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gwynOf interest to probably only about two people on my friends list, but hey, reviews and essays.
At almost the same time that Buffy the Vampire Slayer bowed on television, another chick action show had just started on USA cable network. Also based on a movie of the same name, La Femme Nikita started life an hour after Buffy did on Monday nights, and I remember a friend of mine saying “Suddenly, Monday nights rock.” Though radically different in concept, they were essentially about two women who’d been forced, through no choice in the matter, to descend into, and live in, hell. I remember that at about the time Buffy was breaking my heart by crying, “I’m only sixteen. I don’t want to die,” Nikita was being duped by her mentor and trainer, Michael, into falling even harder for him than she already had, only to have her heart ripped out when she found out he’d deliberately seduced and lied to her to circumvent her escape plan. Buffy had humor and romance and parody, while LFN did not, but they both also had about two tons of angst per episode, and I couldn’t have been happier.
LFN was made for the digital world — the cinematography was incredible, the colors richly saturated, the fashions totally boundary-pushing, the gadgets and spy toys bleeding edge. The music soundtrack was incredible, with little-known techno and ambient providing an even cooler feel to the show. But Warner Home Video has yanked the chains of the fans now for a couple years in terms of putting this most high-tech of shows on disc; they even had the nerve at one point to tell us that unless we bought the Columbia House tapes, we’d never get DVDs. Finally, last week, the first season set came out, and as much as I loathe the bastards for their treatment of this show, I have to give them props for the discs. The prints are fabulous, the sound is outstanding, the menus function just right (unlike Buffy’s, which I hate, because you have to keep going through menu after menu to get anywhere and listen to the same snatch of music over and over if you don’t menu jump fast enough), even their proprietary paperboard packaging isn’t as annoying as it usually is (WHV will never give that up, since they own the system and the plant). Though they spell Birkoff’s name three different ways, even the booklet isn’t half bad. I found only one technical error, where the (still just gut-wrenching use of) Love Thieves by Depeche Mode glitches out as the train comes through the tunnel in the final scene of the season, in Mercy.
I’ve been just boggled by some of the episodes. My first season tapes are all incredibly sharp and pristine (the show, after its second season, began filming in a more subdued style and went for less color saturation in the scene design, which I always thought was a mistake), but these just leap off the screen on a high-def TV. Even though they weren’t shot in hi-def and my DVD player isn’t progressive scan so I often get that digital dragging effect, there’s virtually no artifacting, no edge effects, and absolutely no bleed on colors, especially the blue they use so heavily. At times I just froze the screen to look at the incredible visual backgrounds they abandoned after S1, where they had high-tech maps and grids and information processing systems on full-wall screens throughout the Section One interior. Rocco Mateo’s set design was vastly superior to almost any other TV show at the time, and these discs highlight his work in a magnificent way. Being able to see all the details of a screen on the Section computers, too, is really cool — I can finally read Nikita’s dossier that comes up on the credits each ep.
The clothes were always cutting edge, but what’s interesting is being able to see the detail of Michael’s black jackets, for instance, or Madeline’s Armani suits, or Nikita’s incredible wardrobe. And there are other details I’ve never seen before, including one in the episode War, right after Nikita was tortured with rats (did I mention I love this show? When they tortured people, they did not screw around. Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, who went on to do 24, never pussy-footed around: if they threatened someone with cutting their finger off, and the person didn’t comply, they promptly cut the finger off) and Michael shows up and is thrown in the cage. Nikita can’t look at him, and she is crying. I never knew she was crying there as she huddled in the corner, as I have never been able to see the tears on her cheeks, even with my outstanding off-air copies.
But there’s more to the show than stunning visuals and cool clothes and music. What I responded to initially, somewhat negatively, was that they’d taken a story I loved — of this horrible, worthless, murdering girl who gained humanity by being made into an assassin — and changed it significantly. I had liked both the movie versions of LFN and Buffy, and was dubious about both of them being translated to weekly stories, and LFN especially seemed to have chosen a weird direction: Nikita was no longer subhuman, she was a street kid framed for murder, and put into this place that week after week intended to strip her of her humanity. Between that and Peta Wilson’s big, Amazonian blond gorgeousness, I thought it was going to be bad. But they were right in what they did, I realized quickly — it would be hard to want to watch this subhuman monster week after week, and there’d be little struggle for personal redemption in that. Once you’ve gained your humanity, where do you go in an organization that imprisons you and makes you its slave? And that was the core of the show — her constant struggle against becoming like the inhuman monsters who were her superiors as they fought terrorists with terrorist tactics. She’d never killed, but no one believed her, and they wanted to use her up and throw her away as long as it served their ends. Nikita’s struggle was the audience’s struggle, to find some kind of happiness or redemption or just make it through another day, and Peta was very touching in how she created that character. It is interesting, though, that they’ve completely dispensed with the voiceover intro that used to start each episode (“One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist organization on the planet... if I don’t play by their rules, I die”); I’d never noticed till now that the repeats on Oxygen running currently don’t use it either. I would have thought they might throw it on at least one ep, just for good measure, though I haven’t yet watched all the extras on the set (not many, sadly).
It didn’t hurt, either, that her trainer was a super hottie. I fell in love at first sight with Roy Dupuis’s Michael, a duplicitous, wicked, wonderful, and sexy as hell super agent who we in the audience knew adored Nikita, but he wouldn’t admit to that for quite a few years. The discs here show something incredibly interesting — there is a deleted scene from the pilot where Michael begs Madeline, part of the operational leadership, to spare Nikita’s life from being cancelled (executed, Section’s parlance), because she messed up on her first mission. He is nearly in tears, and it’s quite clear right there that he loves her enough to risk his own life, something in his nature that was never explained to us — it was only shown, so that Nikita often misunderstood his motives for protecting her, while the audience knew what was happening. This scene, if it hadn’t been cut, would have changed the entire tenor of the show drastically. It’s fascinating that it was filmed at all, but I’m glad they cut it out, as it made his “does he or doesn’t he” feelings so much more iffy and cool.
Sometimes, too, the incredible cinematography added to the romantic storyline or as a way to punch up the emotions of the characters on screen. I was reminded of that in watching War, in one of my favorite scenes ever on the show. Michael and Nikita are prisoners of Red Cell, a terrorist group, and they’re being held in cages suspended from a ceiling in a vast warehouse type building. When Michael comes back from being interrogated and tortured, he’s thrown in the adjacent cage and curls up in a ball, while Nikita clings to the side of hers and tries to see if he’s all right. He slowly begins to rock his knees back and forth so that his cage will swing towards hers, then he grasps the sides together as they hit, and the two of them twist their fingers through the holes and talk to each other. Michael is bloody and battered, Nikita’s a mess from rat bites, and he tells her that she is the only one of them (in Section) who still has a soul, and that he is empty of feeling now — and what little is left inside him is her. It’s a gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking scene, and on the discs, with the background lighting making the two seem almost luminescent and the clarity now of their tear-filled eyes and the wounds, it becomes just ten times more powerful than it was even before.
Other scenes that I’ve always loved seem even more vibrant and alive: when Michael cauterizes his critical bullet wound by igniting gunpowder in Rescue (this show also has some of the most stealable plots, too — I can’t count how much I’ve ripped off from it because it makes such good fanficcy background), shirtless, you can now see every drop of sweat on his body; when Nikita wears outlandish makeup for missions, you can see every single false lash, the texture of her skin, count each individual spangle in her evening dress.
I always loved first season because the Section team worked together far more as a team — in subsequent years, there were no more scenes like in Gambit, where they sit together in the main area and throw out ideas of where and how to locate a faceless enemy, or later once they’ve found him, bring his daughter to the interrogation room to coerce his confession. I missed that in a lot of ways, as the focus of the show shifted away from Nikita trying to work within this system and still maintain her emotional core to more of a Michael and Nikita against Operations and Madeline romantic hugger-mugger. I can almost see that happening on Alias, as well, which has stolen about 99% of its style and feeling and story sense from LFN. I kind of hope they don’t make the same mistake, because the stories in S1 of LFN were probably the strongest they ever did, even if Michael and Nikita never actually consummated their relationship until the first ep of S2. It’s good to keep a focus on strong stories, even while developing the thwarted romance, I believe.
These discs are just a joy to have, but now I’m stuck about vidding. LFN is my perfect vidding fandom, you can do almost anything with it except maybe out and out comedy, but there’s no way I could mix up such fabulous visuals as we have on the discs with tapes, and there’s no clear word on when more discs will come out. I’ve waited to make some vids until I got a computer; now I have the computer but these discs make me feel spoiled for the visuals. I really hope that people who like Alias might buy or rent these discs and see what the show was like, because I really want Warner to make more available. I’ve always thought this show was a perfect companion to the two other concurrent ass-kicking chicks that were on at the time (Buffy and Scully on X-Files), and I hope that in this outstanding presentation, more people might give it a shot.
At almost the same time that Buffy the Vampire Slayer bowed on television, another chick action show had just started on USA cable network. Also based on a movie of the same name, La Femme Nikita started life an hour after Buffy did on Monday nights, and I remember a friend of mine saying “Suddenly, Monday nights rock.” Though radically different in concept, they were essentially about two women who’d been forced, through no choice in the matter, to descend into, and live in, hell. I remember that at about the time Buffy was breaking my heart by crying, “I’m only sixteen. I don’t want to die,” Nikita was being duped by her mentor and trainer, Michael, into falling even harder for him than she already had, only to have her heart ripped out when she found out he’d deliberately seduced and lied to her to circumvent her escape plan. Buffy had humor and romance and parody, while LFN did not, but they both also had about two tons of angst per episode, and I couldn’t have been happier.
LFN was made for the digital world — the cinematography was incredible, the colors richly saturated, the fashions totally boundary-pushing, the gadgets and spy toys bleeding edge. The music soundtrack was incredible, with little-known techno and ambient providing an even cooler feel to the show. But Warner Home Video has yanked the chains of the fans now for a couple years in terms of putting this most high-tech of shows on disc; they even had the nerve at one point to tell us that unless we bought the Columbia House tapes, we’d never get DVDs. Finally, last week, the first season set came out, and as much as I loathe the bastards for their treatment of this show, I have to give them props for the discs. The prints are fabulous, the sound is outstanding, the menus function just right (unlike Buffy’s, which I hate, because you have to keep going through menu after menu to get anywhere and listen to the same snatch of music over and over if you don’t menu jump fast enough), even their proprietary paperboard packaging isn’t as annoying as it usually is (WHV will never give that up, since they own the system and the plant). Though they spell Birkoff’s name three different ways, even the booklet isn’t half bad. I found only one technical error, where the (still just gut-wrenching use of) Love Thieves by Depeche Mode glitches out as the train comes through the tunnel in the final scene of the season, in Mercy.
I’ve been just boggled by some of the episodes. My first season tapes are all incredibly sharp and pristine (the show, after its second season, began filming in a more subdued style and went for less color saturation in the scene design, which I always thought was a mistake), but these just leap off the screen on a high-def TV. Even though they weren’t shot in hi-def and my DVD player isn’t progressive scan so I often get that digital dragging effect, there’s virtually no artifacting, no edge effects, and absolutely no bleed on colors, especially the blue they use so heavily. At times I just froze the screen to look at the incredible visual backgrounds they abandoned after S1, where they had high-tech maps and grids and information processing systems on full-wall screens throughout the Section One interior. Rocco Mateo’s set design was vastly superior to almost any other TV show at the time, and these discs highlight his work in a magnificent way. Being able to see all the details of a screen on the Section computers, too, is really cool — I can finally read Nikita’s dossier that comes up on the credits each ep.
The clothes were always cutting edge, but what’s interesting is being able to see the detail of Michael’s black jackets, for instance, or Madeline’s Armani suits, or Nikita’s incredible wardrobe. And there are other details I’ve never seen before, including one in the episode War, right after Nikita was tortured with rats (did I mention I love this show? When they tortured people, they did not screw around. Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, who went on to do 24, never pussy-footed around: if they threatened someone with cutting their finger off, and the person didn’t comply, they promptly cut the finger off) and Michael shows up and is thrown in the cage. Nikita can’t look at him, and she is crying. I never knew she was crying there as she huddled in the corner, as I have never been able to see the tears on her cheeks, even with my outstanding off-air copies.
But there’s more to the show than stunning visuals and cool clothes and music. What I responded to initially, somewhat negatively, was that they’d taken a story I loved — of this horrible, worthless, murdering girl who gained humanity by being made into an assassin — and changed it significantly. I had liked both the movie versions of LFN and Buffy, and was dubious about both of them being translated to weekly stories, and LFN especially seemed to have chosen a weird direction: Nikita was no longer subhuman, she was a street kid framed for murder, and put into this place that week after week intended to strip her of her humanity. Between that and Peta Wilson’s big, Amazonian blond gorgeousness, I thought it was going to be bad. But they were right in what they did, I realized quickly — it would be hard to want to watch this subhuman monster week after week, and there’d be little struggle for personal redemption in that. Once you’ve gained your humanity, where do you go in an organization that imprisons you and makes you its slave? And that was the core of the show — her constant struggle against becoming like the inhuman monsters who were her superiors as they fought terrorists with terrorist tactics. She’d never killed, but no one believed her, and they wanted to use her up and throw her away as long as it served their ends. Nikita’s struggle was the audience’s struggle, to find some kind of happiness or redemption or just make it through another day, and Peta was very touching in how she created that character. It is interesting, though, that they’ve completely dispensed with the voiceover intro that used to start each episode (“One night I was taken from my cell to a place called Section One, the most covert anti-terrorist organization on the planet... if I don’t play by their rules, I die”); I’d never noticed till now that the repeats on Oxygen running currently don’t use it either. I would have thought they might throw it on at least one ep, just for good measure, though I haven’t yet watched all the extras on the set (not many, sadly).
It didn’t hurt, either, that her trainer was a super hottie. I fell in love at first sight with Roy Dupuis’s Michael, a duplicitous, wicked, wonderful, and sexy as hell super agent who we in the audience knew adored Nikita, but he wouldn’t admit to that for quite a few years. The discs here show something incredibly interesting — there is a deleted scene from the pilot where Michael begs Madeline, part of the operational leadership, to spare Nikita’s life from being cancelled (executed, Section’s parlance), because she messed up on her first mission. He is nearly in tears, and it’s quite clear right there that he loves her enough to risk his own life, something in his nature that was never explained to us — it was only shown, so that Nikita often misunderstood his motives for protecting her, while the audience knew what was happening. This scene, if it hadn’t been cut, would have changed the entire tenor of the show drastically. It’s fascinating that it was filmed at all, but I’m glad they cut it out, as it made his “does he or doesn’t he” feelings so much more iffy and cool.
Sometimes, too, the incredible cinematography added to the romantic storyline or as a way to punch up the emotions of the characters on screen. I was reminded of that in watching War, in one of my favorite scenes ever on the show. Michael and Nikita are prisoners of Red Cell, a terrorist group, and they’re being held in cages suspended from a ceiling in a vast warehouse type building. When Michael comes back from being interrogated and tortured, he’s thrown in the adjacent cage and curls up in a ball, while Nikita clings to the side of hers and tries to see if he’s all right. He slowly begins to rock his knees back and forth so that his cage will swing towards hers, then he grasps the sides together as they hit, and the two of them twist their fingers through the holes and talk to each other. Michael is bloody and battered, Nikita’s a mess from rat bites, and he tells her that she is the only one of them (in Section) who still has a soul, and that he is empty of feeling now — and what little is left inside him is her. It’s a gorgeous, beautiful, heartbreaking scene, and on the discs, with the background lighting making the two seem almost luminescent and the clarity now of their tear-filled eyes and the wounds, it becomes just ten times more powerful than it was even before.
Other scenes that I’ve always loved seem even more vibrant and alive: when Michael cauterizes his critical bullet wound by igniting gunpowder in Rescue (this show also has some of the most stealable plots, too — I can’t count how much I’ve ripped off from it because it makes such good fanficcy background), shirtless, you can now see every drop of sweat on his body; when Nikita wears outlandish makeup for missions, you can see every single false lash, the texture of her skin, count each individual spangle in her evening dress.
I always loved first season because the Section team worked together far more as a team — in subsequent years, there were no more scenes like in Gambit, where they sit together in the main area and throw out ideas of where and how to locate a faceless enemy, or later once they’ve found him, bring his daughter to the interrogation room to coerce his confession. I missed that in a lot of ways, as the focus of the show shifted away from Nikita trying to work within this system and still maintain her emotional core to more of a Michael and Nikita against Operations and Madeline romantic hugger-mugger. I can almost see that happening on Alias, as well, which has stolen about 99% of its style and feeling and story sense from LFN. I kind of hope they don’t make the same mistake, because the stories in S1 of LFN were probably the strongest they ever did, even if Michael and Nikita never actually consummated their relationship until the first ep of S2. It’s good to keep a focus on strong stories, even while developing the thwarted romance, I believe.
These discs are just a joy to have, but now I’m stuck about vidding. LFN is my perfect vidding fandom, you can do almost anything with it except maybe out and out comedy, but there’s no way I could mix up such fabulous visuals as we have on the discs with tapes, and there’s no clear word on when more discs will come out. I’ve waited to make some vids until I got a computer; now I have the computer but these discs make me feel spoiled for the visuals. I really hope that people who like Alias might buy or rent these discs and see what the show was like, because I really want Warner to make more available. I’ve always thought this show was a perfect companion to the two other concurrent ass-kicking chicks that were on at the time (Buffy and Scully on X-Files), and I hope that in this outstanding presentation, more people might give it a shot.
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no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 03:02 pm (UTC)Thanks for the detailed review of the LFN S1 disks. I have them on my Amazon wishlist, and I'd actually rather have them than the next Buffy I don't have (S3). LFN was my fandom before I got into Buffy fandom, and I still love it, although I don't watch it much anymore.
I completely agree with you about the music and wardrobe (I say as I sit here in a sophisticated and fashionable black top, black skirt and black shoes). I found so many bands that I dearly love now as a result of LFN (and Karen's kick ass Music of LFN (http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Set/2055/index.html) page).
no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 03:12 pm (UTC)I'd like to second your enthusiastic recommendation of this set. I've only briefly looked at part of one episode, but I'm delighted with the visuals. It really is the perfect show for DVD, and I think the show looks better than it ever did on TV.
Season 1 is also really this show at its purest -- and simplest, before all the retconning started in later years (about which I still feel ambivalent). In terms of raw emotion and chemistry between the leads, there is little that can compare to "Love" or "War" and some of the other season 1 episodes.
We've chatted before about LFN and Alias -- and I still don't feel that Alias is similar in terms of story or style -- to me, LFN is in some kind of slightly shifted techno-world, where Alias feels much more real, and I've never felt that Syd was anywhere close to being as alone or emotionally isolated as Nikita. Alias is on now and Nikita was on then, but to me, it could easily have been the other way around, and I think it's to the credit of both shows that despite the similarities in setup, they've really gone in very different directions, both storywise and emotionally. (Although I think Syd is probably headed for her most isolated period ever during this coming season.)
All that said, I think most fans of Alias would probably enjoy LFN. It's a colder, harsher world with more ambiguity, and in that sense, I think fans of 24 would also find a lot to enjoy. Without Kim Bauer around to annoy them :) (There is a character in serious need of cancelation.)
I agree with you about vidding. It's one thing once you have a lot of the show on DVD, then you can go back and replace the relatively few tape clips with DVDs as you get them. But when you have a few DVDs and mostly tapes, that's a lot of extra work. It's also really hard to go back to vidding from tapes once you've done a couple of vids using just DVDs. Really, really hard :)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 03:48 pm (UTC)Yeah, absolutely. You can tell they were starting to view the show differently in S2, where it became more about emotional and relationship drama than about the spy stuff, which went into the background more. And they were terrible about the retconny stuff. I always felt that the emotional stuff was way more dramatic and affecting when it was between the spy stuff, rather than the other way around.
We've chatted before about LFN and Alias -- and I still don't feel that Alias is similar in terms of story or style -- to me, LFN is in some kind of slightly shifted techno-world, where Alias feels much more real, and I've never felt that Syd was anywhere close to being as alone or emotionally isolated as Nikita.
While I think a lot of why I feel that way is a general ... sensation, if you will, of all the goofy spy stuff that could never happen, I'm sure a lot of it is also really event and set specific, which may be why I get really focused on it (you know my tendency to get overly narrow on certain things!). For instance, I remember in the first few eps, they spent a lot of time on the super-covertness of SD6 (even that number felt like LFN!), and the setting inside Credit Dauphin felt like that cold, sterile world of Section, and Sloane felt very Operationsy. And then they'd do things like have an episode that was an exact duplicate of LFN and I would be all "ripoff!" And probably stupidly, though very strongly, one of the things that nailed me most was when she showed up in a blue vinyl dress with a long blond wig. ;-) But there would be little things like that sprinkled through the first season of Alias that made me really wonder why they weren't acknowleding it as an extension of that universe or something.
I definitely think that it's moved away from that, though -- I mean, Syd has friends, she has the returned emotions of Vaughn (maybe!), she has resources and a life that Nikita could never hope to. So that isolation is definitely different, and it will be interesting to see what they do next year, because I wonder what it would be like for someone who *has* had that much emotional connection in her life to be so isolated now. So I think what makes me say that about the connection of the two shows is more elemental, rather than emotional or dramatic feeling. I get very, very bogged down in weird little details in my monomaniacal tiny world. ;-)
Oh, and speaking of spy stuff, do you think you'll give MI-6 on A&E a try next week? I think it looks pretty cool, and I'm kind of excited about an English spy show again.
Yeah... now I don't know what to do about more vids. Probably the people who are sick of my LFN vids are going, yay! But man... how you gonna keep 'em down on the farm, you know? Arg!
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 02:17 pm (UTC)Yeah, MI-5 -- the previews look interesting, and it got a rave from my favorite TV writer, Matt Roush, so I definitely plan to watch. The only thing that worries me a bit is that I've heard they've had to edit these down from the BBC versions to make room for commercials... and if I start feeling like things are missing, that is a quick turnoff for me. But I'm definitely giving it a shot.
Have you ever had an experience in one fandom that totally reinforces your views about a totally different fandom? I will never forget watching "War" for the first time, and having a chills-down-my-spine recognition that Nikita's reaction to Michael at the end of that episode was a total parallel to Duncan's reaction to Methos at the ends of "Comes A Horseman." It was like, see, see! Michael and Nikita are a romantic pairing and having the exact same conversation Duncan and Methos did. Such a slash affirming moment. :)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 09:30 pm (UTC)I know what you mean about the seeing your fandom in another -- I think it was really LFN that made me understand what people meant by het slash, because the relationship was so very much like a slashy one, in every respect except gender. Seeing them go through those things brought home to me that common relationships weren't necessarily the only real mirror of what we could get in a good show.
I still adore your essay on Campbell archetypes and D/M and N/M. You captured some parallels there so perfectly.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 10:22 pm (UTC)Season 1 was fabulous, and "War" is just such a gorgeous episode. Still one of my favorite episodes of TV. To this day, I can't watch that scene in the cages you described without getting teary. And the "it wasn't all a lie" later on. That gets me every time.
I really loved some of the stuff they did in later seasons, especially in terms of the Michael/Nikita relationship and how Michael and Nikita switched places emotionally (him becoming the one acting on emotion and working against Section; her becoming the cold, calculating one...the most obvious example being after she was brainwashed...but to a lesser extent in her real personality as well.) But I still think season 1 is the best season. It's so well-conceived and it doesn't have the uneven quality or the continuity problems of the later seasons. You're also right about the focus shifting more to the romance/emotional side later on. And I do think they could have done the character arcs I liked without taking the focus off the spy-stuff.
This scene, if it hadn’t been cut, would have changed the entire tenor of the show drastically. It’s fascinating that it was filmed at all, but I’m glad they cut it out, as it made his “does he or doesn’t he” feelings so much more iffy and cool.
I'm so glad they cut it out too. I know my shippy heart would have loved to see it at the time. But I think it was infinitely better to have Michael's feelings ambiguous during season one, and especially as early on as the pilot. It wouldn't have shown as much development in him if we'd been sure from the beginning that he loved Nikita and was willing to stand up to Section for her. Personally, I always thought it was a process, and that he didn't fully fall in *love* with her until much later in the season. Very intriguing to know that scene exists. I do wonder if it will change the way I view those early episodes at all.
I also watch Alias, and when I first started watching I had a lot of trouble getting past comparing it to Nikita. It did feel like a rip-off, and I found some of the "spy stuff" on Alias sort of laughable because Nikita's gadgets were so much more high tech. I remember one episode in particular where Dixon was hiding behind a curtain taking pictures with a giant, regular-sized camera that you could easily SEE poking through the curtain, and I was sitting there rolling my eyes. The glasses cameras on Nikita were so much cooler! :) But. By the end of the season I was hooked on the show. And during the second season I didn't find myself comparing the two any more. Not that there aren't still things you can point to and say...Nikita did that first. But I think Alias has developed the characters and the plotlines to a point where I don't mind. I'm just enjoying the ride. Alias is still just a fun show I like though; where Nikita was a show I taped, which is always the mark of obsession with me :)
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 01:14 pm (UTC)Yeah. I have to admit, it was War that really really hooked me, in the end. I was liking the show but not taping it until that ep, and then at that point realized I had to start keeping it, because it hit every possible kink I had. That ending! Oh! I love those "not everything's untrue" confessions, where the liar has his heart broken because he hurt the one he loves. Sigh.
I really loved some of the stuff they did in later seasons, especially in terms of the Michael/Nikita relationship and how Michael and Nikita switched places emotionally
I hope I don't sound like I didn't like the subsequent stuff or the romance -- I was a hopeless romantic about Michael and Nikita. I still don't know of any love scene that equals the love slinky scene in Into the Looking Glass -- not only was it incredibly risque for television and boundary pushing, the dialog after the sex was just... ahhhhh. Yummy. And while they would often lose their forcus in the whole Maddy/Ops vs. Mikey/Nik thing, I never gave up on the show. It really was about them finding something beautiful in the midst of all that ugliness, but I often thought what made S1 so successful was that they hid that under capers and plots, whereas later it became only that. S1 had such a great mix of both the romance and the character and the plot and the coolness, it would be hard to beat that.
no subject
Date: 2003-07-18 11:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 01:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-21 11:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 05:52 am (UTC)*scuttles off to Amazon to order the DVD*
no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 01:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 10:05 am (UTC)That's actually the main reason I never watched the show -- I just couldn't picture it working with someone so physically different from Anne Parillaud (sp?). Especially after seeing the crap American remake of the film (actually, I didn't see it, just the ads, so I'm making an assumption that it was bad). But your review makes me think again. Although the rat torture sounds awful, I think I'll have to check out LFN. Thanks!
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Date: 2003-07-19 01:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-19 09:34 pm (UTC)Michael is still just achingly hot, even after all this time. It's interesting hearing Roy Dupuis talk about bulding the character, in the little documentary on the last disc. He talks about making him so silent and serious and blank as a way to fight that whole "smiling, quippy killer" thing that was popular at the time. And it sounds like Surnow and Cochran had a different goal in mind for the show than the romance, but that Peta and Roy's chemistry was so intense and the fans responded to him to much that they ended up pushing it in that direction. Yay for the fans!
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Date: 2003-07-20 09:43 am (UTC)I'm in NJ right now, so shipping would be much less. I saw them in the Columbia DVD Club for 69$, but I guess there would be additional shipping. WHich strill is less than what they want for them in stores (99.99$).
And it sounds like Surnow and Cochran had a different goal in mind for the show than the romance, but that Peta and Roy's chemistry was so intense and the fans responded to him to much that they ended up pushing it in that direction. Yay for the fans!
Yay for Roy and Peta! Incidentally, have you seen Peta in League of the Extraordinary gentlemen? He hair color kept throwing me off.
LFN Tapes for sale on slashswap
Date: 2003-07-20 04:58 am (UTC)You can email her for other details if you can't find the post. Email - MethosChickee@aol.com
word! word squared!
Date: 2003-07-20 07:55 pm (UTC)though the name "seymour birkoff" never ceases to amuse me. I honestly wonder what they were thinking.
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Date: 2003-07-21 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-07-22 05:56 am (UTC)I think I've enjoyed the show more the second time around because I know where Michael and Nikita's relationship ended up. I can watch it without constantly worrying about whether they'll escape Section and live happily ever after. I was devastated after the first series finale. And while I was happy with the subsequent finale, I haven't shipped another couple since. It's too stressful!
The clothes were always cutting edge
The clothes were fantastic, and Peta regularly made me drool with envy. I loved the way they worked with myriad shades of white and black. IIRC, they wore lots of Costume National.