IRENA DEREVKO
TO SEEK THE DEATH PENALTY – EPISODE 4
Although she is not present in this episode, she is certainly felt…by Sydney, Jack and even Vaughn. Here were some random thoughts that occurred to me as I watched The Indicator again. As we saw last, Irina was removed from the operations center by U. S. marshals. She was, by Kendall’s order, taken to Camp Harris for unrestricted interrogation, a nice way of saying torture for information. We saw she was totally confused by it all. They told her nothing and off she went handcuffed.
Shortly after, in this new episode, we see Sydney testifying before a committee regarding her mother and how her father saved her. Then Sydney is in the cell Irina had occupied for only a few weeks. Inside she realizes it is really cold and foreboding, not a place you’d like to be staying for any length of time. She finds one of her mother’s earrings, just as Jack enters. She tells him she hadn’t thanked him for saving her life. She leaves and Jack stares for a moment at the empty cell his ex-wife recently inhabited. What were his thoughts about his participation in the events leading up to her removal. Did he feel guilty, possibly. Was he happy? He didn’t look like it.
At a SD-6 briefing, Sydney and Dixon are going to be sent to Budapest to invade the Triad’s secret laboratory where the next generation of weapons is being built. Their mission is to download all the information about the weapons as well as take pictures of the weapons in the lab. SD-6 will then have the info to build them for their organization.
Later, after giving her the counter-mission, Jack tells Sydney that the government is going to try her mother and will seek the death penalty. Sydney is stunned and looks sick to her stomach. Meanwhile Vaughn has accidentally come across the man who did the actual wiring. The man is angry, feeling he is being set up himself and tells Vaughn that Jack Bristow ordered it.
Vaughn talks to Jack who tells him his shortcoming is his naïve sense of morality. Vaughn states if he doesn’t tell Sydney that he set up her mother, he will.
As he says to Jack, “You betrayed her trust.” That word has found its way into almost every episode. And in the world of espionage, trust is needed. It’s easy to see why Jack would think Vaughn, pardon the expression, is naïve, considering what Irina allegedly did to his own father. What Jack doesn’t realize is that the young agent knows only to well how much seeing her mother has meant to Sydney, who has managed to keep her deep feelings hidden from her Dad.
After Sydney comes back from Argentina where she put a puzzle together without thinking, just doing, she wants to be hypnotized and regressed back to her childhood to the time her mother died, either before or after. She is trying to remember why she knew the puzzle. Warned it might be dangerous, Sydney insists. It is then she learns it was not her mother, but Jack, her father, who had indoctrinated her. The Christmas Project that would turn children into American spies when they were adults had been developed by him.
Confronting Jack she accuses him of setting up Irina. He had done this not to protect her from her mother, but because he was trying to protect himself. He knew that Irina, who had been sent by the KGB to learn all about the project, would figure out what Jack had done to Sydney. And Irina had figured it out as she accused him of this when Sydney was in Siberia.
So, without appearing once in the episode, Irina Derevko’s presence was felt by our main characters: Sydney, who now knows what Vaughn had said, was true. That Jack had set her mother up. Jack, who did it because he was afraid Sydney would find out what he had done to her. Vaughn, who in spite of hating Irina for killing his father, still had a sense of morality that made him confront Jack, telling him he had better tell Sydney the truth or else he would.
It really would have been better drama if the last scene was Sydney walking away from her Dad in rain. She had sustained a number of shocks. Her father had programmed her to be spy, taking away her choices in life. Her mother was now probably going to be executed for something she didn’t do. Sydney does a lot of compartmentalizing and must do some more in order to stand up to the mental pressures her parents are subjecting her to now. I don’t know about you, but I probably would be a basket case. But then I’m real, and Alias is where nothing is as it seems.
A brilliant take on this episode. After reading verdanheart's take on Jack's side of this, it's really amazing how these two feel!
breathtaking, i love you put all of this into words
