The Safe House - Expositions

As a matter of fact, it is — which is precisely the point. Against all odds, Sunday's pulse-quickening season finale of Alias gathers up almost every one of its far-flung plot points and dumps them all back into Taiwan, which is where Sydney Bristow's spy-game adventure began.Written by series creator J. J. Abrams, Sunday's exhilarating outing wraps up enough stories to prove satisfying while still leaving you hanging and begging for more.

It's TV puzzle-making at its best, as befits the season's most unexpected pleasure — and, in Jennifer Garner, the season's brightest new star.

The show's twists and surprises are so densely packed together that I can't tell you how or why Sydney is in Taiwan without giving at least one of them away. Suffice to say that, having worked (unwittingly) for the evil spy organization SD-6 against the CIA and for the CIA against SD-6, she's now working for herself. For help, she turns to her father, Jack — played by Victor Garber, who, if there's any justice at all should be a lock for an Emmy nomination.

Insanely complicated and yet incessantly entertaining, Alias is a throwback to such outsized TV adventures as The Avengers and Mission: Impossible. If you like, you can think of Sydney as a double agent Girl From U.N.C.L.E., or as Barbara "Batgirl" Gordon if her dad, Commissioner Gordon, had been emotionally withdrawn and a lot scarier.

What Abrams has brought to the mix is a deeper emotional current. Over the course of the season, Sydney has lost every major underpinning of her life. As if finding her murdered fiancé were not bad enough, she discovered that the father she loathed was actually a good guy, and that the dead mother she adored was both evil and alive.

These being harder-edged times, however, Alias also is a darker and more violent show than most of its TV predecessors — and doesn't always qualify as full-family viewing. Sunday's finale features two torture scenes (both harrowing) and two, possibly three, plot-shifting deaths: one deserved, one poignant and unsettling and one that I'm hoping didn't actually happen.

That kind of out-of-nowhere, did-it-happen-or-didn't-it plot shift is just one of the reasons fans love Alias. Underneath the outrageous disguises, the outlandish inventions (my favorite: the device that eliminated all sound) and the insanely convoluted plot lies, in essence a simple story. A woman we've come to like is trying to strip away her aliases and discover who she really is.

We'll see you in September, Sydney. Back where we all began.

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