Fans of the 1990 Luc Besson film Nikita and the 1993 American remake The Assassin on which this show is based will know the story.
An ugly-duckling junkie girl with a murder record is turned into a beautiful swan of an assassin by a mysterious organisation, known in the TV series as the Division, after they rescue her from execution by lethal injection and give her a new identity.
Life comes with a price, however: she is now the property of her rescuers, who have no intention of letting her go until they’ve got their money’s worth out of her and won’t hesitate to destroy anyone and anything that gets in the way of her doing her job.
The TV series picks up after Nikita (Maggie Q) has escaped the Division, who have killed her fiancé and ‘gone rogue’ – that is, stopped following government orders and started offering themselves for hire to private parties. Now she is trying to bring the Division down in revenge for her fiancé’s murder and to stop them doing to other vulnerable young people what they did to her.
The most obvious thing for the series creators to have done to highlight Nikita’s altruistic side would have been to intersperse the present-time action with flashbacks of her own troubled past in the Division’s training program, but instead they give her a young Ukrainian street girl, Alex (Lindsy Fonseca) to mentor who also happens to be her girl on the inside. It is revealed in the pilot episode that Nikita rescued Alex from her drug-dealing pimp for reasons that are not initially revealed and trained her for a year, preparing her to be her mole in the Division.
The series kicks off with several stand-alone episodes in which Nikita successively foils the Division’s amoral plans, helped on the inside by her mentee Alex, while her own former mentor Michael (Shane West), still an employee of the Division, tries to track her down and kill her.
As the show progresses, however, a larger story-arc emerges in which Nikita finds herself pitted against the main villains of the series, Division’s boss Percy (24’s Xander Berkeley) and his sadistic underling Amanda (Melinda Clarke), while Michael’s feelings for his target start to soften and Alex’s position as Nikita’s mole inside the Division grows increasingly precarious. Naturally the mystery of Nikita’s link with Alex can only deepen as the show progresses.
Nikita benefits from snappy pacing and a story that is skilfully told, with just the right amount of information withheld from the viewers and not too many elements to make juggling them a flirtation with disaster. The first few episodes after the pilot seem a tad repetitive, but the show picks up once it breaks free of the stand-alone episode format that bogs it down at the beginning.
True, it isn’t the deepest or most original TV show around, but what it lacks in distinction it almost makes up for in style: the interiors and costumes are pretty cool, particularly those of its lead, and look even cooller against the frequent hails of bullets that crop up in the later stages of the show.
Only towards the end of the season does the dialogue slide now and then into exposition, with the characters delivering theatrical set-pieces designed to either clarify or sum up what has already been unearthed. Aside from the occasional lapse in story-telling however, the series remains pretty slick over the 22 episodes.
Released on DVD and Blu-ray on Monday 19th September 2011 by Warner Home Video.