Noah Hicks Character Discussion
So. In just about every girl’s life, there’s a boyfriend who got away. Am I right? That one she fell hard for, and then for one reason or another, he disappeared from her life. It broke her heart, and she got to carry around a nice little scar because of it. The scars usually fade, but the memory doesn’t.
She does her best to put him behind her, but as fate would have it, it doesn’t work out that way. He comes back into her life, and tries to get his second chance. She’s got a choice to make, and it’s not an easy one.
In Sydney Bristow’s life, I think Noah Hicks filled that role pretty nicely, don’t you?
Noah was a fellow agent at SD-6 who, five years ago, Sydney had dated while she was still a trainee. They kept it under the radar, since agents dating was ‘discouraged’. Just as things were getting serious between them, he very suddenly disappeared. There was no word left behind for Sydney as to where he’d gone, or if he’d ever be coming back.
Yeesh.
Then, five years later, they run into each other on a mission. Noah was the partner of Wexler, the agent they had undercover who was getting SD-6 intel on Alexander Khasinau. It was a long term operation that, after a debriefing by McCullough, we discover Noah volunteered himself for.
The man had issues with commitment. He found himself falling in love with Sydney, and a part of him couldn’t handle it. He had to get out, so he took the mission, and he left. And then had five years to regret the decision.
But, for what it’s worth, we do find out that he tried to contact Sydney.
Noah: I told you to meet me in San Pedro.
Sydney: I never got a letter.
Noah: I didn't send you a letter. I wasn't allowed to discuss my reassignment. I encoded a message in a junk e-mail. You should've been able to pick it up from the subject line.
Sydney: I always set my computer to filter out junk e-mail.
So technically, he tried to fix them being separated. It just didn’t work out very well. Points for effort?
... Okay, okay, moving on.
Anyway, for all intensive purposes, Agent Hicks is back. He’s quickly reasserted himself into SD-6 life. Being around Sydney, Dixon, Marshall, going on missions again… But Sloane still doesn’t trust him. He’s absolutely sure Noah’s hiding something.
All it really looks like that he’s hiding, and not all that well mind you, is a distaste for Sloane and a general unhappiness with the spy life. He is, as he predicted Sydney would, ‘not having fun anymore’. And he wants out. Not only that, but he wants to take Sydney with him. He lets her in on his scam to get money from the Russian mob, and tells her that when the time is right, he just plans to walk away. But he wants to get her to go with him first.
She balks, explaining how she wants to find her mother. Secretly, there’s also her double agent life that while she wants to walk away from it, she knows she couldn’t possibly give it up. He asks her if he waited for her, would she go then?
So he does genuinely care about her, and doesn’t want to give her up a second time despite his growing need to get out while he still can. But because of her silence, in spite of the smile she gives him, he seems to know that this isn’t going to work. Still, he persists, out of an apparent need to make the effort to be with her in spite of the obvious things stacked against it.
At the same time all of this is happening, we learn of a K-Directorate assassin, codenamed Snowman (so named for his favorite method of killing, ice picks). He’s been on the Most Wanted list for the last twelve years, and the CIA thought he’d died in ’97 until they learned he’d been hired again to kill Khasinau.
Yeah, you know where this is going. Sydney goes to bring in Khasinau, finds out that the Snowman’s already there. She fights with him, and he accidentally falls on a knife. She pulls his mask off… And it’s our boy. Sydney wasn’t the only one leading a double life after all.
Which explains more so why Noah wanted so badly out of the life he was leading. And how much he wanted to keep that side of him away from Sydney, something he tells her in his last moments.
I personally sympathized a lot with Noah. In spite of him being a ‘bad guy’ (or, it could be argued, a good guy doing bad things), I felt bad for him because he tried to get out, and get back the girl he loved, and it just couldn’t happen for him. His death in this is almost inevitable, because he had too many lies following him around, and that sort of thing catches up with you.
Sydney has other people, such as her father and Vaughn, and then entire CIA, helping her with her double life. Noah basically had just himself.
So, even though he was stabbing people with ice picks… I sympathized. Which proves Alias can compel you to like people that you just might run screaming from in real life.
But really, you gotta love it.
She does her best to put him behind her, but as fate would have it, it doesn’t work out that way. He comes back into her life, and tries to get his second chance. She’s got a choice to make, and it’s not an easy one.
In Sydney Bristow’s life, I think Noah Hicks filled that role pretty nicely, don’t you?
Noah was a fellow agent at SD-6 who, five years ago, Sydney had dated while she was still a trainee. They kept it under the radar, since agents dating was ‘discouraged’. Just as things were getting serious between them, he very suddenly disappeared. There was no word left behind for Sydney as to where he’d gone, or if he’d ever be coming back.
Yeesh.
Then, five years later, they run into each other on a mission. Noah was the partner of Wexler, the agent they had undercover who was getting SD-6 intel on Alexander Khasinau. It was a long term operation that, after a debriefing by McCullough, we discover Noah volunteered himself for.
The man had issues with commitment. He found himself falling in love with Sydney, and a part of him couldn’t handle it. He had to get out, so he took the mission, and he left. And then had five years to regret the decision.
But, for what it’s worth, we do find out that he tried to contact Sydney.
Noah: I told you to meet me in San Pedro.
Sydney: I never got a letter.
Noah: I didn't send you a letter. I wasn't allowed to discuss my reassignment. I encoded a message in a junk e-mail. You should've been able to pick it up from the subject line.
Sydney: I always set my computer to filter out junk e-mail.
So technically, he tried to fix them being separated. It just didn’t work out very well. Points for effort?
... Okay, okay, moving on.
Anyway, for all intensive purposes, Agent Hicks is back. He’s quickly reasserted himself into SD-6 life. Being around Sydney, Dixon, Marshall, going on missions again… But Sloane still doesn’t trust him. He’s absolutely sure Noah’s hiding something.
All it really looks like that he’s hiding, and not all that well mind you, is a distaste for Sloane and a general unhappiness with the spy life. He is, as he predicted Sydney would, ‘not having fun anymore’. And he wants out. Not only that, but he wants to take Sydney with him. He lets her in on his scam to get money from the Russian mob, and tells her that when the time is right, he just plans to walk away. But he wants to get her to go with him first.
She balks, explaining how she wants to find her mother. Secretly, there’s also her double agent life that while she wants to walk away from it, she knows she couldn’t possibly give it up. He asks her if he waited for her, would she go then?
So he does genuinely care about her, and doesn’t want to give her up a second time despite his growing need to get out while he still can. But because of her silence, in spite of the smile she gives him, he seems to know that this isn’t going to work. Still, he persists, out of an apparent need to make the effort to be with her in spite of the obvious things stacked against it.
At the same time all of this is happening, we learn of a K-Directorate assassin, codenamed Snowman (so named for his favorite method of killing, ice picks). He’s been on the Most Wanted list for the last twelve years, and the CIA thought he’d died in ’97 until they learned he’d been hired again to kill Khasinau.
Yeah, you know where this is going. Sydney goes to bring in Khasinau, finds out that the Snowman’s already there. She fights with him, and he accidentally falls on a knife. She pulls his mask off… And it’s our boy. Sydney wasn’t the only one leading a double life after all.
Which explains more so why Noah wanted so badly out of the life he was leading. And how much he wanted to keep that side of him away from Sydney, something he tells her in his last moments.
I personally sympathized a lot with Noah. In spite of him being a ‘bad guy’ (or, it could be argued, a good guy doing bad things), I felt bad for him because he tried to get out, and get back the girl he loved, and it just couldn’t happen for him. His death in this is almost inevitable, because he had too many lies following him around, and that sort of thing catches up with you.
Sydney has other people, such as her father and Vaughn, and then entire CIA, helping her with her double life. Noah basically had just himself.
So, even though he was stabbing people with ice picks… I sympathized. Which proves Alias can compel you to like people that you just might run screaming from in real life.
But really, you gotta love it.