[Editor's Note: This article contains spoilers for Alias]
Alias was a spy series that ran on ABC for five seasons, from 2001 to 2006. It followed Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), a woman who posed as an ordinary college undergraduate while secretly working for the CIA. Or at least that’s what she thought. In the very first episode, Sydney discovers that the “CIA branch” she works for, SD-6, was actually a secret organization who worked against the actual CIA. She then becomes a double agent, working for both SD-6 and the CIA at the same time, in a race to discover artifacts and uncover the secrets of Milo Rambaldi.
In the Alias mythology, Rambaldi was a philosopher from the fifteenth century who was able to write prophecies that only got fulfilled centuries after his death. Those prophecies became the life obsession of Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin), the head of the SD-6 who trained agents to secure everything Rambaldi-related and bring to him so he could study it. After Sydney discovers the truth behind SD-6, Sloane goes from mentor to her archenemy.
So what exactly does all this Rambaldi plot mean?
First of all, you need to understand who Rambaldi was. He was never featured in Alias as an actual character, since the show happens in the 21st century, so he serves most as a symbol, almost deity-like. And that makes sense, because one of Rambaldi’s objectives with his work was to find the connection between God and Science. If that sounds similar to another ABC show from the early 2000s, it’s no coincidence: both Alias and Lost came to life helmed by J.J. Abrams, just a little before he became a famous blockbuster director.
Alias and Lost had deep roots in the discussion science vs. faith, but whereas on Lost the two concepts were put on opposite sides, Alias presented them as interconnected. That’s why Rambaldi’s work was so impactful in the series: the philosopher was able to theorize and write about scientific discoveries that only came true well after his death, all based on a belief in miracles and forces you can’t explain.
However, much like it happens with religion, the Rambaldi Prophecy was open to interpretation and this could cause some controversy. In Sydney’s case, it was important to get to the bottom of one specific Rambaldi prophecy, the page 47 of his manuscript, because it seemed to relate directly to her. It went:
“This woman here depicted will possess unseen marks, signs that she will be the one to bring forth my works: bind them with fury, a burning anger. Unless prevented, at vulgar cost, this woman will render the greatest power unto utter desolation. This woman, without pretense, will have had her effect, never having seen the beauty of my sky behind Mt. Subasio. Perhaps a single glance would have quelled her fire.”
Who is “this woman here depicted”, you ask? Well, the drawing is not very subtle:
This means that Sydney was handpicked by Arvin Sloane, and the more he saw the agent’s work, the more he believed she was the One. Sydney was relentless in the search for Rambaldi artifacts, in a way that made everyone believe there was something about her. Sloane, however, kept her at arm’s length because he was also prepared for her to be an enemy, even before he discovered she was a double agent. But, as with any prophecy, the question remained: could Sydney really be the One or was she just getting shaped into becoming it?
When she found out about the prophecy, Sydney herself tried to disprove it, because she didn’t like the idea she couldn’t control her own destiny. That’s why she decided to climb Mt. Subasio, to prove she could “see the beauty” of the sky behind it. But this is where it gets tricky – the mount part of the prophecy was later to be revealed as a misinterpretation, that Sloane hid from Sydney after figuring it out. So, who was the one after all?
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A mother of a problem
Another possible person the Rambaldi prophecy could be referring to was Sydney’s mother, Irina Derevko (Lena Olin). A former KGB agent, Irina was tasked with marrying Jack Bristow (Victor Garber), a CIA agent, and feed the KGB with whatever intelligence she could find out. A fierce Rambaldi believer, Irina dedicated her life to trying to prove herself as the one, to the point of giving her life to retrieve The Horizon (more on that later). She was also not the greatest mother: some years after Sydney’s birth, she faked her death in order to go back to Russia and only came back years later, wanting to know more about Sydney’s connection with Rambaldi. And she did so by continuing to pursue Rambaldi artifacts.
Rambaldi artifacts
Some of the clues Rambaldi left to indicate what was his ultimate project were his artifacts. He had many of them, and they ranged from music boxes to humanity-destroying devices. One of the most important Rambaldi artifact was The Horizon, a small sphere that, according to Rambaldi’s prophecy, would reveal the final piece in his endgame and uncover the secret to lasting peace on Earth. The problem is, The Horizon’s concept played much like Thanos’ plan in Avengers: Infinity War: in order to fix humanity, you’d have to tear it apart first.
The Horizon was the final piece of the puzzle that needed to be retrieved in order to put together the Mueller Device, which was the ultimate Rambaldi artifact. The Mueller Device generated a floating red ball that would emit sub-sonic frequency that would make humanity turn on themselves. The combination of The Horizon with the Mueller Device, according to the prophecy, would make its assembler immortal, giving him or her the opportunity to rebuild the world from scratch. Arvin Sloane and Irina Derevko worked for several decades in order to achieve this ultimate goal.
So, was the prophecy true?
Considering the way that the Rambaldi storyline played out during the course of Alias (most of the cast completely lost track of what was going on, and so did fans), it’d be easy for series showrunner Drew Goddard to dismiss it as just a plot device to move the story forward. However, the promise to grant immortality to whoever figured the prophecy out along with the Rambaldi atifacts came true and Sloane did in fact manage to live forever, albeit not in the way he intended. So, some aspects of the Rambaldi’s predictions and proposed experiments indeed came true.
As to the “One” mentioned in the prophecy, the show ends up in more of a gray area. If Sydney’s mother wasn’t the Chosen One, she certainly made a point of trying to fit those shoes, and in her head, she was fulfilling her own destiny. Sydney, on the other hand, tried hard to escape her alleged fate, but ended up fitting the bill for the Rambaldi prophecy precisely because she tried so hard no to be it. Finally, in the final scene of the series, Sydney’s daughter might have shown some inclination of following her mother’s footsteps when she manages to assemble a complicated puzzle together, only to tear it apart seconds after.
So do you make your own fate or are you destined to be what you are? Even though Alias didn’t lean too heavily on this debate for most of its run, the final message in the series finale “All the Time in the World” is clear: there’s no use in obsessing about things that are beyond our control, because trying to be something you are “destined” to be might destroy you, and trying to escape it might make you obsessed with making drastic choices just to feel in control. The best we can do is live one day after the other and hope for the best.
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