alias season 3 is not even close to as good as seasons 1 and 2 (what is) but what I love is it's so MAD. from everyone else’s perspective sydney bristow came back from the dead; from sydney’s perspective, which is also ours, she woke up one day and found out two years had passed and everything was different. everyone wants her to smile and be gentle and instead she seethes. I will never ever forget the feeling of being 14 years old and expecting her to say yes of course I'm fine when vaughn came to check on her, only for her to eviscerate him and tell him she's doing horrible and by the way he was a bad boyfriend for not believing she was alive after they identified her dead body in the charred remains of her apartment. that one rewired my brain. it was better that she was barely making sense. women didn't have to be small; women could be fucked up in a way that takes up space. sydney's a brilliantly realized character in the first two seasons of alias — she's self-righteous alongside her vulnerability, and as smart as she is she gets rash and illogical whenever it gets personal — but the way she and the show keep so many balls in the air dazzles you into thinking she's always going to be able to cope this well. and then in season 3 she kind of comes back from the dead wrong. but not really back from the dead and not really wrong, because she's just keeping it real. she's being a little mean. she picks fights with her ex-boyfriend's new wife and admits "I hate her." and when her ex needs her help fixing the problems he caused, sydney stands in front of him in sunglasses with her arms crossed. cool! ALSO!!! her evil ex-boss has rehabilitated his image and is now a global humanitarian because bad men are given infinite second chances no matter how many bodies their empire is built upon. but sydney won’t forget. she literally has no memory of his rehabilitation, and neither do we, and she's not buying it, and neither are we. it’s a vacuum in the narrative. he asks her to believe he's done the work and she says no when no one else will. and isn't that how the whole world feels.
it’s a season of almost complete isolation in the wake of this violent series of violations: her body, her mind, her home, her relationship, and now she’s even being told she should be nicer to the man who killed her fiance and her best friend. and I’m not letting the writers off the hook for one of those violations (they took her ova), but the way the season and the show are anchored in her perspective is emotionally visceral in a way that covers a few sins. when sydney was a child she was hardwired not to be brainwashed (trained by her father, one of the only men she actually gets closer to in season 3 — a violation circling back around to being the only kind of love she knows) and I think alias is sort of like that. it’s so hardwired to tell the story from sydney’s point of view that even when it isn’t totally facing the consequences of the plot (she gets one episode to cry that they took her ova) they’re still deeply felt. one thing alias always understands is the cruelty of expecting a woman to smile through her suffering, so the more she suffers the angrier the show intuitively gets. so sydney just goes around biting people’s heads off