‘Alias’ Perfectly Foreshadowed JJ Abrams’ Star Wars
By: Eric Pierce
Tags: Movies, Television, Star Wars, Culture, Film

I recently re-watched season one of Alias for the first time since it was originally broadcast way back in 2001. It holds up surprisingly well! But I couldn’t help noticing similarities to the JJ Abrams-helmed Star Wars films.

In hindsight, Alias is the perfect blueprint for the Sequel Trilogy. This is not a good thing.

Who Are You?

The central question raised by the Sequel Trilogy relates to Rey’s identity. Literally, the entire trilogy revolves around it: The Force Awakens raises the question, The Last Jedi answers it, and The Rise of Skywalker re-answers it. And then the trilogy closes with Rey rejecting all of that and choosing her own identify.

In my opinion, one of the reasons The Rise of Skywalker feels so unsatisfying is due in part to the ongoing preoccupation with this question, which isn’t all that interesting to begin with. Unless they meant to make her a Skywalker — a terrible idea — any possible explanation couldn’t satisfy all the scrutiny invited by posing the question in the first place. Her identity, as it related to Skywalkers and everything established, wasn’t important until JJ fixated on it and made it noteworthy.

This isn’t to say that Rey isn’t important. She becomes important to us simply by making her the protagonist of the film, the yin to Kylo’s yang. She’s important to us because she is a good person, lost and on her own. We empathize with her and want good things for her.

Alias exhibits much the same preoccupation with identity, often to the detriment of the story.

Sidney Bristow is nearly a carbon copy of Rey: an attractive, athletic brunette who is kind and gentle and ridiculously capable. Sid knows a seemingly inexhaustible number of languages. She hacks computers, sings and dances at a professional level, and is an adept mimic. Oh, and she is an amazing marksman and a singular talent at hand-to-hand combat, often besting two or three soldiers in a matter of seconds.

I don’t subscribe to the Mary Sue business, so that’s not where this is going. Sid is an upper echelon spy, and I can mostly take all this in without suspending my disbelief. It’s a fantasy show, basically, and that’s fine. All of this is just to say, JJ clearly has a type.

Sid, in disguise. Image: ABC Television

Sidney is much the same as Rey in temperament and ability. However, making someone without obvious flaws leaves little room for growth. Rey has the added temptation of the Dark Side, but that never really manifests in the new trilogy. That leaves any character arc for Sid or Rey as an internal one. And for both, JJ sets up the question of identity as both impetus and destination.

Sid has a coldly distant relationship with her father. Her mother died when she was young… only that ends up not being true. Her mother was a Russian spy who hoodwinked her father, who was a CIA agent. Sid is pursuing a teaching degree in honor of her mother, who she’d thought was a teacher. Oh, and the organization Sid works for isn’t part of the U.S. government, is in fact the very bad guys she thought she was fighting against. Learning this, she adopts the duplicitous life of a double agent.

It’s all very convoluted. But wait, it gets worse!

There is an ancient prophecy that may refer to Sid. Or it may refer to her mother. It’s not exactly clear, but it’s generally bad news.

Over the course of the first season, Sid’s idea of who she is and where she comes from is constantly overturned. She has questions nobody can or will answer. These questions gnaw at her, compelling her into risky choices in order to find answers. And the answers she gets are often incomplete and untrustworthy.

Sound familiar?

The Making of Myth

Alias has a complicated mythology centering around an imaginary 15th century inventor-philosopher named Milo Rambaldi. Rambaldi is a blend of Leonardo da Vinci and Nostradamus, a genius visionary whose devices had no place in his own time and were taken as the machinations of a madman. Rambaldi’s end game is shrouded by mystery, hinted at by vague prophecies, and determined only by following a bread crumb of artifacts.

The Rambaldi plot gives Alias its procedural framework: go to A and retrieve B. It provides a unified purpose to the globetrotting adventures. And it injects drama, as rival criminal cabals and legitimate government organizations battle over who can get the most Rambaldis. It’s basically a lethal game of Pokemon: gotta catch ‘em all.

But why?

We are never really told why any of this matters. The CIA wants the artifacts to keep them out of the bad guys’ hands. The bad guys presumably want them for suitably bad reasons. What and why isn’t ever really spelled out. We are left to derive their importance simply because they are desired. Which makes a certain kind of psychological sense — remember the Beanie Baby fad? People will absolutely chase things just because other people want them. Value is implied by desire. But it is a really flimsy premise upon which to hang your mythology.

I spent an embarrassing amount of the mid-90's chasing these bean-stuffed monsters.

The newest Star Wars trilogy poses all sorts of important questions that mostly go unanswered. Why does the Republic allow the First Order to fester at the galaxy’s edge? Why there is a Resistance, as opposed to an official Republic space army? Why is the First Order so powerful? How does Palpatine survive? Where does his giant fleet come from?

These are rhetorical questions. I know why. The galaxy at the beginning of The Force Awakens is contrived to be immediately familiar — overwhelmingly powerful bad guys against fledgling good guys — to hearken back to the original formula. So too, with Palpatine. He survives because JJ wanted to end the trilogy with a throne room scene, and who better to preside over such an affair? And the ghost fleet is there so there can be a big space battle. Much like The Force Awakens mimicked A New Hope, The Rise of Skywalker is intentionally derivative of Return of the Jedi.

JJ loves to posit interesting questions but he despises answering them. The whys and hows are just not important to him. He largely gets away with it on Alias. The serialized nature means you are taking the story in over time, often weeks or months. Niggling details are often lost in the cracks, or forgotten in the rush of that week’s adventure.

You can’t hide from the questions in a two hour film. Even if you punt to the trilogy’s next entry.

Alias eventually addresses Rambaldi mania, though even the cast had a hard time keeping up with the increasingly complicated plot.

Every Episode, a MacGuffin

A MacGuffin is an object necessary to a story’s plot that provides motivation to the characters but is largely insignificant itself. It gives the heroes and villains something to fight over, basically. MacGuffins aren’t inherently bad things. The One Ring may be bound to Sauron’s dark soul, but it is still a MacGuffin in The Lord of the Rings.

The problem is when MacGuffins become ends unto themselves.

Alias has MacGuffins like Ahch-To has Porgs. The show is lousy with them.

A Porg, in case you forgot. Image: Lucasfilm

Rambaldi fever means every episode has Sidney traveling somewhere to get something that is important for some reason, and just as quickly forgotten the next episode. It’s quite literally MacGuffin du jour.

The thing is, it mostly works. Like the overarching Rambaldi mythos, the devices tie the episodes into a whole. Yes, they may be chasing another Rambaldi artifact each episode, but there is the sense that this scavenger hunt will payoff somewhere down the road. That the devices themselves will come together, like a steampunk Voltron, and beget something much greater than the individual parts.

JJ developed his love for MacGuffins on Alias. But he applied the wrong lessons to Star Wars.

Luke is the MacGuffin of The Force Awakens, a gambit that mostly works and results in that amazing ending shot. But all sense of subtly and purpose was lost by the time JJ returned for the final stanza. In his zeal to undo the answers The Last Jedi imparted, JJ upended his mystery box and dumped out all his MacGuffins. The Rise of Skywalker was less a movie and more an exercise in chasing space doodads, with the characters themselves lost in the hunt. The film predictably suffered for it.

All the Questions and None of the Answers

JJ excels at asking interesting questions. What would happen if a CIA agent discovered she was working for the bad guys (Alias)? What would happen if a plane crashed near a deserted Pacific island and the survivors had to fend for themselves (Lost)? What would happen if Luke Skywalker hung up his lightsaber and disappeared?

Despite its clear homage to A New Hope, I adore The Force Awakens. It’s energetic and just plain fun. And, too, part of the charm is the mystery. But eventually you have to answer the questions you pose.

I’m not suggesting JJ alone deserves the credit or blame for the Sequel Trilogy. But he did create 2/3 of it, without any overarching story handed down from on high. JJ set the initial story stakes in the ground and decided how best to resolve them.

With the benefit of hindsight, its easy to see how JJ’s Star Wars echoes his work on Alias almost 20 year earlier. But the formula developed for TV stales quickly when forced onto the big screen.