Episode Report Card Tippi Blevins: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Black Oops
By Tippi Blevins | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 09.24.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.A greedy airline CEO calls Percy for help when one of his planes crashes after being overloaded with smuggled cocaine. Division sends in a crew to get the cocaine out of the crash site before anyone else can find it, but a hapless hiker catches the whole thing on video. The hiker calls freelance journalist Jill Morelli, who specializes in conspiracy theories. She's in the middle of a conspiracy herself when Division murders an editor she was meeting with and then frames her for it. Nikita rescues her, gains her trust and helps her get in touch with the hiker with the video.
Percy finally does something about all those suspicions concerning just how Nikita is able to get information on their ops. He suspects computer nerd Birkhoff who, when examined, is found to have had a transmitter implanted in one of his teeth back when Nikita kidnapped him. Sans tooth, he's cleared and allowed to go back to work. But Division still can't track Nikita or Jill, so they turn to the recruits to go through all of Jill's notes. They're told it's a training exercise to hunt down a terrorist, so Alex, Thom and Jaden do an extra-good job of figuring out where their target is. Alex freaks when she realizes she's just led them straight to Nikita, but manages to stealthily calls cops to the rescue while she's in the Ops Room.
Michael finds Nikita, and they face off. She proves how badass she is when she dislocates her own shoulder to escape his grasp. In the end, Jill gets away with the video, and even though she can't prove anything about the mysterious black ops, she does prove the greedy CEO was running drugs and earns Nikita as a friend. Unfortunately, with Birkhoff's sudden dental work, Nikita needs to find another way to keep Division's suspicious eyes off Alex.
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Tippi Blevins is not a highly-trained secret assassin. As far as anyone knows. You can reach her at b_tippi@yahoo.com or http://twitter.com/tippib.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!After Nikita explains the premise of the show, we join the recruits in the Charm School training facility. Alex jogs on a treadmill. In the operations room overlooking the training floor, Percy and Birkhoff are going over one Jill Morelli's stats. In short, she's a young freelance reporter who's big on conspiracy theories. Percy wants to know how she found out about one of their ops, but Birkhoff's at a loss. They look at overhead footage of an airplane crash site. Percy assigns a disposable agent to find out what Jill knows and how. On the training floor, Alex watches the ops room but can't get a good look inside due to the tinted windows. She flashes back to Nikita telling her she'll have to get close but she'll have to be sneaky about it. So she goes over to Jaden and picks a fight with her, allowing Jaden to pin her up against the ops room window. She takes a series of blows to the ribs so that she can see inside to the computer screens still showing Jill's info. Later that night, she goes to the perpetually abandoned computer lab and messages Nikita to check it out.
Somewhere in New York City, a middle-aged man is walking through a parking garage, chatting on the phone with his wife about his imminent arrival home. You know he's a dead man at this point. Jill Morelli ambushes him in the garage, chirpily calling out "Jeremy!" and scaring the pants off him. He's apparently an editor she's been trying to get in touch with. As they walk to his car, she tells him about the flight that crashed in the Appalachians. It's not news to him, but then she tells him about the black helicopters that showed up on the scene "just before a forest fire conveniently destroyed all the evidence." She knows she's onto something because when she called the airline, she was put through to CEO Henry Samson. Jeremy's already weary, but Jill presses on, gushing about how her mystery source has video, available for the low, low price of $50,000. Jeremy refuses to pay. As he gets into his car, the disposable agent from earlier shoots him through the head. Jill tries to scream but she's grabbed by another agent from behind. The murder weapon is forced into her hand and fired again into Jeremy's doubly dead head. She screams into the agent's gloved hand. "You just killed him," disposable agent intones. "And you're going to prison for the rest of your life unless we get that video." They inject her with a tranquilizer and stuff her into a van.
As they speed through the garage, Nikita steps into their path, long black trench coat flapping behind her like she's Angel or something. She whips out one of her big honking guns and shoots the driver through the front window. The van crashes into another car and comes to a stop. Nikita opens the back door, knocks out the other agent and grabs the unconscious Jill.