Alias Season Finale…Goodbye Friends (Recap & Spoilers)

Well it’s over.  After 5 years, last night we had to say goodbye to Sydney Bristow.  I thought the season finale epitomized what made Alias so special for all these years…it was exciting, smart, heartfelt, and satisfying.  I was sad to see my once favorite show leave the air, and I did shed a tear at the “Thank you for five incredible years” tag at the end of the show.

Julie has written her last recap for Alias.  A special THANK YOU to Julie from all your readers at GiveMeMyRemote.com for writing such awesome recaps for us.  I’m hoping this isn’t the last we hear from Julie.  Show her the love and tell her how much you want her back next season for more recaps.  Thanks again, Julie, I am so glad you joined our team. Make sure you check out Julie’s blog, TV and Sympathy.

Alias: “Reprisal/All the Time in the World”

We’re in the Prophet 5 bunker that Syd and Vaughn discovered a couple episodes back, surveying a wall of Prophet 5 casualties and suspected members. Syd’s voiceover describes how Prophet 5 had infiltrated the highest parts of government and attained an enormous amount of power. They believed it was run by 12 people, but no one knew who…until now. “I’ve lived with secrets all my life, and I’m done,” declares Syd. You go, girl. It’s on.

We’re in Sydney, Australia. Syd descends a staircase in a lovely leopard-print dress. She orders a martini, takes a few photos of someone with a lipstick camera, and is about to leave when she hears a couple names that sound familiar–names of Prophet 5 members. Jack tells her to get pictures, but not to blow her cover.

Meanwhile, the other APO’ers are scattered everywhere—Rome, Siberia, Bangkok, London–attempting to obtain pictures of various members of Prophet 5.

Syd attempts to pose as a waitress to get the additional pics, but her cover is blown and she has to race away from security. Up on the roof, she attaches herself to a harness, does a daring dive and takes a couple pictures of her targets on the way down to the ground. And with that, kick-ass rooftop stunts are added to the list of things I’ll miss about this show.

Once they’ve gathered all the pictures, APO put faces to the names on the board down in the bunker. Now they know who the 12 are, but they can’t just go grab them. They need to plan it out–arrest them simultaneously to avoid tipping them off. Jack instructs Marshall to track their movements, as the group wonders about how to deal with Sloane. I’m going to go out on a limb and say I think it should involve severed limbs. 

Sloane, meanwhile, is counseling Peyton and Sark that they need to make themselves valuable so Prophet 5 won’t just off them once they hand over the amulet. There’s some sparkage between Sark and Peyton, which is to be expected, since they’re both crappies – charming rentable amoral professionals.

It’s the middle of the night, and everyone’s awake. Syd’s poring over copies of Page 47, concerned about what the Enigmatic Old Dude told her in the prison, about the stars falling from the sky. Vaughn wonders if she really believes it, reminding her that even if she does, she climbed the Mount Subasio and saw the sky, rendering the prophecy invalid. He reassures her that he won’t let Isabelle grow up without a mom. 

Marshall, also awake at home, climbs in bed with his wife, Carrie, attempting to get a little QT. A noise from Mitchell’s room interrupts Marshall’s amorous overtures and he gets up to check it out. After a while, Carrie gets up and goes into Mitchell’s room, where Mitchell’s alone, asleep, with the window wide open and the curtains eerily blowing in the breeze. No sign of Marshall.

Tom stops by Rachel’s, a little drunk. She invites him in and offers him a coffee. They’re either going to get down, or he’s going to kill her. I’m not really sure what to believe, but either of those two things will be more interesting than the two of them talking about his guilt over his wife and her insecurity with her job performance and…ohh…now there’s kissing. They break apart, and when Rachel leaves to get the coffee, Tom, looking conflicted, heads out the door. When she comes back, she hears a knock at the door. Sark’s there, and he grabs and subdues her.

Marshall’s tied up and being interrogated by Sloane and Peyton, who want him to access US geographical data and locate a particular cavern described by Rambaldi. Peyton gets some pliers and appears to cut off one of his fingers as he screams. Despite the torture, he won’t give in, saying “I want Mitchell to look up to me, to be proud of his dad.” So he won’t help. Sloane has daddy issues of his own, seeing his Nadia hallucination again, who explains he’ll never break Marshall.

Syd and Jack comfort Carrie, who doesn’t understand why someone would take Marshall–he’s just a video game designer. Syd explains that Marshall couldn’t tell her what he was doing, and Carrie offers to come to APO and help with the technical side of things in her hubby’s absence. Tom calls Jack from Rachel’s to let him know she’s missing too. With both their tech people gone, they could sure use the help.

Sark attaches electrodes to Rachel’s body and turns on the power as she screams. Dixon posits that Sloane took Marshall and Rachel, because he needs something from them, and won’t hesitate to kill them once he gets what he needs.

Syd’s at her car, about to take Isabelle to her sitter, when she turns around to see a very Men-in-Black-looking Sloane. I wonder if he birthed a squid baby earlier that day. Nah, he’s probably the Tommy Lee Jones to Sark’s Will Smith. Sloane hands Syd a cellphone and tells her to tell Marshall to comply with his requests. Syd does, saying to Marshall that his life is more important, so he should do whatever they ask. She asks if he has anything he wants to tell Carrie. When he starts to say he loves her, and he’ll finish reading a particular book to Mitchell when he gets back, Peyton shuts the phone off mid-sentence. His task complete, Sloane gets in a car and drives away. I’m telling you, Sloane better suffer before this episode is over. I’m talking some serious “he chose poorly”-type ravaging of flesh here.

They bring Rachel in to see Marshall. Marshall tells Rachel to help him because Syd said it was okay. They do some double-talk discussion of how to get the information – essentially flagging the network with a lot of traffic as a signal to the APOers – while they track down that the cavern is in Italy: Mount Subasio, to be exact. Back at APO, Carrie understands a message Marshall made for her in the book he mentioned. She gets into the network, sees the spikes in traffic Marshall created, and tracks them to Ixtapa, Mexico. Sark, Peyton, and Sloane high-tail it out of there.

Rachel pulls out the underwire out of her bra, opens her handcuffs, shoots a guard, and generally kicks serious ass right before Syd, Dixon, Tom and others show up to get them out of Ixtapa.

Carrie tells Jack that based on tracking Prophet 5 movement, the 12 are gathering in Zurich. They can bring them all down at once. Jack’s psyched: twelve evil world leaders for the price of one! When he says “Sydney, it’s almost over,” I find it really hard to believe. Syd seems to think it’s a little too easy too, and when she finds out that Sloane was headed for Mount Subasio, she decides to head there first. Vaughn goes with her. 

Mount Subasio is snowy and windy. Syd and Vaughn share a smooch before Vaughn lowers Syd into the cavern by rope. Navigating by flashlight, Syd reaches Sloane, who’s alone, examining the amulet. He doesn’t seem surprised to see her. Sloane tells her a heartwarming anecdote about her rescuing stuffed animals as a child. He’s such a tool. He tells her he’s accounted for everyone — APO, Prophet 5—and explains he had to remove those obstacles. “I wouldn’t want you to be there when it happens.” he tells her. He offers her the chance to leave, saying the only person she can rescue is herself.

The APO’ers, meanwhile, have discovered Sloane may have targeted their location for destruction. Jack orders that they evacuate the subway, calling in a bomb threat to get the civilians out. Tom finds a bomb in an abandoned subway car. He plans to slow it down with liquid nitrogen. I have this idea he’s going to sacrifice himself, trying to slow the bomb too much to allow the civilians enough time to evacuate. And…yeah…that’s just what he does. Just before the bomb goes off, he talks to Rachel over the radio, telling her if he’d had more time, he would’ve asked her out. With tears in her eyes, she tells him she would have said yes. Pity about that enormous explosion; what a cock-block. 

Peyton meets with the 12. She says she has the amulet, but what she’s really got it is a briefcase full of whoop-ass (in the form of two machine guns, which she uses to kill all of them). 

In the cavern, light comes in through an opening, and a prism from the amulet creates some kind of sparkling in the air. Sloane tells Syd she’s not allowed to see it, and shoots the ice below her, causing her to plummet down as the first hour of the two-hour finale ends.

And, abruptly, we’re in the classroom with a mini-Syd. The teacher tells her to close her eyes and ask herself this one question: What do you want to be when you grow up? (A pony?! Just kidding.) Grown-up Syd is unconscious in a bed of snow. Are they trying to tell us the answer was “an icicle”? Vaughn rappels down to Syd, where he gives her CPR, telling her she’s stronger than this. Back in another flashback with mini-Syd, her dad tells her that her mom was in an accident and her mom is dead. “Sweetheart, I need you to be strong right now,” he encourages her. Grown-up Syd regains consciousness, taking deep choking breaths as Vaughn tells her everything’s going to be okay.

Peyton, Sark, and Sloane congregate somewhere with really big missiles. Peyton has brought Sloane some kind of glass-and-metal sphere. A snowglobe of evil? Aww Peyton, you shouldn’t have! No, really, I mean it. You should not have done that. When discussing Sloane’s plans, Sark uses the phrase ‘global genocide’. Just when you thought he couldn’t get any worse…he’s new and improved Sloane! Now with 75% more evil! 

Jack calls Vaughn to tell him about the attack on LA. Vaughn tells him Syd’s fine–she took a pretty bad hit, but she’ll bounce back. Meanwhile, we see scenes of mini-Syd studying a picture of her dead mom, then building a complicated tower out of blocks (the indicator! callback to earlier episodes!). There are some definite parallels being drawn here. Homegirl is resilient.

Witness her again in present day. She’s got an enormous gash on her throat, and she’s pretty down about the whole pesky Sloane-blew-up-LA-and-stole-missiles turn of events. Michael “little miss sunshine” Vaughn tells her,”You and I have gotten pretty good at impossible.” That’s all the pep talk Syd needs, it appears, as she masterminds a plan to find Sloane using bank records, phone records, and some other crap I don’t quite understand. Suffice to say, one montage later they’ve tracked down Peyton. Vaughn and Dixon corner her in an elevator, bring her back to Syd for some good old-fashioned interrogation…with a twist! Instead of, you know, tooth-pulling or a shock bath, they use a trick learned from former best friend Rachel. It’s her (and Indiana Jones’) biggest fear — snakes. She lets them in on the fact that Sloane’s in Mongolia, at some building with the Rambaldi symbol on the roof. 

After a commercial break, Syd’s outdoors with a book and a highlighter. If Francie’s appearance, talking about her former fiancé Charlie weren’t enough to convince us we’re in The Past, Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” playing in the background is evidence that it is like, so early 90’s. Francie and Syd discuss how Syd hasn’t picked a major yet, and Syd says she hates to think of making a decision now that would affect the rest of her life. (Yeah, that would really suck.) Before Francie bounces off, she mentions bringing a guy for Syd to meet. His name is Danny. (Aww, Buttercup! Build him up! Then let him down. Then find him dead in a bathtub at your apartment! Wait…that’s not how the song goes…) When Francie leaves, a dude with a CIA card rolls on up and asks for a moment of Syd’s time.

Sark gripes about ruining his $500 shoes as they enter the building in Mongolia, but Sloane stops him partway in and says the next step is for Sloane alone. Hee. Rhyming is fun. Down in the bowels of the building, Sloane takes out his evil snowglobe. Ghost Nadia appears and he’s excited to share this experience with her. He places the snowglobe in the center of a Rambaldi symbol, and it begins to spin and emanate light.

Syd and others arrive in Mongolia, with a lot of shooting. Syd heads into the building. Sloane’s inside, watching as a glowing, quivering red ball (like at the the end of season one!) levitates above the slowly rotating snowglobe. Syd enters and says “It’s over, Sloane.” She removes the sphere from its holder, and the big red ball goes splat. Sloane wants the sphere back, but Syd wants one good reason why she should give it to him. Sark gives her two–Jack and Vaughn, both in his custody.

Meanwhile, Rachel and Marshall notice someone has been trying to disable their defense satellites–someone in Hong Kong. They ask Peyton who, and she tells them Sloane needed something he didn’t have. He got it from a partner.

Sloane tells Syd if she hands him the sphere, she can walk out of there. When she refuses, saying they can all leave the building and then discuss it, he tells Sydney to remember it was her choice, then shoots Jack in the chest several times. Syd drops the sphere and runs to her dad as Sloane scoops it up all “my preciousss”-like. She turns back to him, and with the most venomous look I’ve ever seen on her, shoots him several times in the chest and right between the eyes, before he falls back into the pool of red liquid created when the ball went squish.

Flashback to Syd giving her dad an envelope of money to pay him back for some of her college. He looks pleased and excited at first when she tells him she got a job, but his face falls when she explains where: Credit Dauphine. He tries to get her to quit, insisting that she focus on school. The conversation they’re having is very season one, back when he knew so much and she resented him without seeing the whole picture. Lots of tension and mistrust.

Cut to present day, where their relationship is so full of love, and Vaughn and Syd are pulling injured Jack out of the building. He’s fading fast, and Vaughn goes to call for help. Dixon sends a medivac unit, but it’ll be a half hour. They try to stop the bleeding.

Sark has made off with the artifact. He’s on his way to Hong Kong, to Sloane’s partner – Irina! Grrr! When Vaughn finds this out from Dixon, he tells Syd and Jack. Jack insists that Syd go to Hong Kong immediately–she’s the only one who can get to Irina in time, who can beat her. “I never wanted this life for you,” he tells her, but “you were far too driven to let someone stop you from becoming who you are.” Syd, choking back tears, tells him the medical team is coming, they can all wait, but he talks over her, telling her he’ll hold out till help arrives. Jack insists she has to go stop her mother. Syd, losing control, tells him she loves him, and rushes off in the truck driven by Vaughn. Jack musters the strength to stand as she leaves, but then he keels over as soon as she’s out of sight.

Umm…crap guys…I’m not crying, but first it’s Enrico Colantoni whose life is in peril, and then it’s Victor Garber…? I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.

Sark arrives in Hong Kong with the artifact. Undeterred by Sloane’s death, Irina tells him to set up the missile strikes in Washington and London. Sark initiates the countdown. Marshall, back at APO, tells Dixon and Rachel that they’ve started the countdown. Fifteen minutes to go. 

Syd arrives in Hong Kong. She watches Irina remove the sphere from the case. “It’s the Horizon,” she tells Irina. That’s the whole reason she did everything, right? Irina says she doesn’t expect Syd to understand. “I learned at a very young age the only currency worth anything in this world is power” – which the Horizon gives her. Irina’s spent a lifetime acquiring power, and with the sphere, she’ll never have to give it up. “Rambaldi is alive, Sydney. Through him we can live forever.” Creepily, as she speaks we see Sloane’s injuries heal and him rise from the red liquid. Great. Is he going to have to sleep in a coffin from now on? Maybe Buffy can come stake him. Please?

“I am through being disappointed by you,” Syd tells Irina. Irina tells her she won’t let anything stand in her way again. Syd tells her mom she’ll have to go through her first. 

Flashback to Sloane telling Syd he’s going to promote her to field officer. But he wants her to understand that the job requires sacrifice, and she needs to be able to live with that. Syd is resolute. “This is my purpose. It’s in my blood. It’s who I am. I have never been so sure of anything in my life.”

And with that purpose, we get a serious kick-ass fight between Syd and Irina. There are broken mirrors and stabbed legs before they are thrown out of a high window onto the roof. They lie on their backs looking up at the missiles streaking across the sky. “As the stars fall from the sky,” Syd repeats. Irina tells her she’s too late, Syd will never beat her. Syd’s undeterred; she didn’t come alone.

Sloane meanwhile, has risen from the red liquid and is having a conversation with his best pal dead Nadia about how he now has “all the time in the world”, before they’re rudely interrupted by an extremely not dead gun-toting Jack. YAY JACK I LOVE YOU!

As a matter of fact, Syd brought Vaughn, who attacks Sark and holds him at gunpoint. When Sark refuses to give him the codes for the missiles, Vaughn shoots him. Sark then says he’ll give him the codes. Wuss. He never wanted to commit mass murder. He just wanted to come out on the winning end. You know, Sark, you’re coming off much more pathetic than I’d thought of you before. Marshall receives the codes and they manage to stop the missiles. Wooo! 

Atop the roof, Irina tells Syd she can’t let her be a complication any longer. “For whatever it’s worth, I truly do love you” she tells Syd. More fighting, and Syd lands a kick that puts Irina onto the glass ceiling of the building, just next to the sphere. The glass begins to crack under her weight as she reaches towards the sphere.

“I never gave your faith in Rambaldi the credit it deserved.” Jack tells Sloane. Sloane offers to help him, knowing Jack is dying, but Jack refuses. He has a different plan. A plan that will never let Sloane hurt Sydney again. Jack can’t kill Sloane, maybe, but he can keep him down there with Jack…and his good friend Senor Explosives, which he brought down with him. Jack: “You beat death, Arvin. But you couldn’t beat me.” Jack pushes the trigger, and there is a blinding explosion. Bye, Jack. I think I might miss you most of all.

Syd implores Irina to get off the glass. She offers Irina her hand, but Irina just keeps reaching out for the sphere. She grasps it just as the glass shatters. “Mom, come back,” Sydney pleads as Irina drops to the ground. We see Irina’s body several stories down, her eyes blank, blood seeping out behind her head. Vaughn arrives on the roof and he and Syd cling to each other without words.

Entombed in the rubble of the Rambaldi building, Sloane calls for Nadia. He can’t move. She says she can’t help him. She echoes his words to him: “You have all the time in the world. Unfortunately, you’ll have to spend it here.” Sloane, ever a ‘glass half full’ kind of guy, says ‘at least you’re here with me’. No she isn’t. She fades out and leaves him alone in the black.

A girl makes sandcastles on the beach. She calls to her Daddy, and since her daddy is Vaughn, I guess that makes her Isabelle. Uncle/Deputy Director Dixon has arrived, and he meets Syd at the beachhouse, holding her second kid, a little boy named Jack. Dixon explains Marshall wanted to come, but Carrie’s stuck at home on bed rest with baby boy Flinkman #4.

Isabelle heads away to unpack her toys as Dixon explains to Vaughn and Syd that he’d like their help on a mission with “sentimental value” — a mission to nab Sark. Dixon tells her it might be fun. Syd counters “That’s what you say every time you show up on my doorstep. The next thing you know I’m jumping over canals in three-inch heels while the napalm explodes around me.” Dixon deadpans: “Yes. That’s how I define fun.” (Three-inch heels? Dixon? After all this time, we find out you’re a cross-dresser? I won’t be able to get the image of Dixon as Dr. Frank N. Furter out of my head now.)

Syd asks for some time to think about it, and as they all head out for a walk, we see Isabelle in her room, creating the block tower. She builds it up, then knocks it down and joins her family out on the beach. 

And we end with the screen saying “Thank you for five incredible years.” No, thank YOU – for the high heels and the napalm and one hell of a great character. Sydney Bristow, you saved the world. A lot.