Alias 5.02, Smallville 5.02: The Dead Rise and The Beginning of an Arch-Enemy

Alias welcomes in new cast members and says goodbye to others, while Smallville begins the reign of Lex Luthor as the villain of the story.


Alias starts off at the end of last week's episode at an English pub: Sydney four months pregnant meeting with Renee "the Raven" Rienne, Michael Vaughn's partner in the pursuit of the whereabouts of his father and the organization related to Prophet 5. Renee informs the pregnant Sydney that the bar they are at is an operations center for the organization they are after and that she just blew her cover. Sydney convinces Renee to do the op anyway and they successfully recover a hard drive containing information about the organization. After their escape, Sydney convinces Renee, #8 on the CIA most wanted list, to let her take the hard drive to the CIA to uncover the information. One sticking point I had about Renee would be that there could have been a relationship between Vaughn and her during their work together, but luckily enough Renee kills those ideas in the beginning of the show saying how Vaughn was crazy about Sydney and she didn't have anything to worry about. Thank goodness is all I can say, I didn't want an absolutely useless subplot to develop between Renee and Sydney about a possibility of a love triangle and the fact that it was killed in the intro scene of Alias was even better. Also, the return to the traditional opening of Alias shows three new cast members that will be joining the show and playing significant parts. I guess after four seasons of roughly the exact same cast it was time for a little bloodletting.

Once back in the States, Sydney calls Marshall waking him and his wife up. Marshall helps uncover a meeting that is to take place between Curtis, the man who killed Vaughn, and an arms dealer. Another note about this scene is that Marshall covers about his work to his wife in a very geeky, screwed up, Marshall sort of way. He does this because, although his wife still works with the CIA, their specific group, APO, is off the books and is unknown even to the CIA except for their single contact and head of their division in the CIA. Sydney brings this information to the imprisoned Sloane. Sloane gives Sydney his condolences, although there is always that nagging feeling when he acts sympathetic that he really is the mastermind of EVERYTHING, and tells her how to get a meeting with the same arm's dealer that Curtis is going to meet with in order to set up for Curtis' arrival.

At Amsterdam, Dixon and Weiss run the op and meet with the arm's dealer, Roemer, and piggyback on the surveillance. After doing this, Sydney sees that Curtis is arriving during their op and inform the others. Curtis picks up his package and quickly kills the arm's dealer and his men, after Curtis leaves the building he enters his car with Sydney sitting and pointing a gun at him. They take Curtis is a CIA safe house where they interrogate him. They open the package and inform Marshall of the package's ID. Marshall traces the package and finds out that they are containing a package of Nuridium; an explosive that has the impact of an A-bomb times 50, but is only a small part of a much larger Nuridium source that was already stolen. They decide that it would take to long to break Curtis and choose to allow him to think he escaped and follow him through a tracking device. Curtis pisses off Sydney and she kicks him through a window into a river, I guess that was their plan or it was more of a play it by ear move because kicking someone through a 2nd story window into a river to let them think they escaped is very, very unnecessarily complicated, but I guess that's why they are the CIA.

As they wait for the tracking device to activate, Weiss tells Sydney he has been offered a promotion to a job in Washington. They do a: Sydney says "I'm so happy for you!", Weiss says "Yea but I don’t want to leave you guys after the death of Vaughn :(", Sydney says "No really you should go!". Fortunately, the tracking device activates and they see that he is on a private 747 toward North Korea. In a very unrealistic manner, maybe probable for the CIA that can do anything and everything it wants, they fly up to the 747 mid-flight in a stealth bomber... yup I said it they do a ninja connection to the 747 from a stealth bomber and get on the plane that way. They find the bomb and as Sydney attempts to disarm it with the help of Marshall on the comm., Weiss and Dixon move forward to find and take out Curtis. They screw up and get spotted and there is a fire fight as Curtis leaves them and heads toward Sydney. Curtis points a gun at Sydney and Sydney holds her knife to a tube of the "bomb", but it seems the "bomb" is actually a person in the box with tubes going into it. Very Alias-style weird shit. Turbulence knocks Curtis off balanced and Sydney gets the gun, she attempts to arrest him and offers him safety he will cooperate, he instead pulls the airlock and decides to kill himself instead. He made it seem that the organization he worked for was everywhere, including the CIA, and was more powerful than she could ever imagine, right before he killed himself.

Once back at APO, Jack tells the team that the Nuridium was used as a cryogenic chamber for the person inside of the box, and that the body was going to the DSR, the government's super secret research group I even think they are the guys that did the research on the Ark of the Covenant in those Indiana Jones movies. Just kidding, we all know that the government didn't do any research on the Ark of the Covenant; they just locked it up in a building. Anyhow back at APO, their new agent shows up Thomas Grace, Balthazar Getty the guy looks like he is from the Scream series but he isn't he's like the guy's twin, and Weiss is on his way out. Meanwhile Dixon comes out and tells the team that the body at DSR was stolen :(. Sydney calls Renee to tell her what has happened, the camera then pans from Renee to her background and we see the body in the room and he the heart monitor begins to beep. He's Alive! What would be the best is if the body is of the infamous prophet/inventor Rambaldi himself. Now that would be a great kick to the show and bring in the past four years to the present.



Smallville begins at the Belle Reve mental facility, the home of the crazy and the super powered much like Arkham Asylum in Batman, where Lex has paid for an entire wing to keep his blind father in isolation from the world. On his way out, Lex bumps into a trio of prisoners and the man he bumps into magically unlocks his shackles. The head prisoner, Lee, takes off his rubber gloves and drains the electricity from the hallway and KO's the guards and frees the other two guys with him, a pair of twins, that use their ability to create a force field to stop bullets from hitting them in their escape toward Smallville. Cut to the now mortal, powerless, Clark Kent at a barn raising with the community rebuilding Smallville after their massive meteor shower. After raising a side of the barn, Clark heads to the Kent farm with Lana to grab more nails. Once at the farm the boring part of the show where Clark is going to get lucky with Lana but Clark stalls it when he acts like a girl about it, I think he lost more than his powers last episode, but then again he was always a bit of a girl about things and it is the WB so that always affects you. Simply put the redundant part of the show gets interrupted by the threesome that escaped from Belle Reve.

They take Lana and Clark from the barn into the Kent house, where they tell Clark they've heard stories from the other freaks in Belle Reve about Clark's powers. They want him to break into a secret LuthorCorp facility and steal kryptonite injections that they need in order to keep their powers strong. After explaining this, Martha and Jonathan Kent come to the house to see what took Clark and Lana so long and become hostages as well. Clark is given two hours to get the injections before they start to kill hostages.

Clark leaves and calls Chloe for help, being a mortal and quite powerless he needs the skills of an investigative reporter who knows how to break into buildings. They break into the facility and Clark goes through the vents in order to reach the room that the kryptonite injections are located. He gets in and opens the door from the inside to get Chloe into the room. They reach the vault and notice it is fingerprint only. Chloe uses dust and tape on a flashlight that Lex touched earlier in the show to get a fingerprint to open the vault. Clark sees the Kryptonite injections and goes to grab them, he is unaffected by the Kryptonite since he's a mere mortal now, but is singed by the invisible laser field. Chloe says it would take hours to bypass the electrical field; Clark is forced to leave to head home with his two hours almost up. He enters the house with a suitcase, that can't have the injections so what IS in there? The electrically powered escapee, Lee, opens the suitcase to a flash bang in his face. Clark dodges an electrical bolt and it hits the twins knocking them out. Clark grabs a sledgehammer and strikes the power generator killing Lee's source of power and gets a fist in his face from Clark knocking him out. All is saved by Clark Kent even when he is a mere mortal.

Chloe comes by afterwards to tell Clark that she poked around in Level 3 for a bit and found that a secondary source was watching the surveillance while they were there. A cut to Lex shows him watching the footage of Clark being singed by the electrical field to his amazement. He believed Clark to be super human, but it showed him as a normal person. Clark arrives and confronts Lex as Clark gives Lex a few punches to the face. Clark knows that Lex helped the prisoner's escape from Belle Reve and is officially ending their friendship. After a few punched, Lex counters and gives Clark a punch to the face and to the amazement of Lex, Clark is bleeding. It was perfect timing and all how Lex tests Clark right after Clark loses his powers. Of course the final ten minutes of the show is dedicated to Clark finally getting some from Lana, hopefully after a large waste of time on their on again, off again relationship more time can be dedicated to the geeky comic book stuff the show comes from. Hooray for Lex finally being a full pledge bad guy and the arrival of Brainiac at the end of last week's episode. This season should prove hopeful for the Smallville faithful that enjoy the show because of the comic book parts and not the WB Dawson's Creek portions.