Thursday 2 March 2017

Nikita, Season 2 (2011)



Nikita Mears continues her struggle to bring down Division, the super secret black ops agency that originally trained her to be an elite spy and assassin, assisted only by a group of mavericks who don't always agree with her about the best route forward.

The first season of Nikita was a generally pretty good show with a weak conclusion.  This time around it is a generally weak show with a pretty good conclusion.  Not a great conclusion - one of the big flaws that has plagued the whole season is still present - but a pretty good one.  So at least it ends on a relative high note.

So what are those flaws I mentioned?  Well the biggest one - the one that continues even into the season's conclusion - is that the show is way way way way way way way too impressed with its bad guys, to the point where the shows feels more about them than it does about Nikita and her rag tag band of allies and frenemies.  I was heartily sick of both big bad Percy and other big bad Amanda by the end of the 23 episodes here.  Not least because for a large chunk of the season, the show keeps forcing the idiot ball on one of the good guys in order to make the bad guys look more awesome.

The second issue is how superfluous most of this season really is.  Like, you could watch the first 20 episodes of season 1, and then the last three of this season, and the only disconnect you'd have to deal with would basically be "oh, those guys who were obviously going to join Team Nikita actually did so" and "there are a couple of new secondary characters floating around".  And sure, episodic TV shows often more or less have a status quo they stay at, but Nikita actually dramatically changed its status quo at the end of season 1, and then spent most of this season slowly changing everything back to the way it was before.  It's a bit baffling really.

Still, the very end of this season shakes things up again, in a way that makes me feel some hope for series 3.

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