What little I knew about Alias before watching the pilot episode suggested that it was to spies what Buffy was to vampires; a female-centric slice of entertaining hokum. In practice, just as Buffy turned out — occasionally anyway — to do a blindingly good episode, I’ve been seriously impressed with just how good Alias is on the basis of this first chunk.

Starring Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow, the show opens with a sequence of the heroine in peril, before flashing back to her life as a student. Her scholastic ambitions are mixed with a relationship with a decent guy who does the decent thing and proposes to her. With tragic consequences. Opening up to her lover, she tells him she works for SD-6, a division of the CIA — a decision which leads to his death when an agent is sent to eliminate him.

And that’s not the least of it. Turns out that SD-6 aren’t in fact anything to do with the CIA, but are in fact a front for a collective of sinister baddies — we can tell, because at least one of them is Libyan — who formed their own operation some years ago. Strewth, what a realisation, finding out you’re working for the wrong side. Not only that, but her dad turns out to be part of the picture in the worst possible way…he’s working for SD-6…or is he really there on behalf of the good guys? And who said the CIA were the good guys anyway?

Written and directed by J.J. Abrams, this is high-octane storytelling of unusual intelligence for a successful mainstream show. It looks great, moves quickly, and the action scenes are exciting and credible enough to buy into. There’s also a grim sequence in which Sydney is tortured, and though we thankfully don’t see anything gruesome there’s no doubt that she’s in real peril — which in turn justifies the way she turns things rounds on her tormentor, who is petrified of her but she lets off relatively light in the circumstances.

As with Buffy, this is a show that seems to have a big mythology associated with it from the outset. The interaction between CIA and SD-6 promises plenty of intrigue for the future, and having her dad at the centre of it all keeps things personal for added emotional impact — important since sometimes all the duplicity of spy stories can leave the viewer both cold and confused.

It’s smart stuff. A smart and attractive heroine guarantees an audience of both sexes — Sydney is highly capable, and needs her wits about her to survive in the deadly world she’s part of. She’s written strong but credibly so, having worked as a spy for several years even before the action of the pilot commences. At the same time, she’s easy to identify with as a young woman at college who plays sports and likes guys — she’s fairly easy to empathise with, a flesh and blood woman with identifiable motivations and emotions. And that core needs to be there for the show to maintain its appeal — this is not the time for Mamet style shellgames and wheels within wheels if those ploys risk losing the emotional connection with the protagonist.

The one area of the pilot that didn’t work for me was the music. There’s a fairly constant soundtrack of bland rock music for the most part, and it seemed shoehorned in. One awkward sequence had a ‘meaningful’ song playing which it turned out Sydney was playing on her stereo at home. Cute, in an annoying way. And even when I knew and liked the music used, as I did with Peter Gabriel’s ‘Here Comes the Flood’, I didn’t think it complemented the scene well. The music worked best when there was a dynamic orchestral score for a fight sequence — anything with lyrics and the words got in the way. But that’s a relatively minor criticism of a pilot episode that I thoroughly enjoyed.