Rosie White, "Violent Femmes."

[the_grynne]

As if I didn't have enough work to do, I went to the library to borrow Rosie White's Violent Femmes: Women as spies in popular culture, after class today. Reading the pilot script for the new Nikita TV show, and the nostalgia for Nikita in her previous incarnations it stirred, made me want to write more about it, yet I also felt grossly

Comments

[yahtzee63]

I think that reading of the final scene is total crap, though. Yes, Sydney's married with kids -- as she always hoped to be -- but as Dixon's visit makes clear, she is also still involved with the world of espionage, to the degree that she chooses, not as something defined for her (as it had been previously throughout the show.) As much fun as the world of Alias is, and as much as I would want to run off into it with my GPS stilettos, the show made it clear from the pilot that it was not Sydney's ideal life. She's not Spybarbie; she's herself.

For me, the most telling sequence of the fifth season is the moment where Irina says you can't be a good mother and a good spy; Sydney lifts her chin and says, "Watch me." And we do. Sydney gets her ideal life as she defines it, and this is antifeminist only by the most narrow and reactionary version of "feminism," one to which I don't subscribe.