“Some people can’t be saved†come the chilling words at the end of this week’s Nikita, ‘Broken Home’, and Nikita could be talking about any number of people. There’s still a way to go until the season finale but this week managed to bring us major developments for one character and a shock death for another. The uprising in Division could never be hailed a roaring success by either side, but it’s clear that things aren’t ever going back to how they were.
While the Division base was burning, however, there wasn’t much action from our heroine. Still in Amanda’s clutches, this is the moment when she found out some of Amanda’s deepest, darkest secrets. The reveal that she was a twin who murdered her sister and took on her identity after being tortured by her father was a little cheesy, but effective enough for a show planted firmly in the spy-fi genre. Given that it’s almost exactly what’s going on in Pretty Little Liars (allegedly, anyway) gives you an idea of how twisted yet inflated it came across.
It added a lot of humanity to Amanda’s character and may stave off a little bit of the hatred coming from a portion the show’s fanbase. There’s a general mood that Amanda should have been killed off last season and is now just hanging around cackling like an ineffectual pantomime villain, but now she has a traumatic past to match Nikita and Alex’s. Nikita has always been about strong women broken down by the world and using their pain to take back power. Nikita has done that by trying to take down Division, the place that made her, and Amanda has taken a darker road.
And I love how the show doesn’t shy away from the flaws in each of its characters – heroines and baddies alike. Why would Nikita think Amanda’s (aka Helen) murder of her family was the worst part of her flashback experience? Possibly because she hates her nemesis already, or that she was experiencing the past through the real Amanda’s eyes, but it’s most likely a symptom of her entitled attitude. She would have seen the fault in her enemy no matter what she had seen, and it’s up to the audience to decide whether she was justified in killing her father and sister or not.
Her experience at the hands of her father have led Amanda to quite like messing with people’s heads, literally and figuratively. The catalyst for the uprising was Alex’s connection between the recruits and the fellow lost souls in the brothel, and Amanda probably knows more than anyone that painful memories can make powerful associations in the present. But what has she done to Nikita? She told her that she’s used their time together wisely, so we’ll have to wait and see whether this translates into a similarly dangerous personality shift. As it stands, she now has Owen and the black box, and we can assume Nikita is going to go after both.
Back at the base, there’s that shock death I mentioned earlier. Did you know it was coming? Apparently there was a spoiler that someone was going to die during the episode but, as I didn’t read it, I was caught completely unawares. I like Sean enough to feel a bit sad, but I’m not devastated the way I would be if Ryan, Birkoff, Alex or Michael had bit the dust. He was the most expendable member of the central cast, but his death at least has major repercussions for Alex’s already fragile mental state.
What did you think of the episode? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Nikita Season 3 Review “Broken Home”
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