In an effort to bring Sloane out into the open, Derevko suggests making it know that she is selling Rambaldi documents, but she will have to be allowed out. Jack agrees to accompany her, but can she be trusted? Meanwhile, Sydney and Vaughn have trust issues when the former is brought in for a secret CIA interrogation.

I hate this show. In a good way, but I hate it. I've now taken to suspecting everyone all the time and refusing to believe what anyone is doing is what they're really doing. I mean, I even managed to foster a small degree of mistrust of Vaughn in this episode, and there was really no reason to as it turned out.

Technically, this is the point we've been waiting for all season; Derevko is allowed out chaperone-free in order to contact Sloane, and to make sure she's not given away she manages to convince Jack to remove her tracker. You know the CIA is heading for a fall on this one, especially Jack, but her case is watertight; the tracker would, as she explains, give her away, so regardless of what happens, there wasn't really an option. To be honest, they do also fall for the oldest trick in the book when one car is swapped for another when it drives into a tunnel. I spotted it immediately, so quite why our boys don't is a mystery.

Yet this is the problem with being suspicious: even now Derevko has been picked up by Sloane, having stolen the Rambaldi papers and thanked Sloane for her extraction, whose side is she on? Could her encounters with Jack and Syd have convinced her to turn over a new leaf? Is she working for Sloane? If so, has she always been allied with him or is she operating for her own ends? There are still too many things we don't know, particularly how she arranged her escape considering Vaughn is unable to find anything incriminating during her stay in the CIA.

Which brings us neatly to that plotline. As I said, the suggestion that Vaughn is a traitor did make me wonder for a moment, although I did just assume he was investigating Derevko, as turned out to be the case. I love the CIA interrogator, who manages to get exactly the information he wants out of Syd through reading her perfectly, and her reaction to what she hears about Vaughn demonstrates that she wants to trust him but has been bitten before and isn't sure she can trust anyone.

Trust issues are also a problem with Will, whose dream about telling all to Francie is so effectively done that it's a massive relief when it turns out it's not real. To then have this flipped round and discover that he's been hypnotized into revealing CIA's codes by Francie is a superb little twist and one that I have a feeling will end with someone's death by the end of the season. At the moment I can't see any way this will end without the death of Will, Francie or Vaughn. My money's on the last of these, simply because a happy relationship between him and Sydney is likely to get old quickly. But, as ever, I'll be waiting in anticipation for whatever's next.

****

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