nell65

With TET, I always watch the episode with my hands over my face, just barely peeking at the screen. I always get caught up in the icky TR stuff.

Anyways, with Greg, his presence always screams trouble to me; and yes, I never understood why Paul kept him around, but then again, I never understood why TR kept HR around when HR started being a problem for TR around the beginning of S4. I mean instead of making robot Nikita, it would have made more sense to cancel her or design a profile to take care of her.

Okay, this is a total DON rant.

Okay, I have a meta opinion about this and a non meta opinion about this.

For the non meta opinion, I tend to ignore the TR fuck ups because when they started fucking up royally, it seemed to be a writer's convenience rather than they were characters who would screw up. For so long, the writers went to great pains to show that TR was a step ahead and then suddenly at the end of S3, they are a step slow and constantly making poor decisions. Maybe if the writers had given a substantial reason to why TR had suddenly lost their brains, I could buy it.

For the meta opinion, my concerns with Nikita running Section revolve around who she is as a person. It's not about intelligence, it's about having the stomach to do vile things to win. Paul/Madeline can boil everything down to numbers and body counts. Nikita doesn't have that kind of detachment.

The other thing is, Nikita doesn't desire Section the way TR did.

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Somehow the 'icky TR stuff' bothers me less now (the first time I saw it? HORROR!) now that I 'know' it is, at least in part, an 'act.' Instead I find it really interesting and powerful that Paul and Madeline were willing to play it out that far.

So -- I'm left with nothing but agony over the whole Greg thing. Which isn't really 'new' to TET, as Paul seemed inordinately pleased with Greg from the moment he met him --- for no good reason that I could determine other than Greg =/ Birkof, for whom Paul has nothing but contempt, and again, for no good reason.

Hoisting my DON flag:

Yes - it would have made more sense to kill Nikita soon after the whole Adrian thing.... in fact, they were headed that way... but meta - couldn't have done that. Of course, without meta - Paul would have died when shot point blank by any half-assessed operative, and not lived on. Same with the guy who 'created' Abby. And Madeline stopping and restarting her own heart, in two different episodes? With, apparently, no further health consequences? So - um - long live plot needs? LOL!

Back within the Universe of the Show - I thought Paul made stupid mistakes from the beginning, he just got away with it more often than he should have. So, I tended to see/understand the slow spinning out of control at the end of S3 and most of S4 as .... amplification of earlier trends, and not something out of the blue. (As for the vile things - I thought most the vilest things Paul ever chose to do were in fact really stupid choices that almost inevitably turned back to bite him in the face. Vile acts tend also to be stupid ones, IMO.)

I also don't think Paul is detached at all. He is driven almost entirely by his emotions. So I don't see Nikita's 'emotionality' (which has taken a lot of hits by the end of S4 anyway) as making her meaningfully different that Paul.

As for desiring Section -- there is a whole, and ancient, school of leadership that teaches/posits that to desire to lead something is in itself a sign that this person should not be the one in charge, because desire messes up your ability to judge/direct that thing clearly.

And in any case, I never thought Paul desired Section particularly - just having been dragged there against his will, he would prefer, all other things being equal, to 1) live, and 2) be the boss.

In any case -- most of my DON argglebarggling comes from the position that if you operate within the show universe - you have to take the good and the bad, and the bad includes all the TR choices we saw, including the stupid ones. So, sure, Nikita will never be 'as good as' Paul/Madeline if you get to ignore every stupid thing they ever did! ;-)

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I don't know if I would say that Paul was pleased with Greg. When Paul first saw Greg on Madeline's computer, he says something like, 'don't take any of his crap,' basically implying that Greg's contributions are not worth the hassle of dealing with his attitude. And Paul seems a little disappointed that Greg has such a high integration rate at the end of that episode.

I thought Paul made stupid mistakes from the beginning, he just got away with it more often than he should have.

Really, hmmm.. I must have had my TR glasses on, because while he had the occasional fuck up during the first two seasons, I always thought he was fairly competent or at least TR together was fairly competent.

When I was talking about detachment, I was talking about TR's ability to devalue human life. Sure, Paul cannot devalue his son's life or Madeline's life -except for Sleeping with the Enemy and Hell Hath No Fury, but I'm not convinced that those episodes existed :)- and Madeline had a hard time doing the same with Paul; but for the most part, TR has no problems seeing a body count as a victory as long as the numbers balanced out in their favor.

As for desiring Section -- there is a whole, and ancient, school of leadership that teaches/posits that to desire to lead something is in itself a sign that this person should not be the one in charge, because desire messes up your ability to judge/direct that thing clearly.

But the flip side to that statement is, if you hire someone who is anti-big government to run the government, you can expect the wheels to fall off of the government.

And really Section falls outside the normal purview. Section is a force of its own and you need someone who wants the job to keep the place running. Nikita detested Section for the whole run of the show so why would she be interested in making sure that Section survived in any capacity. Her father and her may have had lofty ideas about humanizing Section, but as soon as you do that, you kill essentially what made Section Section.

I don't doubt that Nikita would make a better leader than TR in any other situation; but in the situation of Section, they were built for the type of work that Section does.

And ultimately, did Paul and Madeline fail or were they setup to fail by Philip? Sure, TR made their mistakes, but if we are to believe the show's canon that Nikita was a super secret mole since S2, you have to take into account several different things.

1)She is using her relationship with Michael as a way to undermine TR; and since Michael is super Mikey and TR's main go to guy, TR was pretty screwed.

2)She had two years to leak stuff to Center, which gave Philip two years to plan on how to destroy TR.

3)If Philip was the big boss man, then it wouldn't have mattered what TR did because ultimately he calls the final shots.

Nikita will never be 'as good as' Paul/Madeline if you get to ignore every stupid thing they ever did

To me, again, Nikita's ability to lead Section does not revolve around whether she is competent enough but whether she is capable or not of burying her humanity to make the impossible decisions.

And for as incompetent as TR may have become, they did dupe Nikita more than once so you kind of have to factor that in as well.

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I think this particular line of argument is a result of some fundamental differences in == well, life-philosophy?

I have never been convinced, based on my life experiences or in my professional research and teaching, that any organization or group falls 'outside' normal human conditions.

So - I've never been impressed by the notion that the Section requires things markedly different than any other organization in terms of leadership.

I recognize that this is not a universally held position. !

There is not a resolution to this - there can't be really. It's like all those debates between atheists and theists. One side believes in the existence of supernatural being(s). The other does not believe that the evidence supports that proposition. There can be no synthesis because it isn't thesis and anti-thesis, but two unrelated propositions about the (non)existence of the supernatural.

You posit that the Sections require something different than 'any other organization.' (for example: burying humanity.)

I don't think they do. Because I don't think they are unique in the first place.

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My rant was triggered because I'd read (yet) another (!) post-season fic that dismissed Nikita's tenure with a simple 'of course' she'd fail in some brief time. So, you know. Rant. LOL!

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Oh, see in real life, I would run very far away from someone like Madeline and Paul and gravitate more towards Nikita, fun/joking/irreverent. In real life, I think that when you start taking the ends justify the means position, you become the thing that you were trying to prevent. And really, most of my rant, comes from the fact that I was a little bitter about how S5 ended up. Very sour grapes of me, I know.

I really liked Nikita for those first two seasons; but as the show took the HR v TR approach later on, I admittedly chose TR mainly because I was fascinated by the fact that these two individuals were attempting to 'play god.' And there were several other tropes in play that I'm very susceptible too as well.

I guess we will have to agree to disagree about the nature of Section which is perfectly awesome because agreeing about everything would be very boring! ;)

I will admit that I'm guilty of the 'Nikita fails as a leader at Section trope.' In a way, I'm right because had TR lived they would have probably hated the way Nikita ran Section, thus she would have failed as a leader in their eyes.

And maybe the point that I should have made or I tried to make but it came off as rather clumsy, say that Nikita does maintain her leadership over Section/Oversight/whatever else she was in control over, the changes that she would have enacted during her leadership would have fundamentally altered Section to the point that Section would have become a completely different entity and no longer the Section that I grew to know.

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Well sometimes we just have to do that. Decide when the end comes, or how it comes, is NOT what the show runners determined.

I was a Highlander fan -- big time -- back in the day.

For me? The show ends *right before* Mac killed Ritche. Everything after that? NEVER HAPPENED. IT IS ALL DEAD TO ME AFTER THAT.

Not even The RAVEN, and I LOVE Amanda to death. Seriously. She is, like, one of my most favorite female characters ever in my whole life. In the history of ever. I love her more than I love Niktia. (Though, maybe, Nikita might have been more like Amanda if she got to live for 700 years, yeah? LOL!)

I was also a Forever Knight fan. The last episode - where the show runners killed everyone? NEVER HAPPENED.

So I'm quite sympathetic to hating the end of a show and the "Madeline and Paul" DID NOT DIE story line. I've written a piece of that myself! In all but one or two of my 'what happened next' stories, they don't die. But - then - Nikita doesn't either! LOL!

It makes me grumbly. Hey? How come I can want your guys to live but you still hate mine and gloat when they die? As though fanfic of all things was a place to find parity! LOLOLOL! Even though I'm not necessarily speaking for the majority of the HR fen, as they were, in the heyday of the fandom.

I think part of what makes the end of LFN, not great, but survivable, for me, even as an HR fan, is that Michael and Nikita don't ride off into the sunset together. (They could have stopped at the end of S4, as planned, and that would have been fine by me too. Well, you know, Madeline would still be alive in my head....!). And, for those of us interested in Nikita and fanfic - it provided buttloads of backstory. Also worth something!

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It is very nice to know that I'm not the only one who practices selective canon.

How come I can want your guys to live but you still hate mine and gloat when they die?

Isn't it obvious!! I ship TR which means I get to be evil and hypocritical!!! Just like when Paul sabotages a mission to save Madeline, it is romantic; but when Michael or Nikita sabotages a mission to save their better half, it is sappy and stupid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! So There! :)

Seriously, though, Nikita can live, but Michael can't.... Okay, he can live but he has to ditch the mullet and go back to S2 hair.

Michael and Nikita don't ride off into the sunset together.

Yeah, but the implication is, HR is going to get it on as soon as Adam learns how to drive and TR, if they lived, is going to be stuck with angst ridden island sex. Well, okay, TR was going to be stuck with that fate even if they hadn't been kicked out of Section.

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Yeah, but the implication is, HR is going to get it on as soon as Adam learns how to drive

Although, oddly, relatively few HR post-season fics actually assume that premise is going to work as advertised.

As for selective canon -- very little open-ended series TV can escape that, I think. A mini-series can, to a large degree, and movies, and novels - anything that is conceived from the beginning as an entire, and single, entity can. But serial TV really can't be (there are amazing exceptions, I know, but they are famous *because* they are exceptions. And even some of those don't work. From what I understand, the BSG reboot was conceived that way -- but I don't think I have *ever* seen anyone in the fannish world who liked anything about the ending of that show.

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Oh, TET! How I love this episode! It wreaks havoc on a lot of S1/S2 continuity, but I love it so much I'm willing to put up with that.

Of course, I love the big reveal of the game Madeline and Paul have been playing, I love seeing how far they are actually willing to go with it, and I love how sort of horrible and messed up it is, even as a fraud. I adore these characters for even coming up with something that twisted, and I like to think that they thoroughly enjoyed themselves along the way.

BUT! While I know what you mean about Greg being anviliciously obvious in his evilness, and the failure to spot this that it reflects badly on Paul (and, frankly, everyone but Birkoff), I love Greg to much to care, and I was positively gleeful about his survival and secret cooperation with George! (I love George, too, by the way.)

I think this once again comes down to my meta-first approach to shows. Now, I can play the game of stay-within-the-confines-of-the-universe, and it's a fun game to play sometimes! But I have to say, my *emotional* reaction to characters (that is, whether I like or dislike a character) is usually driven mostly by meta factors. So...I love Greg because he's the kind of character we're supposed to hate, because he's funny, because he's got the kind of dog-eat-dog attitude that being in an organization like Section would likely foster, because he's an antidote to characters who annoyed me (like Walter), etc. And because I love him, I just don't care if the episode makes sense, so long as he has the last laugh!

WE've gone around on the Nikita-as-leader-of-Section thing in the past, so I won't rehash that too much, other than to say that I think she'd have to become pretty hardened pretty fast to last long. And I don't even mean (only) with respect to the ends-justifying-the-means sacrificing innocents to save the many aspect, but also (and mainly) the cutthroat politics that would be required to stay in that position. I don't think the organization was really a meritocracy, and you'd have to do a lot more than just performing your job to survive -- you'd also have to fight dirty against your rivals. If Nikita could do that for any length of time, she'd become a different person than the person we knew. I'm not saying it's not possible, though -- I think my favorite part of S5 was when she came back to Section and that operative was all, "Oh, you're my heroine!" and then she put him in abeyance anyway. If she taps more into that side, she might endure (and I'd probably find her a lot more interesting as a character, to boot).

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Oh man - I *like* Greg too, I mean, I wouldn't like him if I 'met' him, but as a watcher of the story I do - that's part of why I writhe in embarrassment. If I didn't like him, didn't in some ways admire his determination to survive, didn't, oddly enough, hope he'd make it too, just give all them the finger - I wouldn't hate it so much that he's too young to play it cool long enough to survive.

Of course- some of that *had* to be directorial choices. If he'd cut back, even a little, on the snidely whiplash mustache twirling -- the whole thing would have worked better for me. And would have felt more 'section'ish. And Paul would have looked less foolish.....and, and, and.....

It's just telegraphed SO STRONGLY that it is all going to end badly for *all* of them, and it's so obvious!, that's what just slays me.

I don't by the way think it's necessary or pre-determined that Nikita will survive -- I'd been reading fic again, as I work on my own, and it's true, especially TR fic -- and the hand wave of "oh of course she'll fail" was grating on me.

In the same way, actually, that most of (all?) the romantic HR post-series fic that hand waves her success does, but from a different perspective.

If I ever manage to figure out a stable configuration of Section in my own head -- maybe someday I'll try to write one differently, where she survives but it isn't easy and it does change her. ;-)

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I see what you're saying about Greg -- I'm not sure why, but it just doesn't bother me much for some reason. But yeah, you're right.

I can see why the "of course she'll fail" attitude would annoy you. The opposite attitude (which was pretty widespread when I first joined the fandom) grated *terribly* on me!

I have written one Nikita-fails-as-Section-leader fic. It was my first story, and in a way I just *had* to get it out of my system, both as a big middle finger to TPTB (because for me, at the time, Nikita was TPTB's representative among the characters, and if I wrote her as failing, it would serve as my "Ha! So there!" gesture to them) and also as a reaction against the tropes in the HR fic I had been seeing. (Have I ever mentioned that I'm a contrarian? Hahaha.)

I'd never written any fiction before (and in fact hadn't even *read* fiction in many years), so I didn't know what the hell I was doing technically, and boy does it show. But even with those handicaps, I *tried* to be more evenhanded than what I saw the HRs on the storyboards doing. I dropped plenty of hints so that a reader could, if so inclined, conclude that the main reason for Nikita's failure wasn't any lack of competence but rather the fact that she was deliberately starved of funds and resources by people in the organization who didn't want her to succeed. And not only did I not kill her (or Michael) off, I let them sail off into the sunset together in the end! Considering that the story was mostly written as a TR revenge fic, I think I was pretty generous to "the opposition." ;-) (Don't read it, though -- you'd still HATE it.)

I'd write that story differently now. First of all, I don't equate Nikita with TPTB as much anymore, so I can separate my reaction to her character from my annoyance with them. And I've gained more control over my tools as a writer, so I'm not as limited to painting with a broad brush. I'm fond of subtlety and shades of grey, but I simply wasn't capable of conveying that kind of nuance then.

However, there is one thing about Nikita leading Section that is a huge stumbling block for me, and it comes from the fact that I don't buy (and never have bought) the line about "their ends are just, but their means are ruthless." I don't think their ends are actually very just! So I can buy people whom I see as somewhat crypto-fascist leading it (yes, I just called my OTP crypto-fascist, haha), but the idea of the person who has been presented to us for years as moral, pro-democratic, empathetic, etc....there's enormous cognitive dissonance there for me! To last there in the long term, she'd have to change her core values *so much*, that I can't really wrap my head around it. It would be like putting Medea Benjamin in charge of Abu Ghraib or something! And none of the HR Nikita-as-a-success stories ever try to grapple with that, which is why I find them, in a way, really disturbing -- putting a "good" person in charge of an evil cause doesn't magically make things OK!

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I have a sensitive 'embarrassment agony' reflex. There is a genre of sit com I can't bear to watch either, and I was probably every bit of 40 before I began to 'get' even on an intellectual level things like the three stooges or laurel and hardy. I'm better than I used to be -- but I was still watching all the Greg scenes in TET through my fingers. Well metaphorically! lol!

And, I have read your first story, you nut. *g* I liked it -- And I'm sure I've told you that before!

I hated 'insane' Maddy stories so it was/is always a pleasure to read TR stories because she isn't crazy Maddy. And there are a lot of bizarre Nikita runs section stories from DOMs - those are often (usually?) worse than the TR stories. And to be honest, how boring would a story showing that Nikita is competent be? Serious ZZzzzzsss. LOL!

Do you remember ever reading the one where crazy Nikita has Adam killed so that Michael will come back to Section and her? I think in some ways those all fold together in my head with the TR Nikita fails stories....

Of course - in the story I'm finishing and hope to post very soon, I totally hand wave her running section successfully. I wanted to write a story about her on the outside and what that might be like. So I assume she gets there. Long ago I'd thought to write a whole bit about how and why I thought she could -- but at this late date, that wasn't really the story that this story wanted to be.

Maybe I'll write that one as a stand alone someday....or not. It doesn't press on my head the way the others do.

I think there are a lot of complicated and not-so-complicated reasons I've never written TR -- I didn't like the caricatures of them in a lot of HR fic (although, in retrospect, some of the more over the top ones are kinda funny! Especially the Madeline is jealous of Nikita over Michael stories...), but I also so disagreed with TR in the show'verse that I was sure I could never do them justice in the way I would have wanted to. To some extent, I suppose, I still feel that way.

What Section *is* in the later seasons, and so when it falls to Nikita, is a huge creative stumbling block for me -- though, one of the stories I'd like to finish is about Quinn and as that story continues to tug in my head, things are a little bit more in focus for me. Not enough to finish the story yet --- but, I'm sort of trying to take the stories in the order that they came to me. Which means I have time! LOL!

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Ah, embarrassment squick! I have that, too, but I think it's less sensitive than yours.

And, I have read your first story, you nut. *g* I liked it -- And I'm sure I've told you that before!

Really? I'm honestly surprised by that. I would have thought it would annoy DONs too much. Then again, I originally avoided posting it on the storyboards, too, because I was sure it would get a hostile reception, and then that turned out not to be the case, so what do I know? LOL.

Do you remember ever reading the one where crazy Nikita has Adam killed so that Michael will come back to Section and her?

I do remember that one, but I'm pretty sure that particular story was written with the very deliberate intent of being provocative and stirring up things in the fandom. So I judge that story by a totally different kind of standard. It achieved what it set out to do, and then some!

As for Madeline caricatures...the more over-the-top they are, the more I'm likely to be OK with them. They *are* funny! Just like the Bambi and Aldo characterizations are funny. I loved those stories, albeit maybe not for the reasons the authors intended. My very favorite Bambi scene -- which was a small part of an amazingly-lengthy and surreal dream sequence *within* a cracky AU -- involved her running STRAIGHT INTO THE SIDE OF A BARN

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AT FULL SPEED, for no apparent reason other than her inherent Blondeness. It was so bizarre and ridiculous, I think I may have injured myself laughing. And there were plenty of bizarre things done to the other characters as well.

[Sorry for two posts -- I clearly got excited about the barn scene!]

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The Bambi and Aldo stories were/are great. *bg*

They always make me think of A Fish Called Wanda, which is a movie I also loved.

(Though, again, there is an element of some British humor that I just do. not. get. What's his name -- Mr. Bean? Yeah. mystifies me. And I actually do laugh at The Three Stooges now. *g*)

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I think I did know that (that it was intended to stir things up) about the Mad Nikita in the Perch story - the problem I had with boxing it off like that it is that it was really only on the outer edge of what DOMs already were saying *everywhere* about incompetent Nikita, so instead of seeming outlandish, it got read seriously, because it was really only a step or two removed from what so many thought/said/wrote already.

Besides - the mad woman in the attic is hardly a wild new invention.

But anyway - from this distance, that story doesn't stand out to me anymore as a vivid outlier, instead it symbolizes for me a general theme that is strongly present in lots of post-series fic, which is Nikita can't run the Section -- for whatever reason. Even your reason!

A lot of this makes sense for meta reasons, of course - DOMs and TRs hated that their favorite wasn't in the perch and wrote stories to get them back there, so Nikita is an obstacle to be eliminated, with a handwave or with a more elaborate maneuver. HRs (including me - I totally cop to this one!) wrote stories about their team outside, or inside. But the inside HR stories tended even so to fall back on the idea that it was *Michael* who should be really running Section with Nikita as his second.

So, I understand. But sometimes I need to rant anyway, especially coming off another fic reading binge.

And trends like that are weird. Because they don't, necessarily, produce bad stories. On an individual level.

I bought the Star Trek reboot movie before I left the states in March and, as a life-long Trekie, I have to say I utterly love it. And I went in totally skeptical.

So, as I'm playing around in AO3, I started poking around the 1,000 strong fic list for the film. And the trope of abused, crazy Jim Kirk is *really really popular.* Not in the hurt/comfort trope of Jim charges into danger and is hurt and Spock (or whomever) nurses him back to health, but in the Jim is a former teen prostitute/abused child and (especially bizarre in the Star Fleet setting) raging alcoholic of the binge variety from before he enlists right up through the 'present' of the story, and his resultant quasi-madness drives the plots, such as they are.

I have no idea if this picks up older trends in ST:TOS fic, I have read some but is it all from Shrift and Nestra's links and so that trope doesn't show up there particularly.

Some of the stories are pretty good, a few are really good in terms of capturing voice and character, even hot (as was, of course, their point!) Others aren't. But taken altogether they paint of a picture of a completely mentally unstable and self-destructive man who should be dead or in prison or a mental hospital, and not anywhere near a star ship, much less *on the bridge.* Now, each story has some compensating element to make it work that Jim Kirk can actually be in Star Fleet! but each compensation story is different, and the details blur, so what a reader comes away with is the dominant image of Mad Damaged Jim.

But writing a story about not-mad-not-damaged-Jim competently running his crew and his ship, without coming up with a 'plot of the week' -- is hard! (and coming up with a good plot-of-the-week is even harder.) And definitely not conducive to blogging-style 10,000 word PWP stories. I respect that. I do.

Still, it is interesting that the resulting fandom trope is Mad Damaged Jim.

So, all the dismissing Nikita to make room for preferred whomever does make sense. But each whomever and the particular justification blur and the overwhelming theme, when you swallow lots of fic all at once is 'incompetent Nikita, easily pushed aside.' Which is what makes me flaily. And not any one particular story, though some are worse than others, it is true. ;-)

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