All good things eventually come to an end, as they say, and so did Alias, in a somewhat shorted fifth season, bid farewell to its fans, both legion and seasonally confused. The boxed set of Season 5 is now available (it hit the street on November 21, 2006, for $39.95), and it also comes as part of a complete series box set which features supplementary material not available elsewhere.

To answer the question of what went wrong with Alias you have to first affirm what was right about it. It’s initial season was exciting and sexy, with a slightly boggling but intriguing multi-layer premise (Sydney Bristol as a spy within a spy). The second season was more of the same, but resolved a number of situations, and destroyed the secret evil organization with the CIA, SD-6, only to do something surely unique in episodic television: create a season ender that leaps two whole years into the future ( Battlestar Galactica did something similar at the end of its previous season). This was a prelude to a third season in which creator J. J. Abrams was suppose to solve all the “problems” of the show, which were essentially issues of repetitiveness, water treading, the sluggishness of the Rambaldi stuff, and too much confusion: no one could just “drop in” on Alias, and in that regard it more resembled an HBO show than a regular prime time network program. Season three imposed more impediments between Sydney and her former control, Michael Vaughn, i.e., he got married to someone else, who proved to be an undercover agent (replicating a situation that happened to Sydney’s dad), while she becomes an agent for a conventional CIA, battling The Covenant.

Then, like many TV shows, Alias, after making many, many changes and introducing and then disposing of numerous characters while taking many new and different directions, ended up right where it began, with Sydney working for a covert division within the CIA led by the vile Arvin Sloan, who had killed someone close to practically everyone who now worked for him again. THough few people are actually killed in Alias; they usually manage to come back somehow, including Michael, who we see at the end of season four getting smashed by a truck.

Character-adding got out of control, and so in the middle of season five, while Sydney and the team were pursuing Project 5, ABC pulled the plug. The show took a hiatus in winter, and came back to wrap up all its story threads in a 19-episode season. This amounted to clearing up tangled messes caused by some of the new characters and finding a deeply satisfying “demise” for arch villain Sloan. In a coda, one reminiscent of Kill Bill, the show jumps into the future yet again, and catches up with a final quartet of characters.

You can actually track the rise and fall of the show through its credit sequence, one of the most popular in TV history. Alias has one of those theme tunes that make you want to leap up and dance to it (like the one at both the beginning and end of MST3K). The first credit sequence was a triumph of catchy yet ominous music and graphic design. Magically it embodied the sharpness of the show. But with the fourth season Alias offered up a truncated theme song and added images of Jennifer Garner in a succession of her trademark costume changes and disguises. It’s true that Garner is the heart of her show (it must be disconcerting for male actors to work across from someone who has better bone structure than they do), but this addition seemed both pandering and soulless. The final season had a credit sequence that tried to squeeze in images of all the cast with even more dubious results.

Still there are many pleasures to be hand in the final season, mostly to do with Sydney and her relationship with her father. And the Rambaldi material is finally wrapped up (which isn’t to say that it is cleared up).
Buena Vista Home Entertainment does its usual job with the season, offering up the shows in excellent transfers (in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen) that look better than the TV broadcasts and great sound.

Supplements are relatively modest, but for a reason we’ll get to in a second. There are four commentaries, over the episodes “Prophet Five” (with director Ken Olin, Producer Jeff Pinker and Sydney’s dad, Victor Garber), “Bob” (with writers Monica Breen and Alison Schnapker and cast members David Anders and newcomer Rachel Nichols), “The Horizon” (writers Josh Applebaum and Andre Nemec, along with the episode’s director Tucker Gates), and “There’s Only One Sydney Bristow” (in a novelty yak track featuring the Alias set’s production assistants).

The fourth disc has the bulk of the video supplements. They kick off with “Behind the Scenes at the 100th Episode, which shows making of bits plus footage at the cast and crew “birthday” party. This is followed by “The Legend of Rambaldi,” which starts out as a parody of a History Channel segment before devolving into video interviews with cast and crew about their favorite Rambaldi artifacts. “The New Recruit: On Set With Rachel Nichols” interviews the young actress, while “Heightening the Drama: The Music of Alias,” profiles composer Michael Giacchino. Finally, there is a bloopers reel. All of these segments last about seven to 10 minutes.Those Alias fanatics who made the mistake of buying the season sets as they came must be kicking themselves a the advent of the complete season box set. It’s notable for a single disc of extras called “Endgame.” Among its unique featurettes are “Case Closed: A Look Back at Five Years of Alias,” “Alias Time Capsule: The Pilot Interviews,” “Forty-Seven,” “Axis of Evil,” some deleted scenes, a cover gallery for Alias Magazine, and a small hardcover book about the show’s mythology. Naturally, this disc (which I haven’t seen, only read about) comes only with the boxed set.

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