“Reunion”

Alias season 3, episode 3
Original air date: October 12, 2003

After a satellite crashes to Earth in the middle of Moscow, the Russians and the CIA are scrambling to figure out why. It turns out that a man named Oransky, formerly of the Russian Military Space Command and now working for a French satellite company, may have intentionally crashed his own satellite. Sydney and Weiss are sent to Mexico City to do surveillance on Oranksy, who is meeting with Sark to discuss "Phase II."

During the meeting about Oransky and his motives, Sydney and Lauren (Vaughn's wife) get into a shouting match over whether Sark should be apprehended in Mexico City or merely surveilled. Lauren insists that the technology for tracking people has advance significantly in the last two years, but Sydney is just as adamant that Sark will easily be able to evade any tracking they put on him, as he's been able to do so before. Dixon and Vaughn emphasize that it's a moot point: the NSC hasn't authorized picking Sark up, and moreover, they need to leave Sark free so that they can learn more about what "Phase II" is.

Sydney's blowup doesn't help her standing with Lauren, who admits freely to Vaughn that she hates Sydney. Little did Sydney know that it would be in her best interest to be sucking up to Lauren right now, too: Jack reveals to Sydney that there's another tape of her assassination of Lazarey, and Lauren's investigating it. Lauren asks Marshall to enhance the tape so that the assassin's face can be fed into a face-recognition computer and identified.

Jack, unwilling to let Sydney be identified as Lazarey's killer, goes to a hacker he helped convict a few years back. The hacker gives Jack a disk with a virus that, once loaded on the network from a computer with administrator privileges, will attack only the files it's been programmed to corrupt. Jack sneaks into Dixon's office, uploads the virus, and wipes out the image, just as Marshall's beginning to enhance it to a point where Sydney would be recognizable. Lauren seems suspicious of the fact that the file abruptly stops loading, but doesn't touch the matter.

Sydney faces a showdown with Oransky in Mexico City when she's unable to stay far enough away from Sark and he to keep undercover. Oransky takes a hostage and his men surround Sydney. Vaughn helps her, via her earpiece transmitter, by piping an extremely loud, high-frequency tone into Oranky and his men's earpieces. With the distraction, Sydney's able to shoot Oransky in the leg, save the hostage and disarm his men. He gets away, but is seething.

Fortunately, the trip to Mexico City wasn't all in vain: Sydney learned that Oransky is planning to break into the Russian Science Ministry to steal a weapon named Medusa, a pulse generator that knocks out satellites. The Kremlin can't do anything to help, because they can't admit to having an anti-satellite weapon in their arsenal. At their wits' end, Dixon and Lauren argue that asking Sloane to help them get into the Science Ministry is their only option.

Sloane agrees to sneak Vaughn and Sydney in as his guests at a Science Ministry gala. They'll pretend to be investors, interested in Sloane's work and considering donating to support it. Of course, before he acquiesces, he plays a little cat and mouse with both Vaughns and Sydney, commenting on how glad Michael must be that Sydney's back in fighting form, knowing how close they used to be. He also displays some maddening condescension when he tells the three agents that he's not sure he should be helping them at all, since what they're asking is illegal and immoral.

Sydney and Vaughn break into the subbasement of the Science Ministry, just as Sark and Oransky are preparing to leave with Medusa. Sark has trapped them in the lab with the Russian guards on their way down, so Sydney urges Vaughn to activate their Plan B: destroying Medusa by rigging the generator to explode. Of course, doing that will mean that they'll have to escape through a ventilation duct before the fireball comes pouring out after them. But that's what they're best at, and it's exactly what they do. Oransky perishes in the fireball, still cursing Sydney for shooting him in the leg, but Sark, of course, gets away.

Sydney and Lauren engaged in a little heart-to-heart on the plane on the way to visit Sloane, and both agreed to put their differences aside and work together. Of course, they're probably still not cozy enough for Lauren to overlook Sydney's assassination of Lazarey, which she's bound to figure out eventually as she continues her investigation.

Weiss, on the other hand, is proving to be a very sweet shoulder for Sydney to cry on, first getting plastered with her as they christen her new apartment. She's giggling about the fact that losing your whole existence in a fire is liberating, because there are all kinds of scrapbooks and papers and other detritus that people inevitably hang onto but never really use. He prods her to name some one thing she lost in the fire that's irreplaceable, and then they both lower their eyes in the awkward moment that ensues. Eventually, though, Sydney says that she will miss the first edition Alice in Wonderland that her mother gave her when she was a little girl. When Sydney returns from blowing up Medusa, she finds a third-edition Alice on her desk, courtesy of sweetie-pie Weiss.