Favorite Characters: Nikita Mears (Nikita)

Aaaand we might as well round off the set.  There’s a definite possibility of other Nikita-related posts in the future, but this is, I think, the last immediate entry in my must-write-about list.  Oh, Nikita, how much do you rock?  Let me count the ways.  (Usual Nikita spoilers warning applies.)

Like other characters I’ve loved and reviewed from this show, Nikita is a superb mix of fine assets and honest flaws.  She’s an action heroine, a smart cookie, a BAMF surrogate mother, a hard-decision maker, and a lost soul who’s scraped together some restitution for her past sins.  She’s one of those lucky people who need people, although she doesn’t always realize that and sometimes actively fights against it.  Where redemption is concerned, she puts her money where her mouth is, but at the same time, she often dances on the knife edge between light and darkness.  Most of all, she’s a woman who gets things done; she drives the story forward, and any time the plot tries to dictate her movements, she makes it clear she knows how to push back.

Nikita and Alex are both unique in that they’re female protagonists with pretty morally-murky origins.  Nikita came to Division as a drug addict and a cop-killer (committed under the influence, but still,) and before leaving it, she rose to become one of its top assets.  She killed for them spectacularly and without complaint.  When she does break from Division, her chief aim vacillates between justice and revenge.  She no longer turns a blind eye to Division’s crimes, and she seeks to put a stop to it, while simultaneously trying to atone for the unconscionable acts she did at its biddings, but she’s more than just a crusader.  She’s also a devastatingly wronged party looking to twist the knife – Division killed her fiancé, largely to display their power over her, and this lends a disquieting aspect to her mission.  She wants them to feel every particle of her rage and pain over Daniel’s death, and she wants them to pay for it, pound for pound, in flesh.

This dichotomy informs much of Nikita’s story.  She wants to thwart Division’s nefarious plans and save innocents, whether they’re directly in Division’s crosshairs or mere collateral damage.  However, her desire to see Division break and suffer as it falls sometimes gets in the way of her nobler intentions, and these two drives within her wrestle for pride of place among her motivations.  As such, she is never all good or all bad.  In her efforts to disrupt Division’s villainy, she kills agents who were abducted, blackmailed, and conditioned by Division just as she was.  When she has the means to end the life of one of her enemies, her hand is sometimes stayed by mercy, hope for the better angels of their nature, or a simple desire to end the violence.  It’s strong, thoughtful, character-driven storytelling that women get too rarely on television.

One of my favorite things about Nikita is her slow, gradual admission that she needs a family.  At first, she rebuffs anyone who wants to help her in her mission; Alex only makes the cut due to her sheer determination.  And even after Nikita lets in Alex, then Michael, then Birkhoff, and so forth, she’s prone to go off on her own, to insist she doesn’t need back-up in the field, or to spare others from doing what she thinks she has to do alone.  Her loved ones hate it when she does this, and rightly so, because they’re all highly capable adults who can make their own decisions, but really, when she pulls away on this end of the equation, it only expresses how much she needs them.  Whether she’s misguidedly keeping them at arm’s length to protect them from danger or drawing a curtain over her own darkness so they won’t see, it’s her way of saying how much she loves them.