Nikita – Playing the waiting game

If you happened to miss this week’s Nikita, I’d forgive you. There wasn’t a lot of action going on in “Sanctuary.” However, there was an awful lot of very intriguing setup for next week’s episode … if not the rest of the season.

Another one of Oversight’s meetings led to their decision to eradicate Division, over Senator Pierce’s objections. This led her son Sean to take a shot at Nikita, which got him stripped mostly naked and interrogated in Birkhoff’s living room. (I think I was the only person not making a big deal out of shirtless Dillon Casey.) After realizing his phone had been bugged, Sean told our heroes about the “clean sweep” plan, which put them in the awkward position of deciding whether or not to help the organization they’d all vowed to destroy.

Things weren’t helped by another bitchy dialogue between Percy and Amanda, this one taking the cake as Percy ruthlessly exposed Amanda’s biggest flaw: her unrequited love for him. Telling her it couldn’t have existed because she’s not capable of love, he struck deep (see: the actually heartwrenching vulnerable look on Melinda Clarke‘s face), leading her to want to put him in a medically induced coma from which he would presumably never awaken.

Yet just as she was pressing the needle in, Amanda received a very loaded phone call. Patrick Miller (returning guest star William deVry) and his team had busted into Oversight HQ and taken everyone there, including Senator Pierce, hostage. If Division wasn’t returned to Percy’s control, not only would Miller slaughter the entirety of Oversight, but he’d activate the “clean sweep” and exterminate everyone at Division — including her — as well. That’s an awfully big debacle to be sorting out next week!

By itself, “Sanctuary” was an awful lot of talking, and not much doing. But that’s just fine by me. As a writer, I can say that sometimes you need time to set up your big moments — you can’t just rush into them or they feel inauthentic and/or incomplete. This episode itself wasn’t all that exciting, but damned if it wasn’t pretty terrifying to see everything come together at the end.

It also gave us some neat, if brief, bits for our characters. Having Team Nikita definitely back together again was something I’d been waiting to see all season. We got to see that Alex and Sean definitely have common ground as far as understandable mommy issues. Perhaps that rumored romance is on its way? We also got our first mention of Carla (Erica Gimpel), the woman from Nikita’s past whom we’ll meet later on this season.

And how about Percy and Amanda? We’ve all speculated that there is or was something going on between them, but to finally have it defined? And to see how deeply it affected the ice queen? That was both entertaining and morbidly fascinating. (Can I have a round of applause for Xander Berkeley, who’s spent the majority of season 2 acting inside a box and yet still is as unnerving as he ever was?)

Then there’s the big picture. The twist in the narrative. Having our heroes have to bail out the organization they’ve worked so hard to take out? Nikita’s right when she says that they have to separate what Division is from the rank and file recruits who have no idea what they’re a part of. But the team’s awkward realization that their successes put those same people in peril? Not something that they thought about, and admittedly not something that I thought about until just now.

There’s all sorts of fun ethical questions to be had with the idea of Team Nikita saving Division — and if they do so, it prolongs the general story arc of the series, because where would it go after toppling Division? Wherever that might be, blowing through that story in one season seems just too quick to me.

Okay, so it wasn’t an episode with a lot of fireworks. But it set the tone for a whole ton of them next week, and possibly beyond. And that’s all right by me.

Clacked by Brittany Frederick
on Jan 14, 2012 @ 10:14 EST5EDT