Alias (TV Series) Cipher (2002) User Reviews

The real battle....

[A_Different_Drummer · 8/10 · 27 March 2015]

is as always between the long arc and the short arc.

I am writing this review from the far future. Well actually 2015 but in relation to when this was produced, that really is the far future.

It is a great series. But in revisiting it, episode by episode, I see things that reviewers contemporaneous to the show might have missed.

Reviewers at the time fell in love with Garner (who didn't?) and loved the whole Mission Impossible, Bionic Woman, Femme Nikita thing.

Looking back I cannot help but feel that what we were really seeing was the resume for JJ Abrams being painstakingly crafted week by week, script by script.

Now (in 2015) a Hollywood deity, Abrams made his bones with this series. And it shows. Props JJ.

This episode in particular is interesting. The short arc is the series of Bond-like trips to crazy locations to do crazy things. It is SUPPOSED to dominate. However watching from the far future I find the long arcs (Sloan "haunted" by his guilt and Sydney's mother connecting with her, played by Lena Olin, one of the great femme fatales of the era) MORE interesting.

To this reviewer, the moment when Olin asks Garner, why are not wondering how a mother could shoot her own daughter?, is the high point.

Just sayin

De-cipher

[gridoon2024 · 7/10 · 17 October 2009]

SD-6 learns that Sark is planning to launch a satellite - and Sydney learns from her mother what he's looking for: a music box designed by Rambaldi that contains an encoded mathematical equation for a new type of energy. So she's sent to Sri Lanka to plant a device on the satellite to enable SD-6 (and the CIA) to locate the box and get it before Sark does. Not a classic episode by any means, but it does execute some ambitious action scenarios and contains a particularly gripping "hypnotizing" sequence with a CIA specialist trying to get Will to remember the codes for activating the music box as they were written on Sark's computer on the plane that was taking them to Taipei. Though the best scenes of the episode are, as with the previous one, those with Irina - she meets not only Sydney but Jack as well. Lena Olin has a great physique - you can see where Sydney got her on-screen good genes from! *** out of 4.

Fire and ice

[Tweekums · 8/10 · 18 March 2012]

In the previous episode Sydney acquired a camera for SD-6 but it turns out it was just a prototype; Sark has the fully operational model and he intends to put it on a satellite to search for a Rambaldi artefact known as 'The Music Box'. Both the CIA and SD-6 want the location so Sydney is sent to the launch site in Sri Lanka where she must access the equipment on the rocket just before it launches... to get away without being incinerated she must rely on Marshall's latest gadget: a rocket powered luge! Once the satellite is in orbit the Music Box it located in a Siberian ice cave. Sydney is dispatched there by SD-6 to retrieve the item but they don't realise that she has the activation sequence and plans to use it on site for the CIA and destroy it... of course Sark is on his way there too.

This was a decent episode with some great action scenes; on might have expected the escape from the launch site to be part of a cliff hanger but the scene took part fairly early on. The final scenes were just as tense with Sydney once again looking doomed. I enjoyed the nod to 'Aliens' in the scene where Dixon and his team monitor Sark's men getting closer and closer until they were right upon them without seeing a sign of them till they attack from an unexpected direction. Once again Ron Rifkin put in a great performance as Sloane; showing the character dealing with the loss of his wife as somebody tries to contact him from places he used to go with her. Bradley Cooper also had some nice scenes as he has to relive his capture in order to get him to remember information he might have seen subconsciously at the time.