Seriously. The last time we checked in on Nikita, it was still a superspy show that kept one foot firmly planted in reality. But now, in the show' final short season, it's embracing life, liberty and the pursuit of crazy. Just check out this scene from last night's episode.
Spoilers ahead...
I almost called this recap "Let's assassinate high government officials and then talk about our feelings, on Nikita." But that's too long a headline, and not strictly accurate — Nikita's not assassinating the real deputy director of the FBI here, but an evil duplicate. In fact, you can see the real deputy director urging her to kill his doppelganger in the clip.
This season on Nikita, she's been accused of assassinating the first female U.S. president — but in fact, it turns out that the president shot herself in the head. And it wasn't the president, it was an evil duplicate. Because Amanda, the evil high femme supervillain, has been systematically replacing people with pod people, using drugs and super-surgery and polymers and stuff to create copies of people that even their spouses can't tell from the real thing.
You would think that, having replaced the POTUS with a pod person, Amanda could just do whatever she wanted — but instead, framing Nikita for the POTUS's assassination is just the first step in a plan to start a war with Pakistan, a conflict which will most likely turn nuclear. And Amanda has another pod person in the NSA, ready to move this plan along.
Last week's episode, in which Nikita is on the run alone, and being hunted by pretty much everyone in the United States, was probably more fun in terms of sheer badassery. But this time around, Nikita is reconnected with three of her sidekicks: Michael, Ryan the conspiracy nut, and Birkhoff aka Nerd, who is a nerd. They're all sad because Nikita decided to handle the whole "framed for the U.S. president's asssassination" thing alone. and Michael has that super-romantic moment of holding hands with Nikita while they shoot a man in the head using an improvised TV microphone-gun thing above — but he's through trying to be her boyfriend. There is some super high quality CW-y angst in this episode.
Oh, and Birkhoff finds out who the NSA mole is, but decides to suppress the info because of feels.
Meanwhile, Alex, Nikita's old protegee, is investigating human traffickers in Mumbai to get close to the source of Amanda's "pod people." And she falls afoul of Owen aka Sam, who is a former pod person who now doesn't know whether he's the good guy he was pretending to be, or the bad guy who was doing the pretending. Owen/Sam decides to team up with Alex and Sonya, even if they're not sure they want his help. And then Alex gets nabbed by the cops, because she's been framed as having bankrolled Nikita's killing spree.
Honestly, this show had me with "the President was replaced with a suicidal pod person." The rest of it, with our heroes being hunted by the entire government while having all the emotions, is just gravy. Let's hope next week, Nikita guns down a few Supreme Court justices, using an improvised umbrella rocket launcher, while Michael scowls and confesses that he had planned the perfect honeymoon for the two of them but now it's too late, dammit. TOO LATE.