Is everyone ready to break the time barrier for 69 minutes of heart-stopping, pulse-pounding action? No? Good, let's watch Alias instead. My roommate flat-out refused to watch it with me, and instead went over to our friend's house to watch some guy get his butt pierced on Jackass. I was forced to make do with my Bitchy Gay Chinese Friend (as if there's any other kind) via long-distance. He's asked to remain nameless so his boyfriend, who loves this site (hi, Jeremy!), won't read this and realize that he ditched helping him clean out the garage to kibbitz with me for an hour. Ooooops. Oh, well.

By the way, this is brought to you without interruption, but with plenty of plot-jarring goodness, by Nokia.

Blippy opening credits.

A woman with Kool-Aid red hair is being held underwater. Her interrogators let her up. Bubble, bubble, gasp, gasp. Chinese is spoken by everyone, Sydney ('cause we all know that's who Kool-Aid head is) and interrogators alike, but no subtitles are provided. Was Nokia too cheap to pay for subtitling?

Bitchy Gay Chinese Friend: They should hold her underwater again for her awful accent!
Manimal: I know I made fun of it, but I think she looks cute with the Run, Lola, Run hair.
BGCF: You should go hold your head underwater. Girl, she looks like Raggedy Andy!

Sydney gets slapped around, then handcuffed to a chair. There's a rattling at the door. Sydney looks terrified/excited. Close-up of the door…

…and we fade to a similar-type door in a university. Hi, J.J. Abrams? This is Alfred Hitchcock's estate calling. We'd like you to stop ripping off North by Northwest now. A professor (you know he's a professor because he has a crazy Friar Tuck tonsure and a bowtie) walks over to where Sydney is finishing her test. He tells her that her time is up. She says okay, but then keeps talking so she can keep writing past the limit. That sassy lady!

Cue some complaint rock. I'm deeply confused. Am I watching a sweet coming-of-age dramedy or a rock-'em-sock-'em spy show?

Sydney and doctor-boyfriend Danny are walking across the college campus. Sydney's telling Danny she's pretty sure she got a D. There's some super-obvious attempt at character-establishing dialogue, wherein we learn that Sydney is not only super-smart, but really, really, REALLY sassy, as the only other time she got a D was when she embroidered a saucy word on her Home Ec project in high school. You go, girl! Sydney mourns that she deserves the D this time, since she didn't prepare. Danny sighs and tells her she needs to quit her part-time job at the bank. He stops and wrestles with his backpack as if trying to find something, and ends up kneeling at her feet. He mutters something about not being able to go through a double shift again. Sydney drops to her knees and says, anticipation alight in her eyes, "Did you get the Dave Matthews tickets?" You know what? I try to be nonjudgmental and live and let live and all that, but I'm with Janeane Garofalo on this one -- Dave Matthews blows. Also, do the kids -- even the grad student kids -- even listen to DMB anymore?

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