Female-Led Sexy-Spy Show Comparison: Alias & Nikita

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.