Episode Report Card Tippi Blevins: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Inside Woman
By Tippi Blevins | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.09.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.You've seen the annoying promos enough to know the back-story: Nikita was trained to be assassin, she escaped, she's going to help others escape, she's a rock star, hey baby. The episode is far less annoying, thankfully, and revolves around the titular heroine, who's bent for revenge after a secret government agency known as Division trained her to be an assassin and then killed her fiancé. She leaves Division a trail, first by contacting her skeezy foster dad, then by visiting the grave of her lost love and thwarting an op to kill a peace-making African leader. Pissed that Nikita is somehow intercepting their intel, Division head Percy assigns an operative named Michael to take her down. Mike swears he's up to the job, but he's got feelings for Nikita. When Nikita confronts him and Percy at a fancy party, he soft-heartedly agrees to give her a head start before hunting her down. She thanks him by shooting him in the shoulder. That's just one half of the story.
The other half deals with the inside workings of Division. It starts with recruiting a feisty young woman named Alex. We meet Alex when she and a masked companion rob a pharmaceutical company, but things go south. The companion gets away, but Alex is taken in and eventually winds up in Division's training program for young assassins. She struggles against her fate, but is told Division killed her boyfriend and framed her for the job. Then, because they're really thorough, they also faked her death. In the training program, she meets fellow baby assassins, as well as a "teacher" named Amanda, whose job is to turn a bunch of Eliza Doolittles into cold-blooded killers.
Alex still seems very much against the whole idea, but at the end we see that her recruitment was actually by design: She's Nikita's "inside woman," feeding her information from Division computers, while Nikita was her masked companion in the heist. Dun! Stay tuned for the full weecap.
See what our No Prior Knowledge vlogger thought of Nikita:
Want to immediately access TWoP content no matter where you are online? Download the free TWoP toolbar for your web browser. Already have a customized toolbar? Then just add our free toolbar app to get updated on our content as soon it's published.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A pretty young woman in a sparsely furnished but gorgeous loft sits at her computer before picking up a gun. Her voice-over tells us her name is Nikita and that six years ago, she was taken out of prison and forced to be an assassin for the government. Three years ago, she escaped. "I was the first recruit to get out," she tells us as she stares seriously at a pinkish blob just out of focus. "I'm going to make certain I'm not the last." Cue the steely title card, which fades into the cartoon rabbit mask of my nightmares. The mask is worn by a woman holding a gun on several hostages. Bugs shouts, "Come on!" and her partner, wearing an equally nightmarish pig mask hoofs it over to a medical vault. Porky starts shoveling armfuls of prescription bottles into a bag. One of the hostages takes Bugs's gun. Porky shoots him from behind, splattering Bugs red with his innards. Cops arrived on the scene. Porky gets away, but Bugs Bloody trips in her haste. Cops grab her and tear off her mask, revealing a panicked teenager. The caption identifies her as Alex in Detroit, MI.
Alex is dragged into prison, but fights against her captors. A man in a suit watches the struggle, looking quite pleased with what he sees. Everything goes white. Next time we see Alex, she's waking up in a different place, bleary-eyed and disoriented. The man in the suit greets her. He says as far as anyone else knows, she's dead. He shows her a death certificate to prove it. "My name is Michael," he says, his voice as weaselly as it is raspy. "I work for the government." They're giving her a second chance because she's "a young, attractive, white female," with no paper trail. Even more impressive, he says, she managed to kill a criminal they've been tracking for ages. "I didn't kill no one!" she protests as he grabs her wrist, but realizes it's a losing battle. He says they'll teach her how to walk, talk, and serve her country. Be all that you can be!
Nikita walks into a pool party in a teeny-weeny red bathing suit and catches the eye of a portly older gentleman. He waves her over to his jacuzzi, making innuendos about her getting "wet." She pretends to lean in for a kiss and instead snaps his neck, much to his surprise. She reaches for a nearby knife and chucks it into a bodyguard's chest. Another guard comes at her with a gun; she fights him off with a chair. She runs inside, calling on a cell phone for "extraction" now that her target is down. A familiar raspy, weaselly voice on the other end tells her it's impossible. Suddenly, Michael is right behind her, a gun leveled at her head. "There is no out," he says, and pulls the trigger.