Angelias

I had another bout with insomnia last night, even after “helping” Alex move, and then drinking a whole lot of beer, the two things that should guarantee I fall asleep immediately. So what that means is that I finished another four episodes of “Alias,” and there’s just two discs left in Season 3.

At this point in the series, it’s reminding me a lot of the TV series “Angel.” Not in the content or the tone, but in how I’m responding to it. “Angel” is my quintessential love/hate TV series — there were so many characters and plotlines that I just despised, and which annoyed me enough to just give up on the show over and over again. But when they did well, it was some of the best television ever made.

They had the lame “lawyers are really evil” and “LA is really phony” gags that they just never put to rest, and they had some really loathesome characters that were supposed to be sympathetic, like Lorne the demon guy and Angel’s son. But then they’d have a killer storyline like the one where Faith came back and had more depth to her character in those two episodes than in an entire year of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Or the whole fourth season of “Angel,” where they had basically written themselves into a corner and had to cover up a pregnancy, but came out of it with a great season arc that all fit together and had episodes which were genuinely scary (and I didn’t think TV could scare me anymore).

And season three of “Alias” is kind of like that. Most of it just shatters all the “I know it’s implausible and over the top, but it’s supposed to be” good-will I’d built up. All the plot twists and change-ups and revealed secrets just seem like bored writers in afternoon meetings, moving characters around on a grid without even trying to come up with real motivations for them. The characters have gone from being two-dimensional but lovable, to one-and-a-half-dimensional and so boring that even they seem to be bored with what they’re doing. Here’s yet another scene where Jack breaks the rules to save his daughter. Here’s another scene where Dixon encounters somebody behind bars and vows vengeance. Here’s one more scene where Sydney shows teary-eyed determination. Here’s still yet another girlfight with the evil Allison Doren (who got an extraordinarily anti-climactic send-off). I’m still fine with being earnest, but that will only take you so far if you don’t have an engrossing story to back it up.

And the big villain of the season was so completely obvious from scene one, that I can’t tell whether or not the reveal was supposed to be a surprise. There are still two discs left, and I’m sure that they’ve got more plot twists to throw at the story, but so far it’s been a real yawner. (Although I will say that as soon as she started playing evil, she became 1000 times sexier. What that says about me, I don’t know and don’t want to think about.) And granted, the whole bit about Sydney’s missing two years was getting stale, but instead of throwing in some twists to make it interesting, they just blew their wad and explained the whole thing away.

So that’s the hate; where’s the love? Well, this is also the season where they really got the big budgets, it looks like, and they’d built up enough reputation to attract even bigger-name guest stars. And they had the freedom to do interesting stuff that didn’t quite fit in with the formula. Like the episode with Ricky Gervais as an IRA bomber: pretty neat. And the one with David Cronenberg as the doctor who sent Sydney on that whole dream-sequence episode: very, very neat. And Isabella Rosselini as the superspy that helps Jack: pretty lame episode overall, but she gave a great performance, even though she looks even more uncannily like David Foley in drag the older she gets.

I’m still unspoiled for the rest of this season, so I have no idea what the big cliff-hanger is going to be. And considering that the next season isn’t available on DVD until mid-October, I’m actually going to have to wait to see the resolution of this cliff-hanger. It’ll be interesting to see how long I can hold out before begging people to tell me what happens in season four.