I’ll be happy if I don’t hear the phrase “game change” ever again. Not only was it the title of this week’s Nikita season premiere, it was uttered by the title character in the episode, and that clip was used in promos that I’ve seen dozens of times. The Powers That Be obviously wanted to make sure that we understood season two would be a different entity from season one.
It wasn’t so much ‘message received’ as it was ‘message repeated ad nauseum.’
The premiere did a fine job of setting up the underlying conflicts and themes that will be played out throughout the season. Nikita has guilt over Alex’s fate? Check. Alex doesn’t get along with Oversight watchdog Sean (Dillon Casey, who reminds me of Jeremy Sisto)? Check. Percy and Amanda still have issues with each other? Check. In short order, we got our starting points for the season.
And then, instead of moving forward, we came back to them, over and over again. There was plenty of Nikita angsting, Alex and Sean arguing, and Amanda enjoying her new-found authority as boss of Division. It was as if the writers thought we might forget what they were going for, so they made sure to remind us by having multiple scenes touch on the same things.
In addition, they gave us a couple of heavy-handed aids, like Michael and Birkhoff having taken on new looks, as if to reflect their new directions. Even the editing was a bit on the nose — Nikita talks about Alex, so of course we cut to Alex! Percy tells Amanda “good luck with Nikita,” so we cut right to Nikita! I don’t mind a little slowness or exposition, particularly in a complicated show like Nikita, but this all too often felt like a primer for those with a short attention span.
There was one scene in this episode that was profoundly awesome — Nikita’s tangle with Alex in the alley outside the club, which reminded me of her confrontation with Michael in the alley in the pilot, including that both ended with Nikita shooting her opponent. This one, though, had more fighting and some hellacious screaming from Lyndsy Fonseca that both sold the moment and slightly deafened me.
Everything else, however, felt stuck in pause. I gave the episode time to re-establish its characters and story — but I also wanted to see some real moving forward. If these changes at the end of season one were allegedly so drastic, I expected similarly big alterations to the protagonists going through them. I didn’t feel that. Sure, some looked different and others got a few more snappy one-liners, but it wasn’t too much different from an average episode of season one. I wanted to have an idea of the bigger picture and I’m still peering past this week.
There’s certainly plenty of potential here. Sean might be an interesting character, or he might just be a cranky foil. New Female Birkhoff has obviously caught Birkhoff’s attention; she could be fun or she could be flat. The problem is that I don’t know well enough yet to know. And while I’ll allow that this is just one episode, I was hoping that I’d at least be thrown something worth waiting those few hiatus months for. Something to get me excited. Something to turn the lightbulb on.
This was a fair season opener; I was hoping for a great one.
Oh, well. We’ll just have to see how the game is played. …
Clacked by Brittany Frederick 
on Sep 24, 2011 @ 10:36 EST5EDT
