As Garner has played the character -- and that's superbly, a mixture of steeliness and impetuousness -- Sydney has traveled from a cusp-of-adulthood coltishness to something more confident. She's not jaded or cynical, but like other great pop-culture characters we've followed over a period of time, like Buffy or Harry Potter, Sydney has toughened up with experience. The scene in last week's episode where she was interrogated by a no-nonsense agency chief played by Angela Bassett captured Sydney's quick, confident, impatient sharpness. Standing up to an actor as commanding as Bassett is a test for any performer. It's a measure of how good Garner is that she did it without breaking a sweat, and a measure of how much we've come to believe in the character of Sydney that we didn't question the insubordination.

You'd be hard-pressed to find a character on television who has undergone a harder "one damn thing after another" trial by fire than Sydney Bristow. The series opened with Sydney juggling grad school with a job in international banking. The job was a cover for her work with SD-6, which she believed to be a supersecret section of the CIA.

After she confesses her job to her fiancé and her boss, Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), has him killed, Sydney discovers that SD-6 is not part of the CIA but the exact sort of criminal syndicate she believed herself to be working against. When Sloane orders that Sydney be killed as well, she's rescued by her estranged father, Jack, and finds out that instead of being a globetrotting businessman, he is also an SD-6 agent. The difference between them is that Jack knows the truth about SD-6, has made Sloane believe he shares his evil goals, but is in fact working as a CIA mole to bring down Sloane. Sydney spills all she knows about SD-6 to the CIA and, now a mole like her father, goes back to work for Sloane, having sworn revenge on him.

And that, folks, was just the first two hours of the series. "Alias" is yet more proof that the best television series have all but abandoned self-contained week-to-week episodes in favor of sprawling novelistic narratives. (I caught up on "Alias" over the summer after being knocked out by Garner's performance in "13 Going on 30," bingeing on the first three seasons as if I were reading a long, satisfying novel.)

Even among those shows, "Alias" is noteworthy for the way it has played with the premises it has established. Like Joss Whedon, Abrams is a pop-culture genius who operates right on the line dividing confidence from recklessness. Having established the premise of Sydney as mole at SD-6, Abrams blithely threw out that premise midway through the second season by having the CIA raid SD-6 and shut down the organization, and sending Sydney and Jack to work for the CIA proper. Last week, Abrams flipped the series yet again, sending Sydney and Jack and most of the show's secondary characters to work for an actual secret section of the CIA. Sydney is now back exactly where she was at the beginning of the first season, pretending to have a job in international banking while actually working as a spy.

But for all the pleasure of those narrative flips, the meat of "Alias" is in the more quotidian stuff. The heart of the show is the relationship between Sydney and Jack, a relationship that begins in estrangement and ventures into something approaching a conventional father-daughter relationship. That is to say, strong protective feelings from Jack butt heads with Sydney's contradictory desire for his protection and her wish to be thought of as an independent, competent adult. Any only child (which Sydney is -- kind of) will recognize that dance. You don't have to be an only child, though, to recognize Victor Garber's beady-eyed glint, which is simultaneously uproarious and frightening. Jack plays snarling papa bear to anyone who would jeopardize Sydney. To her he's some combination of Zen master, drill sergeant and oracle.

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