Alias is a shade tokenistic in how it depicts other cultures, and is fairly white monocultural in the lens it views the world, so while it’s good to see Lumbly getting dramatic meat to chew on as Dixon, it’s a shame it comes at the expense of destroying the one reliable, secure family unit on the show in the process, and sees Vaughn become his most self-righteous in trying to get the damaged Dixon removed from field duty: “If he makes some mistake out there, it could get you killed!” he tells Syd.
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Alias has never particularly been aware of a distinctive element of black culture in the ethnic characters it has included on the show, and there’s an argument that Carl Lumbly and especially Merrin Dungey have been among the most underused main cast in the series to date (perhaps only Kevin Weisman being the exception). It is a shame that Alias does, in doing so, reinforce certain stereotypes about black culture in having Dixon immediately turn to self-medication after Diane’s death in order to keep his mind clear. Pinkner’s script here is making up for lost time by taking Dixon to the absolute brink of emotional security and even sanity. It is a tremendous amount of character development packed into a short time, perhaps designed to make up for all of the episodes that Alias effectively ignored the character completely. Over the course of seven hours of Alias, Dixon has discovered he was secretly working for a crime organisation, almost lost his wife Diane to those secrets, joined the CIA, accidentally shot and killed Emily Sloane, and watched Diane be horrifically murdered in a revenge car bombing. This really does mirror Truth Takes Time quite clearly, with this time Dixon in the crosshairs as opposed to being the one behind the trigger, and it shows just how far the character has travelled in just a matter of episodes. “I’ve got NOTHING to LOSE!” he barks, clearly at a point of desperation (because he actually has two kids to lose), as Vaughn is ordered to potentially take him out.
In step with Truth Takes Time recently, Countdown also chooses to begin with the in media res technique, opening on the point that Dixon is threatening to detonate a bomb on mission. Indeed, for all Rambaldi’s prophecies and mythology influences Alias in the next three seasons, we never quite get an episode like Countdown again, where the prophet’s hand reaches out from the 15 th century and directly threats to destroy the world of the 21 st.
Countdown suggests Rambaldi could see the future as well as create technology that was centuries ahead of his time, and in many ways beyond our own. The very conception of Rambaldi was as ‘Nostravinci’, a fusion of these two legendary figures of the Renaissance, but while Alias has given us plenty of examples of Rambaldi as Da Vinci, there have been few points to date where he could be compared to Nostradamus. In that sense, it almost hits the pause button on the thrust of the Rambaldi narrative and the majority of the other storylines, to facilitate these two key character arcs.Īt the same time, Countdown chooses to hone in on an aspect of the Rambaldi mythology which has never been expressly explored, outside vaguely of the nebulous quatrains in The Prophecy: the idea that Rambaldi is not just analogous to Leonardo da Vinci but also Michel de Nostradame, the 16 th century prophet who predicted, with varying degrees of accuracy that have been questioned by historians for centuries, a wide range of future apocalyptic events and key points in ‘future history’. Gaborno’s story-certainly contains ongoing pieces of the narrative in play, but it chooses to specifically focus on two characters who are going through the same trauma in very different ways: Dixon and Sloane, both of whom killed each other’s wives. This year, I’ll be looking at Season Two’s 22-episode run in detail… Countdown is quite a strange episode of Alias, especially considering the placement of it toward the end of Season Two.Ī season ago, The Solution began establishing the key narrative pieces that would build up into the finale, that played out over the next two episodes, but Countdown doesn’t quite operate in that way.
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Window.In 2018, I began my first deep-dive TV review series looking at JJ Abrams’ Alias, which ran from 2001-2006.
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