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Mission ends for 'Alias'

Bittersweet though it is, Jennifer Garner says it's the right time for the show to call it quits.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published May 22, 2006

BURBANK, Calif. - Alias is coming in from the cold.

"I think we have done these characters justice, and to do any more would be pushing it," says star Jennifer Garner, who plays double agent Sydney Bristow, perhaps TV's most gorgeous female spy since Diana Rigg played Emma Peel in the '60s British series The Avengers.

After five seasons, the ABC series that revitalized the espionage genre with a visually dazzling combination of glamor, angst and trickery concludes tonight with a pair of episodes.

The brainchild of J.J. Abrams (who has since created ABC's hit drama Lost and directed Mission: Impossible III), Alias leaves behind a loyal, cultlike group of fans that understood the minutia of the double-dealing plot twists.

But mainstream viewers were often left scratching their heads over the spies' constantly shifting alliances between good and evil, not to mention their occasional faked deaths.

Executive producer Jeff Pinkner, who was in charge of running the show day to day, says Alias has "always been a family drama" and has "always played with the question of whether or not Sydney Bristow had a choice in what she was doing in her life ... fate vs. free will."

The role made Garner an A-list star and her private life media fodder. Supermarket tabs tracked her divorce from Felicity's Scott Foley, her dating of Alias co-star Michael Vartan, her marriage last year to film star Ben Affleck and the November birth of their daughter, Violet.

Simply clad in black, action star work clothes, Garner arrived promptly for lunch at the Mickey Mouse-themed Rotunda restaurant on the Walt Disney Studios lot, where the final episodes of Alias were in production.

Pinkner joined her, and they shared thoughts about the bonds that developed among cast and crew.

"This show will always be the backdrop to me growing up, and I did it with these people. They've seen me struggle through stuff, figure stuff out, struggle through it again," said Garner, 34. "They have been enormously kind to me the entire time and have done nothing but facilitate my growth and been very patient."

That included her pregnancy, which was worked into the plot, with Bristow giving birth to a daughter, Isabelle, in the April 19 episode.

Filming that sequence felt "too intimate," Garner said. "It was a horrible scene to shoot. I felt ridiculous. I kept saying to the crew, 'This wasn't what it was like. I wasn't like this. I was very calm.' "

Certainly more fun for her over the years were the many disguises Bristow adopted to go undercover, including "hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of wigs," Garner said.

Her favorite was "the blond bob," which she donned, along with blue contacts, to pose as a Nordic beauty. "It's the only time I've ever felt, 'I wish I was this person.' "

She also mastered snippets of many foreign languages, the hardest being Czech.

And Garner is proud to say she performed many of her own stunts, though she's miffed that as her fame grew, so also did Disney's insistence on stunt doubles.

She said she had wanted to do a "descender" in one of the final episodes, where "you're rigged in a harness. Couldn't be safer. A hundred and fifty feet. I've done higher than that several times."

But she was told insurance wouldn't cover her. "I was crushed. I was so bummed."

So on this day, she was happy to be going back after lunch to shoot a rappelling scene, even though "it's just a wussy thing."

Pinkner said the conclusion honors Bristow's ongoing romance with CIA agent Michael Vaughn (Vartan) and her relationship with her parents, particularly her father, double agent Jack Bristow (Victor Garber).

[Last modified May 22, 2006, 05:56:56]