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Three Eyed Turtle
I have such conflicted reactions to this episode, and the one before it.
On the one hand - TET has awesome Paul/Madeline stuff going on.
On the other - both episodes have Greg Hillenger.
I like the first episode he is in in the (first? second? season - I've just watched them all, you'd think I could remember).
But this pair of eps? There is something about Greg and his interactions with all the other characters that triggers in me that horrible - cover my eyes because OMG (!!!111!!!!1) they are *all* going to embarrass themselves terribly over this!!!11!!!! - feeling.
There is something about the structure of the eps that is so heavy handed with it's telegraphing that "Greg=trouble" that the utter obliviousness of *everyone* else to this problem, even after Greg is deliberately guilty of murder of a sr. operative, just makes it almost impossible for me to enjoy anything else going on.
Or, seriously, for that matter - in the final scene in the hanger - when George suddenly rolls over and plays dead?
OMG - Paul!!! Wake the frak up!!!
Okay, this is a total DON rant.
I think this series of episodes in particular, though with plenty of other evidence from the very beginning through the very end, is what make me just seethe over the notion that Nikita will *obviously* fail immediately (as opposed too -- in time) at running Section because she isn't as good as Paul/Madeline. I mean, maybe she will, but Paul and Madeline fuck up all the dang time, and yes, they did eventually fail - after ten or eleven years. If they are the baseline - Nikita doesn't have to be any better than she is shown to be to be *just as good as they were.* Arrrgghhghgh! flail!~!!!!
On the one hand - TET has awesome Paul/Madeline stuff going on.
On the other - both episodes have Greg Hillenger.
I like the first episode he is in in the (first? second? season - I've just watched them all, you'd think I could remember).
But this pair of eps? There is something about Greg and his interactions with all the other characters that triggers in me that horrible - cover my eyes because OMG (!!!111!!!!1) they are *all* going to embarrass themselves terribly over this!!!11!!!! - feeling.
There is something about the structure of the eps that is so heavy handed with it's telegraphing that "Greg=trouble" that the utter obliviousness of *everyone* else to this problem, even after Greg is deliberately guilty of murder of a sr. operative, just makes it almost impossible for me to enjoy anything else going on.
Or, seriously, for that matter - in the final scene in the hanger - when George suddenly rolls over and plays dead?
OMG - Paul!!! Wake the frak up!!!
Okay, this is a total DON rant.
I think this series of episodes in particular, though with plenty of other evidence from the very beginning through the very end, is what make me just seethe over the notion that Nikita will *obviously* fail immediately (as opposed too -- in time) at running Section because she isn't as good as Paul/Madeline. I mean, maybe she will, but Paul and Madeline fuck up all the dang time, and yes, they did eventually fail - after ten or eleven years. If they are the baseline - Nikita doesn't have to be any better than she is shown to be to be *just as good as they were.* Arrrgghhghgh! flail!~!!!!
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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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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 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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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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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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[Sorry for two posts -- I clearly got excited about the barn scene!]
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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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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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As for Mad Damaged Jim...I'm not especially a Star Trek fan, and I haven't seen the reboot, so when you mention this character trope, I immediately envision it being played by William Shatner in his over-the-top campy melodramatic style, and it's actually HILARIOUS to think about in that way. Setting that aside, though, that's a really common trope in House fandom, too. Super SUPER common. Mind you, canon provides a basis for some of it, but people go to unbelievable extremes in fic. It's an interesting socio-fannish pattern, isn't it?