Some
time after I watched (and adored) Nikita,
I checked out Alias, based on my love
of Victor Garber and a friend’s recommendation.
I enjoyed Alias, though not as
much as Nikita. However, that’s possibly in part because I’d already seen Nikita, and the two shows ring major
bells with each other, to a fairly crazy degree in a few places. Note:
I’m mainly just looking at the comparisons to be made here, not deciding
whether Nikita (2010) cribbed plot
elements from Alias (2001). If nothing else, even though Alias came out a decade before Nikita, it was predated by La Femme Nikita – both the French film
and the first TV series inspired by it – neither of which I’ve seen, so I can’t
speak to who did what first.
There’s
of course our main premise. In both
shows, the heroine, a highly-adept spy for a top-secret organization, comes to
learn that the organization isn’t what it claims to be. When the organization kills the man she
loves, she turns absolutely against them and starts planning out to take them
down. Did I mention that in both shows,
the dead fiancee’s name is Danny/Daniel, and that the heroine also has a deep
but complicated relationship with a colleague named Michael (he goes more often
by his last name, Vaughan, in Alias,
but still)?
Just in
case you’re starting to wonder if this is a shot-for-shot remake scenario a la Psycho, let’s get into the differences within these similarities. In Alias,
SD-6 masquerades as a specialized branch of the CIA when, in fact, it has no
government affiliation whatsoever. Only
the higher-ups know what it really is and are aware of its more nefarious
aims. Most are like Sydney at the start
of the show; they fully believe they’re CIA operatives, having been recruited
and gone through vetting and training that seems perfectly official. On the other hand, Division does have its origins in government,
designed as an off-the-books black-ops group to do the jobs the government
can’t own up to. However, it has since
veered from that path and become much more self-serving, doing similar
opportunistic-but-immoral jobs as SD-6.
It is able to do so because its head has “little black boxes” storing
electronic proof of all the government’s dirty secrets, which he uses to keep
himself in power. Division recruits,
like Nikita, are mostly criminals who are removed from prison, have their
deaths faked, and are trained in Division’s secret underground base for an
indeterminate amount of time, knowing that they’ll be “canceled” if they don’t
measure up. Though they’re similarly
lied to about what Division is really about, they realize from the start that
it’s not about going through “official channels.”
Given
their very different arrivals to their organizations, it’s understandable that
Sydney and Nikita are very different people.
Nikita already knows how shady Division is, but when they kill Daniel,
she breaks out and plots her revenge, interfering with Division missions and
trying to track down Percy’s black boxes so he can be taken out without
international repercussions. Meanwhile, Sydney
doesn’t learn the truth about SD-6 until after they kill Danny, at which point
she marches straight to the real CIA and volunteers to share what she knows,
ultimately becoming a double agent who works at sabotaging from the
inside. In this way, Sydney is more like
Alex than Nikita; though she intentionally gets herself placed in Division
knowing what it is, Alex serves as Nikita’s mole, feeding her encrypted intel
and helping out where she can.
I
incline way more towards Nikita as a character, because I feel she’s generally
more complex from a writing standpoint and more competent from a spy standpoint
(there are a lot of times in the
first season of Alias when I want to
shout, “You’re a double agent in the belly of the beast! Work on your frickin’ poker face!”) But to be fair to Sydney, she and Nikita
start their shows in very differently. Nikita
begins three years after Daniel’s death, with Alex freshly imbedded and Nikita
ready to take her plans to the next level.
Alias, on the other hand, all
but opens with Danny’s death. Within the pilot, Sydney is blindsided by the
murder of her fiancée and the
discovery that the “government organization” she works for is anything
but. She has a huge amount of stuff to process, on the fly, as she jumps right
into being a double agent, while Nikita has already had years to process all
that before we even meet her. As such,
it totally makes sense that Nikita holds it together better at the start and
has a more steely resolve – she’s much further down her path than Sydney is
down hers.
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