Mark Watches ‘Alias’: S04E11 – The Road Home

In the eleventh episode of the fourth season of Alias, this was… an actual break??? I’m genuinely shocked, y’all. If you’re intrigued, then it’s time for Mark to watch Alias. 

Trigger Warning: For mention of suicide.

Seriously, this is probably about as close as I’m going to get to a “break” from this show, especially since Vaughn’s subplot is introducing some seriously fucked up revelations into the show. I enjoyed it! It was nice to get to laugh at a plot instead of feeling like my insides were going to evaporate.

I’m not expecting this again, for the record.

Vaughn

Across Alias, multiple characters have had to cope with their pasts being re-contextualized. It’s in the fabric of the show, right from the very first episode. Sydney learns she doesn’t work for the CIA. She later learns her mother isn’t dead. Dixon is heartbroken by his own ignorant complicity. Vaughn discovers his wife is a double agent. And so on and so forth, this is a common motif mostly because it has to be. Alias is about fake identities! It stands to reason that there’s going to be a lot of deception, and oh lord, does this show EVER deliver on that promise. But I can’t yet predict where Vaughn’s story is going, even knowing how often the show has upended commonly accepted facts and realities. The previous episode introduced the idea that Vaughn’s father might be alive, but it’s still hard to believe. 

Yet “The Road Home” gives us yet another experience that doesn’t fit in with what everyone knows about the man. We’ve always heard that Bill Vaughn was a “good man.” Time and time again! So how the hell is it possible that Bill shot someone in the back intentionally and watched on in disinterest??? Murdoch’s story seems incompatible with what we know of Bill Vaughn, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it? We don’t actually know all that much about him. Everything we know is secondhand or from third parties. There’s no real reliable portrait of this person at all, and these stories are the closest any of us can come to knowing him… yet. Vaughn is stubborn in this regard, and we know from past behavior that he’ll keep pursuing this until he gets closure. But I don’t know what that closure looks like! I genuinely don’t know if Bill Vaughn is alive or not, y’all!!! I’M WORRIED.

Korjev

At first, I wasn’t sure what Jack’s subplot was intended as beyond a really disturbing assassination scenario. It seemed so out-of-place with everything else, at least until I began to think of Korjev’s death as a reckoning. Jack and Sloane both knew what Korjev was capable of, but Jack’s interactions with the arms dealer revealed to us that in many ways, Jack was responsible for Korjev. Whether he intended it or not, he trained Korjev, and since the CIA (and Jack) cut off ties with him, he became ruthless. Pragmatic. Willing to do terrible things to get what he wants. SOUND A LITTLE FAMILIAR???

So, this wasn’t immediately obvious to me. I was confused by Jack’s desire to be the one to take out this man. Why? In his own brutal way, I suspect Jack wanted to take care of a loose end, to eliminate Korjev because he had been complicit in Korjev’s growth as a monster. Hell, Jack even says he should have taken out Korjev years earlier. And this is his chance! It doesn’t matter to him that Korjev has since married or that he has a kid on the way. The man has created such an unbearable air of terror that one of his men killed himself rather than face the consequences of failure. In Korjev, I imagine that Jack saw his own self, and this was his way of excising a small part of the monster within. 

Sam

Well, Jason Segel was an odd surprise, but looking back on “The Road Home,” he was kind of perfect as the mostly-useless character who needed to be saved again and again by a trained operative. On a superficial level, it was nice that this was a man that had to be saved by a woman, and Segel played the part well. It’s so unlike most of the missions on the show, especially because the targets are so rarely folded into the action like this. Sam’s plot reminded me of a less horrifying version of Will’s, a character who is suddenly thrust into a world of espionage with no real training. I know I’m biased in favor of this because I do love that trope of people being told there’s a secret world existing within their own. Yet this was actually a lot of fun! The show changes things up for most of the episode by poking fun at some of the absurdities of this life, and as I mentioned, it’s a welcome change of tone and pace. 

Part of the tension, though, comes from a problem we haven’t seen in a while. Once you know, the world becomes more dangerous. That’s how knowledge works within Alias. The ignorant generally are happier, and thus, there are times when the threat of collision (between Sam’s life and Sydney’s life) fuels the dramatic tension. Has Sam’s life been irrevocably changed? Can he ever go back home, or will he be dumped into a traumatic system that will remove him from what he knows? 

I can’t believe it, but there’s ACTUALLY a happy ending here. I kept waiting for something tragic or terrible, but it never came. And it made me appreciate “The Road Home” more! The wacky tone was intentional and long-lasting, rather than a trick to make us like Sam until the show was done with him. He actually gets to go home! He got excitement and adventure! NONE OF THE HEROES OR GOOD PEOPLE DIED. It’s a magical day on Alias when that actually happens, so I’m gonna take it for what it is.

The video for “The Road Home” can be downloaded here for $0.99.

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