Nikita and Michael (La Femme Nikita)
Title: Lovers in a Dangerous Time
Author: gwyneth rhys gwyn_r
Spoilers: Everything
Warning: I have no idea if I'm doing this right... I should be canceled.
La Femme Nikita began airing on the USA cable network a scant few weeks before Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted. With The X-Files and Xena in full swing already, television suddenly had four strong female leads on fannish-type programs, a first for American television. By its fourth season, LFN was the highest-rated original cable series, and even without much press, it had become part of the cultural zeitgeist of ass-kicking chicks, high-fashion derring-do, and high-tech spy wizardry. Alias owes every bit of its success to Nikita, from first-season plots that bore startling resemblances to LFN’s to its thwarted-romance story of handler and “material.”
Nikita Voiceover: One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist group on the planet. Their ends are just, but their means are ruthless. If I don’t play by their rules, I die.
Fans of the French movie original, like me, tuned in to the first episode with a lot of trepidation. Not only was the big blonde Amazonian goddess Peta Wilson not the picture of Nikita most of us had, but the name of her handler and trainer, Bob, had been changed to Michael, and the relationship had been altered a bit. Nikita also was resculpted from a drug-addicted cop-killer into an innocent street kid framed for a cop’s murder. The shadowy government organization the movie Nikita became an assassin for was now a high-tech covert anti-terrorist organization staffed by criminals who have been retrained and are essentially imprisoned for life in service to Section One’s agenda. So Nikita’s escape in the movie would not happen in the TV Section One. And romance seemed an impossibility, as we learned from the movie.
Yet it turned out to be the core of the story, and one that kept viewers hooked for four years, plus a truncated fifth comeback season after cancellation. Some people watched for Australian actress/model Peta Wilson, many for French-Canadian actor Roy Dupuis (and some for other characters such as Operations, Madeline, Walter, and Birkoff), but the majority of fans watched because of the relationship between their characters, Nikita and Michael. It did not hurt that both leads were unbelievably hot and willing to take off their clothes at the drop of a hat (before USA’s management change, there were more than a few shots of both actors’ nude behinds, not to mention other carefully but barely concealed body parts). They had intense chemistry from the start, even while they were feeling out their characters in the pilot episodes. On the surface the show is about high-tech spy gadgets and bad-guy-fighting, ass-kicking fu, haute couture fashions, and the best new-music soundtrack since Miami Vice. Underneath, though, it was all about Nikita and Michael.
Nikita: Because I'm not who you think I am. I'm not a killer.
Michael: The moment I believe that, Nikita, you're cancelled.
It began much like the movie: Nikita wakes up in a cell to Michael’s face, and he tells her that everyone believes she died in prison; he even shows her a photo of her grave. She has a choice--work with them, or die. Within two years she has become an agent, and he takes her on what she believes is a date (her first time outside Section since she was brought in), but which turns into a brutal test. Once she passes, she is released to the outside world. But the big difference here is that she is as attracted to Michael as he is to her, and because she is stuck in Section, she continues contact with Michael--which leads to love.
Michael: You’re the only one of us who still has a soul... I don't know what love is anymore... but the only part of me that's not dead is you.
Michael is much more complex than Bob. He is clearly, to the audience’s eyes, in love with her. A deleted scene in the first season DVD set shows this, where he begs the operational command to spare her life when she screws up her first mission. (I’m glad this was never included, as it would have completely obliterated the wonderful is he or isn’t he? quality of Michael’s feelings for Nikita, and would have made his choices seem less interesting.) The show balanced this dramatic irony carefully, though--we know his feelings, but we are never totally certain he can be trusted; Nikita believes he is as duplicitous and manipulative as he appears to be, without being able to see the lovelorn core we could. He is still grieving for his dead wife, a Section agent who died about three years before. He shows no emotion after those first three eps--he nearly whispers when he speaks, and speaks only the words that are necessary. The only emotion he shows is in his eyes, something very difficult for actors to do successfully. And Nikita constantly struggles with her feelings for Michael, knowing that it’s deadly to love him, and believing she can’t trust him. Michael is ultra-controlled, where Nikita is ultra-humanistic -- she wears her heart on her sleeve, she suffers great emotional toll for what Section has done to her and what they want from her (she insists over and over she can’t kill in cold blood). But it’s that quality of feeling, of her big emotions, that draws Michael to her. While her spirit puts him in grave danger all the time, he clearly needs it, and loves it.
Michael: I thought I’d lost you.
Nikita: You never had me.
Two scenes embody the back and forth ambivalence of their thwarted love and illustrate their passion better than any others (and there are plenty, believe me). At the end of first season, Michael helps Nikita escape Section One rather than see her die. For months he contacts her but she never responds. In the second season opener, Hard Landing, he is ambushed on a mission, but is saved when Nikita shoots the two men. She vanishes before he can say anything, but they meet again later. She had been found on the run by the organization he was after, and escaped from them to save him. She wants to go back because she can no longer live on the run, and Michael devises a plan.
He’s been set up as uber-competent and deadly--he could kill you with his pinky finger, and can do anything and do it well. Nikita is strong and deadly and smart. To make it look like she’s been held and tortured for months, he beats her to within an inch of her life--when he asks to stop, she says, “no, it has to look real.” Only Michael could ever do this to her and not get killed. And she is the only one he would risk everything for. It’s one of the most intense scenes between a man and a woman I’ve ever seen on TV, and it is not downplayed at all. She trusts him at last, and he is so desperate to be with her again that he’s willing to do something that probably causes him more pain than it does her.
Nikita: I’d rather die than go back there.
Michael: Don’t say that.
Nikita: Why?
Michael: Because I can’t live without you.
The other scene occurs shortly after the start of fourth season. In third season, after two years of keeping Michael and Nikita apart once they’d finally made love in Hard Landing, the show rekindled the romance. But Section One didn’t want their operatives to suffer from the reduced efficiency they believed would occur if they were involved, and they brainwashed Nikita into believing she didn’t love Michael, turning her into a robotic, emotionless drone.
Michael kidnaps her and deprograms her in one of the most electrifying and romantic episodes they ever had. In the end, they make love (in one of the most risque love scenes shown on TV at that point) and when they are holding each other, they have the conversation quoted above. For most fans, those six words of his, accompanied by the ragged sigh he gives as they hold each other tighter, was far better than any I love you could be on any other television show. For a man who keeps every emotion in check except when it comes to Nikita, this was a defining moment. He had done everything to bring her back time and again, risked his life repeatedly for hers, and we knew that he was telling the ultimate truth right there--he will die if he can’t have her in his life. Even if she can’t be his, just having her in his world is everything he needs.
Michael: This isn’t over. We will be together.
The series initially ended in a very unpleasant way for most fans, and many people felt it had betrayed that beautiful love scene. But USA’s failed franchises made it possible, with fan action, to bring the series back for a short fifth season, and the series ended as it should have--bittersweetly, hauntingly. Michael must leave her, and Nikita is now running Section One, and they are trapped by their obligations the way they were once trapped by their service to Section. This time, though, they have the means to control their destinies when the future changes for the better. Finally, too, they declare their love, not so much a revelation to the viewers as confirmation of what we’ve known all along. They are not together in the ending, no, but the series was too dark for it to end happily; we know that Michael will be back and Nikita will always let him know where she is, and they will, as he told her once when everything seemed against them, be together in the end.
Nikita literally enters hell when she comes into Section One. Michael has resided there for some time. It’s Nikita who brings him back from the underworld, Nikita who offers him life and light. When the Section operational command try to come between them, to force them apart, Michael lets them take everything away from him without fighting back, because he knows that the only thing that really matters is what he thinks of himself, and what Nikita thinks of him. In the end she is the one who helps him get his life back at great cost to herself and to their love. But that’s what they do for each other -- they keep each other going through the fire and the smoke and the pain, and though they’re in hell, at least they’re in hell together.
*****
Unfortunately, despite its success on cable, LFN was one of those “feral” fandoms where most folks have never participated in other fandoms or the online world. I think vids are possibly the best introduction to the incredible look and feel of this gorgeous show. There are vidders, but they don’t even know they’re practicing a time-honored fannish art, or how to make fannish vids. LFN vidding has been rare among experienced fans, so the only place I know of with top-quality vids is Morgan Dawn’s site. Many of the wonderful vids she and Gayle F. have done over the years, as well as one of mine, are there. I’m have a DVD of digitized (not digitally remastered) versions of all my VCR-made LFN vids; e-mail me for details (gwynethr at gmail dot com), as I would love to share these with a wider audience.
General LFN sites disappeared in large part after the show was cancelled, but these top few are the ones I think best, and here are some other links that might be of interest.
http://www.flashmission.com/
http://lfnforever.tripod.com/
http://sectionoperative.com/index.html
http://www.aadikah.com/nikita/intro.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Network/9606/
http://www.roydupuis-online.com/history/tv/lfn.htm
http://www.eugenerobertglazer.com/lfntran.html
http://www.suersite.com/lfn-pages.html
I do not read fic in this fandom because I’ve found it to be unsatisfactory, but someone gave me these links. I can’t vouch for quality and they looked pretty iffy, but people less nitpicky than I might find something of value, or a place to start.
http://p067.ezboard.com/fstraightouttasectionfrm18
http://www.thesplitpersonality.net/lfn/writers/writers.shtml
http://www.voy.com/15165/
ETA: I feel I need to make a stronger disclaimer here, that I am by no means an expert in this fandom. I do vid a lot in it, but fic has never been a big interest of mine beyond writing myself, so my experience is quite limited. In the comments below, some much more knowledgeable fans have provided links to good fic resources; please take a look at those, and follow some of the links for vids, as well. I can't vouch for anything, but it sounds like they've got some great resources here.
Most depressing, though, is that source is hard to come by. Warner Home Video have been abysmal in their support, and took years to release this most DVD-worthy of shows on disc. After the first season box set sold only marginally well, they refused to put out more seasons, then finally relented after a management change, only to pull the second season box set one week before it was scheduled to hit shelves-more than a year after first season discs. The set was rereleased recently with one very cool song removed for legal purposes, sadly. Season 3, surprisingly, is due in stores June 28. Fingers are crossed that S4 will actually come out. There are many “tape fairies,” though, on the LFN Haven message board, and it’s possible to connect with some fans who’ve put them on VCD or recordable DVD. If you’re interested in getting the other seasons, definitely go to the Haven and ask around; the people who still participate there are kind, generous, and really want more new fans. http://p079.ezboard.com/fsavelfn69411thesavelfnhaven
Author: gwyneth rhys gwyn_r
Spoilers: Everything
Warning: I have no idea if I'm doing this right... I should be canceled.
La Femme Nikita began airing on the USA cable network a scant few weeks before Buffy the Vampire Slayer debuted. With The X-Files and Xena in full swing already, television suddenly had four strong female leads on fannish-type programs, a first for American television. By its fourth season, LFN was the highest-rated original cable series, and even without much press, it had become part of the cultural zeitgeist of ass-kicking chicks, high-fashion derring-do, and high-tech spy wizardry. Alias owes every bit of its success to Nikita, from first-season plots that bore startling resemblances to LFN’s to its thwarted-romance story of handler and “material.”
Nikita Voiceover: One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist group on the planet. Their ends are just, but their means are ruthless. If I don’t play by their rules, I die.
Fans of the French movie original, like me, tuned in to the first episode with a lot of trepidation. Not only was the big blonde Amazonian goddess Peta Wilson not the picture of Nikita most of us had, but the name of her handler and trainer, Bob, had been changed to Michael, and the relationship had been altered a bit. Nikita also was resculpted from a drug-addicted cop-killer into an innocent street kid framed for a cop’s murder. The shadowy government organization the movie Nikita became an assassin for was now a high-tech covert anti-terrorist organization staffed by criminals who have been retrained and are essentially imprisoned for life in service to Section One’s agenda. So Nikita’s escape in the movie would not happen in the TV Section One. And romance seemed an impossibility, as we learned from the movie.
Yet it turned out to be the core of the story, and one that kept viewers hooked for four years, plus a truncated fifth comeback season after cancellation. Some people watched for Australian actress/model Peta Wilson, many for French-Canadian actor Roy Dupuis (and some for other characters such as Operations, Madeline, Walter, and Birkoff), but the majority of fans watched because of the relationship between their characters, Nikita and Michael. It did not hurt that both leads were unbelievably hot and willing to take off their clothes at the drop of a hat (before USA’s management change, there were more than a few shots of both actors’ nude behinds, not to mention other carefully but barely concealed body parts). They had intense chemistry from the start, even while they were feeling out their characters in the pilot episodes. On the surface the show is about high-tech spy gadgets and bad-guy-fighting, ass-kicking fu, haute couture fashions, and the best new-music soundtrack since Miami Vice. Underneath, though, it was all about Nikita and Michael.
Nikita: Because I'm not who you think I am. I'm not a killer.
Michael: The moment I believe that, Nikita, you're cancelled.
It began much like the movie: Nikita wakes up in a cell to Michael’s face, and he tells her that everyone believes she died in prison; he even shows her a photo of her grave. She has a choice--work with them, or die. Within two years she has become an agent, and he takes her on what she believes is a date (her first time outside Section since she was brought in), but which turns into a brutal test. Once she passes, she is released to the outside world. But the big difference here is that she is as attracted to Michael as he is to her, and because she is stuck in Section, she continues contact with Michael--which leads to love.
Michael: You’re the only one of us who still has a soul... I don't know what love is anymore... but the only part of me that's not dead is you.
Michael is much more complex than Bob. He is clearly, to the audience’s eyes, in love with her. A deleted scene in the first season DVD set shows this, where he begs the operational command to spare her life when she screws up her first mission. (I’m glad this was never included, as it would have completely obliterated the wonderful is he or isn’t he? quality of Michael’s feelings for Nikita, and would have made his choices seem less interesting.) The show balanced this dramatic irony carefully, though--we know his feelings, but we are never totally certain he can be trusted; Nikita believes he is as duplicitous and manipulative as he appears to be, without being able to see the lovelorn core we could. He is still grieving for his dead wife, a Section agent who died about three years before. He shows no emotion after those first three eps--he nearly whispers when he speaks, and speaks only the words that are necessary. The only emotion he shows is in his eyes, something very difficult for actors to do successfully. And Nikita constantly struggles with her feelings for Michael, knowing that it’s deadly to love him, and believing she can’t trust him. Michael is ultra-controlled, where Nikita is ultra-humanistic -- she wears her heart on her sleeve, she suffers great emotional toll for what Section has done to her and what they want from her (she insists over and over she can’t kill in cold blood). But it’s that quality of feeling, of her big emotions, that draws Michael to her. While her spirit puts him in grave danger all the time, he clearly needs it, and loves it.
Michael: I thought I’d lost you.
Nikita: You never had me.
Two scenes embody the back and forth ambivalence of their thwarted love and illustrate their passion better than any others (and there are plenty, believe me). At the end of first season, Michael helps Nikita escape Section One rather than see her die. For months he contacts her but she never responds. In the second season opener, Hard Landing, he is ambushed on a mission, but is saved when Nikita shoots the two men. She vanishes before he can say anything, but they meet again later. She had been found on the run by the organization he was after, and escaped from them to save him. She wants to go back because she can no longer live on the run, and Michael devises a plan.
He’s been set up as uber-competent and deadly--he could kill you with his pinky finger, and can do anything and do it well. Nikita is strong and deadly and smart. To make it look like she’s been held and tortured for months, he beats her to within an inch of her life--when he asks to stop, she says, “no, it has to look real.” Only Michael could ever do this to her and not get killed. And she is the only one he would risk everything for. It’s one of the most intense scenes between a man and a woman I’ve ever seen on TV, and it is not downplayed at all. She trusts him at last, and he is so desperate to be with her again that he’s willing to do something that probably causes him more pain than it does her.
Nikita: I’d rather die than go back there.
Michael: Don’t say that.
Nikita: Why?
Michael: Because I can’t live without you.
The other scene occurs shortly after the start of fourth season. In third season, after two years of keeping Michael and Nikita apart once they’d finally made love in Hard Landing, the show rekindled the romance. But Section One didn’t want their operatives to suffer from the reduced efficiency they believed would occur if they were involved, and they brainwashed Nikita into believing she didn’t love Michael, turning her into a robotic, emotionless drone.
Michael kidnaps her and deprograms her in one of the most electrifying and romantic episodes they ever had. In the end, they make love (in one of the most risque love scenes shown on TV at that point) and when they are holding each other, they have the conversation quoted above. For most fans, those six words of his, accompanied by the ragged sigh he gives as they hold each other tighter, was far better than any I love you could be on any other television show. For a man who keeps every emotion in check except when it comes to Nikita, this was a defining moment. He had done everything to bring her back time and again, risked his life repeatedly for hers, and we knew that he was telling the ultimate truth right there--he will die if he can’t have her in his life. Even if she can’t be his, just having her in his world is everything he needs.
Michael: This isn’t over. We will be together.
The series initially ended in a very unpleasant way for most fans, and many people felt it had betrayed that beautiful love scene. But USA’s failed franchises made it possible, with fan action, to bring the series back for a short fifth season, and the series ended as it should have--bittersweetly, hauntingly. Michael must leave her, and Nikita is now running Section One, and they are trapped by their obligations the way they were once trapped by their service to Section. This time, though, they have the means to control their destinies when the future changes for the better. Finally, too, they declare their love, not so much a revelation to the viewers as confirmation of what we’ve known all along. They are not together in the ending, no, but the series was too dark for it to end happily; we know that Michael will be back and Nikita will always let him know where she is, and they will, as he told her once when everything seemed against them, be together in the end.
Nikita literally enters hell when she comes into Section One. Michael has resided there for some time. It’s Nikita who brings him back from the underworld, Nikita who offers him life and light. When the Section operational command try to come between them, to force them apart, Michael lets them take everything away from him without fighting back, because he knows that the only thing that really matters is what he thinks of himself, and what Nikita thinks of him. In the end she is the one who helps him get his life back at great cost to herself and to their love. But that’s what they do for each other -- they keep each other going through the fire and the smoke and the pain, and though they’re in hell, at least they’re in hell together.
*****
Unfortunately, despite its success on cable, LFN was one of those “feral” fandoms where most folks have never participated in other fandoms or the online world. I think vids are possibly the best introduction to the incredible look and feel of this gorgeous show. There are vidders, but they don’t even know they’re practicing a time-honored fannish art, or how to make fannish vids. LFN vidding has been rare among experienced fans, so the only place I know of with top-quality vids is Morgan Dawn’s site. Many of the wonderful vids she and Gayle F. have done over the years, as well as one of mine, are there. I’m have a DVD of digitized (not digitally remastered) versions of all my VCR-made LFN vids; e-mail me for details (gwynethr at gmail dot com), as I would love to share these with a wider audience.
General LFN sites disappeared in large part after the show was cancelled, but these top few are the ones I think best, and here are some other links that might be of interest.
http://www.flashmission.com/
http://lfnforever.tripod.com/
http://sectionoperative.com/index.html
http://www.aadikah.com/nikita/intro.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Network/9606/
http://www.roydupuis-online.com/history/tv/lfn.htm
http://www.eugenerobertglazer.com/lfntran.html
http://www.suersite.com/lfn-pages.html
I do not read fic in this fandom because I’ve found it to be unsatisfactory, but someone gave me these links. I can’t vouch for quality and they looked pretty iffy, but people less nitpicky than I might find something of value, or a place to start.
http://p067.ezboard.com/fstraightouttasectionfrm18
http://www.thesplitpersonality.net/lfn/writers/writers.shtml
http://www.voy.com/15165/
ETA: I feel I need to make a stronger disclaimer here, that I am by no means an expert in this fandom. I do vid a lot in it, but fic has never been a big interest of mine beyond writing myself, so my experience is quite limited. In the comments below, some much more knowledgeable fans have provided links to good fic resources; please take a look at those, and follow some of the links for vids, as well. I can't vouch for anything, but it sounds like they've got some great resources here.
Most depressing, though, is that source is hard to come by. Warner Home Video have been abysmal in their support, and took years to release this most DVD-worthy of shows on disc. After the first season box set sold only marginally well, they refused to put out more seasons, then finally relented after a management change, only to pull the second season box set one week before it was scheduled to hit shelves-more than a year after first season discs. The set was rereleased recently with one very cool song removed for legal purposes, sadly. Season 3, surprisingly, is due in stores June 28. Fingers are crossed that S4 will actually come out. There are many “tape fairies,” though, on the LFN Haven message board, and it’s possible to connect with some fans who’ve put them on VCD or recordable DVD. If you’re interested in getting the other seasons, definitely go to the Haven and ask around; the people who still participate there are kind, generous, and really want more new fans. http://p079.ezboard.com/fsavelfn69411thesavelfnhaven