Uhh, did I say that I don't watch the episodes when they air? Because I do. I don't mind seeing them for the second time on TV. You can see them early and then see them again when they air. It's not like repeat Alias viewings would bore you...

Downloading is a lot of hassel for me; im on 512kb and downloading can take days when i need my bandwidth.

Anyway; the Alias reviews are once again, strongly in its favour - claiming that the pregnancy is promising to bring an exciting new leash of life to the show; and the new characters add to the show rather than try to take over.
They call it "clever" and "exciting" . All critics seem to agree that Alias has the real ammunition for a very interesting year; but how they use it is up to what the shows producers decide to do with the show. They could make it great; or the could makeit aimless.


Critics have been surprisingly candid in their reactions to the crash cliffhanger of last season; one saying

"Not a second after I resumed playback, the final nanoseconds of the broadcast showed a big truck slamming into the driver's side of the car. That's when I exclaimed. It's a family newspaper, so I can't print what I said.
"

"Alias,'' returning in a new time slot (8 p.m., ABC) is that the show is looking at a very interesting year after last season's spectacular cliffhanger (right) and as it enters what could be its final season.
"

Meanwhilst Night Stalker has been called "bland", a "dissapointment" and that it fails to "measure up" another calls it a "muddled mess," with an "awful lot of reshooting" i wonder how much it will build on Alias,

Lena Olin is apparently going to be back for bits of the new season. Ive heard this leaked before but Burlington Free Press seems to confirm it

"Hello, goodbye in spy world: We'll see Syd's supercool mommy, Irina (Lena Olin), again this year, but fellow APO agents Weiss (Greg Grunberg) and smokin' half-sister Nadia (Mia Maestro) assume a much lower profile. New spy kids on the block include Balthazar Getty ("Into the West") as a new APO black ops agent and Rachel Nichols ("The Inside") as a hot new technical whiz schooled by Syd. Hey, she's an expectant mother and a rockin' good mentor.

Dangerous new assignment: A tough new time slot opposite Thursday night rivals "Survivor," "The O.C.," "Smallville," fading "Joey" and "Everybody Hates Chris," UPN's hot new comedy. Good luck, Syd. Hope it's not a mission impossible"

You know, I've always worried myself over Alias ratings in the past, but I figure it's such a lost cause at this point (and with the show presumably coming to a close) that I'm just going to try to enjoy the remainder while it's here.

I'm not expecting good numbers tomorrow, but... meh. Doesn't matter.

ALIAS maybe strong enough to beat JOEY, but WILL AND GRACE will make sure that doesn't happen. CHRIS has not much competition against ALIAS as they are different shows. SMALLVILLE hopefully this is the last season, the writing on SMALLVILLE isn't strong enough for ALIAS fans to record ALIAS, so many people will be recording SMALLVILLE. SURVIVOR may lose more viewers tonight.

Will and Grace will only do mildly better than Joey. By mildly, I mean two or three-tenths of a rating point. It rarely did much better last season, so I expect no more, even with a live premiere.

Will and Grace is in its final season for a good reason.
Funny? Yes. Unorginal? God yes. The shows basically become a rooster of celebrities and the actual story/character development stopped about 4 seasons ago.

Is it just me or did ABC suddenly kickstart the entire Alias buzz campaign on the actual DAY OF PREMIERE? Ive seen it on nearly every media site around at its #5 on the top searched for shows on Zap2it, 2 down from Lost.
http://tv.yahoo.com/feature/alias.html

Also. No Screener was sent to reviewers; Can someone tell me if the episode was good or not and put spoilers in protected blocks until i leave the thread?

Omg everyone died and JJ Abrams is sitting here telling us why we should watch Lost. Powerful and unexpected series finale.

I don't get the episode till Sunday.

Oh, so CTV is still airing them on Sunday's now? That's good I can catch what I missed then, damn everything being on Thursday's at 8. From what I saw it looked promising.

I'm fairly certain it is. If it's not, I'll be pissed.

Just checked, Sunday 4pm EST. Veronica Mars follows at 5pm EST.

Close lol.

This was the most discussion-worthy episode of Alias ever, and nobody has anything to say?

I'm ambivalent.

Let me sleep on it.

Oh, and before anyone starts discussing anything, I think this is only necessary...

MICHAEL:

SPOILERS. HARDCORE. BEWARE.

well...yeah. i am upset, though not for the reason that you'd think.


SPOILERS

s
p
o
i
l
e
r
s

h
e
r
e

vaughn is dead. i do believe that he is dead dead, and not oh-he'll-be-back-somehow dead, it was just so final. the big reason that i am upset is that i wasn't surprised, it didn't shock me. Vaughn getting gunned down while Syd saw the whole thing should have left me in shock, but thanks to all the talk that Vartan may or may not leave, i didn't expect Vaughn's death but i was expecting that it might happen. i wasn't officially spoiled or anything, just the talk of it ruined it for me. my friends who have not seen Alias who are watching the DVDs really have an advantage there. by the time they get around to S5 it'll be into S6 (or done completely) so they won't hear any reports about who is or isn't or might or might not come back next season, they will just assume that Vaughn is as big a player in S5 as he was in 1-4.
Now on to the ep itself. I miss the good old days when J.J. was actually involved in the show. When he would write a few, and direct sometimes, as opposed to his name just popping up in the opening credits and that being all of his involvement. while i think that the episode was good, i just miss the J.J. Alias touch (that actually hasn't been around since the end of S2 and a little, i stress little, in S3)
Jack didn't have any cool Jack moments that he typically does, Dixon was there and then not, Marhsall was great as always, Sloane made an appearance, but it was mostly the Syd and Vaughn show, which was fine. I know this sounds like complaining, but it isn't. i enjoyed it, there were many parts that i smiled slash laughed at, parts that i was genuinely sad, and am still in love with Alias, but i just feel "meh". Vaughn's death should have made me upset, but it didn't really. the only thing that i found sad about it was thinking that this is now the SECOND time this happened to Syd. Her boyfriend proposes, they very shortly after that he is killed and she finds the body. it will be a long time before Syd has another relationship, if she ever has one again. I would imagine that after her baby is born, that will be her life. She will be a single mom whose life is her family. That's all for now.

um...wow???


it was an excellent episode is all I really have to say. Kinda reminded me of the pilot episode but that didn't make it any less good, in part cause more was at stake this time aorund. Regardless of all the rumors I had heard really wasn't expecting it at all.

So for some reason I was extremely worried that this season would kinda...suck?? But if the rest of the season is nearly as good as this episode...

I don't know if it was the fact that I was watching the recorded tape and not at the actual hour it aired, but I felt it was very average, pretty meh!

I actually have to watch it again because I was having a REALLY hard time following the entire Vaughn plotline, who all these other people were, what his fatehr was doing... I sort know but then again, I realize I didn't quite get it.

I don't know, it could have been from the articles and talk about it, but Vaugn's death just wasn't really that great; it felt like it was something in the plot that needed to be executed and they did. He's the freakin male lead and that's all we get? And what would piss me off more is if he came back; like if that wasn't really him and just the genetic clone (like Franci and Irina)

Alias will never ever be what it was and that is because J.J. Abrams is not really attached to it anymore. I'm having some memories now (it's been so long I had forgotten how completely obsessed I was with Alias) of how I used to go completely insane over Alias while watching it; like my body was going to explode from the inside out because of all the great momentum of the show. I remembered it now because that's how I feel when I watch Lost now.

I'm still going to watch it every week, it's still going to be among my all tiem favorite shows and they might bust out some great arcs this season but I have finally come to the realization, Alias peaked at Season 2 and it was all downhill from there; I'm not saying it was a steep downhill... it just never got to recapturing the brilliance of the first two years.

And even though this new Vaughn revelation was a very interesting twist (one that I liked) I just couldn't get into it and believe the writers because you know that it wasn't planned all along... you know that they never really expected this would happen and so there was never any trace of it!

I don't know... my feelings towards Alias are very bitter-sweet right now as it seems to finally be ending. Maybe I'm just pissed cuz I still ahvent watched Lost's second episode.... but I will rwatch this premiere of Alias and hope that next week gives us something better and more concrete to build on. This episode was basically cleaning the floor for the new season to start; they did what had to be done to set up some fo the plot and nwo we're going to get into it.

All right, here's my take. Quick, though, because it's late. (Remember, Michael, SPOILERS.)

I was disappointed at first. I didn't really feel like we were getting anything new or exciting. And then the end came, and I was completely unaffected, kind of like Nate's death in Six Feet Under.

HOWEVER...

I have to credit the folks at the Television Without Pity forums, because although this thought was in the back of my mind by the end of the episode, it wasn't until I read some stuff over there that I became convinced. I'm now about 70% sure that...

Highlight to read:

Vaughn is NOT DEAD, folks. He's NOT.

Why?

Again, highlight:

1. The affirmative glares shared between Jack and Sydney throughout the last ten minutes of the episode.

2. No Sydney sobbing.

3. No body shown in the casket.

4. I didn't spot this, but someone mentioned Sydney giving Vaughn something to drink right before his 'heart stopped.'

5. It's ALIAS.

So to me, at least, it looks like daddy helped Vaughn get away.

So pretty much if that's true, I think we just saw a great season premiere.

If not, a miscalculated, kinda dumb one.

My thoughts. Done.

Tell me I just didn't blow your guys' minds.

Mmmk, it's bed time.

Could someone explain Vaughn's secret? I couldn't make heads or tails of it.

Im sorry but i HAVE to download this episode.
Theres no way i can possibly wait.
Anyone know a good source for it?

P.S thanks for putting the spoilers in white guys - I appreciate it alot and will bow out of this thread after ive seen the first episode ; aside from one guy who wrote "Vaughn is dead" in the first line which was a grreeeeat help

Alias is now zap2it.coms top searched for show

1. Alias (ABC)
2. Lost (ABC)
3. House (FOX)
4. Smallville (WB)
5. Reunion (FOX)

Just watched the premiere
I cried like a baby; which is more than Sydney did anyway. Fantastic. Great, I loved it. Theres so many interesting new themes set up rather than in season 3 and 4s debut where they were like resolving whatever happened last season and saying "Time for a mission!" this time; theres a cliffhanger, theres new arcs emerging. Its fantastic. Its too early to tell; but i really felt like this was an older season episode.

Wow; i didnt feel at all like they were trying to "clean the slate" as has been mentioned; rather i felt like they were going back to season 1 and 2 and saying - you know what - theres reasons behind whats happened....that you guys didnt know about - and its the most engaging episode of Alias in a long, long time. Certainly its the best premiere since season 2's.

I just feel its started to hark back to the old days and now this has definately added a very interesting dynamic to sydneys life.

The whole Lena Olin is returning rumour adds spice to the fire. And I must say i found the Eliode Bouchez's character to be very interesting. Rachel Nicols short screentime was meh, even if shes pretty i think she'll make a good supporting character - like Wiess.

I too believe that Vaughn is very much...well i dont think hes in the casket.

FYI [SPOILER AHEAD FOR EVERYONE]






..


It's been confirmed that Vartan will be in future episodes - wether in flashbacks or actually being present - we dont know. Also JJ Abrams has said that "Its not how it appears" and mentioned that "In Alias nothing is as it seems" or something along those lines. I think the lack of hoopla around the death of Vaughn is probobly due to the fact that he isn't dead.