How do you follow up one of the
weirdest cliffhangers in television history? With an episode chock
full of jaw-dropping moments and one terrible shock. They could have
called this “The Last Temptation of Nikita.” This show is
going out on an amazing high note.
Spoilers ahead…
Parts of last night’s Nikita
felt like a dream sequence, or one of those science-fiction tropes
where someone gets trapped in a dream world where they have
everything they’ve ever wanted. But it was real, and it was
fascinating.
In last week’s episode — which I
apologize for not recapping, but life got in the way — Nikita
started getting too close to the Shop’s conspiracy to start a war
with Pakistan using brainwashed doubles, and using Nikita as the fall
guy. So the Shop’s head, Philip, contacted her and offered her a
deal. Nikita offered a counter-deal: he and Amanda should turn
themselves in and she wouldn’t hunt them down. In the end, Philip
gave her exactly what she wanted. Exactly.
Nikita gets pretty much the perfect
happy ending, and it’s painful to watch because you know it’s an
illusion. The bad guys faked their own downfall, sacrificing one
operation to keep their larger organization intact, and set Nikita up
as the big hero who rescued the President that she was supposed to
have killed.
The scenes where Nikita and Michael
bask in their victory are flooded with sunlight, so that they’re
washed out and overexposed — and this codes them, visually, as being
like a dream sequence or hallucination. Nikita not only gets to be a
hero, she gets a medal, in a somewhat less impressive sequence than
the end of Star Wars. She gets pardons and immunity for everybody.
She gets forgiven for everything she’s done.
But Nikita’s real bribe here is that
she gets to tell the truth, the whole truth, for once. At the start
of the episode, on a military base that could almost be mistaken for
suburbia, she tries to figure out a cover story that she and her team
can tell — but then it’s too late, and anyway she realizes the truth
is the only thing that will work. After years of lying and hiding,
she comes out and explains everything she’s done — much of it in
public, to a Senate hearing. Her reward isn’t just the medal, it’s
getting to come clean.
Nikita fears that if she tells the whole truth, everyone will hate her — but Michael convinces her that if she shares her whole story, they’ll all love her instead. The whole world will see her the way Michael does. And he’s right. Her approval ratings go through the stratosphere. (The one thing this episode needed was some more talking heads going on about Nikita the Hero.)
The scenes of Nikita explaining the
whole storyline of the show, from her origin story to becoming an
assassin for Division to going rogue to bringing Division down, could
just be the show nodding at its past and maybe patting itself on the
back a bit — but instead, they come off like Nikita finally getting
to unburden herself.
I would have gotten away with it,
too…
The great thing about this is that
Nikita really wouldn’t ever learn the truth — that Amanda is still
alive, and the bad guys are still out there, with mind-controlled
duplicates all over the place — on her own initiative. She’s too
invested in her dream world, and being the hero of the story is a
trap as well as a reward. She can’t do anything to tarnish her new
forgiveness.
But there are two people who just won’t
let it rest. One is Ryan, who’s too much of a paranoid conspiracy nut
to accept how many mistakes the Shop suddenly made before Nikita
brought them down: Sending Ramon, an operative Nikita and Michael
knew, to help hijack that Pakistani missile, sending a guy after Alex
who would get caught and squeal, and giving Ronald Peller a computer
to talk to his son. Ryan creates a brand new wall of crazy in his
house at the military base, and starts trying to piece together who
these new bad guys are.
Meanwhile, Amanda is still out there,
and visibly rankles at the idea that the sacrifice of the Shop means
that they have to leave Nikita alone and preserve the illusion of
Nikita’s victory at all costs. (In fact, you could argue that Nikita
did win, since preserving that illusion means the bad guys, the
Group, can’t make any overt moves that she’s likely to notice for
several years, at least.)
Amanda very nearly gets herself shot by
her new boss, whom we’ll call Tennis-Playing Guy since he’s always
playing tennis. But then she sells him on some line of bullshit about
how the duplicates need to have their brainwashing upgraded so they
don’t go off the rails — and he lets her personally brainwash all
50-something of their duplicates. Soon she has a small army of rich
and powerful people completely devoted to her. Oops.
When Ryan goes to see Phillip in
prison, he barely even bothers to pretend that Ryan’s not on to
something — you could argue the smarter play would be to send Ryan
off in a wrong direction, so he follows some bogus leads and ends up
just seeming like a crazy person at last. Or pretend that Amanda was
always the brains of the operation and now she’s dead, and maybe she
was losing her grip at the end there. Or whatever.
Instead, Phillip immediately has Ryan
seized, and taken off to see Amanda, who tries to do her brainwashing
mojo on him. Ryan escapes, gets into a totally awesome shootout
with Amanda’s thugs, and finally — when it’s clear he’s cornered and
there’s no other way — decides to throw himself out a window rather
than compromise his commitment to the truth. This is absolutely the
perfect end for a paranoid conspiracy guy, and just screamingly
heroic — and yet terrible and sad as fuck, too.
Meanwhile, Alex has sent Sam off to
Paris with a bunch of fake diamonds, to test his reliability once and
for all, and Sam has unexpectedly passed the test — but then he gets
nabbed by the creeps he owes money to. They take him to Club Besson
(ha) which doesn’t look nearly Fifth Element enough, and Alex
goes to rescue him, in classic Alex style. The great thing about the
Alex/Sam subplot is the part where Alex tells Sam that he needs to
figure out who he is (after having been a duplicate of Owen for so
long) and that he shouldn’t be figuring out who he needs to pretend
to be to make Alex happy — he needs to find himself, for real, and
then maybe they can be together. This, interspersed with Nikita
finally getting to be herself in public and open up about her past,
is a subtler thematic resonance than I’m used to seeing on network
TV.
So in the end, Nikita discovers Ryan’s
sacrifice, and he tells her just enough before he dies to let her
know it’s not over. And now, she has a choice: carry on with the
charade and try to work within the system to bring down these bad
guys, or go do what she does best. Michael argues she has no choice
but to carry on and stick to the story she’s already told — and
Amanda tells Tennis-Playing Guy the same thing — but they’re wrong.
The episode’s final moments consist of
a Nikita voice-over in which she tells someone they have to go bring
these guys down, and this is how it was always going to end. Not with
the shiny happy ending where everybody’s together and we’re all
forgiven and it’s all lovely, but with Nikita and her partner, on
their own, risking everything. In the final shot, we see Nikita back
where she started — going rogue and teaming up with Alex.
