Thoughts on the CW Nikita
Oct. 22nd, 2010 12:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nell65I watched it last night (no Fringe! No Olivia - Alt or Original flavor!).... and I have to say, on the one hand the characters are growing on me, but on the other..... OMfreakingG, how I dislike the relentlessly *personal* motivations of Nikita, Alex and Niktia's new sort of helper Owen.
Musings below -
One of hte things I most loved/appreciated about LFN's conception of Nikita, right up to the bitter end and even after it sort of started to seem that that the show runners themselves didn't even really agree with her anymore, was that she fought the Section and by extension Paul and Madeline *because she thought they were objectively wrong* about their methods, and in time their ends too. TR created, in a good tragic King Lear sort of way, their own executioner because, IMO, they successfully convinced Nikita very early on of the seriousness and conviction of their work, that the Sections existed because they could make hte world a better, safer place -- and so while in time Nikita came to believe that they were 'doing it wrong' -- she never really gave on the idea that it could be done right, or even the hope that Paul and Madeline would correct their own course and 'do it right.'
That they also screwed with her personal life and, in time, for a while, made her and Michael's lives suck was, to her, a symptom of the larger problem and the larger cause for which she fought - -and NOT her motivation or the cause *for which* she fought.
But in this new conception of the show 'verse -- it's all personal, baby. All of it. Nikita/Alex/Owen etc... don't seem to care what it is Percy is doing or supposed to be doing or for whom or why, they just want to kill him because he killed people they cared about. Revenge and nothing more interesting.
It's all very old testament I suppose, but not really very compelling as an overarching story. Especially as it suggests that if they hadn't fallen in love with 'outsiders' -- they'd've continued killing as Percy instructed until they died, without questions or concerns bigger than their own personal lives. Which isn't, you know, all that admirable and really makes them seem pretty shallow people.
I'm also really full of frown about Percy's black boxes. Paul didn't need black boxes in order to blackmail everyone in power to cover his own ass.... because Paul actually believed in what he was doing, among other things. (As I've said before, Paul infuriated me mostly because he convinced me too (!) that he believed in his own vision of/for the world and the possibilities of the sections, and then proceeded to -- as I saw it -- run the Section so stupidly and so far into the ground that he ended up so repeatedly bashing up his organization that it was so badly damaged survival was all it had to pursue.) And - in LFN - do you remember who had black boxes that had to be found and destroyed? David Fanning. yeah. Fanning.
Musings below -
One of hte things I most loved/appreciated about LFN's conception of Nikita, right up to the bitter end and even after it sort of started to seem that that the show runners themselves didn't even really agree with her anymore, was that she fought the Section and by extension Paul and Madeline *because she thought they were objectively wrong* about their methods, and in time their ends too. TR created, in a good tragic King Lear sort of way, their own executioner because, IMO, they successfully convinced Nikita very early on of the seriousness and conviction of their work, that the Sections existed because they could make hte world a better, safer place -- and so while in time Nikita came to believe that they were 'doing it wrong' -- she never really gave on the idea that it could be done right, or even the hope that Paul and Madeline would correct their own course and 'do it right.'
That they also screwed with her personal life and, in time, for a while, made her and Michael's lives suck was, to her, a symptom of the larger problem and the larger cause for which she fought - -and NOT her motivation or the cause *for which* she fought.
But in this new conception of the show 'verse -- it's all personal, baby. All of it. Nikita/Alex/Owen etc... don't seem to care what it is Percy is doing or supposed to be doing or for whom or why, they just want to kill him because he killed people they cared about. Revenge and nothing more interesting.
It's all very old testament I suppose, but not really very compelling as an overarching story. Especially as it suggests that if they hadn't fallen in love with 'outsiders' -- they'd've continued killing as Percy instructed until they died, without questions or concerns bigger than their own personal lives. Which isn't, you know, all that admirable and really makes them seem pretty shallow people.
I'm also really full of frown about Percy's black boxes. Paul didn't need black boxes in order to blackmail everyone in power to cover his own ass.... because Paul actually believed in what he was doing, among other things. (As I've said before, Paul infuriated me mostly because he convinced me too (!) that he believed in his own vision of/for the world and the possibilities of the sections, and then proceeded to -- as I saw it -- run the Section so stupidly and so far into the ground that he ended up so repeatedly bashing up his organization that it was so badly damaged survival was all it had to pursue.) And - in LFN - do you remember who had black boxes that had to be found and destroyed? David Fanning. yeah. Fanning.
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Date: 2010-10-22 06:02 pm (UTC)I MISS FRINGE, STOOPID SPORTS
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Date: 2010-10-24 04:13 pm (UTC)(Can you tell I'm back in the states w/ full spectrum cable? LOL!)
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Date: 2010-10-22 08:37 pm (UTC)You put your finger on exactly why I found the pilot so boring, though. All of the characters seem to be simply out for themselves, so their conflicts don't raise the kind of moral dilemmas that I would be interested in. Whereas moral dilemmas were pretty much the entire *point* of LFN!
I do find it vastly amusing that this show is prompting you to talk about Paul in a (relatively) favorable light! I agree with you that his arc was very Lear-ian - including the ego, stupidity and blindness that led to his downfall. But he *did* genuinely seem to believe in his cause, no matter how wrongheaded some of his decisions were, and he was even willing to put himself at personal risk for that cause from time to time - which I can't imagine Percy ever doing.
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Date: 2010-10-24 04:38 pm (UTC)All of the characters seem to be simply out for themselves, so their conflicts don't raise the kind of moral dilemmas that I would be interested in. Whereas moral dilemmas were pretty much the entire *point* of LFN!
I know. It cracks me up, in retrospect, that the first spate of reviews talked about how much "darker" this version is than 'our' LFN. I think they confused the color palette of the new one, which is a really, really, really dull and muddy collection of army greens, browns, grays and blacks (did I mention, dull?).... taupe is a shocking change up here, with, you know, plot.
I've started rewatching LFN eps again because I'm still writing, so it keeps me grounded in the original material..... and just saw the Perry Bauer ep from early in S1. That ep is full of color, esp. at Perry's estate, captured in all it's early autumn glory (seriously beautiful setting for that house they filmed at).... and yet the story line is amazingly nuanced and complex for 40 minutes of prime time TeeVee. Far MORE complex than anything "Nikita" has put up there.
I do find it vastly amusing that this show is prompting you to talk about Paul in a (relatively) favorable light! I agree with you that his arc was very Lear-ian - including the ego, stupidity and blindness that led to his downfall. But he *did* genuinely seem to believe in his cause, no matter how wrongheaded some of his decisions were, and he was even willing to put himself at personal risk for that cause from time to time - which I can't imagine Percy ever doing.
Yeah. Ha ha! ;-)
But, more seriously, what drives me batty about Paul is his failure to make his team function well *because* I did absolutely believe that Paul believed in what he was doing, and that he believed for the right reasons, you know? Even if I might think his strategy of choice was colossally stupid. Then his failures to make them all gel together so seem so rooted in his awesome blindness about himself and his own assumptions about the world, and about the people he works with,..... especially because they some so so so close so often, but then, wham, back to suckitude ..... that's why even now I get so all out of patience with him. Because I'm a romantic at heart, as you know (!), so I always want the 'come on gang, let's put on a play!' ethic to prevail, even when I understand - in my head - that far more compelling drama comes from the gang not functioning as a gang very well.
Percy is just sort of a cartoony dick right now, not worth getting mad at for failing to be the leader I would want him to become if he was doing anything that actually mattered in the world , because with this guy? Not a chance on any of those fronts.
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Date: 2010-10-22 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-24 04:40 pm (UTC)i wondered if anyone else was watching this...
Date: 2010-10-26 01:26 am (UTC)But in terms of the writing, what I miss most is the subtle writing/keep us guessing about motivations.
This feels like NIkita Dumbed Down [all the violence, half the plot].
But I'll still watch it ... for now.
Re: i wondered if anyone else was watching this...
Date: 2010-10-26 01:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-02-09 04:09 pm (UTC)I do absolutely agree that the characters are shallow because their motivations are personal--Nikita has made some vague noises about Percy's "for hire" ops, but it's laughable in comparison with the Adrian arc on LFN, which dealt with real questions about power and how much one person should be allowed to have of it. Honestly, I think the "revenge as primary motivating factor" thing is probably the main result of the CW-ification of the series. The show is supposedly geared towards young people, and they're indulging the narcissism of that demographic (or what they believe is the typical narcissism of teenagers and 20-somethings; I wouldn't comment on that personally). It's all very self-centered and doesn't approach the, for lack of a better word, more *adult* moral quandaries on LFN.
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Date: 2011-02-17 04:58 pm (UTC)(For lack of activity I don't check my fannish email account very often these days....which is where my notifications go..... instead it was just actually looking and thinking, 9? comments? hmmm, that doesn't seem right..... )
The other day I took the time to read some episode recaps/reviews on a site called, I think, Fanbolt?, and it is clear that the show has definitely caught on with at least some viewers.... and the writer/blogger did stress that, in her view, the show had improved over the course of the run. Maybe I'll tune in again, just to see. If only because the reviewer called Percy 'an odious toe-rag' and Michael 'a jolly good egg' !
The last ep I watched in full was that poor boy who so wanted to be an OP getting turned into an in-house guard instead and then going all postal and ending up a cleaner.... which had the intended? or perverse? effect of convincing me that this Section is being run by incompetent boobs, and in turn dramatically *lowering* the stakes for Nikita in taking them on. ..... ;-/
Of course the suspension of disbelief that Alex was able to regularly get to a secure chat room from inside the training facility was beyond me. I kept hoping that Percy would show up, rip back the curtain and laugh manically as Nikita died in a hail of bullets well choreographed to gansta rap, music vid style. Not that I wanted her to die, but just .... you know, not have Section be so, so bad at internal security.