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Reblogging because of Noah! I was actually hesitant to read this because hardly anyone likes Noah with Sydney and I was afraid of what would be said about him, but - yay! - no flames! As for Sydney being off-balanced during the mission, I put it down to shock. She'd known Noah for around two years and they were together for maybe a year-and-a-half. So it wasn't like they'd just had a romantic fling and that was that; plus, as they say, first cut is the deepest.

Also, about the 'recruited out fo college' bit, Sydney was recruited during her freshman year. In Sister Spy, we do learn of another SD-6 rookie agent who was in her senior year, Jen Williams; in Free Fall, Stephanie Harling was also mentioned to have been picked up in her senior year. I'm sure there's other recruiting methods (Wikipedia has Dixon being with the Recon Marines before his SD-6 days) but getting people from college would be a way to ... pick them green, so to speak. With them having no previous knowledge of how spy-life worked then I'd imagine that'd make them easier to mold into the ''SD-6 is a part of the CIA'' way of thinking. I'm pretty sure, though, that Sydney (at 19) was the youngest recruit they had.

Alias s01e18 ‘Masquerade’

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.  

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Three (27.27%)

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Eight (72.73%)

Positive Content Rating:

Three

General Episode Quality: 

Better than I remembered it being.  

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Keep reading

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This song is perfect for them! I actually think there’s another one out there, but it doesn’t matter - I’ll take all the Jack&Sydney I can get.

by Naomi Alexis

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Reblogging because I’ve never seen these - it’s not the angle they used in the show - and I don’t know what Sydney is holding in the first pic.

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Reginald Wilson

''Excuse me. Ms. Bristow? Are you Sydney Bristow?''

Sydney glanced up. A man in a black suit had materialized next to her. He looked around fifty, with thinning reddish blond hair that was already almost half gray. His broad shoulders and chest suggested an athletic background, perhaps an ex-football player.

''Yes ... I am. I;m Sydney Bristow,'' she said, momentarily taken aback. She wasn't used to having men approach her on campus, especially ones with such proud posture - or ones wearing such official-looking clothes.

''My name is Reginald Wilson. I'm a recruiter for the Central Intelligence Agency.''

Alias, Recruited, pg. 44

Wilson! He kinda looks how I imagined him, but not at the same time. I’ve been meaning to GIF all his scenes - there’s not many - but I still haven’t gotten around to it. (There is actually one more scene of him, where he’s introducing Sydney to Sloane, but for the life of me I couldn’t get a clear image.) I was working on something else, and I thought that while I had the episode up I’d take some stills.

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You know, I never really thought of it before, but when Umbridge was forcing Harry to write lines with the blood quill, would it have been possible to take the parchment he was writing on and somehow siphon the blood from it, and put it in a vial to use it for something. Harry's protection was in his blood, right? Not to mention there'd probably be a whole host of things she could do with his blood.

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Wouldn't this be a hilarious way to stop your kids from playing video games and texting so much? Just attach it to their thumbs and say they can get their device back until after they’ve figured out how to take it off.

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Writing is not always writing.

Writing is being on the train and mentally seeing your OCs stumble into other people, or flinching away from the germ-ridden handrails, or sleeping on each others’ shoulders.

Writing is hearing a song on the radio and watching one of your scenes play out to the lyrics.

Writing is laying on your floor or sitting by your computer and spending hours collaging newspaper clippings or pictures or people or plants together and making something that is completely, uniquely, your story.

Writing is drawing your characters in your notebooks, and making tea only your one, picky character would drink, and writing an open letter to all your characters just to remind them you love them.

Writing is moodboards, and playlists, and crafts, and asks, and prompts, and pictures, and memories, and you.

So never think that just because you’re not putting words on a page, you’re not a real writer. Writing is something that follows you everywhere, beyond the word document, and beyond the screen.

Because writing isn’t something you do. It’s something you are.

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(... Coffee that had been hidden in the back of the toilet tank (brewing) for five months...)

Just imagine John flushing: ‘‘Sherlock?! What did you do to the toilet ... and why does it smell like Starbucks?!’‘

the thing all sherlock holmes adaptations get wrong is making the guy an irredeemable asshole who treats everyone like shit . not only is it not reflective of the original stories they miss that “nice, smart, well mannered dude who snorts coke when he needs to think” is possibly the funniest character ever devised 

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You have to know that you were my anchor. Your friendship was the only thing that kept me sane.

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Due to the quarantine, I've been left alone with my thoughts. This was a mistake.

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You know, it never really occurred to me just how well Gina Torres was able to play a bad guy role before. I was trying to find a particular episode in Alias she was in, and noticed in the trivia section where it said that it wasn't until season four that she and Sark worked together. At first I thought it was a mistake but it's true. Anna Espinosa was only in a total of six episodes for the entire series, yet she was one of the biggest baddies of them all.

When you think of ''bad guys'' in Alias, the first person you'd probably say is Sloane, which is accurate. Sloane was a bad guy in season 1, a bad guy in season 2, a good guy with bad intentions in season 3, a good guy with bad intentions in season 4, and back to a bad guy in season 5. He takes that enemy-number-1 spot easily, but remember, Sloane was a constant in the show; he was present for all five seasons.

On the other hand, Anna was only in a handful of episodes, yet she's the next bad guy you think of right after Sloane. Part of that has to do with how her character was written - the anti-Sydney Bristow, the nemesis, the ying to her yang, a glimpse of how Sydney would be if she ''went to the dark side''. The rest can be summed up with great acting on Gina's part. To only be in a few episodes and come out being one of the most iconic villains, yeah, she's good.

So good, she's bad. 😏

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I don't understand why Sydney wasn't able to find the doctor to get her memories back. When she was looking for Rambaldi's tissue with Will, she found it by asking herself where she would hide it; not where Julia Thorne would hide it but where she would hide it. So why didn't she apply the same method to find the doctor who erased her memories? After all, Sydney was the one who reached out to the doctor, not Julia, so if she'd just thought like herself she should have been able to find the guy. Yet, a search as to who could help her revealed ... this dude? Mr. Facon?

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How Sydney Bristow reacts to missing 2 years compared to Jenna Rink missing 17 years.

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Ok, so I know the whole ''spy'' trick of writing with lemon water for invisible ink and then you hold it up to the light to reveal what's written. My question is, when Francie spilled lemonade on the book, assuming it got on that part of the book, wouldn't that have erased the codes written there? Which, I don't think it ever says what the codes were written with (I'm just guessing lemon juice since the words become clear under the light), but wouldn't the acid from the lemon have erased, or at least distort, the writing anyway? Sydney's read those books before, so the fact that she didn't notice the codes until now kinda implies that the lemonade helped to reveal the codes.

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Sydney smiled. ''Well, if we had to let out the truth about our relationship to save my life, then it was worth it to me.''

Noah gave a half smile. ‘‘I still don’t know how he [Sloane] found out about it,’‘ he said. ‘‘I wish I could figure it out - I’m always pretty cold to you in the office.’‘

Well, Sydney did tell two people within the span of the same book: Emily and Stephanie. She met Emily when she was invited to a party at Sloane's house [Free Fall] and they hit it off, and she found herself spilling the beans about a lot of things, including her secret romance with a co-worker. Remember, while Sydney doesn't really know either of them at this point, they know her, so I can easily imagine Emily sitting at her vanity after the party is over, in a dressing gown and taking off her jewelry, and rubbing lotion into her hands while telling her husband how grown up Sydney is and about everything they talked about. I can see him 'innocently' inquiring about this paramour's identity and her telling him. Which it's not like she knew Stephanie would rat her out to Sloane, but she should have figured Emily would. Seriously, you're having a secret tryst with a co-worker behind your boss' back and one of the few people you tell about it is ... your boss' wife?

Fast-forward to the end of the book, we have Stephanie reporting back to Sloane and confirming the relationship between Sydney and Noah, but assuring him that she didn't think it would get in the way of Sydney's development as an agent. Sydney and Stephanie met during SD ''summer school'' and Sydney thought they were destined to be friends with how similar they were - including them both having boyfriends that they worked with, and Sydney confided in Stephanie thinking that she in turn would admit to her own relationship with a fellow agent (not knowing that that was what Stephanie was doing to her - and it worked). Looking back, I wonder just how much of Stephanie's background was true, or if she was handed Sydney's file and told to fabricate a believable backstory to get close to Sydney and get her to open up.

After telling Stephanie that she was dating someone she worked with, she also said that Sloane ''would not like it, that's for sure'' and thinks that Wilson [her former handler] wouldn't have either. However, one book before this one [Father Figure] he didn't seem to mind.

''Really?'' Wilson raised a skeptical brow. ''I thought you and Noah had hit if off.''

''What are you talking about?'' she said, embarrassed. ''He never even talks to me!''

''Hence my suspicion,'' he said with a wry smile.

''Noah's alright,'' Sydney admitted, making Wilson's smile even broader.

(That's as far as I'm reading for this because that's where it starts to get heartbreaking.)

Four people in total knew of Sydney and Noah's relationship. Emily and Stephanie (and both told Sloane), Wilson (who wouldn't have told Sloane) and Francie, who, coincidentally enough, also found out in Father Figure when Sydney had a bit of a meltdown. (The meltdown was totally valid.)

Despite my love for the books, one thing I didn't like is how they wrote about her 'love life'. I'll admit, I can kinda see why she sorta dated Burke, but she should have broken things off as soon as she got back from Hawaii. She also shouldn't have let Gromnovich make her doubt her feelings for Noah, and while she's still an ingenue in the love department, she shouldn't have been so easily romanticized by Trevor. As well as telling Brennan upfront that she already had a boyfriend instead of letting him think that, as Francie put it, ''scored the first cutie of sophomore year'' (which was also a ruse - on Brennan's part). I blame this on the books having different authors and them trying to put their own spin on things, but when you have a girl whose a spy at 19 and 20 years old (remember, the 12 books span a year of her life; a little more but not much), she doesn't need that many romantic entanglements. ''Noah was the one she wanted, the only one she'd ever wanted.'' [Sister Spy] and they should have just stuck with that.

Most of the problems Sydney and Noah had were communication-based, such as in Disappeared, when Noah voiced that he didn't think Sydney was ready for a solo mission. Now the reader could understand that when he said he ''didn't want anything to happen to jeopardize the mission'' he was really saying that he didn't want Sydney to get hurt. Of course, Sydney didn't realize that and she hadn't learned how to read Noah yet (and still hadn't really by the end of the book series) and got mad. I can understand why Noah's closely guarded and keeps things close to his chest (being an agent for as long as he has it kinda comes with the territory) and sometimes it like just assumes that Sydney knows the same things he does (a compliment, really) and doesn't think he has to say anything. Sydney, despite being more open and forthcoming, holds back on things that need to be said. Plus, neither one of them have much experience with the whole dating thing; Noah was Sydney's first real boyfriend and Noah had claimed that ''it's just better to be alone''. Add work to that when there's supposed to be 'no fraternization', then, yeah, it can get messy.

My main problem is Shadowed. I actually have a few problems with Shadowed. It starts off with her calling Noah her ''quasi-boyfriend'' and swearing off men (while she was still dating one), and making a squabble they'd had in the previous book sound like it was big enough to end their relationship. In retrospect, the rest of the book Sydney and Noah wise kinda meshed with what was already out there, but the 'summing it all up' that the author tried to do at the beginning of the book didn't really work; it was like they read the previous books so they'd have an understanding but didn't really get the details right. Such as: Shadowed having her had ''... a relaxing week of camping on the Oregon coast''. The lie she came up with (actually Sloane came up with it) [Skin Deep] was that she was going to take care of her ill father, and while it does say she ''drove up to care for him'', it never said Oregon. So unless her ill father decided to go camping - no. Also, Sloane didn't have the ''idea'' to send Sydney into K-Directorate - Noah recommended her [Infiltration]. Two, she didn't ''finally'' meet Anna Espinosa; she met her for the first time, and Anna didn't escape Sydney's grasp. (''... remembering with irritation how Anna had - but only just! - escaped her new agent grasp''.) Sydney came up with a plan and it worked. The plan wasn't supposed to last so much as buy time, so to speak. Then, later in the book, there was the small issue of her getting out of the van in Berlin twice - on the same page even, seriously, how does no one catch that? We also never find out what Anya was doing with Sydney's jacket tag. Close to the end of the book, it's surmised that she was putting a bug on Sydney to get her voice-print. However, once we find out that Anya wasn't working with Lucy, it still didn't say what Anya was doing. Intimidation tactic?

My second biggest pet peeve, right after the whole ''quasi-boyfriend'' thing is something Francie said. ''Well, well, well,'' she chuckled. ''Looks like you just scored the first cutie of sophomore year.'' Now this is when Brennan, obviously, is expressing some interest in Sydney, and one would think this would be the moment that best-friend-Francie, after hearing Sydney declare her love for Noah a couple months prior [Father Figure] would've piped up and said something along the lines of, ''Hey, she's dating someone, but I'm available''. Instead of inquiring how things were with Noah, Francie basically encouraged Sydney to start something with Brennan. Which sorta makes me wonder if she ever met him in between books and didn't like him. In The Solution (1x20), Francie says ''He was never good enough for you.'' Now, that frame of mind could have come after Noah left and she was heartbroken for her friend, or it could mean she met him at some point after Father Figure and didn't like him and proceeded to subtly push Sydney towards other guys.

((I had something else here but I forgot what it was.))

((I'm gonna have to apologize for how ... awful and off this all sounds. I had had a rough draft written down on paper, typed it out, and then when I was looking up something else my computer went to a blue screen and then rebooted itself - and I hadn't save the document I was typing. So I had to retype everything and this is round two and it's not nearly as good and flowy as it was on the first one. It's also longer than I planned; I had a topic and then I just went off it.))((Make that round three; blue screen, another reboot, and nothing saved. I'm stopping and posting this before I lose it again.))((A month+ later ... thankfully, I haven't lost it again, but if you've made it this far in reading - thank you. I know it's not the greatest but it's backing up other things I have, so ...)))

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Dude, I haven’t read or watched Harry Potter in years - it’s the ‘‘fandom’‘ that’s keeping all that magic alive.

My mother says that fanfiction doesn’t count as reading because “it isn’t nearly as good as the stuff that’s published. You’re not going to find something online that will win a Booker Prize.” Please reblog if you count fan fiction as reading, or if the fanfiction you’ve read is equally as good as published novels. I want to see the figures.