Alias 5.3: The Shed

A woman arrives at a secured lab in Istanbul where scientists in protective suits experiment with a liquid substance. She shoots a guard and punches a code to enter the lab. Holding the scientists at gun point, she steals two vials and breaks a third before locking them in and bolting. They die instantly.

In the APO office, Marshall shows a video feed of this theft to the team. The liquid, he says, is called Substance-33, a deadly nerve agent that kills in seconds. He identifies the woman as a lackey of Gordon Dean, based on her knowledge of the code and the computer she used to hack it.

Marshall traced the hacker's signal to Prague. Jack gives the case to Sydney, Marshall and Tom Grace. Sydney privately asks Jack why Dixon isn't going. Jack says that Dixon is with Sloane, who was allowed to meet a contact with information about Nadia's cure.

Inside his prison cell, Sloane tells Dixon that he's paying Dolzhenko, the contact, $300,000 for a lead. Later, in Omsk, Sloane convinces a wary Dixon to allow him to meet Dolzhenko alone. At the meeting, Dolzhenko points a gun at Sloane and steals the money.

In Prague, the APO team tracks the hacker to a coffee shop. Armed with a microprocessor concealed at the back of a mint pack, Syd enters the café, and speaks to a man with a laptop, assuming he's the hacker. Just then, the signal fades - the real hacker has left the building. Tom and Marshall give chase and capture her.

The team interrogates the hacker, whose name is Rachel Gibson, in a hotel room. Tom catches her transmitting a signal through her watch, and she admits she's a black ops CIA agent. After she passes a lie detector test, Syd says she was in the same situation 13 years ago - when she believed she worked for the country but was actually an enemy.

When Marshall confirms that Rachel's signal went to Gordon Dean, not the CIA, Rachel cooperates. She agrees to download the encryption key from Gordon Dean's Vlasska office nearby in order to enable a file transfer from Marshall's PC.

Rachel, thanks to Syd's remote guidance, successfully downloads the encryption key. As Rachel walks to the elevator, her friend, Peyton, joins her. Sensing Rachel's panic, Sydney receives the key in a quick brush pass. Marshall begins his server download.

Back in Dean's office, Peyton, who has been observing Rachel's change in behavior, alerts Dean. After spotting the file transfer, Dean and Peyton leave the building and trigger a bomb.

Marshall discovers that Dean had triggered an EMP that fried all electronics. Tom rushes out the hotel room to help Rachel. Bombs explode as Tom makes it to Dean's office. He finds a semi-conscious Rachel beneath the rubble and cradles her in his arms. Sydney, who arrives shortly after Tom, meets his gaze silently.

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I'm thinking the writers are eventually going to kill off Nadia, Sloane's daughter and Sydney's half sister. Tonight's episode was just a teaser in regard to Nadia's storyline, which was a bummer. I really would like to know, is the charachter (dying) dead or not. If so be done with it, if not let's find a cure and get her back on the show. Still the episode was good and we were introduced to one of this season's new charachters tonight.

If you currently do not watch this show, please do. Thursdays at 8 PM on ABC. Check your local listings. Alias is one of the best shows on television. You can buy seasons 1-3 on DVD now and season four will be released on October 25. That's what I did after getting involved with this show at the start of last season. Now I'm up tp speed. I've watched seasons 1-2 twice and season three once, so far.