Nikita – Could Xander Berkeley get any better?

When it was announced that Xander Berkeley would be one of the stars of Nikita, I did a happy dance of joy. I’d fallen in love with his work as snarky, arrogant yet somehow noble supervisor George Mason in the first two seasons of 24, and he became my favorite character actor. Since then, I’ve seen almost everything he’s done — and that’s a long list, including projects like The X-Files, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Gattaca, and Kick-Ass (which also starred Nikita‘s Lyndsy Fonseca). No matter the type or size of the role, Berkeley is one of those actors who always delivers.

Having seen “Betrayals,” I’m ready to say that there’s no one more perfect for the role of Percy.

Don’t get me wrong. Berkeley has been doing good work all season long. Yet it’s the first part of the season finale that gives him his best material to date, allowing him to show a level of malice and self-delusion that Eugene Robert Glazer would be proud of.

Fans of La Femme Nikita will recall that Glazer cut an impressive figure as Operations (real name Paul Wolfe), who filled Percy’s job description on the original series. He was one of the best villains on television. It was because of Glazer’s outstanding performance that Berkeley faced the same quandary as Shane West: a role with a long shadow. Percy didn’t quite jibe for me at first because I was expecting Glazer’s unsettling evil, not Berkeley’s deadpan wit. But that was the old series. For this new Nikita, that wit was a stroke of dark humor, and a hint that Percy would behave differently from his predecessor.

“Betrayals” put Percy’s thought processes and Berkeley’s acting talents on full display. The Division boss has every reason to go entirely off the rails: Alex (Fonseca) has been exposed as a mole, Amanda (Melinda Clarke) is getting nosy and Michael (West) has blown his cover as the good soldier. There’s no one Percy can trust. No one would have blamed him if he just flipped out, had a rant to end all rants, and then started shooting. But what does Percy do? He kicks Amanda out of his office, calmly has a chat with Alex about the circumstances surrounding her parents’ death, and barely reacts when Michael threatens him at gunpoint. By the end of the episode, he’s put Amanda in her place, turned Alex against Nikita, and banished his former right-hand man to the basement, all while acting as if this is just another day at the office.

And maybe for Percy it is. We’ve seen all season how self-preservation is his prevailing instinct. It would have been surprising if it hadn’t reminded Amanda who’s in charge and didn’t have a plan for dispatching Michael all along. We’ve been told how smart he is, so of course he’d figure out that Michael was a turncoat (love that he, like we, caught Michael taking that phone call with Nikita in the car last week!). Everything that he revealed was perfectly in character.

His best moments, however, came with Alex. Explaining the truth behind the event that had driven her, he told the young woman that her father had been betrayed by his right-hand man, and that Division’s involvement had been ordered to help him by its own higher office, Oversight. The shocker wasn’t that Nikita had been the one to shoot Alex’s father. It was that Percy offered an honest apology, saying that he regretted Division’s part in the tragedy. The man we’ve been comfortable hating for his lack of compassion showed real vulnerability. The guy who’s always believed Division is right admitted that they were wrong. In turn, that made him an even better antagonist; it’s much easier to hate someone when you think they’ve just appeared straight out of Hell, but not so much when you begin to see them as a human being.

Therein was Berkeley’s brilliance. It was deliciously uncomfortable to see Percy pushing around people like they were, to use his own metaphor, pieces on a chess board and be completely unruffled while doing it. Where any other actor might have wrung every last drop of wickedness out of such juicy scenes, Berkeley never let Percy’s attitude change, leaving us to sit there uneasily and wait for the moment when he’d finally snap. The fact that he never did was scary enough. And though we know he’s the man we’re supposed to hate, not only did Percy tell Alex the truth that Nikita had omitted, but there was no doubt that he gave Alex some good advice: she needed to think for herself. Granted, he was trying to turn her against her friend, but he was still absolutely right.

As far as Xander Berkeley roles go, I think my favorite will always be George Mason on 24. Over two seasons, he took what was supposed to be a simple antagonist, and made him into a fully developed, surprisingly conflicted man who went out a hero. I have no shame in saying that I cried when he left the series. Yet Nikita is quickly becoming a close second, as he’s working the same magic with the character of Percy. He’s taken a man who could be just another megalomaniac, and made him into a person who has plenty of his own issues to sort out, and might actually be worthy of some sympathy. It takes real talent to do that. Let’s just hope that Percy sticks around for a long time to come. Seeing Xander Berkeley every week is a wonderful thing.

Clacked by Brittany Frederick
on May 06, 2011 @ 11:00 EST5EDT