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Oh, for the '90s, when women played electric guitar, Ridley Scott's "Thelma and Louise" flew high at the box office and Lara Croft shook her booty without losing her cool. With "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and Xena kickboxing their way into monumental cult status, even television was busting with feminine moxie. Fast-forward to century 21, when women have vanished from the rock scene, Scott has returned to his blood-and-guts epics, Xena died and retired (in that order), Croft had a disappointing film debut and Buffy ... well, Buffy is still Buffy, thank God. But she's a lone gun, and, to contradict Tina Turner, right now we do need another hero. Preferably a female one.
Enter this year's model, college student-turned-secret agent Sydney Bristow, played by Jennifer Garner in ABC's spy show, "Alias." At first glance, Syd looked promising: a lethal vixen with Day-Glo hair lifted from "Run Lola Run" and "Matrix"-style moves flexed to urban electro beats.
Then came the first episode. And the second. Then more and more episodes, each making it clearer than the last that Syd is in fact more kitten than vixen. Where Buffy and Xena casually rewrote the book on girl power through pithy dialogue, creative angst and ambisexual escapades, Sydney merely dons this week's fetish gear to grump and hiss her way through a series of hackneyed scripts (all the way, alas, to an inexplicable Golden Globe award for Garner).
The plot, such as it is: In "Alias"' preamble, we are told Sydney thinks she's "working for the good guys" (um, that would be the CIA) when she decides to garnish her studies with a little espionage extra credit. Too late, she discovers that she is in fact employed by SD-6, a renegade agency bent on sowing international mischief. Having trained Syd to be a lethal weapon in spandex, SD-6 then rudely turns around and assassinates her fiancé.
Sydney is vexed. "They made me think I was giving my life to God and country, but it was all a lie!" she fumes before turning double agent for the real CIA, which of course never lies about anything, and devoting herself to the downfall of SD-6.
So it begins. Bad techno now supplies the weekly soundtrack as Sydney, dressed like a grim transvestite hooker, battles Evil through a combination of high kicks, long wigs and improbably skimpy ensembles.
While I smirk at the sight of Syd performing martial arts in a latex dress, other women are embracing her as an icon of feminist chic. "We love her wigs, her clothes, her accessories, her walk," says writer J.G. on the Elite TV Web site. "She's competent, feminine and independent."
OK, I must interject. Independent? Sydney's life is run by a posse of male handlers that includes her estranged father. As for competence ... well, it's safe to assume that if loose-lipped Syd hadn't told her fiancé about her espionage hobby, SD-6 wouldn't have felt the need to kill him.
Face it: Syd is hopeless. She whines too much, and she lacks style: Trying to fuse Buffy's attitude with Emma Peel's cool, she achieves only petulant frigidity. Her deadpan voice is flatter than an ice floe; her face, a tabla rasa frozen in what Karen (a.k.a. Manimal) from the review site Television Without Pity calls "a Baywatch look of concentration -- you know, look like you're thinking, but don't deflate your Botox injection."
Of course, "Alias"' inanity isn't all Sydney's fault. Selling the idea of a spy who wears a black leather ensemble to go undercover in a corporate office requires wit and a campy sensibility. "Alias"' writers have neither. While Buffy subjects notions of Good, Evil and heroism to nuance and spot-on parody, "Alias" guilelessly offers villains with names like Mr. Strange and government-funded good guys mouthing lines like, "They've turned Patel into a human bomb, which is not good." Even if Syd lost the Botox and latex, the dialogue would trip her every time.
What makes "Alias" and Sydney's failings extra-special disappointing -- though someday "Alias" might achieve "Showgirls"-like cult status, whereupon it will be extra-special funny -- is that, in an era of Britney and Bush, we need all the smart heroines we can get. As J.G. notes on the Elite TV site, women "want to see women with integrity kicking ass." You betcha. If only we could only get Buffy to kick Sydney's.