"First of all, my name is not Michael Vaughn."

According to this story, the premiere of season 5 of Alias is a mere 6 weeks away, on September 29. (Aside: September 29 is Wasteland Fan's 33rd birthday and the premiere of Alias is a nice gift.)

With that in mind, I'd like to speculate about last season's cliffhanger, which involved Agent Vaughn delivering the linethat is the title of this post followed by an out-of-nowhere and, seemingly, devastating car accident in which some huge SUV-looking thing T-Boned the driver side of the little green Jag Vaughn and Sydney were driving. I remember watching it and turning to Wasteland Spouse, both of us with our mouths agape, saying "Huh?"

Who is Michael Vaughn, if not Michael Vaughn? I would guess he has some connection to Rimbaldi. Hence, Jennifer Garner's real life pregnancy can be worked into the Alias story line and play out one of the Rimbaldi prophecies (and develop a bit more one of the hanging threads from Season 3's "lost years" storyline, involving the harvesting of Sydney's eggs to combine with Rimbaldi's, uh, DNA or whatever).

I would also guess that his father was a Russian spy, tied in some way to Irina. So, Vaughn's given name is Aleksandr Tursinov, or something like that. That might explain the cryptic conversation between Vaughn and Irina as they were fixing the subway train earlier in the episode.

I've no idea how all that adds up to it not being a coincidence that Vaughn was assigned as Sydney's handler when she walked into the CIA to turn double agent on SD-6 during the series premiere -- as Vaughn told Sydney it was no coincindence just before divulging that he is not, in fact, Michael Vaughn.

Thing is, neither of these two speculations is very creative or inspiring. What do you think? How's JJ Abrams going to pull this one out and maintain even a shred of integrity to the previous four seasons' storylines?

P.S. I refuse to believe it was a dream sequence, as suggested by several speculators on the Television Without Pity boards. JJ wouldn't do that to us, would he?