V
verdantheart
Guest
At the outset of “S.O.S.” and “Maternal Instinct”, Sydney sends out an SOS as she eludes Peyton within the cargo ship.
Back in LA, they pick up the transmission, but it is deleted almost as soon as it is received—at Langley's archive. At the ship Peyton says that it's taken care of.
In LA, they discuss the message at a briefing. Jack proposes that they break into CIA headquarters. Since they can't risk tipping off Prophet 5, they must risk charges of treason. He asks whether anyone would like to take a leave of absence, but no one does.
At sea, Peyton finally catches up with Sydney. Sydney takes control, but Peyton says the message went nowhere.
At the CIA, Dixon and Marshall join a tour, Tom heads towards payroll, and Rachel comes in for a job interview. Rachel has brought along a camera phone, which is confiscated and stashed away for safe-keeping until her exit. The phone accesses the computer system. Tom, having talked the payroll clerk out of her seat to work out his problem, now has access and the codes he needs. Rachel, passing the tourgroup, makes a pass to Dixon. Meanwhile, Tom lets Rachel into the server room and continues to look up Witsec records and unlock that area as well. As Dixon and Marshall reach the Kryptos sculpture, Marshall announces that he's decoded it. As Marshall distracts the group, Dixon sprays a substance near a detector. An alarm is set off for anthrax. As Rachel homes in on her records, Tom looks up records regarding the murder of a woman and one Allen Korman. Jack directs Rachel to pull the hard drive containing Sydney's message, which initiates a lockdown.
They have to call Weiss to get them out. Weiss claims he must get Dixon and Marshall to a high-level meeting. They dispatch Dixon after Tom and walk Rachel around the guards and out of the server room.
Back at sea, Sydney and Peyton come to a standoff in a medical area where Sydney discovers a great deal of information about herself. When Sydney is stricken with a bout of pain, Peyton relieves her of the gun. Sydney faints. When she awakens, she finds herself strapped to a gurney. A male nurse tells her that “they're on their way.”
Marshall, meanwhile, reports that the message was deleted by someone with alpha black clearance—which cuts down the possible US Prophet 5 members to one of seven men. When Marshall links the clearance to a secure cellphone, Jack is inspired. He calls a high-level operations meeting in Washington, D.C.
At the meeting, Jack reveals his purpose. All of the attendees (save himself) have alpha black clearance and one of them has ties to Prophet 5. Marshall gets a match and calls the secure phone—Davenport's phone. Jack shoots him, beginning an interrogation on the spot. Davenport admits that Sydney is on a cargo ship in the north Atlantic.
In LA, Tom has his own use for the drive that Rachel brought back, obtaining Korman's location from it.
Sloane and crew look at the selection of cargo ships, selecting the most likely one, one in international waters. Dixon and Tom are dispatched.
On the ship, Sydney sees that her own ob-gyn is present! She asks, “What did you do to me?” The doctor proceeds to remove some amniotic fluid. Peyton receives word that help is on its way and asks how far out they are. The doctor says she needs an hour, but Peyton gives her 40 minutes.
Tom and Dixon find the ship abandoned—except for Sydney.
Sloane, meanwhile, receives a call chastising him for his tardiness in keeping Prophet 5 informed.
Marshall discovers that Tom is looking for the man who killed his wife Amanda. At that moment, Tom is staking the man out. Korman calls him Peter and asks him how he found him. Tom says that he's not there to take revenge, but that he needs to get a message to the Cardinal.
Finally Sydney and Jack are reunited. Jack explains that her abductors saved the baby's life. Sydney tells Jack that she was interrogated, but that she lied to them.
As we shift into “Maternal Instinct,” we find Davenport being transported in a van—which is unceremoniously crashed into by a semi. “God, they're here!” says Davenport, as he crawls out. Irina arrives, telling him, “You compromised our agenda,” and asks whether he told her husband anything about the Horizon. Having confirmed that he said nothing, she kills him.
Dixon tells Sydney that they're to meet her father before returning to APO.
Meanwhile, Devlin arrives at APO on a mole hunt and asks to see the ops files.
Sydney and Dixon meet Jack in the desert, where he tells her that Davenport has been killed. Obviously, there is another mole in APO. Sydney describes what Prophet 5 was after: a particular Alliance mission in France that had to do with Leo 47 Norte. Jack has Dixon rendezvous with Rene to investigate.
Dixon drives Sydney home, insisting that she pack a bag and hide out in a secure location until the baby is born. However, Irina is waiting in Sydney's house. They hug. Sydney says there's “no one else I'd rather do this with.”
Marshall and Jack extract a name and location from the 1999 mission data: Jean Bertrand in Paris.
Later, Jack arrives at Sydney's house, asking “She still here?”
Meanwhile, in Paris, Dixon and Rene pump Bertrand for information by strapping him to the hood of a car and speeding toward a wall. He quickly coughs up the location of a safety deposit box in Vancouver.
Jack, with few resources, agrees to go co-op with Irina to retrieve Horizon. Sydney (already past her last-fly-day, as you recall) insists on going along for the ride. Elsewhere, Peyton decides to crash the party. It's not that she questions Irina's loyalty; it's that she won't take a chance that she's mistaken at this stage of the game.
Jack and Irina pose as grandparents looking to endow a trust fund for their grandchild—just at closing. It's such a generous check, though, how can the manager turn them down? They need a safe deposit box, though, and he's more than happy to oblige.
Rachel, in the meantime, approaches Tom, telling him she knows about his wife and Korman and asks him to promise that he won't do anything stupid. Tom responds with a sob story about seeing Korman's family and walking away.
In the vault, Irina stabs the bank manager with a syringe (looks like that). They open box 135. Sydney warns that Peyton and her crew are entering. Jack detects a booby-trap on Horizon, so they can't open it there. Irina pulls the syringe on Jack, but he blocks her and a struggle ensues, ending with Jack holding a gun on Irina. Sydney arrives, realizing that it was she behind the glass on the ship. “When you couldn't torture it out of me, you came to me as my mother,” she says. “I am your mother,” Irina reminds her. But just then, Sydney is stricken with contractions.
In LA, Sloane is concerned about the mole hunt and the fact that Jack and Sydney are in the field without clearance. Rachel says she can clear the read-only files.
In Vancouver, Irina says she'll help Jack and Sydney escape in exchange for Horizon. Peyton, meanwhile, turns off the power and heads up the stairs. Irina says that she planned to have a helicopter waiting. They head to the roof, but Peyton takes out the helicopter with a shoulder-launched missile.
Jack heads downstairs to take on Peyton and her crew, leaving Irina and Sydney to tend to the birth.
In LA, Sloane and Rachel finish deleting entries.
In Vancouver, Sydney and Irina chew things over. Sydney accuses Irina of wanting her baby. Irina claims she never wanted to have a child in the first place, that she was ordered to have a child by the KGB. She decided that she couldn't be both a mother and an agent, so she chose to fail at being a mother. “You can't do both,” she says. “Watch me,” says Sydney.
Downstairs, Jack explodes a fire extinguisher, taking out Peyton—at least temporarily.
As Jack returns, Irina tells Sydney there is trouble with the birth. The two talk Sydney through it, Jack calming her and Irina telling her what to do and playing midwife. It's a girl, 'natch. Irina disappears—with the satchel, of course. Jack reassures Sydney that they'll find it. Irina calls Marshall for their extraction.
In Bhutan, word arrives of the birth . . . for Vaughn . . .
Comments . . .
At last we see that Vaughn is, indeed, alive. Are we surprised? No. But who is behind this? Is it Jack and Sydney? I've kept my mind open to this possibility all along and Sydney's look followed by Jack's “I'll take care of it” adds credence to this suggestion. Another possibility is, of course, Irina, who would have been at least in some way linked to Vaughn's death by virtue of her connection with Prophet 5. If she is, as usual, playing her double- or triple-agent game, putting Vaughn on ice would definitely be a possibility, and since she is generally the one who sees all, knows all, and tells nothing (oh, great goddess Irina, we bow down to thee), one would assume that she would be behind it or at least know about it. What a refreshing change it would be if Jack and Sydney had finally teamed up to put one over on her!
Heh, are the cards really out on the table? Needless to say Peyton isn't dead, but . . . Is Irina really a bad girl again? Is Sloane really a reluctant mole—and is he the only one left in APO? I'm hoping there are a couple of twists left—ones that make sense.
About Irina, though. Bad girl, good girl, bad girl. After what I've seen, they can't make her realistically bad any more—they'd just have to settle for inconsistent—so I'll just go with the flow. No matter what the case is, though, Irina is a lot more compelling when she's bad, isn't she? This is why I loved the bad-tainted-with-good idea. Here's someone who has her eyes on the prize, yet can still stop and help her daughter through the hard birth. OK, she may have an ulterior motive in helping ensure the health of the child . . . but, hey. On the other hand, I see this more likely as misdirection and that they are going to return to good Irina in the end. After all, Irina didn't have to open up about being ordered to have a child and this might have been a way of slipping Sydney information while seeming to torture her—you know, tipping her off without blowing her cover? This may be her indirect way of addressing Sydney's accusation that Irina wants her child—maybe she's saying that Prophet 5 wants her child and Prophet 5 and her “orders” dictate that she go after the child—or appear to. Further, this may be her way of confirming to Sydney that Prophet 5 is after her child without coming out and saying it. But no matter how I look at it, I like the Irina who snuggles up and turns on you so much better than the one who can somehow be held in prison—against her will—by a complete lunatic for months on end.
In any case, the nursery-nest that Jack found in Hungary should tell them that Prophet 5 has plenty of interest in Sydney's baby. And what better reason for Irina to involve herself, whether good or bad? And what better reason for us to keep our minds open that she will return to good-ol' rehabilitated form in the end?
Irina claims you can't be both an agent and a mother, to which Sydney replies, “Watch me.” Unfortunately, Sydney is giving birth at the time, giving Irina a distinct advantage. Irina makes off with Horizon, so let's score round 1 to her, shall we? Sydney flew up to Vancouver after her last-fly day; she was asking for trouble.
Moving on, we have Tom, who lost a wife, but seems fairly copacetic about the whole thing. All he wants with the murderer is to use him as a messenger to get a note to the Cardinal. Hm, is this guy in the Kremlin, or are they recycling their codenames these days? In any case, this contact must be a pretty old one, and he has to use a very old contact—one in witness protection—to get word to him. What does the Cardinal have to do with all this and what prompted Tom to contact him then? Was it Sydney's abduction? My only comment on this is that it was Jack who brought Tom in . . . I'm hoping that Jack is aware of—and counting on—some connection just like this. At least it's such an old connection (and the message was sent before the birth) that it can't be Vaughn!
Quibbles . . .
Man, there have been so many sudden crashes lately in so many shows they're getting to be routine! Heck, it's only been since the cliffhanger since our last one in Alias.
Peyton seemingly lifeless, but no . . . just a routine Alias day.
Random thoughts . . .
Thank goodness Tom's wife isn't someone we already know. Things are already incestuous enough on this series. I was worried about that, too.
Jack/Irina missions and fighting . . . always fun. The Sydney/Irina argument also worthwhile.
Discuss . . .
Who do you think the Cardinal is? How do you think he plays into this?
Who do you think hid Vaughn? Why do you think it was that person?
Why do you think it was so important to Prophet 5 that Vaughn be killed? Once Prophet 5 was revealed, why couldn't Vaughn have returned?
What do you think Irina's motivations are (is she “good” or “bad”)?
Do you think Irina wants the baby? That Prophet 5 does? Why or why not?
Do you think that Sydney can be both a good agent and a good mother? Why or why not?
Where do you think Sydney and Jack are going (at the end of the show)?
Next:
Anna and Will meet at last.
Back in LA, they pick up the transmission, but it is deleted almost as soon as it is received—at Langley's archive. At the ship Peyton says that it's taken care of.
In LA, they discuss the message at a briefing. Jack proposes that they break into CIA headquarters. Since they can't risk tipping off Prophet 5, they must risk charges of treason. He asks whether anyone would like to take a leave of absence, but no one does.
At sea, Peyton finally catches up with Sydney. Sydney takes control, but Peyton says the message went nowhere.
At the CIA, Dixon and Marshall join a tour, Tom heads towards payroll, and Rachel comes in for a job interview. Rachel has brought along a camera phone, which is confiscated and stashed away for safe-keeping until her exit. The phone accesses the computer system. Tom, having talked the payroll clerk out of her seat to work out his problem, now has access and the codes he needs. Rachel, passing the tourgroup, makes a pass to Dixon. Meanwhile, Tom lets Rachel into the server room and continues to look up Witsec records and unlock that area as well. As Dixon and Marshall reach the Kryptos sculpture, Marshall announces that he's decoded it. As Marshall distracts the group, Dixon sprays a substance near a detector. An alarm is set off for anthrax. As Rachel homes in on her records, Tom looks up records regarding the murder of a woman and one Allen Korman. Jack directs Rachel to pull the hard drive containing Sydney's message, which initiates a lockdown.
They have to call Weiss to get them out. Weiss claims he must get Dixon and Marshall to a high-level meeting. They dispatch Dixon after Tom and walk Rachel around the guards and out of the server room.
Back at sea, Sydney and Peyton come to a standoff in a medical area where Sydney discovers a great deal of information about herself. When Sydney is stricken with a bout of pain, Peyton relieves her of the gun. Sydney faints. When she awakens, she finds herself strapped to a gurney. A male nurse tells her that “they're on their way.”
Marshall, meanwhile, reports that the message was deleted by someone with alpha black clearance—which cuts down the possible US Prophet 5 members to one of seven men. When Marshall links the clearance to a secure cellphone, Jack is inspired. He calls a high-level operations meeting in Washington, D.C.
At the meeting, Jack reveals his purpose. All of the attendees (save himself) have alpha black clearance and one of them has ties to Prophet 5. Marshall gets a match and calls the secure phone—Davenport's phone. Jack shoots him, beginning an interrogation on the spot. Davenport admits that Sydney is on a cargo ship in the north Atlantic.
In LA, Tom has his own use for the drive that Rachel brought back, obtaining Korman's location from it.
Sloane and crew look at the selection of cargo ships, selecting the most likely one, one in international waters. Dixon and Tom are dispatched.
On the ship, Sydney sees that her own ob-gyn is present! She asks, “What did you do to me?” The doctor proceeds to remove some amniotic fluid. Peyton receives word that help is on its way and asks how far out they are. The doctor says she needs an hour, but Peyton gives her 40 minutes.
Tom and Dixon find the ship abandoned—except for Sydney.
Sloane, meanwhile, receives a call chastising him for his tardiness in keeping Prophet 5 informed.
Marshall discovers that Tom is looking for the man who killed his wife Amanda. At that moment, Tom is staking the man out. Korman calls him Peter and asks him how he found him. Tom says that he's not there to take revenge, but that he needs to get a message to the Cardinal.
Finally Sydney and Jack are reunited. Jack explains that her abductors saved the baby's life. Sydney tells Jack that she was interrogated, but that she lied to them.
As we shift into “Maternal Instinct,” we find Davenport being transported in a van—which is unceremoniously crashed into by a semi. “God, they're here!” says Davenport, as he crawls out. Irina arrives, telling him, “You compromised our agenda,” and asks whether he told her husband anything about the Horizon. Having confirmed that he said nothing, she kills him.
Dixon tells Sydney that they're to meet her father before returning to APO.
Meanwhile, Devlin arrives at APO on a mole hunt and asks to see the ops files.
Sydney and Dixon meet Jack in the desert, where he tells her that Davenport has been killed. Obviously, there is another mole in APO. Sydney describes what Prophet 5 was after: a particular Alliance mission in France that had to do with Leo 47 Norte. Jack has Dixon rendezvous with Rene to investigate.
Dixon drives Sydney home, insisting that she pack a bag and hide out in a secure location until the baby is born. However, Irina is waiting in Sydney's house. They hug. Sydney says there's “no one else I'd rather do this with.”
Marshall and Jack extract a name and location from the 1999 mission data: Jean Bertrand in Paris.
Later, Jack arrives at Sydney's house, asking “She still here?”
Meanwhile, in Paris, Dixon and Rene pump Bertrand for information by strapping him to the hood of a car and speeding toward a wall. He quickly coughs up the location of a safety deposit box in Vancouver.
Jack, with few resources, agrees to go co-op with Irina to retrieve Horizon. Sydney (already past her last-fly-day, as you recall) insists on going along for the ride. Elsewhere, Peyton decides to crash the party. It's not that she questions Irina's loyalty; it's that she won't take a chance that she's mistaken at this stage of the game.
Jack and Irina pose as grandparents looking to endow a trust fund for their grandchild—just at closing. It's such a generous check, though, how can the manager turn them down? They need a safe deposit box, though, and he's more than happy to oblige.
Rachel, in the meantime, approaches Tom, telling him she knows about his wife and Korman and asks him to promise that he won't do anything stupid. Tom responds with a sob story about seeing Korman's family and walking away.
In the vault, Irina stabs the bank manager with a syringe (looks like that). They open box 135. Sydney warns that Peyton and her crew are entering. Jack detects a booby-trap on Horizon, so they can't open it there. Irina pulls the syringe on Jack, but he blocks her and a struggle ensues, ending with Jack holding a gun on Irina. Sydney arrives, realizing that it was she behind the glass on the ship. “When you couldn't torture it out of me, you came to me as my mother,” she says. “I am your mother,” Irina reminds her. But just then, Sydney is stricken with contractions.
In LA, Sloane is concerned about the mole hunt and the fact that Jack and Sydney are in the field without clearance. Rachel says she can clear the read-only files.
In Vancouver, Irina says she'll help Jack and Sydney escape in exchange for Horizon. Peyton, meanwhile, turns off the power and heads up the stairs. Irina says that she planned to have a helicopter waiting. They head to the roof, but Peyton takes out the helicopter with a shoulder-launched missile.
Jack heads downstairs to take on Peyton and her crew, leaving Irina and Sydney to tend to the birth.
In LA, Sloane and Rachel finish deleting entries.
In Vancouver, Sydney and Irina chew things over. Sydney accuses Irina of wanting her baby. Irina claims she never wanted to have a child in the first place, that she was ordered to have a child by the KGB. She decided that she couldn't be both a mother and an agent, so she chose to fail at being a mother. “You can't do both,” she says. “Watch me,” says Sydney.
Downstairs, Jack explodes a fire extinguisher, taking out Peyton—at least temporarily.
As Jack returns, Irina tells Sydney there is trouble with the birth. The two talk Sydney through it, Jack calming her and Irina telling her what to do and playing midwife. It's a girl, 'natch. Irina disappears—with the satchel, of course. Jack reassures Sydney that they'll find it. Irina calls Marshall for their extraction.
In Bhutan, word arrives of the birth . . . for Vaughn . . .
Comments . . .
At last we see that Vaughn is, indeed, alive. Are we surprised? No. But who is behind this? Is it Jack and Sydney? I've kept my mind open to this possibility all along and Sydney's look followed by Jack's “I'll take care of it” adds credence to this suggestion. Another possibility is, of course, Irina, who would have been at least in some way linked to Vaughn's death by virtue of her connection with Prophet 5. If she is, as usual, playing her double- or triple-agent game, putting Vaughn on ice would definitely be a possibility, and since she is generally the one who sees all, knows all, and tells nothing (oh, great goddess Irina, we bow down to thee), one would assume that she would be behind it or at least know about it. What a refreshing change it would be if Jack and Sydney had finally teamed up to put one over on her!
Heh, are the cards really out on the table? Needless to say Peyton isn't dead, but . . . Is Irina really a bad girl again? Is Sloane really a reluctant mole—and is he the only one left in APO? I'm hoping there are a couple of twists left—ones that make sense.
About Irina, though. Bad girl, good girl, bad girl. After what I've seen, they can't make her realistically bad any more—they'd just have to settle for inconsistent—so I'll just go with the flow. No matter what the case is, though, Irina is a lot more compelling when she's bad, isn't she? This is why I loved the bad-tainted-with-good idea. Here's someone who has her eyes on the prize, yet can still stop and help her daughter through the hard birth. OK, she may have an ulterior motive in helping ensure the health of the child . . . but, hey. On the other hand, I see this more likely as misdirection and that they are going to return to good Irina in the end. After all, Irina didn't have to open up about being ordered to have a child and this might have been a way of slipping Sydney information while seeming to torture her—you know, tipping her off without blowing her cover? This may be her indirect way of addressing Sydney's accusation that Irina wants her child—maybe she's saying that Prophet 5 wants her child and Prophet 5 and her “orders” dictate that she go after the child—or appear to. Further, this may be her way of confirming to Sydney that Prophet 5 is after her child without coming out and saying it. But no matter how I look at it, I like the Irina who snuggles up and turns on you so much better than the one who can somehow be held in prison—against her will—by a complete lunatic for months on end.
In any case, the nursery-nest that Jack found in Hungary should tell them that Prophet 5 has plenty of interest in Sydney's baby. And what better reason for Irina to involve herself, whether good or bad? And what better reason for us to keep our minds open that she will return to good-ol' rehabilitated form in the end?
Irina claims you can't be both an agent and a mother, to which Sydney replies, “Watch me.” Unfortunately, Sydney is giving birth at the time, giving Irina a distinct advantage. Irina makes off with Horizon, so let's score round 1 to her, shall we? Sydney flew up to Vancouver after her last-fly day; she was asking for trouble.
Moving on, we have Tom, who lost a wife, but seems fairly copacetic about the whole thing. All he wants with the murderer is to use him as a messenger to get a note to the Cardinal. Hm, is this guy in the Kremlin, or are they recycling their codenames these days? In any case, this contact must be a pretty old one, and he has to use a very old contact—one in witness protection—to get word to him. What does the Cardinal have to do with all this and what prompted Tom to contact him then? Was it Sydney's abduction? My only comment on this is that it was Jack who brought Tom in . . . I'm hoping that Jack is aware of—and counting on—some connection just like this. At least it's such an old connection (and the message was sent before the birth) that it can't be Vaughn!
Quibbles . . .
Man, there have been so many sudden crashes lately in so many shows they're getting to be routine! Heck, it's only been since the cliffhanger since our last one in Alias.
Peyton seemingly lifeless, but no . . . just a routine Alias day.
Random thoughts . . .
Thank goodness Tom's wife isn't someone we already know. Things are already incestuous enough on this series. I was worried about that, too.
Jack/Irina missions and fighting . . . always fun. The Sydney/Irina argument also worthwhile.
Discuss . . .
Who do you think the Cardinal is? How do you think he plays into this?
Who do you think hid Vaughn? Why do you think it was that person?
Why do you think it was so important to Prophet 5 that Vaughn be killed? Once Prophet 5 was revealed, why couldn't Vaughn have returned?
What do you think Irina's motivations are (is she “good” or “bad”)?
Do you think Irina wants the baby? That Prophet 5 does? Why or why not?
Do you think that Sydney can be both a good agent and a good mother? Why or why not?
Where do you think Sydney and Jack are going (at the end of the show)?
Next:
Anna and Will meet at last.
