David Bilek wrote:
>
> Matt Ruff wrote:
>
>> One retcon I still marvel at is the one that ended the La Femme Nikita
>> series, where it was revealed that she'd been working as a double-agent
>> for Center since the beginning of season two. Continuity-wise it
doesn't
>> withstand scrutiny, but it was such a gutsy move I really wanted it to.
>
> I never watched "La Femme Nikita". Was Center the bad guys?
[I should probably put in a belated spoiler warning here...]
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In the TV series, the organization Nikita worked for was an
international anti-terrorist group called Section One. There were other
Sections mentioned during the series (the numbers went up to Eight, at
least), though for the most part their roles were never defined. All of
the Sections were answerable to Oversight, an administrative watchdog
group with the power to order the "incineration" of a Section if it was
publicly exposed, compromised, or just got out of hand. Center,
introduced fairly late in the series, was a sort of Oversight to
Oversight. In theory, they were all good guys, but in practice, as
Nikita would say in the show's intro, "their ends are just, but their
means are ruthless," and they were always in danger of becoming as evil
as the terrorists they fought.
Re: the retcon, Nikita faked her own death at the end of the first
season in order to escape the Section. At the beginning of the second
season, she was identified and captured by a terrorist group who thought
she was still a Section member; when Section got a hostage video and a
ransom demand, they were very surprised that Nikita was still alive.
After she was rescued, she managed to convince Section that she'd been
held hostage the whole time she was gone, rather than for just the last
couple weeks (she had help pulling this off). So they let her resume her
duties as a Section operative.
Now, jump ahead to the end of season four. After numerous additional
reversals of fortune, Nikita once again fled Section, was recaptured,
and was about to be executed, when at the last minute the head of Center
showed up and announced that Nikita was actually a deep cover agent
who'd been investigating Section One on his behalf. He'd found and
recruited her for the task after she'd escaped from Section that first
time -- the implication now being that her capture by the terrorists,
rather than being an unfortunate accident, was actually planned as a way
of slipping her back into Section as a double agent for Center. By
itself this might actually have been believeable -- by Section
standards, it wasn't an especially Byzantine strategy -- but there were
other incidents that had occurred over the course of seasons two through
four that were much harder to square with the idea that Nikita was
really working for Center at the time. Still, it was such a great moment
when Nikita's wicked superiors at Section One realized that she was
higher up the chain of command than they were, and always had been, that
I really *wanted* it to work...
-- M. Ruff
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