'Alexandra' Reaction Post

[moonspinner]

I loved ‘Alexandra’. Loved. Loved. Loved it. As much as I like ‘Alex’, I have to confess that I’ve never been particularly wowed by Lyndsy F but that’s all in the past now. Now, she’s just a fraction of a decimal behind Maggie Q in the list of ‘Why I Watch This Show’. And the relationship between the two women is still so much love.love.love. Were there Malex vibes in the last episode? Perhaps? If you ship them? But I felt his attitude to her, while protective and affectionate and could be read as romantic, was more paternal, more big-brotherly. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think Michael might do the same for any other recruit as well because he’s that type of guy. Also, I don’t think it’s a mistake that they blocked Nikita carrying young!Alex (whose actress is so freakishly identical to a young!LF that it’s uncanny) to ‘safety’ (a.k.a. a family that ends up selling her into sex slavery and drug addiction) with Michael carrying grown-up!Alex with identical blocking to safety (a.k.a. Amanda who’s about to use her mind games and torture techniques to pump Alex while she’s most vulnerable).
Oh wow, incoherent review is incoherent. Let’s try again with bullet points.

Highlights:

• I totally called Alex’s father being connected to Gogol, didn’t I? I mean, it wasn’t confirmed in this episode but I think the pointers to Nicolai being in the Russian mafia and Gogol being the Russian Division will be too much of a coincidence if there’s not a connection.


• Even though he was clearly evil, props to Nicolai for training his daughter to be heiress to his empire. There wasn’t even a hint of her being second fickle to a possible brother, or being groomed to be the bride of his successor. He was a total equal opportunity Evil Overlord.


• Nikita took out three men in the Russian Mafia Spa (technically, she took out two men with one hand behind her back) while Michael was brawling with one dude. :D


• Then they ran out holding hands. Of course, they immediately turned guns on each other when they caught their breaths. But. They.ran.out.holding.hands. I’m not even a Mikita shipper (I’m a Nikita/Every-one Shipper) but that was cute.


• ‘She took one for the team’. I loved that line. I loved Nikita sacrificing the mission to make sure Alex got a hero’s welcome back to Division. I also loved Michael going underground to find her, Amanda going all ‘Percy doesn’t need to know everything’ to Michael, Birkhoff’s ‘Boy Scout’ line (another ALIAS shout-out I’m sure)…


• Alex and Irina reminded me a lot of Cara and Dahlia from Legend of the Seeker. Heck, I could swear that I’ve used the exact same analogy (sex slavery and drug addiction with Darken Rahl as pimp) when I’ve tried to illustrate all the ways what Dahlia did to Cara was wrong, completely not romantic and why she deserved to DIAF. :D :D So in case I wasn’t clear, I kind of hated Irina and was a tard disappointed that someone didn’t blow her away. (And that’s an understatement).


• It’s probably been raved about ad nauseum in the blogosphere but I will add my voice to the chorus: Alex taking out Vlad execution-style after that bad-ass line (I’m sure TV Tropes has a perfect category for this scene but I’m too lazy to check up on it) got me jumping on the sofa and whooping and half-crying and scaring my girl silly. :P

Quibbles

Of course there will be quibbles (because it’s me :P) but they aren’t that many. Funny enough, the most popular quibble about this episode in the blogosphere is one I don’t share: I don’t think the show has shifted focus to Alex/ made Nikita a supporting character in the least. I have always read the show as a XENA-but-with-spies and XENA was really about Xena-and-Gabrielle. So Alex having just as important/ romantic a back-story as Nikita fits into the Nikita-and-Alex dynamic. Plus, it makes the nasty theory that floated around during the Pilot that Alex was some innocent kid that Nikita was using in her vendetta moot. Nikita is not even on a vendetta mission, not really (no matter what the original opening lines used to say). She’s on a redemption mission (and rehabilitating Alex was a big part of that redemption). If anyone is on a revenge mission, it’s Alex.

So the actual quibbles:

• How exactly does the Kill/ Tracker Chip work? Nikita re-routed it so that it gives Division a false signal when Alex is doing her double agent duties. (Which I’ve always thought is just this side of suspension of disbelief. There are too many ways that can trip them up.) But does Division still have the Kill access? If Percy had ordered a Kill on Alex’s chip once she resurfaced, would it still have killed her? It needs to be made clear. It doesn’t make sense from a characteristic point of view (or even a plot one because Fletcher makes a point of stating that Nikita threw him under the bus in ‘Free’ to get that chip neutralized for Alex) for Nikita to allow Alex to walk around with a bomb in her neck.
• Where is Jaden? Great, we get Amanda reading her diary/ being in her head a.k.a. ‘not a pretty place’ but she’s been conspicuously absent since ‘Free’. She’s also the only person that knows for sure - or at least strongly suspects that the mole was not Thom but Alex. What is she doing with her information?
• Were the episodes aired out of order or written out of order? Two episodes have passed and Michael hasn’t done anything about what he discovered at the end of ‘Coup de Grace’. Does he or does he not still suspect Alex of working with Nikita? Perhaps what he presented to Nikita in ‘Alexandra’ was very good acting… but it really looked like he believed Nikita to be a threat to his agent. Make up your mind, show.
• I miss the ‘Six year ago, I was recruited…’ opening line. LOL! Call me a geek but I thought it was cool. And it was always amusing to see the way the convoluted ways they re-worked it to serve as intro and ‘previously on’ at the same time. R. I. P.
• Another non-quibble: Michael taking out one guy in the time it took Nikita to take out three (technically, she took out two with one hand behind her back and yes, I will never get tired of saying that! :P) wasn’t a problem for me even though Michael trained her. The student has surpassed the master and all that. Plus, Nikita doesn’t get to have an Alpha Team on standby when she goes into the field. Michael can afford to get soft. He’s not the one who’s taking down a Rogue Black Ops agency single-handedly.
• Just in: One month hiatus after "Echoes"??? ONE MONTH!!!???

Gosh, I was going to talk about Vampire Diaries and Clone Wars (I’m all caught up on that one!) and even an episode of Dollhouse that I caught today! But I’ve written over 1, 000 words about Nikita instead! People, if you are not watching this show, then the quality of your life is seriously compromised. Seriously, what are you waiting for?