Be Ready for Your Noodle to Cook
Kirsten and I just finished watching Season 3 of Alias, as well as the season 4 premier which I had taped two weeks ago while she was out of town.

For those of you who haven't seen the show, I'm going to give you a rundown of the plot up through season 3's finale. Try not to let your ears bleed.

The main character is Sidney Bristow, a woman recruited for an agency she believed was a section of the CIA called SD-6. She was recruited over the objections of her father Jack, a founding member and operative for SD-6, who was married to a woman named Irina Derevko who was a KGB spy, though he didn't know it. Sidney was recruited by Arvin Sloane, who worked in the real CIA with Jack Bristow and who later had an affair with Irina; Irina had another daughter by that relationship, before faking her own death to get away from the FBI.

With me so far?

Good.

So, Sidney becomes a double agent for the CIA to help to bring down SD-6 and the other 11 SD cells collectively known as the Alliance, while working for a CIA handler named Michael Vaughn who later shares Sidney's bed, to Jack's great dismay. She later joins the CIA along with her closest friends from SD-6 (which was, of course, an enemy of the state, but don't let that get in the way of protagonism). Then Sidney has to fight off a clone of her best friend and become a brainwashed killing machine for a terrorist organization named the Covenant, while actually surviving the brainwashing and later erasing her memory of the two years when she was held captive.

Sloane, meanwhile, has become a good guy in search of his daughter because a papal architect 500 years prior named Rimbaldi wrote several prophecies which later turned out to be correct, and one as-yet-come-to-be prophecy involving Sidney and her half-sister. Did I mention that at some point, Jack becomes romantically involved with his wife's (they're still technically married, because they never divorced - the world just thought her dead) sister named Kattia, who has become a member of the Russian secret service yet is played by an Italian actress, and who later attempts to stop Sidney from discovering an artifact created by Rimbaldi, because Kattia is looking for it as well on behalf of the covenant, which has also recruited a woman named Lauren to marry Michael Vaughn, as well as her mother - the lovely Ms. Vaughn (actually, she kept her name Reed) and her mother kill their father/husband Senator Reed who is a member of a quasi-governmental Black Committee named The Trust who we never hear from again.

And, finally, the technological officer for the CIA's Los Angeles field office has managed to impregnate his technologically-inclined girlfriend, who refuses to bear a child without first marrying the father, so they get hitched by a CIA agent who has become certified as a minister in the Internet Church of Mammals just for this occasion.

There we go.

Now, there are two possible explanations for the complexities of this show:
1) The writers had all of this planned out before even beginning their writing, so that there would be no loose ends, or
2) The writers just get together a few hours before each filming session and smoke a bowl, then:
"So, let's have Sidney fall in love with a clone of her boyfriend who just happens to be Kazakhstan intelligence."
"The boyrfiend or the clone?"
inhale"Whatever. As long as there's some tight dress."
inhale"Cool. And an explosion. Let's kill Dixon's kids."
"We already did, dude." giggle
"Oh yeah!" Five minutes of uncontrolled giggling. "I'm hungry."

Stay tuned for season 5, which, if it happens, will involve lava lamps. Somehow.