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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no subject
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.