Rick Yune, Modern Day Samurai

Melissa Hung
January 6, 2005

Anyhow, I was pleased to see Rick Yune listed as a guest star at the beginning. He plays a villain, a guy name Tamazaki who's got two personas. Everyone is after this crazy evil guy named Vadic. But actually, Tamazaki is Vadic. Made him up. What a crafty fellow.

I was hoping that Tamazaki would be a recurring villain, like the character Sark, someone who's evil, but charmingly so, who's got a bad boy appeal and flirts relentlessly with Sydney Bristow while they're kicking each other's asses. Alas, Sydney kills him at the end of the episode, with a fricking samurai sword no less. During the CIA's debrief of our villain, we learn that Mr. Tamazaki fancies himself a "modern day samurai." In fact, he broke into a British museum once in an attempt to steal the above-mentioned samurai sword to "restore glory to his country." In order to lure Tamazaki out from hiding, Sydney and her spy team steal the sword, then wait for him to contact them.

WTF? This man's motivation for blowing up buildings and assassinating heads of states is because he thinks he's a samurai and wants to honor his country, blah blah? Puh-leeze. Real convincing. Really smart writing. Good job, Alias writers.

Contributor: 

Melissa Hung

Founding Editor

Melissa Hung is the founding editor of Hyphen. She was editor in chief for the magazine's first five years and went on to serve in many other leadership roles on the staff and board for more than a decade. A writer and freelance journalist, Melissa has written for NPR, Vogue, Pacific Standard, Longreads, and Catapult. She grew up in Texas, the eldest child of immigrants.

Comments

Comments

claire wrote on Fri, 01/07/2005 - 3:04pm
sigh. i'm calling it. as of 11 pm pacific time, January 6, 2005, "Alias" is officially on the wrong side of the shark. others might contend that all of season three was pretty shark-infested, but i found the whole lauren-tension-thing pretty, well, fun.but all the things they left hanging last season were wrapped up *in expository dialogue* this season, including the missing Lena Olin, who is rumored to have asked for too much money last season and pissed the producers off. check this: they have the protagonist's father assassinate the protagonist's mother, the protagonist find out about it, identify the body and have it buried ... all *off camera*. did somebody forget that television is a *visual* and *dramatic* medium?so rather than moving forward into new and different situations with new and different characters, they contorted the whole scene to get the same characters back into the same situation as the last three situations. cowards.yes, i agree, rick yune was pretty much the only interesting thing about the season premiere and they flubbed that, too. i waited an extra half-season for this?