So I’m watching Alias at the moment. It’s taken me a good few weeks to get to the end of Season 2, but I’ve made it at last. I know it was out years ago, but I’ve just seen it, so it’s new to me.

Before I sit down to watch Alias, I have to put myself in the right mindset. My disbelief has to be not only suspended, but chained up and hung from a steel cable to ensure no chance of escape. The show’s like a patchwork quilt, this huge mass of incongruous and seemingly unrelated bits that they’re trying to jam together into something workable. You have your lipstick transmitters and your bareknuckle kickboxing; your college exams and your CIA wetwork missions; your touching family moments and your brutal slayings. It’s almost like they tried to appeal to everyone by sticking in one scene from every show ever made, with the characters’ names changed so there’s some kind of continuity.

Almost, but not quite. The show’s saving grace is that it seems somehow aware of this. It knows full well that it’s doing something just for dramatic effect, or just to show the ridiculous amount of combat training that Jennifer Garner’s done. It knows that the only reason she has short blue hair in this scene (and only this scene) is because it makes her look fucking hot in the matching blue plastic minidress she’s wearing. Somehow, with a wink and a nudge, it manages to pull it off, somehow turning the cheesiness into entertainment rather than annoyance.

It reminds me of, if nothing else, Moonraker-era Bond. You know, with the cars that turn into submarines and the jetpacks and the giant space stations. It’s the same sort of thing – cheesy scifi-cum-espionage (I think I’m supposed to call it spy-fi) that just about manages to get away with it.

And even though it does occasionally end up with too much sci- and not enough spy- to go with its -fi, it does have some really great moments. The relationship between Syndney and her parents is great, as is her friendship with Will and Francie (before that all goes funny in S2 anyway). Marshal is also a brilliant character, if a little too stereotypical – not that that’s out of place in this show. I can’t stand Vaughn, but that’s just because he’s a French smeghead and there’s not a lot he can do about that, so I’ll let him off.

But. And it’s a big but, so I’m going to take a run-up.

…

But. What the fuck, Abrams!? Why do you insist on doing this crazy shit!? End of series 2, everything’s fine – we’ve had the Big Battle with “Francie” that we’ve seen coming for the last ten episodes, and while it wasn’t as epic as I’d've liked (too much throwing each other through glass, too little actual fighting) it was still good. But now it’s two years in the future for no reason? Why do you do these things!?

Not that this utter ridiculousness is going to keep me from watching the show – it’s still got plenty of value yet. You can tell when it’s gone too far when it’s not readily obvious what’s keeping you watching the show, and I’m not there yet. But this is seriously pushing it, man. This is House territory. Here be dragons.

Besides being a quite entertaining way to spend 45 minutes, Alias is also a useful vehicle for thinking about Lost. As we all know, Abrams’ latest show is a hundred kinds of fucked up. Polar bears, visions, giant black men with Bible sticks… it’s got it all. “We’ve gotta go back!” But you can really see the evolution of this kind of thing in Alias. You’ve got the Rimbaldi stuff for the utterly incongruous plot feature that nobody’s quite sure about – what the hell has a 16th century soothsayer-cum-inventor, a la Da Vinci, got to do with a show about today’s CIA? – of which Lost has far too many to list. You’ve got the troubled familial relationships that both shows explore in depth. You’ve got the shameless retconning.

I was going to say that Lost is Abrams now thinking “Okay, so this sort of thing worked pretty well in Alias, but how far can we push this before people go insane?” – but really, this whole two-year gap thing is just as crazy as any shit Lost ever pulled, if not moreso. I think I’ll have more to say once I’ve finished season 3 of Alias, but for now – good god.