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The Show: I would never expect much from a spy show by the same guy who gave us Felicity. However, is consistency too much to ask for? Sure, Buffy the Vampire Slayer fought a brand new villain each season, yet she never threw away her vampire stakes only to say "This is boring; I'm going to go fight bugs, instead..." Alias, as early as season 3, went through some serious overhauls...none of them very good. Face it, fanboys: as of season three, this show started to look a little goofy.

Yes, I said it: this show's third season is goofy. No, not goofy as in "don't take it seriously and just have fun with it"; goofy as in...remember that season of The Six Million Dollar Man, when they decided to have Steve Austin fight bionic bigfoot?!? Only the most devout fan would say that was a great part of the series. It was ridiculous! It wasn't just, as the cliché goes, "jumping the shark" (the moment any series goes so far, they can never top themselves). It was just plain goofy.

Season three was already dangling from a thread over "is this the same show or not?" territory, when season two had the CIA thwart SD-6, making Sydney a regular agent, not a double agent. Then the second season cliffhanger rolled along, telling us that Sydney has been presumed dead for two years. Her lover, Vaughn, is now married; a concept as inane as if he had mourned her death a mere week, started dating in a mere month, and got engaged just in time for an August wedding. Talk about "getting over it"...! Meanwhile, Sydney's arch nemesis, Sloane, is a reformed bad guy. Yep, according to him, he assembled the pieces of the Rimbaldi device and it said, "peace," changing his outlook on life forever. Again: this is a thought as inane as if you were to tell me your typical TV villain merely needed to be told "Don't do that, you...you cad!" and suddenly they'd all drop their guns and share a group hug. Oh, come on.

Okay, enough editorializing; on to the season itself. In short, this was a season with Sydney trying to find out what happened in her missing two years, and along the way, she must deal with Vaughn's wife, Lauren (new series regular Melissa George). Ah yes; Lauren. The season's biggest enigma. I must admit that the season began, impressively enough, with Lauren portrayed as a good, adoring wife --where Sydney just had to deal with it-- and yet the script writers quickly caved in to fans' pressure, and made Lauren's motives more and more questionable, just so Syd and Vaughn could get together again ASAP. This all led to a ridiculous turn of events where, by the finale, Vaughn is even ready to shoot Lauren in the head. Excuse...me?!? It's one thing to say Vaughn is a fickle jerk who can marry a woman less than two years after the "love of his live" dies, though now you say he wants to shoot this wife, in just under a year of marriage...?!? Again, I must say: Oh, come on.

This is alluding to some spoilers, as to Lauren's true intentions. To me, you cannot "spoil" something that is already rotten. Changing Lauren from a unique three-dimensional character into a seedy double agent cliché was absolutely ludicrous. You cannot say such plot twists are "spoilers," when they made no sense. These are turns of events brought in because fans of the Sydney/Vaughn romance demanded them, not because anyone could've possibly planned them. If they did plan such twists from the very beginning, answer me this: why would someone as allegedly seedy and conniving as Lauren marry Vaughn in the first place? It made no sense to her ongoing plans, and had no purpose aside from "Well...just because." Oh. Come. On.

There was one saving grace of the season, however; that of Sydney's missing years, and the implication she was working, for a short time, for the other side. It's the occasional question all season, as to whether she was truly working for them, or a good guy working undercover, or a good guy working undercover yet actually turned into a bad guy, by various brainwashing techniques. There is even the occasional dream sequence implying that an "evil Sydney" is just waiting to burst out from "real" Sydney's body, ready to return to her dirty work. Unfortunately, not even a plot potential as intriguing as this could survive in the poor writing of this season. Spoilers intact (this time); we learn the meaning of the "double Sydney" dreams, and quite frankly, it's utterly laughable. Why not have Lee Majors guest star, and have "evil Sydney" be a fembot? That's far more believable than...oh, never mind.

Some fans will disagree with this. Such fans are the sort who love the series to such an extent, it can do no wrong. I'm sure these people will tell me that the plot twists this season were great for series ratings (they weren't). They'll tell me the series was far from at risk of being cancelled this season for such laughable shenanigans (it was), and that message boards were all in favor of them (they weren't). They'll tell me the series isn't in dire straights for such shenanigans (let's put it this way: the series is not slated to return until mid-season, in January 2005!). They may even tell me they actually liked the plot twists this season; plot twists so inane, most fans hoped that the long-sought-after "Rimbaldi device" would turn out to be a time machine, so Sydney could go back and erase this season entirely. This is immaterial to fanboys, claiming this was a great season after all.

The DVD: As this DVD has not yet been released, only the intended extras can be listed here. Maybe I'll rent this season just to review them, but...most likely not. For now, the extras that are planned to be here include:

...of course, this is presuming the season finale didn't annoy you too much, and you still want to see this season at all. Here's hoping, right?

	Final Rating : Near Miss. With plot twists only acceptable to the most devout of fanboys, this third season of the series began with a stupid plot twist, and spent all season trying to recover. It barely did.
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Alias: Season 3

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