Last night’s Nikita finale had a
definite feeling of wrapping up everything at top speed, as the
pieces fell into place really quickly. But for all that, it still
managed to deliver one final insane fake-out, doing the last thing
you ever expected.
Spoilers ahead…
After last week’s too-good-to-be-true
happy ending, the last thing any of us would have seen coing is
another ridiculously perfect happy ending. And yet, that’s what we
got. The episode led us down the garden path, until we were expecting
some kind of tragic ending in which Nikita was denied the happiness
that was dangled in her face in the penultimate episode. I was primed
for some kind of Blake’s 7-esque thing with Michael and Nikita
killing each other or something.
Instead, we were being played. By
Nikita, and by Nikita.
In the finale, Nikita and Alex go rogue
one last time, to wipe out the other members of the shadowy Group
behind the Shop, and get hold of the list of the 54 mind-controlled
duplicates i positions of power around the world. We think Nikita’s
throwing it all away, including her newfound forgiveness and
acceptance, for a last stab at revenge over the death of Ryan. And
that she’s willing to unleash global chaos to get what she wants.
In fact, it’s all a lot of theatrics,
as Nikita pretends to kill the puppetmasters and fakes a giant
rampage, all for Amanda’s benefit, so she can lure Amanda into a
trap. See the above clip.
Yes, it’s rushed and a bit sloppy —
but in a “we wish we had a dozen more episodes to tell this
story” way, not so much in a “we were making this up as we
were going along” way. I’m reminded of the final short season of
Jericho, where events were suddenly happening at lightning
speed purely because the writers only had six episodes to tell an
epic tale.
And it works because it’s rooted in
character. Amanda thinks that Nikita is still the wild, destructive
creature she met in the beginning — as illuminated by a flashback to
a feral Nikita that reveals how Amanda still sees her. But Nikita has
grown and changed over the course of five seasons, and she’s no
longer that person. She listens to her friends and weighs the
consequences of her actions instead of just bulldozing everything in
her path.
Amanda thinks that by killing Ryan,
she’s unleashed the old Nikita, and the monster is back. Nikita’s
victory comes from proving that she really has changed, for good, and
that she’s both smarter and better than she used to be. As a result,
she traps Amanda, frees the originals of the 54 doubles, and helps to make a “sting operation” happen, capturing all the doubles.
It’s hard not to contrast the Nikita
finale with Matt Smith’s Doctor Who finale a few days earlier
— both have great character moments, and the Who episode has
more sparkly dialogue, but Nikita manages to pull off
surprises that are the result of character development and careful
narrative groundwork. The best clever twists are the ones that are
based on character and story, not so much endless rabbits coming out
of endless hats.
So everybody gets a happy ending —
even Ryan, who gets recognized on the CIA Wall of Awesome. Alex and
Sam go off and do human rights stuff, with Sam as Alex’s right-hand
man and boyfriend. Birkhoff releases the code for ShadowNet and gets
to be a hacker hero, talking about Open-Source Anarchy to some
impressionable journalist. And Nikita and Michael elope, before
leaving their mojitos to go off and stop some war in Ecuador where
child soldiers are being forced to pick up machine guns.
I half expected the cloyingly happy
ending to be revealed as another fakeout, but I guess these
characters have earned it. Right?
