Some thoughts on injustice and compassion in Nikita
I’ve had this post in my drafts for a year at least, but I just got an ask from someone saying they enjoy reading my thoughts on this show, so I decided to finally post this. It’s kinda long, so I’m putting it under the cut
TL;DR: Nikita sees that the system is causing harm to all but a select few who can profit off of it. Saving it, then, is to tear it down, yes, but also to rebuild something kind and just.
“Michael, social services dumped me with Gary. Corrupt cops shook down Carla to steal her money, and they killed my friend. The bureau of prisons helped fake my death. This government has always treated me like I was expendable. And I’m gonna save it anyway.” - Nikita, “Dead Drop,” 2.21
Okay but can we just talk about this moment though???
Like obviously, there are unrealistic aspects to the show, but it’s grounded in enough reality that it really maps onto our current moment and culture. One of the overarching themes of this show is that people in power will set up systems to take advantage of people (be they the main focus of the show, like Division, Oversight, the Shop, etc., or background but still shown to be part of the world building, like police violence, the prison industrial complex, privatized warfare, human trafficking upheld/aided by local officials, the surveillance state, etc.). And it’s so important that the show acknowledges those things, because a lot of other ‘ooooh black ops unit of the government, they go and kill people abroad’ shows or movies tend to valorize or at least justify these units, thereby normalizing all of these systems to us. And so the fact that this show does expose some of that is great. But they also go one step further.
The other big theme of the show can be thought of as either breaking the cycle of violence or surviving and living with horrific pieces of your past. On an individual level, it shows people working to help others. Carla to Nikita to Alex to the many groups of trafficked people Alex helped. It shows the power of providing someone space to heal, a way out, forgiveness for past harm, and forgiveness of themselves. But on a societal level, Nikita is still doing exactly that. She’s fighting Division to interrupt the chain of violence. The whole point is taking people “screwed over,” as Nikita says in this scene, by the system, and then holding a gun to their head and forcing them to kill. It’s the dressed-up-action-show version of prison labor.
Division has a vested interest in maintaining oppression in society, because if we started putting less people in prisons, if we didn’t criminalize so many groups of people, if we didn’t stigmatize prisoners so that they can’t get jobs, housing, etc., out of prison and are funneled back into prison again... then Division would lose its source of recruits. (The real life version of all of this is: cheap/free prison labor that provides profit to those in charge, and prisoners not able to refuse working because they’re charged absurd prices for everything they need to survive...). Amanda calls division agents ‘expendable’ in (s2 ep18). This isn’t even bringing up Percy’s mission-for-hire jobs. The show explains it as operating expenses because Oversight won’t give them enough funds, but like. You can’t convince me he wasn’t at least skimming off the top for himself.
Carla is this weird, contradictory character. On a personal level, she got Nikita clean, she helped her. On a systemic level, she took people from one prison and put them in another (and yes. She’ll say that it was Amanda who perverted her program, but no matter who’s running it, it’s a coercive program). She’s really the most sympathetic representative of that system, because we can see she does actually care on an individual level, at least. And so Birkhoff saying, “You know what really pisses me off? After all this is over, she’s still gonna forgive you. See, that’s the thing about Nikki. No matter how many times the people she loves let her down, she keeps doing the right thing. ‘Cause it’s the only thing she knows how to do” (“Doublecross,” 2.16), shows just how much Nikita can see the humanity in people, and how much she can see the injustices built into the system. Michael and Ryan, as Michael says in the “Dead Drop” scene, came up in the system, but Nikita has never been a part of it. So it’s easier for her to see clearly what’s going on, because she’s never been inside the system, has never benefited from it, in the way they did. Of course, as she points out in this scene, yes, “Ryan got screwed over by the system almost as badly as I did.” But he still grew up trusting it, until his brother’s death was covered up, and he started to see corruption. But he still believed it was fundamentally good with bad actors and organizations, not that the whole thing was designed this way.
Anyway, this is all to say that Nikita sees what Division is doing. She’s doing what she did for Alex, just scaled up to an entire organization. She’s working so hard to keep agents alive and safe, even trying to bring in the dirty thirty alive if she can.
Division is all about “second chances.” But they’re just doing things the same way the second time around. Work for us, or you die. There’s no chance for anything real there. Fancy apartment in the city and cushy cover job or not, they still belong to Division. They can’t make a life for themselves, because their life belongs to Division. And Nikita sees that, and once she gets out, she takes all that pain and anger and turns it on the hand that forged her. But it’s not a destructive rage (I mean. Yes. It is, but not completely.) she’s building something too. Taking down Division doesn’t mean, and never meant, killing every single person there. In fact, she goes out of her way to try to save as many agents as she possibly can, because she knows that even if they’re fighting against her, they don’t have a choice. But she’s there to give them one. She is there to break the cycle of violence. Pull them out of the fire. Everything they do to her, “and I’m gonna save them anyway.”
@itmeansdove asked “#4: favorite minor character + first movie/show that made you go ‘WAIT ACTUALLY I LOVE THIS’”
↳ Ryan Fletcher, Nikita (2010-2013)
[Image Description: Nine stacked gifs of Ryan.
Second: Ryan says, “The second you showed your face, I knew my future was over tonight. If you want to know my system, it’s pretty simple... I pick up your trail, I point it out to Nikita, and she follows it straight to your door. My only regret is I won’t be there to see you get your ass kicked.”
Fifth: A man says, “Fletcher, I read your file. You’re just a low-level analyst.” Ryan responds, “Low-level analyst? Right. A low-level analyst who was killed, resurrected in a hole filled with criminals and murderers. A low-level analyst who’s gone up against the MSS, FBI, CIA, ordered heads of state executed, even kidnapped the President of Uzbekistan from inside the White House.”
Eighth: Nikita says, “You were smart. You used your head. I was-” Ryan responds, “Using your heart. Which got you further than anyone else in this fight.”]
