Anybody here watch Alias? Saw the season ender last night. It was ok except the 'cliff hanger' at the end. What was in that envelope and why do we have to wait until January to find out? Alias will be back in 6 MONTHS. Why have a cliff hanger if your show's off for 6 months?

Hey there... I don't know if you'll get this so late after the original post... but I'm a hardcore Alias fan and I thought I'd answer your question.

For starters, every hour-long drama series and sitcom on television goes with a cliff-hanger for their season finale. It's been done like this since the end of the 1970s. It was around that time that a couple of tv shows -- namely Dallas with the "Who Shot JR" scandal -- realized that cliffhanger endings would pretty much guarantee an audience would tune in the following season with even more hype and an even bigger crowd. And it's been done this way ever since. When shows end their seasonal run in April/May/June to take vacation and shoot more episodes, 4, 5 or six months is pretty standard. They usually come back on in Late September or October.

In the case of Alias, as with a few other shows, the networks are deciding to change their format and start some shows in January instead of the fall. So Alias will be off longer than normal. This is also so that they can do some major revamping of the show because the 3rd season got a lot of slack. They had new writers and the creator JJ Abrams was absent working on his new show.

That said, if you ever get into Alias hardcore like the rest of us, you'll learn to have a love-hate relationship with those cliffhanger endings. They drive you absolutely nuts waiting for the next episode. It keeps you coming back. Though Alias does it less now, the first 2 seasons had cliffhangers at the end of every episode.

On to the next part of your question... I would HIGHLY suggest renting or buying Alias on DVD. The first 3 seasons are available and you have time to catch up. Otherwise, read each synopsis on ABC.COM/ALIAS in the episode guide. But if you want me to reveal the history for you here, I will. Hehe. Ready? If you don't wanna know, I suggest skipping down to the stars below. Ready... ooookay... well....

At the end of Season 1, Sydney discovers that her mother used to be a Russian spy who was supposed to have died in a car accident when she was just a child. So Sydney goes on a hunt for her mother "Laura" aka Irina Derevko. (Not to be confused with Col. Katya Derevko who appeared in the Season Finale you watched. She is Irina's sister). Now, Sydney has very little memory of that traumatizing period after her mother died... but in the beginning of Season 2, Irina Derevko turns herself in to the CIA. After discovering something called "Project Christmas" in which foreign children at their most impressionable stage of development are tested and trained (from the age of 4 or 5) to have the skills of a master spy, Sydney eventually learns that when her mother supposedly "died", her father put her into the American version of that program. At the end of Season 2, Sydney fights and kills an arch nemesis, passes out from the battle, and awakes to find herself in a Hong Kong alley. When she calls home, Vaughn is sent to retrieve her... only he's got some shocking news for her... she's been DEAD for almost two years and they had DNA evidence to convince them of it. That was the cliffhanger for THAT season. So Season 3 was about Sydney trying to uncover what happend to her in those missing 3 years. What she found in that envelope were classified CIA documents about her... signed by her father Jack Bristow. Us fans suspect, of course, that Jack knew about her disappearance or is responsible or... he's Covenant... or... that the papers are just more details about Project Christmas. We're not sure.

**So, I'll leave you with that... but I thought you should know it's also interesting that the number "47" is important to the Alias plot and it's exactly the number of posts you have in your info there. Sydney Bristow was Rambaldi's 47th prophecy and the number comes up several times each season (in secret and in the open for fans to see). Welcome to the obsession! Hehe.