Alias 5.4: Mockingbird

Wearing a glitzy outfit, Sydney emerges from a sleek car in Monte Carlo and hands her key to Tom, dressed as the valet. She goes inside the casino and starts attracting attention with her boisterous behavior and consecutive wins. Meanwhile, Tom drives the car to the basement and picks the lock of a maintenance station.

With a big crowd, Dixon accuses Sydney of cheating. After the casino guards bring her in the office, Syd shoots them with a tranquilizer and goes to the office vault. With a laser cutter and the key code that Tom relayed through her earpiece, Sydney retrieves a laptop and drives away.

As she passes by a shipyard, she is stopped by a policeman and is boxed in by another vehicle. Suddenly, a shipping crane with a large magnet grabs her entire car and Syd is lifted hundreds of feet off the ground. She gets a phone call from Gordon Dean saying he wants Mockingbird back.

In the APO office 72 hours earlier, Rachel shares her guilt with Sydney on getting her coworkers killed. When Sydney urges her to rest and points out that it is Gordon Dean's fault, Rachel insisted on finishing her report on Dean. Syd then asks Rachel what "Mockingbird" is as written in some of her reports, and Rachel replies that it's her call sign.

At an industrial office, Gordon Dean tasks a man named Keach with an assignment. After, Peyton approaches Dean and mentions that they need money for an account transfer so they can rebuild their offices. Dean types in his password.

Waiting in the APO office, Marshall announces that he has been monitoring Dean's accounts based on Rachel's intel, and recently, Dean had liquidated all his finances and stored them all in one account. Rachel shares that the account is Dean's fail safe account in Cayman Islands, and that since she built it, she had made it a trap-door account. The only way to access it is to be at the bank and go through Dean's protocol questions. The answers are in Dean's servers in the Prague office -which has been destroyed.

Later, Syd asks Rachel to go with her to Prague. Using Marshall's recovery software, they can reconstruct protocols and help Dixon and Tom with getting into Dean's account before traces of Dean disappear once again. Rachel adamantly refuses.

In a Federal Building, Sloane sits in front of Boyd Harkin, Special Prosecutor to Sloane's case. Unsympathetic and determined to punish Sloane, he lists Sloane's criminal activities, and expresses his disbelief on the pardon agreements that Sloane had gotten in the past. Sloane admits to his wrongdoings and promises that he is reformed. Later, Sloane is approached in his cell by Keach. Keach says that he has benefactors who can help Sloane. He considers this offer.

With their Czech Intelligence Badges, Sydney and Rachel enter Dean's Prague office and heads to the servers. In spite of Rachel's anxiety and difficult flashbacks, they find the hard drive amidst the debris and was able to plug it into the laptop. Rachel starts hacking.

Dixon and Tom sit at a beach in Cayman Islands and were approached by the bank's emissary, Pierpont, earlier than expected. After Dixon alerts Sydney of the sudden change, they go into a cabana where Dixon and Tom is seated. With the guards' pistols aimed at Dixon and Tom, Pierpont starts asking them a series of questions. As Dixon subtly relays the questions through his earpiece, Syd and Rachel supply answers from Prague with the data they are slowly recovering. Despite a setback, Dixon was able to withdraw all of Dean's finances.

At this moment, Dean and Peyton realize that they have been cleaned out. As they conclude that Rachel is the only person who could have done this, they make plans to get her back.

At the APO office, Dixon reports that because of the recent events, Echelon was able to intercept a call revealing a location where Dean stores one of his operation archives. With the blueprints in front of them, they realize that they need to retrieve the archive from an electromagnetic deposit box system. When Dixon mentions that the mainframe resets passwords daily, Rachel blurts out that she can get around it by decrypting the building's network. With determination to destroy Gordon Dean, she volunteers for this next assignment.

At Monte Carlo, after Sydney heads to the casino and Tom brings the car to the basement, he pops the trunk and Rachel goes with him to the maintenance station. Rachel decrypts the algorithm and passes the code to Tom who relayed it to Sydney. She goes back in the trunk and Sydney drives off.

With her entire car hanging from the crane, Syd speaks to Dean on the phone who is demanding that Mockingbird be delivered in 30 minutes. As Dixon attempts to rescue them, a camera captures their presence and the car plummets 20 feet. Talking Rachel through this predicament, Syd asks Rachel to call Dean to confirm that she is on her way. As Dean listens, he hears a foghorn in the background, revealing Rachel's actual location. In a flash, Syd tells Rachel to kick the trunk, and grabbing Rachel by her arm, Syd uses her laser cutter to attach herself to the magnet -a split second before the car crashes to the ground.

At the hearing, Sloane stands in front of Harkin, awaiting his sentence. Sloane surprisingly gets pardoned and is released from the federal penitentiary. Jack looks at him suspiciously.

On the plane ride home, Sydney tells Rachel that they can't release her until Dean is brought in -and everyone involved. Rachel sits back and realizes that her life is never going to be safe.

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Again the story was good, but as is always the case the episodes build on each other. There's still no way of knowing how the season will go. Next week's episode looks promising. Maybe I'm too wrapped up in the show to offer an unbiased opinion.

Oh well.