’ll see them again soon.
And I loved the way Syd browbeat Vaughn at the end, calling him on his lack of faith, because that’s really what it came down to. Jack didn’t in any way take the evidence that his daughter was dead on face value. He even went to the lengths of working with spy mom in order to get information. So Syd’s right in that it shows a level of disingenuousness to insist that he had “proof,” that he really had tried to verify what happened to her. Jack is right in that, in this case, Vaughn really wasn’t good enough for Syd; he didn’t have the faith necessary to keep looking for clues as her own estranged and emotionally distant father did. Whatever happens for them in the future — the real future — she’s always going to be faced with the reality that they way she believed in love, in a relationship, was far different than what Michael Vaughn believed, and that by her standards, he didn’t care enough.
Which I guess is what bothers me, deep down, that I can’t shake from last year’s ending. As much as I love roadblocks being thrown up in front of the couples, this one never felt real. Vaughn was willing to risk a great deal to be with Syd. He also had a lot at stake, personally, in terms of being in love with the daughter of the woman who killed his father (phew!). He did have a huge investment in that relationship, and to hurl the plot two years into the future so you can tell different stories than the ones you didn’t know how to get out of in the middle just seems... cheap, for me. I don’t know that I necessarily believe these things about Vaughn — Syd’s right in what she’s saying about the character as he’s represented right now, after having abandoned her memory, her life, but I don’t now that that’s really true of the Vaughn we knew from the first two seasons.
So I’m cautious, because I’m not sure I enjoy the direction the show’s going, but they did do a bang-up job on the premiere. I’m not sure how or whether they can sustain it, but I’ll keep watching to see. Alias frequently loses my attention for stretches at a time, so I’m hoping they won’t fall victim to the third-year curse and my attention will really stray. A lot of shows have their strongest seasons in their second year, and by third start to disintegrate a bit. There’s a bounce-back effect for dramas that last into a fifth year, but few can sustain superior quality past four seasons. I’m curious to see if Alias will fall into this pattern or not, whether this third season will be a little lackluster because of Abrams’s choice to do this wacky, zany jump into the future. But hell, if he brings spy mom back for a little action with spy dad, I won’t be able to complain too much. Spy mom was the best character they’ve ever had on the show, and she made last year just smoke. It will be interesting to see if anything the showrunners have come up with can compare to that great second season storyline; I’m hoping the melodrama of the relationship won’t detract from the possibilities. But hey, at least they used a favorite Rickie Lee Jones song!
And on a totally different note, would anyone know where I can get some pics of Lilo and Stitch (the movie) that I could use for icons? I've spent way too much time in a fruitless search for decent screen caps; if I'm lucky I find ones that are too tiny or have type or other things on them. If anyone knows of a place, I'd be grateful for a direction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-09-29 01:03 pm (UTC)http://www.lucky-stars.ca/liloandstitch/pictures.html
http://www.lucky-stars.ca/liloandstitch/pictures2.html
no subject
Date: 2003-09-29 03:15 pm (UTC)Big virtual hugs of thanks!
no subject
Date: 2003-09-30 03:59 pm (UTC)Hopefully this will go somewhere good.