Written by Michelle, Amy, Melynee
Please, bear with us, as we found this to be extremely difficult. Condensing the plot, that is. It is a very elaborate plot, and we are very verbose gurls. But we tried. Really. So, without further ado, we start with…
Sydney Bristow’s boy toy – okay, love of her life, aka Danny – proposes to her in the middle of the campus. She accepts, and days later decides she can no longer lie to her new fiancé. She tells him that her bank job with Credit Dauphine is a sham and that she’s really working for SD-6, a division of the CIA. Danny promptly responds to this news by showing up dead in their bathtub. Sydney, extremely bitter about this and blaming everybody but herself, refuses to go back to work – until they attempt to kill her for desertion. She’s in too deep, yo. While escaping the goons out to cancel her, she is rescued, miraculously, by her father. Turns out that her estranged father, Jack, is also in SD-6. Well, whatdyaknow? And here she thought he just sold airplane parts for a living. Guess someone could keep a secret, eh Syd?
Anyway, her father spills some oh-so-startling news.Turns out that SD-6 is not a shadow division of the CIA, but rather a renegade company. Sydney then denies her father any hugs, borrows a passport, dyes her hair red, and heads off to Singapore to steal the first of what will be many items made by a 15th century nutcase named Milo Rambaldi, in a bid to get back on SD-6 ‘s good side so they’ll call off the goons. And it works! Because SD-6 is actually rather trusting for a renegade group of evil white guys in expensive suits.
But oh ho ho! Sydney pulls a disappearing act on them and ends up at the CIA. She’s going legit, and taking SD-6 down while she’s at it. Believing she could take down SD-6 in a matter of months, (the first glimpse of her naiveté), she flirts mercilessly with her handler Vaughn, (another glimpse into what will soon be that infamous naiveté), and meets him way more than she should.
Vaughn, however, puts her in her place and shows her a nice little diagram of just how far-reaching SD-6’s grasp is. (Far.) And it turns out her father is also CIA. Of course, there’s a whole lot of doubting going on, what with the fact that her mother’s death may have had some connection to her father’s job. Vaughn and Sydney do a little bit of investigating on their own, until they get pulled into the office with the CIA head and Jack, who informs them that her mother was killed while carrying out a mission – for the KGB. (That’s three different spy agencies, in case you were counting.)
Let’s go back to Milo Rambaldi, shall we? In a mess more drawn-out than we could manage ourselves, it’s important to know that Rambaldi is this guy who lived in 15th Century Italy and was an inventor of things light-years ahead of his time. Most of his sketches detailed items that “would be very dangerous in the wrong hands…” Hence, SD-6 and their enemies are very interested in breaking Rambaldi’s codes before anyone else.
OH! SD-6’s enemies! We can’t forget them! Aside from the obvious CIA, we’ve got K-Directorate – which is the Alias version of Red Cell – and various other random terrorists and shadow organizations we have yet to see. They are bad, they are mean and they have no morals. None, none we tell you! Anna Espinoza, of K-Directorate, is Sydney’s archenemy and she pops up from time to time to kick her ass. (However, she can’t be that good of a secret agent, or she would have followed Sydney to class one day and knocked her off, yo. For it seems that K-Directorate has Miss Bristow’s name. First and last. Apparently SD-6’s budget is too tight for a long-term alias.) This makes four different spy agencies that we know of and probably an infinite number we have yet to see.
Then there’s a whole other adventure into a mental institution. Sydney is sent in to get the location of a dead man from one of the inmates: a man named Martin Shepard, who has been brainwashed to be the perfect assassin – recite a phrase and he will do your evil bidding with no recollection afterward. But Shepard isn’t quite the dullard that they had predicted, and K-Directorate was clued in on Sydney’s expedition, so she ends up breaking them both out. Even after she learns that Shepard was the one sent to kill her fiancé Danny. (It’s important to note here that Shepard went off on his own, and Sydney reported back that he had committed suicide. We think it won’t be the last we see of him, mwha ha ha ha… after all, he sent her a postcard, to her home address! Not the home he’d been in, the one she’d moved to recently! Remind us, how is Sydney still alive, again?)
But wait! There’s still so much more! Sloane (the SD-6 head) gets wind that there’s a mole in the department. He decides to put everyone through the ringer, and although Sydney passes with flying colours, Alain (SD-6’s version of the torture twins, and resident weirdo) is convinced it’s her. He tries to convince Sloane as well, but it’s a no-go. However, Sloane can’t ignore the possibility when Marshall (Pseudo-Birkoff) tells him that there was a second transmission when Sydney was in a bank vault, reporting data to SD-6.
And of course, what would Sydney be without a personal life? Her best friend, Francie, is so obsessed with her is-he-or-is-he-not cheating boyfriend (Charlie) that she completely misses most of the emotional turmoil that Sydney is going through after Danny’s death. (He isn’t. Or so we are lead to believe…) In fact, Francie and Charlie are so callous that he actually proposes to Francie at Thanksgiving dinner, in front of Sydney. And it takes a few episodes for Francie to realize that, “Hey, Sydney’s fiancé was killed and maybe, just maybe, it’s kind of cruel to be rubbing her nose in all the wedding stuff.” However, that mini-moment of clarity only lasts for so long and then it’s back to self-involved Francie.
Lastly, we got Will. Ah, Will. Syd’s reporter bud. He holds a torch for Sydney, yet carries on with his 20-year-old assistant. That’s class Will, indeed. But wait! There’s more! Will is also investigating Danny’s murder, against Syd’s wishes! And it all gets very confusing from here on in, so it would probably be best if we didn’t get into it, but there was an SD-6 operative named Eloise Kurtz who pretended to have an affair with Danny – because Jack told her to – who really sucked as an agent, because she got all sad and was going to spill the beans to Will after one interview, but instead died. And now Will, after many twists and turns to the point of dear-god-get-on-with-it-already, has heard the magic phrase “Did you tell them about SD-6?”
And it just keeps going on from there.
2001-11-01