In the fifth episode of the second season of Alias, this show continues to get more and more messed up. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Alias.
Trigger Warning: For consent, including nonconsensual medical procedures, abuse, and gaslighting.
How much of Sydney’s life is a lie? How carefully crafted is the reality that Jack has given her? How much more of her memory is missing or replaced? HOW MUCH MORE FUCKED UP IS JACK THAN I CURRENTLY REALIZE?
I fully admit that I expected the truth of Jack’s betrayal in “Dead Drop†to be revealed slowly, piece by piece, at some later date. I certainly didn’t expect that Vaughn would be immediately suspicious of the explosion and pursue it. But holy shit, does it ever make for some compelling storytelling. This is an exquisitely composed episode, one that builds to that crushing climax in which Sydney confronts her father about his big secret. WHICH WAS THE WHOLE REASON WHY HE TRIED TO KEEP HER AWAY FROM IRINA.
I’m sure that we’re going to deal with the ramifications of this disaster, but holy shit, “The Indicator†is a train wreck in the best way possible. The writers set up the tension right at the start by having Vaughn suggest that Jack was behind the bombs allegedly planted by Irina. (I’m still confused on one point. Is Irina’s trial still happening? How is that possible if it was technically a CIA operation? Is Vaughn just not going to tell anyone? Does that mean the man Jack hired gets sent to prison forever? THERE ARE OTHER IMPLICATIONS FOR THIS THAT AREN’T ADDRESSED.) And from that point, we consistently see the threat of discovery hang over the entire episode. We go from watching Vaughn discover the truth to him forcing Jack into an ultimatum: either Jack tells his daughter the truth or Vaughn will.
As is the case with Alias, that truth has a high price, and it’s one of the more consistent themes across the show. You can see it in Arvin Sloane’s subplot, too, since he finally comes clean to Jack about what happened to his wife. Lord, that sounds so passive, too! ARVIN HAPPENED TO HIS WIFE. HE KILLED HER. Except… oh my god. What the fuck does this episode MEAN? Are we meant to believe that someone ousted from a possible seat in the Alliance is taunting Arvin about what he was willing to do to get that seat? Or did Emily survive??? If it’s physically/medically possible that she survived Arvin poisoning her—and if we definitively did not see her dead body—I have to accept that she might actually be alive. WHAT IF SHE IS TAUNTING HER HUSBAND OUT OF REVENGE?
And that’s what I mean about consistency: all of these plots touch on the consequences that come from telling the truth in a world built so wholly on lies. Arvin told the truth, but does that truth even matter? He still murdered his wife in order to get a seat on the Alliance. He can try to justify it with some piss-poor excuse about Emily suffering if her cancer came back, but he still did it. The cost of that is that Jack now knows. Someone else does, too, and whomever that person is, they’re using it against Arvin. GOOD.
But what does it mean that Sydney knows the truth? Does she get closure? I suppose, but that closure comes with the opening of a wound. As she tracks down a doctor responsible for the mental re-programming of children to become spies later in their lives, a memory is triggered. That memory leads her to a wooden puzzle, which leads her to pursuing hypnotic therapy, where the reality of her childhood is unearthed like a corpse from beneath the ground. We now know what Irina meant when she asked Jack if he had told Sydney about what he’d done to Sydney after Irina disappeared, and the truth absolutely makes him out to be even worse of a father than we thought. In that sense, I was glad that the writers gave Sydney the chance to reject her father so completely. It’s true what she said: he robbed her of her agency by making those decisions without her consent. His obsessive paternalism has, time and time again, worked against her interests. He could have killed his own daughter! And he most certainly harmed her by using her in a program meant to develop kids into spies. HE DID EXACTLY THE SAME AWFUL THING THAT THE CIA WANTED STOPPED.
I’m guessing we’ll find out how complicit the rest of the CIA was in this, but that shouldn’t detract from how truly terrible it was that Jack subjected his own daughter to a manipulation on such a grand scale. He participated in gaslighting his own daughter!
I JUST.
I DISLIKE JACK SO MUCH. And my heart breaks for Sydney, y’all. It’s not easy to deal with overprotective and abusive parents, and that’s certainly the case when you must still contend with the scars that the trauma left behind. This stuff rarely stays contained to your past, you know? It’s even more insidious because Jack has been using this all to get closer to his daughter, when the best way he could have gone about that was to just BE NICER AND MORE HONEST WITH HER.
Whew, I’m HEATED.
The video for “The Indicator†can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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