Mission Improbable

With the NFL playoffs bumping Fox's usual Sunday night lineup, and yours truly still trying to fill that self-induced void of social activity over this past weekend, I tuned in to Alias again, for maybe the second or third time in over a year. On the one hand, that provides for some interesting continuity challenges, but on the other, I've come to the conclusion that watching the show for plot and continuity is a losing battle. Basically, it's about fights and double-crosses and narrow escapes and gadgets. Pure eye candy, in the Mission: Impossible tradition. Trying to think about what your watching is a sure route to madness. To wit: last week, the new organization of badguys, whose name I can't remember, dispatch orders to kill agents Bristow and Vaughan as they travel to North Korea. A sniper has the two in his sights, then plugs the two pilots of their private jet with poison that kills them while in the air, forcing a crash. I mean, come on, why not just shoot the two agents? The plane crash didn't fool anyone into thinking the bad guys weren't behind it, so why bother to be so elaborate?

In other spy-show news, I'm getting a bit impatient with 24 this time around. Forget about the abject stupidity of having Jack Bauer's daughter working at CTU and starting a relationship with Jack's new partner. It's the dime-store Mexican drug lords that just make the whole thing even more implausible than usual. I'll keep watching, of course, because they will likely fade to the background as a red herring of sorts as new threats and new plots come into play, but it's still making it mildly difficult to watch. Even with the well-placed twist of Gael not actually being a bad guy.

And finally, after it's promising start, Jake 2.0 is getting a bit too by-the-numbers. I still give the show credit for giving a good reason for it's superspy being a superspy, but any show that has to explain it's premise each and every week at the top of the show (Brimstone, anyone?) is going to be followed by a black cloud, even on UPN.