What I Learned from Watching Alias

We finished off the whole series in about 5 weeks and it made for enjoyable viewing. But there were a few lessons that I took away from the whole thing (uh, slight spoiler alert):

1) Torture is great!
What's great about torture, you see, is that when it's done to the bad guys, they spill their guts and tell all their plans with complete honesty. But when the good guys are tortured, they never give up any information!! In truth, torture is extremely ineffective as a means to get information but since it works well in drama it'll keep showing up in political thrillers.

2) Anything can be done in the interests of your daughter
Alias spent a lot of time dealing with the relationship of the main character, Sidney, and her father, Jack. Jack, while being emotionally distant, repeatedly saves Sidney's bacon, a nice dramatic device that shows us his true feelings for her. However, many times he does this by going around the law, through the law and with no concern for the safety of others. He'd blow up the planet if he thought it was in Sidney's interest and the show never pointed out the moral problems with this. It would have been nice if he'd have killed some innocents along the way and maybe learned a lesson. This lesson is particularly interesting because I now have a daughter. Wonder what I can get away with...

3) Hold guns against people
OK, this is a littly nitpicky but I can't hold this in. Alias primarly concerns the activities of trained killers, both good and bad. Despite the training they've allegedly received, they persist in detaining prisoners by holding guns against their nemesis' body. This is incredibly stupid as it leaves the detainor vulnerable to numerous techniques that have been developed to escape from such a position. If you're serious about holding someone captive with a gun, you keep the gun close to your body and stand about 10 feet away from your prisoner; I don't know of any escape from that, unless the captor can be reasoned with or hypnotized or something. I know this is hardly exclusive to Alias but I just had to say something.

4) Commercials really suck
Yeah, this has nothing to do with Alias. But we were able to watch the first 4 seasons on lovely commercially-released DVD sets but couldn't wait for the final season to come out on DVD so we borrowed copies from a friend who recorded them onto DVD. It was very difficult, even with fast-forwarding thru commercials, to feel a sense of the tension & suspense when you had these annoying breaks filled with the equivalent of annoying salesmen shouting at you.