and because the series regulars have to put on airs of respectability as proper and decorous cia agents, they don’t get to be as interesting and rogueish as he does as a recurring guest.

it’s the same problem sg1 had when they first introduced vala.  she blew in like a hurricane and defied expectations all over the place, then they wrote her out for twelve episodes because they were afraid she would either overwhelm the more understated regular cast, or lose her edge and become one of them.

ironically, they forgot that everyone on sg1 had once been just as charming and unpredictable as vala, such that she only felt fresh by comparison to nine years of writer’s fatigue.  when they brought her back full time, the writers managed to pull off the rare trick of using her presence to bring new energy to everything.

which is to say, it’s a rare trick not because it’s hard to pull off, but because people just don’t do it often enough.  in this case, it’s because the covert affairs writers haven’t quite realized yet that the show they’re writing most of the time isn’t nearly as interesting as the paris episodes.

so we get an hour of oded fehr being jason bourne, then we go back to sendil ramamurthy standing around a lot and the fake blind guy being pretty and, you know, whatever.  piper perabo is rad but that doesn’t actually carry a series, especially when the premise is basically ‘alias with no costumes and no myth-arc’.