#yes I did pause mid-episode to gush about this moment on Tumblr

[whatsagirltoblogabout]

This moment. This damn moment. I love this moment so much that I'm back on Tumblr because I need to gush about it. I learned how to make a gif just so that I could capture the full glory of this moment. This moment drives me absolutely nuts in the best way.

Spoilers ahead for the Alias season 2 premiere.

Okay, so she's got a bullet wound in her shoulder from her mom shooting her when they were reunited for the first time after Almost Thirty Years™. It's been sore all episode, she was rubbing it while talking to the CIA-mandated therapist, it's a whole thing.

Now Sloane, Mr. I'm-evil-but-I-also-care-deeply-about-you, is trying to comfort Sydney by giving her a gentle shoulder squeeze. Normally this would be completely incidental and unremarkable, just a casual bit of contact. But here, he's causing her pain by squeezing her bullet wound. All while telling her how much he cares about her! And of course, she's hiding her pain from him, a reinforcement of the continuous theme of her hiding things from him that's existed throughout the whole series so far.

It's a brilliant piece of blocking and performance. The subtlety of it, the depth of the characterization conveyed in this one moment, it's all so good. Notice how she doesn't react the moment he touches her shoulder, but waits until he squeezes. And he squeezes mid-line, specifically on the word "care." Genius, the whole thing is absolute genius.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL. See, my latent script supervisor brain has been keeping track of which shoulder is the injured one ever since attention was drawn to it by her fidgeting during her therapy session early in the episode. Way before this scene with Sloane, there's another character who interacts physically with her shoulder in a way that's intended to provide comfort: Weiss pats her shoulder as he's leaving their meeting in the warehouse pre-France, and he pats her uninjured side. This episode deliberately has a direct parallel to this moment, demonstrating which characters genuinely care for her and which one just thinks he does. Or, well, he probably does care, just in his own unique way. Not enough to realize which shoulder he's squeezing. And that's so cool. I freaking adore bits of visual storytelling like this.