Alias

Episodes

Premise:

Graduate student turned super-spy

Who's Important?

What do you need to know?

So, in the first season, we find out that Sydney was recruited as an undergrad to work for SD-6, which she thought was a government agency. Turns out, they're actually a counter-government agency, which she found out when her fiance was killed by SD-6 agents and she was approached by the CIA. She's now a double agent, which means that she goes on SD-6 missions, but passes the information about her missions to her CIA handler, Vaughn, with whom she shares more than mutual admiration and information...

Sydney's father, it turns out, is also an SD-6/CIA double agent. She was estranged from him for years, but they've got a wary truce going. At the very end of the season, it was revealed that Sydney's mother was not killed 20 years ago, as both Jack and Sydney thought, but had in fact reverted to her KGB roots and was running an operation of her own under the alias "The Man." Sydney and her father spent the season trying to keep these elaborate plans for a massive battery designed by a 16th-century philosopher/prophet from falling into The Man's hands (this is where it gets really complicated). They ended up destroying the battery, but in the process Sydney was captured by The Man, and Vaughn was swept away in the tidal wave that followed the destruction of the battery.

There's also something about a prophecy from the 16th century that Sydney's supposed to fulfill, which is awesome and creepy and thrilling, but which I couldn't really piece together. JJ Abrams, Alias' creator, has promised that it'll be much easier to follow this next season, which premieres Sunday, Sept. 29, at 9:00 pm.

Episodes: