The two Nikitas.
If you're in the US, apparently you can watch all 5 seasons (96 episodes) of USA Network's La Femme Nikita here at the WB website. Anyone who's seen the emotionally wrenching final two seasons of LFN will recognise the disconnect between the way the series ended and the new Nikita being developed by CW (details on that here and here), and yet there are so many similarities between the characters (Michael, Amanda/Madeline, Birkhoff) that Nikita can't possibly NOT be intended as a continuation of LFN in some form or other.
The question is, which parts of LFN are they going to dismiss? My best guess at the moment is that Nikita will presuppose the basic character trajectories of season one, up to the point where Nikita (Peta Wilson in LFN/Maggie Q. in the new show) escapes from Section. In LFN, she accomplishes this with Michael secretly helping her. This will be before the infamous "love boat" scene in the season two episode "Hard Landing", which was when the Michael/Nikita romantic relationship really took off. Since this relationship is absolutely central to both La Femme Nikita AND the original film on which the franchise is based, I cannot see a Nikita that doesn't include it in some way. But how will CW's Nikita rewrite Michael/Nikita, and where does Alex, the replacement "Nikita", fit into all of this?
One way (perhaps the only way) I can imagine this possibly working is to make it much more of an ensemble, and to give Nikita and Alex close to equal screentime, while making Michael the link between the world inside Section, and Nikita outside of Section. But how will this be sustained when presumably there will also be a "case of the week" storyline, which won't directly involve Nikita? That setup would be doomed to repeat the problems with the Bionic Woman remake, which spent too much time with the new (and boring) Bionic Woman, and not enough with Katee Sackhoff's Sarah Corvus, the original model.
I don't see a way of resolving this story problem that doesn't involve pushing Nikita completely to the margins, probably as the main overarching antagonist, and building Alex as a strong character in her own right. But with so much backstory between Nikita and Michael, in the film and especially in LFN, the chances of that are slim.
ETA: The show that this could have been: a continuation of S4, more or less, with MICHAEL as the rogue agent, and Nikita training her own replacement. The dynamics of that would be so much more interesting: Nikita torn between Section and Michael, Alex not sure if she can trust her mentor, Michael the enigma. That way, you wouldn't have the two female leads wrestling for screentime. ( original comment)
The question is, which parts of LFN are they going to dismiss? My best guess at the moment is that Nikita will presuppose the basic character trajectories of season one, up to the point where Nikita (Peta Wilson in LFN/Maggie Q. in the new show) escapes from Section. In LFN, she accomplishes this with Michael secretly helping her. This will be before the infamous "love boat" scene in the season two episode "Hard Landing", which was when the Michael/Nikita romantic relationship really took off. Since this relationship is absolutely central to both La Femme Nikita AND the original film on which the franchise is based, I cannot see a Nikita that doesn't include it in some way. But how will CW's Nikita rewrite Michael/Nikita, and where does Alex, the replacement "Nikita", fit into all of this?
One way (perhaps the only way) I can imagine this possibly working is to make it much more of an ensemble, and to give Nikita and Alex close to equal screentime, while making Michael the link between the world inside Section, and Nikita outside of Section. But how will this be sustained when presumably there will also be a "case of the week" storyline, which won't directly involve Nikita? That setup would be doomed to repeat the problems with the Bionic Woman remake, which spent too much time with the new (and boring) Bionic Woman, and not enough with Katee Sackhoff's Sarah Corvus, the original model.
I don't see a way of resolving this story problem that doesn't involve pushing Nikita completely to the margins, probably as the main overarching antagonist, and building Alex as a strong character in her own right. But with so much backstory between Nikita and Michael, in the film and especially in LFN, the chances of that are slim.
ETA: The show that this could have been: a continuation of S4, more or less, with MICHAEL as the rogue agent, and Nikita training her own replacement. The dynamics of that would be so much more interesting: Nikita torn between Section and Michael, Alex not sure if she can trust her mentor, Michael the enigma. That way, you wouldn't have the two female leads wrestling for screentime. ( original comment)