We caught up with the Series Finale of Alias last night.
In case you don’t recall, I had stopped watching the show after this season’s opener because… well, because it had gotten criminally stupid. When I heard that they were coming back for a last push to the series finale I decided that I was going to watch and see how it turned out, just to find out if J.J. Abrams was going to be able to salvage the series that got away. The idea was that if he could, I might have less apprehension toward Lost. So I watched.
At first the new episodes were as bad as I remembered. But then a couple of weeks ago they had an episode that I felt was very much in tune with the golden era of Alias and I started to build a little hope. Maybe—just maybe—they could actually pull this off. There were a lot of semi-spoilers about guest stars and body counts floating around the Internets leading up to the two-hour finale and I started thinking that this just might make up, if only a little, for the torture (how apropos) of the last few seasons.
In typical Alias fashion, my hopes were built up only to be utterly decimated. They hooked me just enough to add one more scar to my already blackly ravaged faith in pop culture.
The finale was, hyperbole aside, an utter failure on every single level. The pacing, despite the two hour time allotment, was atrocious as they tried to cram what could have been a whole season’s worth of plot resolution into two episodes’ worth. The acting was inexplicably off kilter and drab, possibly because of exhaustion but probably because of the dismal dialogue. The details behind the show’s bizarre mystical Da Vinci-like prophet Rambaldi were never revealed, the fate of the villians from this season (Prophet-5) was laughably anticlimactic and the conclusion of the principal villians’ arcs were almost universally incomprehensible. There were pointless guest appearances, huge blocks of time devoted to disposable secondary characters, cheap and hackish writing tricks which ignored the entire history of the series and even plot points from only a couple of episodes ago! They devoted a lot of time to a series of flashbacks which served absolutely no purpose in developing story, characters or parallels to current events. The epilogue was jarring and unsentimental even in its inanity.
So no, I wasn’t a fan. What kills me about this show is the unrealized potential. The Rambaldi thing could have been phenomenal. Instead it was so painfully clear that the writers had no idea what they wanted to do with it and so they let it drift into this retarded grey area of repetition and casual dismissal because they clearly couldn’t come up with any decent explanations for what it all meant. For all the talk of “Rambaldi’s End Game,” what exactly that meant or what it was would never be explained. As a serial spy drama it could have been extremely cool as well, witness the first two seasons. But the stupid TV myth that one actor makes or breaks a show ruined the chances the writers had to stay fresh and interesting, choosing instead to stretch viewer’s credibility until it broke and snapped back into their eye.
The only thing that I can take away from the wretched train wreck the show ultimately became is that near the end (and specifically in the finale) I didn’t see J.J. Abrams’ name anywhere on the credits except in the “Created By” line. So all I can hope that means is that he had nothing to do with the assault on my brain I experienced last night and that when it comes to Lost he’ll do the right thing and see it through to the end and make sure not to allow anyone who was even remotely associated with Alias’ denouement to come within 50 miles of it.
