Sydney Bristow

Sydney Bristow
Season(s):	1, 2, 3, 4, 5
First Episode:	Truth Be Told
Last Episode:	All The Time In The World
Status:	Alive
Relationship:	Jennifer Garner
Occupation:	Government operative
Affiliation(s):	SD-6 CIA APO

Sydney Anne Bristow (born 17 April 1975) is a highly skilled and well established agent for the United States government. She deals with some significant trauma over the years: the death of her fiancé, the death of her best friend, the realization that her mother was a former KGB spy, the estrangement of many of her friends and the constant activity and changes that she must endure from being a spy on a regular basis.

Sydney is highly skilled in Krav Maga and is quite a polyglot, speaking English, Russian, German, Greek, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Romanian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Uzbek, Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Vietnamese, Czech and Bulgarian.

After learning that the organization she had worked for for years was actually a terrorist group, she assisted the CIA in bringing it down. She then worked for the real CIA, but was attacked and kidnapped and forced to believe she was Julia Thorne for two years before returning to the CIA having no idea where she had been for the last two years. Feeling alienated after her return Sydney discovered the truth about what happened to her, realizing she had been brainwashed into believing she was Julia and made to do very bad things. After successfully taking down The Covenant Sydney moved to APO, a real black ops division of the CIA. Her fiancé was threatened by the terrorist organization Prophet 5 and so she helped to fake his death. After APO managed to take down Prophet 5 Vaughn returned and he and Sydney left APO for good.

Personal Information

• ID-CLASS: USS-CI-2300844
• Call signs:
  • Freelancer (CIA call sign at SD-6)
  • Mountaineer (CIA)
  • Bluebird (SD-6)
  • White Rabbit
  • Nightwing
  • Phoenix (APO)
• Aliases: Julia Thorne
• Height: 5'8"
• Weight: 125lbs
• Characteristics: L/R Shoulders reverse-jointed, R01 Molar extraction.
• Training/Special Skills: Krav Maga, track and field, Pilates, Linguistics, Theatre Arts, and electromagnetic lock picking.
• Languages: English (various dialects), Czech, French, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Hebrew, Arabic, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Hungarian, Uzbek, Urdu, and German.
• Education: Masters in English Literature, graduated in February of 2003.
• Experience: Recruited Fall of her 26th year, first generation (possible test subject) of Jack Bristow's, Project Christmas Program.

Family

• Father: Jack Bristow
  
• Mother: Laura Bristow (aka Irina Derevko)
  
• Half-sister: Nadia Santos
  
• Aunts: Katya Derevko, Elena Derevko
  
• Fiancé: Michael Vaughn
  
• Children: Isabelle Bristow Vaughn, Jack Vaughn
  

Before SD-6

Seven years before the events of Season 1, whilst in her freshman year at college, Sydney was recruited to SD-6, a supposed black ops division of the CIA. She worked in the cover location, Credit Dauphine, for six months before undergoing eight months of physical training before being taken to the real SD-6 (Q&A). She quickly passed through all the tests, with the officers there telling her that she was "a natural". She continued with her studies at college despite the fact that head of SD-6 Arvin Sloane disliked it. Her cover with her friends was that she was working at the bank, Credit Dauphine (Truth Be Told) When she told her father this he angrily told her that she had to quit (realizing that Sloane had enlisted her to work at SD-6 which he knew to be a criminal organization). However she refused and said she could do what she wanted to (All The Time In The World).

She dated Daniel Hecht for two years before Season 1 (Truth Be Told). She was friends with Will Tippin for three years before Season 1 (So It Begins).

Working for SD-6

Three years before learning the truth about SD-6, Sydney escaped capture in an office building in France before getting into a limo with Leonard Dreifuss, a man who bankrolled SD-6 operations, and giving him a package (So It Begins).

Six months before Season 1 Sydney and Dixon observed Ineni Hassan shooting his partner out of anger whilst they were at his weapons base in Egypt to get arms for SD-6 (So It Begins).

Season 1

Danny proposes to Sydney (Truth Be Told)

Sydney got engaged to Danny, and so decided to tell him that she worked for the CIA, and whilst he thought about what he was feeling Sydney left on a reconnaissance mission for SD-6 to Hong Kong. When she returned she found Danny dead in his apartment, and realized he had been killed by SD-6 because of his knowledge of their existence. She confronted Sloane who said that Danny was a risk and so their security section took him out as per their procedure, and as she was now a risk she had to take a lie detector test which she had been trained to defeat. Sydney attended Danny's funeral along with her friends including Will Tippin and Francie Calfo. Afterwards she stayed up listening to her answer phone message over and over, which had Danny's voice on it.

She took three months off from working at SD-6, despite the fact that Sloane gave her only one. He became impatient and sent Dixon to bring her back. He told her that the FTL organization had got control of the Mueller device and Sloane wanted her personally go and retrieve it before they could activate it. Still, she refused to go in. As a result Sloane tried to have her killed, sending several teams after her. She managed to take them all out, with the assistance of her father whom she realized also worked for SD-6. He arranged for her to go on a flight to Switzerland to escape Sloane's men, explaining that SD-6 was a branch of the Alliance of Twelve, a criminal organization, and not part of the CIA as she had been led to believe. However she did not get on the plane, deciding not to trust her father, and ran away.

Sydney is tortured by the agents (Truth Be Told)

She contacted her friend Will, and asked for one of his sister's credit cards and her passport. He gave them to her, reluctantly, and she styled herself to look like Will's sister; bright red hair. She travelled to Taipei, broke back into the labratory she went in whilst with SD-6. Before she could get there, however, she was captured by Hong Kong agents who tortured her, asking her who she worked for. She refused to answer and made jokes about them, and so they began to pull her teeth out. She managed to escape from custody and she reached the lab. She found the Mueller device that Sloane wanted, stole it, and took it back to him at SD-6 headquarters. She requested the week off, saying that she had midterms.

Sydney then went to the real CIA and offered to be a double-agent working within SD-6 for them. She wrote pages of information about the organization. After she was done she met with Michael Vaughn who said that he was sure it would be helpful to have another double agent in SD-6. However she suspected it was all a ploy in case she was a triple agent. He told her that it was not a play, and she left. She went to Danny's grave, where she encounter her father who told her that he was the other double agent in SD-6, and that she had been authenticated to work with the real CIA (Truth Be Told).

Sydney told the CIA about Ineni Hassan, the head of weapons resources for SD-6 located in Memphis, Egypt. She said that he had to be taken down to significantly help reduce the power of SD-6. Vaughn told her that when she returned to work she had to make sure that she acted as she always had done. He formulated a plan so that when she got her mission from SD-6, the CIA could make a counter mission. She said that her objective was not to satisfy Langley, but to bring down SD-6 so she could leave the spy world. She said that she would be out after two months. Vaughn then showed her a map of how far SD-6 reached, and said that they were not just going to take down SD-6, but the whole Alliance of Twelve.

Will asked Sydney why she used his sister's passport and credit card, but she said that she could not tell him. He assumed that Danny was in some kind of trouble, but she told him to forget about it and to trust her. SD-6 called, with Sydney telling Will that it was the bank, and she left. Marshall Flinkman told her that he was glad to have her back. She met with her father at SD-6 and asked if he knew that they were going to kill Danny. He said that he did, and she slapped him. Sydney told him never to speak to her again, then left. He later told her that he tried to save Danny but arrived too late, and she thanked him. Sydney and Dixon were sent on a mission to Moscow to stop Nabul Hasayn Navor from getting files from the Russian government. She informed the CIA and Vaughn told her the counter mission; they would do two brush passes at the airport and clone then return the files.

The mission was a success and Sydney managed to pass off the files to the CIA and they returned them before Sydney left or Dixon noticed. The discs revealed that a nuclear bomb was hidden somewhere in the US, and than a man named Milovich Ivanov was connected; probably looking after the bomb. Sydney went to an address they had for Ivanov and realized he was dead. She found his gravestone, dug it up and found the bomb inside. She managed to deactivate it with the help of Marshall. However Sloane shipped the bomb to Cairo and sold it to Ineni Hassan who planned to use it. She decided to go and stop it herself. Sydney made it to the bomb but was found by Hassan himself (So It Begins).

Relationships

Jack Bristow

Sydney had an antagonistic relationship with her father. They did not agree upon many things but a friendship began to form when she learnt that he was also a mole within SD-6 for the CIA (Truth Be Told).

Michael Vaughn

When Sydney and Vaughn first men, she acted very hostile towards him, thinking that he was being condescending to her with the CIA counter missions. Furthermore she even commented that she thought he was too young to be her handler (So It Begins).

Arvin Sloane

Since discovering that Sloane was a traitor to his country, Sydney held an intense dislike towards him.

Daniel Hecht

Sydney was incredibly happy in her relationship with Danny, and after dating for two years he proposed to her. Realizing that getting married would be a big change in their relationship, Sydney decided to tell Danny that she worked for SD-6, a government organization. He was shocked by the news, and due to a drunken phone call Danny placed to Sydney in which he alluded to her spy status, Arvin Sloane had Danny killed as he felt he was a security leak. Sydney found Danny's body in the bathtub at home (Truth Be Told).

Will Tippin

Others

Notes

• Sydney shares her middle name with actress Jennifer Garner.
• Sydney appears in every episode of Alias.