The ABC show Alias covered a lot of ground while Sydney Bristow, her friends and enemies were spying around the world. One of the constants of the show was the work of Milo Rambaldi, a fictional 15th century philosopher whose work was a central theme of the show. Everybody was always after Rambaldi’s mysterious devices and trying to unlock the secrets of his work. Well, now some of the cast has admitted that while we at home were trying to make sense of all the Rambaldi twists and turns, so were they. Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber and Ron Rifkin talked about the enduring plot line.
GARNER | [Laughs] Victor had no handle on it. Sometimes I could piece together a bit of the Rambaldi plot. Sometimes I was pretty fluent in it, but definitely a lot of the time, it went over my head.GARBER | I had no idea what was going on, but I’m doing a show now [DC’s Legends of Tomorrow] that I have no idea what’s going on. [Laughs] I’m not very smart.GARNER | [Ron] couldn’t [keep track of it]. He really couldn’t. He was so good at saying it, though.RIFKIN | No fucking handle on it at all… Then poor Mia Maestro [as Nadia]… She had to fall through that glass floor. Oh, it was just terrible.
Man, this makes me feel so much better. Alias stars Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber and Ron Rifkin spoke to TVLine for the website’s oral history of the show, and revealed that even though they should have had the inside track on the show’s complicated Rambaldi plot lines, they were often as in the dark as the audience.
Alias focused on college student/super secret spying badass Sydney Bristow (Garner) as she juggled her classes with working with her dad, Jack (Garber), in a super secret branch of the CIA. Because of the highly classified nature of her work, Sydney has to keep her job a secret from her friends, and has to take on many different aliases in order to complete her globe-trotting missions. Many of those missions involved gathering devices created by Rambaldi, and other artifacts created by him, for her boss, Sloane (Rifkin), who was obsessed with figuring out the mysteries behind the Renaissance-era inventor. Alias went on for five seasons from 2001-2006.
Rambaldi artifacts were such a large part of the show that it was hard to keep track of what they were, when they were important and what they could do. Since she played the main character in Alias, it makes sense that Jennifer Garner would have a greater handle on the various Rambaldi plots. But, even as Garner puts her co-stars on blast, she admits that she only had a tenuous comprehension of the storylines as well. When even your stars don’t quite get what’s going on, it’s fair to say that some of your plots are kind of convoluted. Well, so what if Alias was sometimes unnecessarily complicated? It sure was fun while it lasted.
