Before 2001, I had no idea who Michael Vartan, Jennifer Garner and Bradley Cooper were. I had no idea the terrific actor that is Victor Garber existed and that Ron Rifkin made such a great villain. In 2001 – before Lost- there was Alias. The connection between the two shows? The creator/executive producer J.J. Abrams. The two shows could not have been more different. Yes, both include mystery, some unexplained supernatural possibilities (Alias will remember “Rambaldi”) and lots of action. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Lost became the phenomenon that it still is. Sure it is captivating and all, but Alias had created an addiction in me that Lost didn’t. For those of you who never caught Alias, here’s the plot (although I should mention that the order we are given the story is more complicated & intriguing than my orderly version).
THE BACKGROUND
Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is a promising college student, with a great boyfriend Danny (Edward Atterton) and loving friends (Will and Francie; played by Bradley Cooper and Merrin Dungey). Her estranged father Jack (Victor Garber) is a businessman she barely talks to and her mother died when she was a kid.
What she told Danny and her friends:
Graduation is taking a tad longer, since she is “working at the finance department of a bank called Credit Dauphine”.
REALITY, as Sydney knows it:
It’s not really a bank. It is SD-6, a secret branch of the CIA and Sydney is a secret agent there. She fights well, speaks many languages and knows her hi-tech gadgets, prepared for every mission by the fast -talking and nice geek Marshall
(Kevin Weisman). Every time she tells her friends, she is going on a business trip, she is actually going on a deadly assignments with her partner/trusted friend Dixon (Carl Lumbly). But Danny proposes ans she feels obliged to tell him. So she does..
He gets into shock and leaves a drunken message on her machine. The agency guys has him killed. Why would CIA kill an innocent civillian? They wouldn’t. They also wouldn’t go after her to kill her.
REALITY
She’s rescued by her absent businessman father and is told the truth: SD-6 is not CIA, in fact SD-6 is an enemy of CIA. Also, he is not a businessman; but a senior SD-6 agent. He offeres Sydney an escape route. But Sydney is upset and she wants vengeance. So she proves herself useful to her boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin). She further proves her loyalty by undergoing tests/interrogations and is cleared. After all, she is the best agent they have. Then she goes to the real CIA and joins them.
There she meets her “handler” Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan– the guy who is supposed to tell her about the counter-missions. Oh,that’s right! Now she is only pretending to be loyal to SD-6, while being true to the actual CIA. Now each mission has a counter one, making the timing harder, the missions more dangerous. She also has to pull this off under the unsuspecting nose of her SD-6 partner, who is genuinely a good guy that doesn’t know what SD-6 is really up to…
Then of course her father isn’t really only SD-6. He is also CIA, and he is loyal to them, not Sloan.
It is full of action. Car chases, gadgets ( lipstick with cameras and all that nice stuff), disguises, plane crashes, travelling all over the world- even 3-4 countries in each episode back to her resident location: Los Angeles.
MISSIONS
Of course as smart, gorgeous and dangerous as she is, Sydney is only human and taking all of the below very badly:
Arvin Sloane:
*Arvin is the man whom she regarded as a father figure until he turned out to be a psychopath and her fiancée killed. He also sent men to kill her. We also know he has lied to her everyday, since her recruitment. Now she has to see him everyday and smile to his face; so that she can bring the whole organization down when the time comes.
Not to mention the fact that she has to live with the fact that she worked for that organization for 7 years, thinking that she was helping the government whereas she had been betraying it.
Jack Bristow
* What is worse than an absent father? Probably a father who lied to you all your life, and seems to be revealing the truth at his own convenience: Oh yes, he has more secrets. He is not just SD-6, he is also CIA-a double agent. He also seems to be deprived of emotion. The guy has a poker face that makes him a great agent and the social bonding skills that make Hugh Laurie’s House seem like a teddy bear. He does love his daughter but he really has to work on the honesty issue. Her mother may not have been a school teacher after all. Telling what happened to her will be a spoiler, sorry…
WILL & FRANCIE
*Oh, she has great friends who know nothing about this secret life so she can only talk about trivial stuff with them and hang out. They love her and for the lives of them can not figure out why Sydney doesn’t leave her boring bank job. Pl?us, Will is a journalist and nosy by nature; and he suspects Danny’s murder was no ordinary crime. If he gets close, he too will be killed so she has to protect him from himself. It gets tricky to lead a double life when you live with one of your friends (Francie) and the other is fixed on solving your dead fiancé’s mystery.
DANIEL HECHT
- * She has to live with the fact that her fiancée Danny was killed by her boss, and because she told him who she is.
- MICHAEL VAUGHN
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If her cover is blown, and he is discovered to be of CIA, they are both screwed (as in risking to be murdered by SD-6)…It really doesn’t help matters that they keep getting closer and become increasingly attracted to each other…Their relationship never lacks adrenaline, friendship, honesty, sexual chemistry, bottled up feelings and not to mention the fact that they both face death almost everyday. It is nerve-wrecking to go on missions and fight together on the field- without being detected by SD-6 and it is worse for Michael to sit and watch as Sydney overtakes one deadly mission after another. So she can tell Michael anything. But she can’t even go out with him. Another thing about her life that drives her mad.
This is as close to a date it gets for Syndey Bristow and her handler Michael Vaughn. She’s being briefed about her missions while pretending to be too strangers streching on the benches. 
So this eventually happens: Sydney and Vaughn get together. But how many episodes does it take? You are just going to have to see it for yourselves. - The Guest Stars
Yes, of course each episode has many guest stars but some of them are remarkably famous and it was certainly fun to see them in those kick-ass episodes: Ethan Hawke, Christian Slater and Quentin Tarantino.
Ethan Hawke appears in Alias episode Double Agent (Season 2, Episode 14) 
Christian Slater appears in two episodes of Alias: Endgame (season 2, episodes 15 & 19) 
Quentin Tarantino appears as McKenas Cole in 4 episodes of Alias. TO SUM UP:Season 1 is brilliant with an incredible season finale.Season 2 does not dissapoint. Moreover it features guest stars that I love; such as Ethan Hawke and Christian Slater.The whole season is amazing and the finale is arguably even more shocking than the first season’s. In season, 3 the show is still good- you hardly get upset with the script but with some actions of some characters (major actions of major characters, to be exact) but after season 3…The show is no longer addictive. It lose its vibe. The characters and their actions aren’t interesting anymore. The story twists are sort of desperate and you say “Come on,what the…?” a lot. Don’t even get me started on the 5th season. Of course they are worth watching in the sense that you want to know what eventually will happen to characters you have come to care about but still, if you quit with the 3rd, I am not gonna blame you.My guess is J.J Abrams found a new show idea that he liked (Lost) and fell out of love with Alias. Writers wrote with the philosophy of “anything goes” and since this is not a soap opera, they failed.However I watch the first 3 (and especially 1st &2nd) seasons over and over. After all, real life is never going to get that interesting and exciting. It is fun to be in a world of lies, deceit, passion, fights and chases and espionage for about 40 minutes each episode.