This was a couples episode: Irina and Jack, Sydney and Vaughn, Will and... who is that woman wearing Francie's face?
As Jack was cutting the homing device out of Irina's shoulder, Dan was yelling, "Don't do it, Jack! She's playing you!" She was so obviously getting ready to split. She said goodbye to Sydney in the prison when she said, "I love you," and to Jack on the plane when she thanked him for raising Sydney. (Not to mention their farewell fling in the hotel room. I just knew she would seduce Jack before she took off.) Did Jack know? Did he do it on purpose?
Irina said to Stuka, right before she knifed him: "You know me. I love games." What game is she playing? I don't understand why she turned herself in in the first place, and why she picked this particular time to leave; her motivations are still clear as mud. I thought she was trying to turn Sydney to the dark side of the Force, but if she is, why leave now?
Moving on to Syd and Vaughn: I absolutely did not believe that Vaughn could be a traitor, and of course, he wasn't; he's simply still suspicious of the woman who killed his father, and he has good reason to be – even though he wasn't able to find anything bad about Irina's current motives. It was nice that both Sydney and Weiss were ready to defy the CIA to support Vaughn. I wonder if that will come back to bite them.
Finally, how about the situation with Will and the woman wearing Francie's face? That dream sequence shocked me (clearly, Will's subconscious was trying to tell him something) and then the second scene in bed where Francie was questioning a hypnotized Will about CIA secrets just blew me away.
Sloane has some kind of personal connection to Rambaldi. I don't think I realized that before. The latest Rambaldi artifact is about immortality. I keep wondering when Rambaldi himself will show up.
Bits and pieces:
— The opening scene was a ripoff of the opening scene of Speed. Except that the elevator actually did get stopped by the basement. And I noticed that there were only 47 floors.
— Michael Vartan must have been a hockey player at some point. You think?
— Richard Lewis played an obnoxious counter-intelligence threat analyst. His interrogation of Sydney was meant to grate on us, and it did.
— More yellow tint photography during the limo-chase scene.
— Kendall: "Jack, when the hell did we switch places?"
— This week's itinerary: Bangkok, Hong Kong, Panama, and a smushed elevator somewhere in Russia.
This season has just been wonderful so far, and it keeps getting better. Three out of four spies,
Billie
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Billie Doux loves good television and spends way too much time writing about it.
This wasn't happier than the last episode! Not at all! Although I did love Jack's line about his "unsentimental patriotism." Because we were certainly all expecting sentimental patriotism from Jack Bristow, that weepy man-child.
ReplyDeleteGreat parallel structure here, with Francie/Will, Vaughn/Sydney, and Irina/Jack: each couple reaching a milestone in trustability or untrustability. Jack, how could you let yourself get played again! You should know by now that the number one sign Irina is up to something is that you start trusting her. That doesn't mean she's trustworthy; it means she has succeeded.
We started off with the traditional family: Irina, Jack, and Sydney, all being open about the love for one another. We ended with the spy-family of convenience: Mama Irina, Papa Sloane, and Sark as baby.
Interesting implications, too, on the immortality front, which has been mentioned before as one of Rambaldi's goals. Jack said that he had something Irina and Sloane didn't (Sydney), implying that he'd found his own immortality the traditional way: reproduction. That isn't enough for Irina, though. Unless, of course, she's long-conning Sloane the same way she has Jack, Sydney, and the CIA all this time.
It amazes me that Jack fell for Irina’s games, especially after all of his protestations at the beginning. The only explanation is that he still loves her; unless, of course, he is playing her; but, I don’t think so. He looked genuinely angry and hurt at the end.
ReplyDeleteSydney and Vaughn’s conversation jumped out at me this time as well. When he says to her that there are some things he doesn’t feel comfortable discussing with her because they just started dating seemed off. True, they’ve just started sleeping together, but they have been emotionally intimate for years. I got the impression that Sydney thought that Vaughn was confiding in her as much as she was in him. Guess not.
Oh Jack... can you be this trusting? This is so out of character. Maybe he just wants to trust, for Sydney's sake.
ReplyDeleteI love that Sydney is committed to Vaughn. She trusts him completely, which is something that she cannot do with anyone else. The last person she trusted completely was Danny, and that clearly didn't end well. For Sydney to put Vaughn over the investigation/agency, is a big leap of faith.