In the Alias Pilot, Everything Is Personal

In my memory, Alias feels bifurcated. There’s the spy drama: the wigs, the costumes, the accents, the gadgets, the globe trotting, the world saving, the ancient sci-fi prophecies portending doom. And then there’s the homespun drama, in which Jennifer Garner‘s Sydney Bristow wears turtlenecks in Southern California, writes papers for grad school, and plays Boggle by the fire with friends, clinging to any chance she gets to be honest with them about anything without exposing her double life.

On recent rewatches, I’ve been struck by the warmth and liveliness of those off-duty scenes, which have the DNA of Felicity in them. At this point, most fans know the legend of Alias‘ origins — that the show began with creator J.J. Abrams daydreaming about what might happen if Felicity were secretly a spy. When you watch Sydney and her friends affectionately rib each other, you can see it. Alias isn’t just going through the motions while it waits to get back to the sexy, flashy stuff; what’s happening at home matters, both to Sydney and to the show. Really, despite how it might live in my memory and the memories of others, the show isn’t split cleanly down the middle. The gap between the spy world and the “real” world is one thing, but when Alias is at its best, it’s more interested in the places where those worlds overlap. Just look at its first episode. 

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The Alias pilot, written and directed by Abrams and titled “Truth Be Told,” premiered 25 years ago, on Sept. 30, 2001. It’s fantastic television: smart, energetic, thrilling, and grounded in pure emotion. Why not be honest here? It’s my sentimental pick for my favorite TV episode of all time. It helps that it debuted when I was in middle school, the prime age to get overly attached to an episode like this, but a quarter century later, “Truth Be Told” still impresses. The stakes are larger than life, but the story is personal. And what really stands out is how much the spy side of the show needs the domestic side to make it hurt.

The two worlds of the show bleed into each other quickly. In the first shock of the hour, Sydney’s fiancé, Danny (Edward Atterton), is killed after leaving her a voicemail, alerting the wrong people to the fact that Sydney told him what she does for a living. Sydney works for a group called SD-6, which she’s been told is a black-ops division of the CIA. In the fallout from Danny’s murder, she learns the truth: SD-6 is actually part of an organization known as the Alliance, an international league of bad guys. All lower-level employees, Sydney included, have been lied to; she has been, in the show’s words, working for the very enemy she thought she was fighting.

There’s too much to be said about the political context of Alias‘ premiere. The pilot debuted in the immediate wake of 9/11, though it was filmed before, and the show’s early definition of good guys and bad guys lacked nuance in a way that made it unfortunately timely. Patriotism that might have once seemed allegorical — a way to explore loyalty and betrayal on a grand scale — now felt very literal. If you try, you can read into Alias as a critique of how duplicitousness and violence come wrapped in the American flag, but it takes a few seasons for the series to suggest that this might be a systemic problem and not just the fault of a few bad actors. In the pilot, the show’s worldview is still too innocent for that. 

But it’s a voicemail that seals Danny’s fate. The surveillance state kills him. There are phones everywhere in this pilot, and a beeper, too, and no call is secure. At the end of the episode, after Sydney tells the real CIA everything she knows, the government gives her a new cell phone, the smallest phone I’d ever seen in 2001 — when the 66-minute-long pilot aired on ABC with no commercial breaks, it was sponsored by Nokia — as confirmation that she’s been accepted into their ranks. It seems like her every means of communication is being taken over by her job, but it’s equally true that her job is being taken over by her personal life. Her father, Jack (Victor Garber, absolutely perfect), is the one who hands her that tiny cell phone, revealing that he’s also working inside SD-6 as a double agent for the CIA. When he observes, “I guess we’ll just have to learn to trust each other,” Alias is articulating its vision for the heart of the show. At the same time, Sydney is learning, again, that her emotional baggage isn’t private. Her painful relationship with her father just became another office dynamic she’ll have to manage in order to stay alive. 

The pilot sticks closely to Sydney’s perspective, giving it the ability to pull off twists that might otherwise have felt like overkill. The audience rarely knows more than she knows; we’re there with her as she finds Danny’s body, as Jack breaks the news that she’s been working for the Alliance, and then again as Jack discloses that he’s also secretly CIA. Abrams’ Lost pilot, which juggles multiple memorable character introductions, is understandably his most definitive pilot, but Alias‘ focused approach is more satisfying, mostly because of how effectively it conveys that the twists aren’t the point. This character is.

“Truth Be Told” is so immersed in Sydney’s experience that it also manages to sell one of Abrams’ favorite gimmicks: nonlinear storytelling. Abrams was eventually dinged for his habit of opening an episode in medias res to grab viewers’ attention and then flashing back to deal with the setup, but in the Alias pilot, his clichés aren’t clichés yet; they’re just fun. The episode begins with Sydney being tortured in Taipei, her hair dyed clown-nose red, then rewinds to the days before her life fell apart. As she tells Danny the truth, loses him, and reckons with the news that her life has been a lie, the pilot keeps flashing forward to find the red-haired version of Sydney still handcuffed to a chair as a man (Ric Young) plies her for information. The effect is disorienting, but Sydney is disoriented. Her own life has been fractured as the plot has. You get the sense that from this point on, there will always be a part of Sydney who’s being tortured. “I’ve got nothing to lose,” she insists, feigning cool bravado. Her captor counters, “That’s not exactly true. You have teeth.”

It takes most of the episode to catch up on the context that lands Sydney in that chair: She’s trying to get back in SD-6’s good graces by stealing a device she knows they’ll want. “Truth Be Told” takes plenty of happiness and security away from Sydney, but what keeps it from becoming a torturefest — aside from its heightened tone, which winks at being campy without crossing the line — is how actively she takes what she needs in return. She steals the device. She steals a car. She gets her friend Will (Bradley Cooper) to lend her his sister’s passport and credit card, no questions answered. She dyes her hair rather than wear a wig. In later episodes, she might sneak in and out of a mission without a trace. But here, in her debut, Sydney leaves a trail of destruction behind her, and it’s a thrill that Alias never apologizes for that.

It’s not all roundhouse kicks and gunfights, although there are plenty of both. In the show’s first big fight scene, set in a parking garage, Sydney whacks an SD-6 goon in the face with a car antenna. Later, in a Taipei warehouse, she starts a gas leak by breaking a pipe open with a screwdriver, then provokes the men firing on her to blow themselves up. Highlighting Sydney’s resourcefulness makes her more believable as a superspy, but it also makes her more believable as a human being, because it makes the world around her seem tactile. Sydney’s environment acts on her, and she acts on it in return.

Anything can be a weapon on Alias, including Sydney herself. She’s been used by SD-6 to cause harm she didn’t intend; she also, however inadvertently, gets Danny killed. By the end of the show’s first hour, she’s already worn out by how much she cares. But if “Truth Be Told” establishes early that Sydney’s emotional attachments will be used against her, it also lets her use her relationships to save herself. In the parking garage, Sydney calls her friend Francie (Merrin Dungey) on her cell phone and asks her to call her right back, using the ring tone to lure the SD-6 goon into a trap. There’s some comic relief in the fact that Francie is having a casual night in while Sydney fights for her life, but it’s sweet, too: Without realizing it, Francie is helping Sydney survive. 

There’s an eagerness to this episode that I love. It begins by suggesting that a vast spy underworld lurks beneath our own, in parking garages and sub-level offices, and that it’s cool and exciting and callous and horrible. Then it spends the rest of the hour reaching for the surface, grasping for ordinary things, because it loves them and because they cause pain. The Alias pilot keeps prying Sydney open, confident that this is a character who will always have more to give and more to lose. She has teeth.