A fly spy — for a while

After five high-tech, McGuffin-chasing seasons, "Alias" goes into deep cover tonight.

Deep cover, deep-sixed. Same difference. At least ABC's canceled spy series gets to wrap up its story lines in a two-hour finale (at 9 p.m. on KOMO-TV) denied to other worthy shows. For instance, ABC's "Invasion" ended Wednesday, a finish that made the one for "Twin Peaks" seem almost satisfying.

Claiming it wanted to avoid spoilers, the network wouldn't give critics an advance look at the "Alias" finale. (Attention, ABC: It's a teevee show, not the Manhattan Project. Get over yourself.) So there's no telling if it's a wrap-up worthy of "The Fugitive's" one-armed man or not. But the preview at aol.com/alias suggests that one major piece of business could be resolved: The endgame of Rambaldi, the Leonardo da Vinci-like prophet-genius whose apocalyptic inventions would be the envy of Albert Einstein and Ron Popeil. After a wind-up comparable to the government conspiracy in "The X-Files," it all appears to come down to a grapefruit-size red sphere that evil Sloane (Ron Rifkin) wants from Sydney (Jennifer Garner), and he's willing to smoke her dad, Jack (Victor Garber) and baby-daddy Vaughn (Michael Vartan) to get it.

Show runner and executive producer Jeff Pinkner told The Associated Press the conclusion "honors" the romance between Sydney and Vaughn and her relationship with Jack. Whatever that means.

"Alias" has had more flip-flops than the last general election — characters going from bad to good, back to bad, dead to alive, back to dead. And there's been an increasing roteness to the infiltrate-and-retrieve missions for the various Rambaldi artifacts or other McGuffins. So it's a good time to put the agents out to pasture like Valerie Plame. In fact, when Garner's character recently got pregnant to match her real-life pregnancy, and two young agents (Balthazar Getty and Rachel Nichols) came onboard to take up the slack, there was an undeniable sense that the show had, if not jumped the shark, begun circling it in a really cool boat.

Given all that, it's easy to forget what a knockout "Alias" was when it premiered in 2001. The premise from "Felicity" honcho J.J. Abrams — college girl Sydney leads a double life as a secret agent, and soon a double-agent — was a little squishy. But as soon as she lost a tooth getting interrogated by a bad guy, it was clear the show had grit. Likewise, Garner has a saccharine quality that you wouldn't find in a broad like Honey West or Modesty Blaise. But her rip-roarin' fights would have made Mrs. Peel from "The Avengers" jealous, and they were the best female action scenes on U.S. TV to date.

As has been said before, the gadgetry was what "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." only wished it could be. And as the Bond movies grew increasingly dumb, "Alias" had film-caliber production quality and remained a good ongoing source of spy smack.

The show has spawned a couple of big-time success stories. After winning a Golden Globe in 2002 and a Screen Actors Guild award last year, Garner has a viable if not A-list film career.

Series creator J.J. Abrams became TV royalty with "Lost," but his fledgling career as a film director is more of a question mark. Setting aside the issue of whether "Mission: Impossible III" was crippled by Tom Cruise's lunatic public behavior — that's apparent lunatic behavior if you're one of Cruise's lawyers — the movie is just a big "Alias" clone. It's a season boiled down to two hours and given a jolt of whatever Barry Bonds uses, with Cruise looking bug-eyed intense throughout. Tossing the original "Mission: Impossible" long-con format, its "Alias" similarities are cookie-cutter blatant, from the look and politics of the IMF headquarters to Abrams' flashback structure, right down to a cameo by "Alias" actor Greg ("Weiss") Grunberg.

Meanwhile, the magnificently grim Victor Garber has landed on the Fox crime show "Justice" this fall. Rifkin will pop up in ABC's Calista Flockhart drama, "Brothers & Sisters." And hey, you can always hear the criminally underused Carl ("Dixon") Lumbly's voice as the Martian Manhunter in the "Justice League" cartoons.

"Alias" never was a big ratings hit, and you wouldn't pass a polygraph if you called the finale hotly anticipated. So I say go out big.

There have been some missteps on the way to the end. Maybe hoping to tap into the ruthlessness of "24," they killed off the only character intriguing enough for a spinoff: lethal French criminal Renée Rienne (Élodie Bouchez). But all that did was cut down on reasons to keep watching. Even worse, they had Syd's nemesis Anna Espinosa (Gina Torres) turned into a double of Sydney.

An evil twin? Are you !@#$% kidding me?

The evil twin has been put out of my misery with a bullet to the head, just in time to pull out a win at the end. Something big.

Something really off-the-wall, like the greatest spy series of all time, "The Prisoner." When the 17 episodes of that cult classic reached their bizarre climax in 1968 — a near-inexplicable ending that involved hero Patrick McGoohan's character discovering that he was his own prisoner, sort of — viewers were confused, furious, some were in awe. But boy did they remember it, and the legend grew.

In "Alias," Rambaldi's prophecies call Sydney "the chosen one," and he predicts she'd bring forth his final works. In one of the last episodes, an elderly Italian prisoner who hands her an artifact mentions something about "the battle to come" and the stars falling out of the sky.

Will Sydney cause the invasion of Iran and the inauguration of Jeb Bush as the 44th president tonight? Nah, go bigger.

Rambaldi's centuries-old sketch of a divine-looking Sydney is key to the show's mythology and gives off a "Da Vinci Code" vibe. Why not make Syd the second coming of Mary Magdalene — the wife of Jesus and mother of his child according to "Code"? Then she could send Sloane to Hell where he belongs, and nobody would forget about it any time soon.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com