It's really fun to still be surprised by shows that you're already really familiar with. At the end of last week's episode, Nikita worked pretty hard to make us see that something was up with Birkhoff. The prospective NSA double he pulled up on the screen in the final moments of "Dead or Alive" was played by Judd Nelson, so it was clear that Birkhoff had found what the team was looking for.
The question, at least for me, was whether or not Birkhoff was actually a
double himself, or just covering something up for any number of other
reasons. But somehow, I didn't ever think that Nelson's Penner character
could be Birkhoff's father (I also don't remember someone saying it in
the comments, but if you did, great job by you!). Even the first 10
minutes of "Set-Up" did a great job of swerving us into believing that
Birkhoff was, in fact, a double, and that all hell was about to break loose.
Hey, when Ryan writes "NSA" with arrows pointing toward Amanda on his
crazy board, you know it's about to go down on the jet HQ.The existence of doubles* adds an air of mystery and tension to Nikita's final-season proceedings, but as "Set-Up" illustrated, it also gives the show an excuse to script personal conversations between characters amid the regular hail of gunfire and talk about conspiracies and Pakistan. Twice, this episode drew from the well of "If they're really who they say they are, they'll know X," with both Birkhoff and his father, and each of the resulting scenes was pretty good. The news that Birkhoff's name isn't actually Seymour Birkhoff isn't that surprising, considering he's one of the world's greatest hackers, and the information about his childhood didn't seem especially tacked-on, which is often what happens with this sort of fourth-quarter reveal. If anything, the scene where Birkhoff told Nikita the truth about his past only underscored the fact that we haven't learned that much about him over the years. These aren't the best circumstances to unveil your true family history to your besties, but it's cool to get that info now, and Aaron Stanford did a really great job of playing the initial conflict about what to do, not to mention the subsequent anger that Ryan and the team might have fingered him as a possible double. The second use of that tactic brought even better returns, as Nikita's interrogation of Penner's double forced Birkhoff to spill even more information about his troubled childhood (his poor dead tarantula).
* On the double front, a little mea culpa on my part from last week's review. You guys are right, "double" does not mean "clone." What The Shop is doing isn't full-on cloning, which is why Nikita pushed the various agencies to check the DNA of Graham and Not Graham against one another. It's about as close to full cloning we can probably get, but I'll try to get keep the Dolly jokes at a minimum. Probably.
One
of the things I've always enjoyed about Birkhoff as a character is his
moral center and general aversion to the kind of killing that Nikita and
Michael do in the field. That was on full display in this episode with
his father, a man who he spent the majority of his life hating—so much
so that he faked his own death to escape. Still, Birkhoff knew that his
father didn't deserve to die, and that created a nice little wrinkle for
the typical Nikita-Amanda maneuvering, subsequently forcing Nikita to
go back on her promise not to kill the double because Birkhoff's life
was in jeopardy. Although this season has set up the global conspiracy
angle pretty clearly, the fact of the matter is that the show just
doesn't have the money to play that out on any grand scale. So the best
course of action is to tell stories like this one, where this endless
war between Nikita and Amanda suddenly has additional personal stakes
(on top of the personal stakes already present because these
people have all worked together for years). And the story gave Stanford
some good material to work with.Of course, because the show will eventually give us the Penner family reunion, Birkhoff's father wasn't killed as quickly as the real Agent Graham was last week (how convenient), but it seems as if Amanda intends to use some ESPECIALLY freaky tech from The Shop to get into Penner's brain as a way to figure out how to shut down Shadow Net. That sounds ridiculous, but it's Amanda, and the plan will probably work masterfully.
Halfway across the world, the next part of Amanda and Mr. Jones' plan took shape as Alex found herself renditioned by the CIA for her "role" in Nikita's "assassination" of the president. These scenes didn't do much for me, but they did work well in making sure we all understand what information the CIA has about the larger Pakistan plot. With Nikita's actions in the news all over the world, dragging the Pakistani name with it, the CIA believes an attack is imminent, and it's almost a given that the so-called attack will be perpetrated by the next double that Amanda and The Shop were working on in "Set-Up." Again, it's not as if we're going to see some kind of global-scale war, or even multiple smaller sequences involving military action, but I like how this final season has made the stakes as clear and as high as possible as the show nears its end. Although it's going to come down to Nikita deciding whether or not she wants to kill Amanda or turn her in, now there's so much more involved. Sam and Michael working together was as tension-filled and entertaining as you'd expect. Sam's disappointment when he learned that Alex didn't have much money left thanks to the CIA freezing her assets was palpable. He's clearly in trouble, and there's going to come a time where he's going to have to admit that to Alex, especially if the show keeps intimating that they're going to be a full-on thing sooner rather than later.
But everything is coming together sooner rather than later on Nikita right now. We're somehow already halfway through the final season, and the properly named "Set-Up" succeeded in establishing what's to come while providing some pretty good character stuff, especially for Birkhoff.
0 comments :
Post a Comment