Customer Reviews

Alias - The Complete Fourth Season

5 star:		(65)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(24)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I'm an admittedly big fan of "Alias," so you'll probably have to take some of my comments with a grain of salt. Season Four, for the most part, is likeable and fun, suffering only in comparison to the heights the series reached in its first two years. Even though "Alias" creator J.J. Abrams seems to have run out of ideas regarding the series, he's established the characters and situations well-enough so that series can continue on sheer momentum for a while.

This season, like every other season, focuses on the adventures of a small group of CIA agents who work together. Despite the opening credits' insistence on the importance of series star Jennifer Garner, this season is more a team effort than ever before. There's Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), who's a multilinguist and a master of disguise. There's her love interest Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan), a decent straight-arrow of an agent troubled by his recent past. There's her father Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), who is alternately grim and emotionally unavailable, and her step-sister Nadia (Mia Maestro). They're led by the enigmatic Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), a former CIA agent who turned into both a terrorist and a criminal mastermind similar to a James Bond villain and now claims to have been reformed. Sydney has a long history with Sloane, as does the rest of her team. As if to prove that you don't have to be part of Sydney's inner circle to work for the CIA, the remainder of the team (all in subordinate roles) include a geeky comic relief computer genius named Marshall, a strong experienced backup agent named Dixon, and a formerly occassional guest character promoted to series regular named Weiss, who serves mainly as comedy relief as well as Nadia's love interest. The cast is uniformly strong; as Nadia, Mia Maestro does the best she can with a character that isn't all that well-developed.

Abrams constructed the first third of the season to consist of self-contained episodes with a minimum of character development and next to no continuity. I'm assuming that this was intended to make it easier for new viewers to become interested in the series. These episodes reminded me a lot of the 1960s "Mission Impossible" series so perhaps it isn't surprising to learn that Abrams is working on the latest MI movie. I enjoyed these episodes a lot although I was disheartened by both the lack of continuity and absence of an overall story arc.

All this changes with the remainder of Season Four, in which Abrams not only returns to the extended story arc of earlier seasons, but also revives the Tomb Raider-meets-DaVinci Code obsession Arvin Sloane has for the Renaissance megalomaniac named Milo Rambaldi. We are treated to a series of implausible but hugely entertaining vignettes involving radiation poisoning, a woman from the past manipulating Nadia's feelings, an Arvin Sloane imposter nicknamed "Arvin Clone," and a Rambaldi doomsday scenario that would not seem out of place in a George Romero movie.

Why can't I rank this DVD set higher? It's tough to follow the ending of the season if you aren't already a fan, for starters. If you are a fan, you're likely to be annoyed at the seemingly endless succession of stand alone episodes at the beginning of the season. You'll also be disappointed in the revisionist treatment Abrams thrusts upon the occassional "guest villains" from earlier seasons, as well as the almost total lack of big-name guest stars in comparison to earlier seasons. You'll wonder why Abrams does next to nothing to further the Sydney-Vaughn relationship, and marvel at the almost total lack of chemistry between Nadia and Weiss.

Season Four of "Alias" has all the high-tech espionage, stunning stunt coordination, excellent music, and top-notch cinematography as previous seasons. (Indeed, it's far more enjoyable than most of the recent 007 films!) It's lacking much of the emotional impact of the first two seasons however, and I strongly suggest you begin your "Alias" obsession elsewhere. This isn't bad TV by any means; it just isn't up the the earlier seasons' standards.

For most Alias fans, much more than their time is devoted to the show. And the show most certainly does not end when the hour ends on Wednesday night. Time is spent talking with other fans on the internet and discussing the show with friends. I am an Alias fan. I spend countless hours each week watching and discussing the show. This season, Alias fans everywhere were sorely disappointed.

In the past, Alias has been a strong show with interesting storylines, fabulous acting, and great art direction. This year, all three were below par. Jennifer Garner's performance (although the Emmy nominators may disagree) was not what it has been in the past. She lacked the passion that she had in the past that made even the most ridiculous storylines intriguing to watch. With a few exceptions (Victor Garber and Ron Rifkin), the rest of the cast had the same melancholy attitude as Ms. Garner.

The art direction in season four was dull and repeated. The set of choice this season was a nightclub; which can be interesting the first few times, but when it is exhausted it begins to drag the entire show down. Which it did. The only artistic aspect of the show that did not lose its life was the costumes that outfitted Ms. Garner. They were, as always, stunning and fabulous.

The part of the show that suffered the most was definitely the writing. I believe I can speak on behalf of many Alias fans when I say that it was absolutely abysmal this season. Many storylines seemed to be borrowed directly from the X-Files. Never before have the writers had to resort to exhausting paranormal storylines in order to get viewers. Also prevalent in the series this season were so many cheesy lines and bad dialogue. The best example of this comes in the season finale, "Before The Flood". It was embarrassingly bad. The exceptional talents of special guest star Lena Olin were wasted with a plethora of bad dialogue! Several examples of this come to mind: the whole speech about the white horse; and when Irina is reunited with her evil sister, Elena, she says "Hi sis". The writing of the finale pales in comparison to the actors.

The only advice I would give to Mr. Abrams and the good people at ABC for next season is to drastically improve the quality of the writing for next season. Also, I highly recommend bringing back the marvelous David Anders (Julian Sark) and Lena Olin (Irina Derevko) for next season. Both of these actors are beyond superb and improve upon the overall quality of the show dramatically.

As an Alias fan, I will be purchasing the fourth season; but it will be only for the reason that I purchased the third season: to complete my collection.

After finishing the final disc of this season, i felt a great dissapointment and sadness as i realized that the show is far from what it once was. The storyline remains the most important thing so i'll try not to reveal anything, though when reading most of the other reviews it's hard not to ruin yourself most of the surprises.

So here i go:
After 3 years of great TV, despite a few mistakes and wrong turns here and there, Alias entered its fourth season wanting to regain the audience lost in the last season. And the new structure of the episodes manged to attract more viewers, at one HUGE, WRONG, DESTRUCTIVE sacrifice, the storyline. You're watching the episode and listening " this new weapon could wipe out an ecosystem....you must get it back and stop the terrorists from using it." And then you think: wasn't this in the last episode? No, last time it was a bomb, and the time before it was a chemical weapon, and before that a new weapon, and before that a new defense technology...etc.etc... Every episode is almost the same! (except for the final ones, but i'll get to them later). However, i'm not saying the episodes are bad, the missions are better than before, longer more realistic, Marshall no longer makes everything happen. Sydney and the gang have use oldschool tricks.

Towards the middle of the season, the shows begins to show faint signs of a storyline, despite this, the level of excitement remains as low and you then continue to the ussual "terrorist" episodes. it is until the final episodes that the story takes hold and doesn't let go, but it is not as strong as past seasons for this very reason, it all happens in a short time and you don't understand what happens until the final episodes when everyhting is explained, including what happened to nadia and sloane at the end of the 3rd season. Besides, big plus here, you finally get to know what is the goddamn red ball from season 1 for.

So, if the missions are good, and you get some explanation from past misteries, why do i say it is horrible for die hard fans? Well the answer is the lack of a continuing storyline, in past seasons, each episode flowed nicely into the next, however, like lost, the next episode may have nothing to do with the past one. This new way of presenting the storyline creates a whole different Alias, wich fans may not see as a better one, like i did.
Secondly, the storyline only answers misteries from the 3rd season, not progressing much, not moving moving forward (this is most obvious when in the final episodes a series of flashbacks from different characters appear to explain the past). Therefore, i see season 4 only as closure for the past season. Finally the season finale, though interesting, was most different from the past ones. It felt more like a superhero movie where the villain is about to destroy the world with his evil creation and the good guy has to stop him before its too late. You'll see for yourselves if you buy it. Also, the twists and turns are getting old and predictable, much like 24's i could see the surprises a mile away! It's getting boring when the bad guy says he is good again blablablabl and we all know how that turns out later.

So...yes i recommend it to new viewers, fans may find the final episodes to be the only interesting ones. Nevertheless, i feel i owe it to the show to continue watching the 5th season,and if you are a fan too you may feel you have to watch this season, but don't expect too much. I didn't and i felt dissapointed anyway.

I am a huge fan of Alias. I've been addicted to this series since the opening scene of the very first episode. Having said this, it pains me to say that Alias isn't the show it used to be. Seasons 1 & 2 were fantastic; Season 3 was mediocre; and I am sad to say Season 4 was no better.

There are several reasons why Season 4 was disappointing. First of all, the writers once again completely ignored almost everything that occurred in Season 3. The Rambaldi prophecy, which consumed nearly every episode of Season 3, was only featured in a handful of episodes in Season 4. In addition, at the end of the 3rd Season, Sydney gets into a knock-down fight with Lauren, and in the process, Lauren tells Syd that they "are both pawns in the same game", and that Syd "doesn't know who controls her". In the ending scene, Syd cries as she looks at shocking documents that contain her name along with a code of "S.A.B 47". The season ended with Jack telling Syd that she was never supposed to have found the documents. Between Lauren's statements and Jack's warning, I concluded that Jack had done something terrible to Sydney. In Season 4, however, it was revealed that Jack had done nothing to Sydney; instead he had murdered Irena Derevko. To this day, it still hasn't been revealed as to what Lauren was talking about.

Another disappointment in Season 4 was the bland addition of Sydney's sister, Nadia, who is played by Mia Maestro. The writers, hoping to show real-life Sydney away from work, added Nadia to list of characters in an attempt to fill the void left by the Will and Francie after Season 2. Unfortuantely, Mia Maestro isn't nearly as engaging as Francie (Merrin Dungey), or Will (Bradley Cooper). Instead, her monotonous lines, and dull performances often left more to be desired.

Season 4 was also substandard in the fact that most of the episodes began with a new storyline. The days of continued storylines were all but gone in Season 4. Instead, Alias became more of a procedural drama, rather than a serialized weekly action hour. This was a big mistake for the writers/producers, since Season 4 ran uninterrupted every week of the whole season. No repeats were shown. So every week Alias could have picked up where the previous week had left off, without the viewers worrying that a repeat was approaching. Instead the writers and producers passed on such an innovation. In this aspect, Alias suddenly seemed to become a clone of Mission Impossible rather than the unique drama it once was.

Probably the most unsatisfactory aspect of Season 4 was the constant absurdity of the storylines. In the first episode, Syd agrees to once-again work for Arvin Sloan... a man that murdered both Sydney's fiancé and her best friend Francie. Yeah right. I also thought it was cheap how the writers have made many of the characters bad one minute and good the next. In the beginning and middle of the season, Jack seemed to be a secret villain, but by the end of Season 4, he was good again. Always the evil-doer, Sloan suddenly becomes good at the end of the season. Then, suddenly in the season finale, Vaughn, who was always the good guy Sydney could rely upon, reveals that he is in fact bad. Can't the writers think of anything better to do than constantly rewrite the main characters? This isn't Lost!

By all accounts, Season 4 was decent. There were a few fantastic episodes such as "Welcome to Liberty Village" where Syd and Vaughn pose as a married couple in order to infiltrate a terrorist organization, "Mirage", where Syd must disguise herself as her mother to save Jack, and "Prophet Five", where Sydney and company must save the world from Syd's evil aunt. Overall, however, the quality of Season 4 continued to slump. I will buy the Season 4 DVD, but I have doubts I will watch every single episode in the set. It is rumored that Season 5 will be the last for Alias. Hopefully the producers/writers can make the final year as great as the beginning... we'll see.

I've watched every episode now since season 1 episode 1.

Alias is a 5-star series, but as a long-time fan, I'd say this was a 3-star year.

For those new to Alias, I'd suggest you start with season 1. It's an extremely well-done series. Very engaging. Each episode is gripping, well acted, with plenty of action, Bond-like gadetry, tremendous effects, etc. Across any season, it has an overall story arc that holds together and keeps you coming back and wanting to see the episodes in order. It's not quite as tightly dependent as, say, 24. But the episodes work better in order than they do individually. It's a great show to watch while you exercise -- the workout flies by.

Alias has an overall plot that, if I explained it, would simply sound ridiculous (like Lost or 24 et al), but the good acting actually sells it and allows you to get caught up in the story and suspend disbelief. At least enough to have fun with the show.

But for those familiar with Alias who enjoyed Seasons 1-3, you may be disappointed with Season 4.

It starts out very weak. I almost stopped watching after half a dozen episodes. The premise of the year seemed strained. And the episodes were very mission-oriented, stand-alone without an overall storyline in my view. I frankly felt that the team must have been distracted by launching Lost and just weren't giving this enough time to make it a good story anymore. Acting and effects remain solid, but the intertwined twisting plot that we had come to expect got... lost.

Things picked back up though in the 2nd half of the season, and caused it to finish reasonably well.

For a long time fan, it's worth seeing, but it's just not as good as prior years have been. The reason for the dropoff in viewership is pretty evident in my view.

In a nutshell:
- If you haven't seen any Alias, buy Season 1 first
- If you like Alias a lot, get this, but lower your expectations from prior years -- it is still entertaining though, and the cast remains terrific.
- If your time is limited, get Lost Season 1 instead.

An amazing thing happened in the last minutes of Season 4's penultimate episode "Search and Rescue": I had a feeling flood over me that I hadn't felt watching Alias since it was revealed Lauren was evil at the end of season 3's "Full Disclosure": I was hooked. It had been so long since Alias was the vital, nail-biting show of high excitement and high melodrama that I almost didn't recognize it anymore. Now, here was Lena Olin exibiting the full capacity of her greatness - equal parts loving mother and twisty snake, Jack was at the edge of his wits, Sydney was frantic and focused, and Nadia, thankfully, wasn't that important except to earn welcome gooeyness out of Olin. How exactly did this happen?

Season 3 was widely viewed as a disappointment at the time, but at the beginning of season 4, it seems fans like me were nostalgic for its chaos and ambition. To say the format for the season stretched the limits of credibility does a disservice to the limits of credibility. A top secret CIA agency under the control of Arvin Sloane despite his so recently having been sentenced to death for treason?! One with the lamest acronym in the history of acronyms (that being APO: Authorized Personnel Only)? No amount of Rimbaldi-artifact-transferring makes that swallowable. And the theoretical reconfiguation of the show, while noble, only made matters worse - a covert-op-of-the-week sameness took over in an ostensible attempt to make this look like season 1 again. But as this opened the door for plotlines that ranged from ridiculous (a Russian Stepford Village of secret uber-spies) to embarrassing (umm, vampires?), any number of us long time fans were about to give up. There was brief reprieve in "Detente," a masterpiece exploiting Sydney's seething distrust of Sloane, climaxing in a cunning monologue about Sloane by an undercover Sydney to an insignficant baddy on a boat - it's one of the finest hours of Jennifer Garner's acting career. Still, it seemed like an aberration - the plots never got past their high predictability. And Nadia, as played by the gorgeous Mia Maestro, I'm afraid, is too much of a cold fish - her woe-is-me mommy issues are grating, and her unconvincing flirtation with Weiss - tv's most sexless and sparkless romance - seems there just to create a Weiss-Vaughn buddy repartee that's uninteresting to a fault.

Then came "Tuesday" - Sydney's buried a live, APO's locked down, and for some contrived reason Marshall's the only one who can save the day. In the process, he resurrects the show. From there, everything works - a cunning Derevko nemesis arrives and the world actually feels in danger again! Joel Grey as a second Sloane! Jack's near-fatal attempt to save Sydney! Vaughn as a rogue agent (a far more convincing meltdown than his yeah-right freak out over Lauren in season 3)! And no amount of words can convey the greatness of seeing Olin as Irina again. Combine that with the show's cliffhanging car crash - a fall out of your seat moment to match Sydney's Hong Kong wakeup at the end of season 2 - and we find Alias in full addictive mode again, even accepting that it may never again reach to its unmissable stride of the second season.

After the disappointment of season 3 to many fans, Alias goes back to basics. Alias basically started over. A new night of the week helped Alias grab its best ratings ever for season 4, and unlike the first 3 seasons most of these episodes play as stand alones, and with the complexity of most of the storylines, that may have helped new viewers jump into the action without needing to hear the back story.

Being a hardcore Alias fan, I didn't like the idea of stand alones at first. Part of the reason I love the show is the season long storyline that twists and turns after every episode. Having said that, the first two episodes of season 4 blew me away, with one exeption. The cliffhanger of season 3 isn't even resolved until the beginning of episode 2. That bothered me a lot at first but the more and more I watched this season the more I think it worked out brilliantly. The new plan to make stand alone eps they resolved it in such a way that didn't require you to have seen the cliffhanger of season 3.

There is a season long storyline that starts off slow, really slow, but toward the halfway mark of season 4 it picks up pace at a good speed and it well worth it by the end. The last few eps of season 4 are near perfection, but so are several mid way through.

The episodes in the middle are stand alones as I said but have a continuing storyline thats easy to catch on to but not the main point of the story. Two of the best of the season are episodes 6 and 7, "Nocturne" and "Detente".

The packaging is beautiful. Out of the 5 seasons of this show this set is the best to look at. It doesn't hurt that everyone in this season looks their best. A very nice set with tons of extras as well.

So if anyone has yet to see a full season and is just interested in watching a few (after seeing it you'll want to watch them all!) this is the one to grab since it's easy to follow and will get you hooked immediately.

Alias: Season 4. Wow. The characters have been through heck in the first three seasons, much of it caused by a man named Arvin Sloane, and afterwards by a group called The Covenant. In a stroke of genius, now the best of both SD-6 and the CIA are combined into APO, and headed up by (guess who?) Arvin Sloane, the guy everybody loves to hate.

The usual cast of Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan, Victor Garber, Ron Rifkin, and etc. are accompanied by the absolutely adorable Mia Maestro, who plays Sydney's half-sister Nadia Santos. Throw in some nice guest stars like Angela Bassett, some Derevko sisters (yes, plural) and a person or two who you probably thought was dead, and you've got a great season, culminating in the ultimate family team-up to take down a terrible Rambaldi device that could trigger the next apocalypse! And of course...The Chosen One must battle The Passenger. And only one...will survive. Unless you want either one to be in the next season, in which case, they might live. But I'm not sayin' if they both survive or not, 'cause that'd be a spoiler.

And the big shocker at the very end of the season, wow. Let's just say not everyone is who they claim to be. Now I don't know what happens in Season 5, except that somebody gets a clip or two unloaded in 'em and there's probably a double or a clone or two somewhere in there. (I saw a few moments of the series finale...not knowing how great a show it was at the time.) Whatever the case, while I admit there was a creepy episode or two in there, Season 4 comes on strong and has a well-deserved place amongst the other three seasons, all of which I enjoyed. Trust me, you won't be let down by Season 4 if you enjoyed the other three. I highly recommend it.

I bought all the seasons of this show (Alias) and remembered why I cried when the series was over. Anyone wanting clever stories, mesmerizing locals, and characters you will love (and some you will hate)- they will become your world while watching and you can't wait to see what happens next. So much story in each episode, so much action!

I finde ALIAS one of the best series with a lot of action and suspense. Very recommended... But to understand what is all about you have to see the three previews seasons first...