After all the time Nikita spent building up the plot to take over Zetrov, I was glad that it finally happened. I didn’t expect that when it happened, I’d end up being more interested in other things. But in an episode with plenty of action and big plot points, it was the characters who stole the show.
Ari (Peter Outerbridge, whom I’d love to see as a regular next season because I enjoy him so much, even though I know that would make no sense) and Amanda (Melinda Clarke) made their play for control of Zetrov, stealing a device considered “the future of clean energy” and using their possession of it to make their pitch to the company’s board. This plan failed spectacularly. Alex (Lyndsy Fonseca) told the board members how Ari had tried to kill her, Nikita (Maggie Q) went to swipe the device, and Percy (Xander Berkeley) turned the Division agents against their absent leader with a little help from Birkhoff (Aaron Stanford), leaving Amanda and Ari on the run…but with a black box in their possession.
Yeah, that’s a lot of story. Story that needed to occur and I’m glad it did. But I was more focused on these screwed-up characters and how good these actors are.
Nikita is first and foremost an action series, and it does that very, very well. I think, however, that in the plethora of fight scenes, explosions, and gun battles, it’s easy to lose sight of character development. With all that action, it’s possible to be distracted away from the acting, which the Nikita cast happens to be pretty darn good at.
I’ve talked before at length about how I believe Shane West to be criminally underrated in his role as Michael, and I’m a longtime Xander Berkeley fan glad to see him get a role he can sink his teeth into, which he has. But it was the women of Nikita who ran off with this one. Yes, Maggie Q is a great fighter, and she’s gorgeous enough to play a fake supermodel, but the scene in which Nikita finally confronts Amanda was something to watch. To see Nikita apparently resigned to death by suffocation and yet still insistent that Amanda would lose was wrenching and also true to the character.
The argument between them over who hurt who more was obviously a long time coming, and in it we saw some great vulnerability from Q and from Melinda Clarke. To me, you could have stripped away the whole rest of the show in those scenes; it didn’t matter that we were talking about an ex-assassin and the woman that trained her. We were just talking about two women who honestly no longer understood what each other had become. Of all the main characters, it’s taken me the longest to come around on Amanda, because I still have haunting memories of Alberta Watson‘s Madeline from La Femme Nikita in my head, but between Amanda’s relationship with Ari and scenes like this, there’s been a lot more shading to her character this year that I really appreciate.
And how fun must it have been for Lyndsy Fonseca to have Alex publicly stick it to Ari? By the end of her impassioned spiel I couldn’t help but cheer a little.
As we near the end of season two, the rumblings begin again (as they did last year) about whether or not Nikita has done enough to secure a renewal. While season two has been flawed, and I think a step back from season one, I’ve still got my fingers crossed for a season three, because I just enjoy watching this cast work. Even when the writing has been at its worst, the actors have pulled something out of it. The writing can get better; it’s much harder to find an ensemble that clicks like this one. Despite the other problems I might have with the show, I think about not having the opportunity to watch Shane West or Maggie Q each week, and that would be a disappointment, indeed.
Clacked by Brittany Frederick 
on Mar 31, 2012 @ 16:00 EST5EDT
