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Nikita starts the episode a little off her game, judging by the fact that Thom, in his graduation mission, is able to beat her to the scene and assassinate a woman she's trying to rescue. Thom is distressed that this woman, Anna, seemed like an innocent. Alex is distressed, too, because now sweet Thom is tainted. Nikita digs into Anna's life and finds she was a low-level intern in a government job, and appeared to be having an affair with an important senator. Anna's bartender boyfriend is devastated. A little more digging and Nikita finds out Anna was pregnant, presumably with the senator's child. The senator is the one who hired Division to kill her under the guise of protecting national security. Even though that was a ruse, it turns out to be 100% true, as Nikita finds out when she goes to question Anna's parents and ends up captured by Anna's Russian spy handlers instead.
Anna's mission was to seduce the senator and weasel some good ol' American secrets out of him for Gogol, the Russian equivalent of Division. Ari, a Gogol bigwig, forces Nikita into agreeing to kill the crooked senator by injecting her with a toxin. The only way for her to get the antitoxin is to carry through with the assassination. She agrees, but contacts Alex once she's loose. Alex gets herself into the Division medical facility, steals the antitoxin and plants it on Thom when she learns he'll be protecting the senator that night at a party. (She also plants a kiss on him -- hubba.) Nikita manages to knock out and/or distract all the Division field agents at the party, nab the antitoxin from Thom and use the senator as a human shield as she escapes. Girl is smooth. And busy. At the end, Ari offers her a deal: Work for Gogol and he'll help her take down Percy and Division. Nikita knows he's just trying to maneuver Gogol into a more powerful position, so she turns him down. But she doesn't kill him, either, so we'll have to see what comes of that. Also, she rescues an adorable Boston terrier somewhere in there. Like I said, girl is busy. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Nikita doesn't tell us this week that Percy's last word will be her name. Instead, we jump right into the story. It's night. A young, somewhat mousy woman walks into her Washington, DC home. Across the street, a man watches her, his face hidden by the hood of his sweatshirt. Meanwhile, Maggie Q's stunt person is speeding through the crowded city streets on a motorcycle. A cute little Boston terrier named Yoshi greets the young woman as she comes in, whimpering for attention. The hooded man jogs across the street toward us. Motorcycle goes vroom-vroom. Mousy young woman who sort of reminds me of Amanda Plummer cuddles Yoshi. "You miss him, too, huh?" "Aroo," agrees Yoshi. Young lady sees a picture of her with her parents and flips it over in annoyance. Maybe she doesn't like them watching her kiss her dog. Yoshi begins barking frantically, but his mistress doesn't realize he's warning her about the hooded man just walking in through the door. At the same time, Nikita pulls up outside. She runs inside, gun at the ready, but the young woman is already dead. Faithful Yoshi whimpers by his mistress's side. Aw. Outside, Michael is driving away from the scene with the hooded man. The man pulls back his hood; it's Thom. He's obviously shaken but reports that he made "it" look like a robbery. Inside, Nikita finds the woman's work ID tag. She's Anna Harcourt, an intern for some government office. Nikita gently closes Anna's eyes. In the car, Michael tells Thom he's an agent now. Thom looks like he's going to vomit.
Later, in her fabulous loft, Nikita's chatting with Alex and chastising herself for not being fast enough to save Anna. Nikita thinks something is weird with the whole thing. She looks at Anna's ID and gets to hatchin' a plan.
Charm School. Alex finds Thom sitting outside her room, his face buried in his hands. He pulls himself together long enough to tell her he graduated. Alex realizes this means he's killed someone. He wants her approval, or at least her reassurance, but she's disgusted with him.
Back to the Loft of Fabulousness. Aw, Nikita has Yoshi! She cuddles him in front of the computer as she studies Anna's files. Her work info says she has a degree in Baltic-Slavic languages. It also says she's 25, which... no. Nikita asks Yoshi questions in Polish, Russian and Czech, the latter of which he responds to, earning multiple kisses from Nikita. She checks pictures from Anna's camera, most of which have her hobnobbing with the rich and powerful in DC. "Low-level intern," Nikita muses. "Why did they kill you?" She finds pictures of Anna in a bar with a handsome young man and uses the "geotag" feature to track the location.
Dressed in a conservative suit, Nikita strolls into the bar and asks for a mojito. The young man in the pictures is the bartender. "Tough order for a dive," he says. While he mixes, she pretends to be doing a background check on Anna for the Department of Justice. Turns' out she's the cute bartender's ex-girlfriend. She was always stressed about her job, he says. He last saw her a week ago. She was crying and needed to tell him something but couldn't. With some prodding, he admits he followed her and saw her go into a private club on Capitol Hill. "Way above her pay grade," he says, with just enough bitterness for Nikita to get the implication. Anna was seeing someone else, but cute bartender doesn't know who. Nikita gets the address for the private club.
Clad in one of her many, many all-black outfits, she picks the lock on Regal House's front door. It must be the wee hours, because no one seems to be hanging around this gargantuan Greek Revival mansion. She encounters no alarm system to speak of on her way inside. Moments later, a car pulls up outside. Always thinking ahead, Nikita presses the speaker button on a nearby phone before darting upstairs. A middle-aged, chipmunky sort of man walks in with Roan and Percy. He also featured prominently in Anna's pictures. Chipmunk is nervous. "Relax, Jack," Percy says. "Regal House is as private as it gets." Y'all should look into an alarm system. Nikita finds a bedroom with a phone and listens in on the conversation downstairs. Jack doesn't understand what they're doing there. Percy reminds him he's a senator now. "We have to get rid of all the evidence," he says. Roan is going to go around cleaning up all of Jack and Anna's crusty leavings from wherever they had sex. Probably much to his relief, Roan notices the speaker phone light is on and has to postpone his icky chores to go chase down their mystery eavesdropper. Nikita hears him approaching and hides in the minuscule space between a sofa and the wall. Nikita's hiding spot conveniently allows her to listen in on Percy and Jack's conversation through a nearby air vent. "In two days, DC police will find the body," Percy says. "The victim of a senseless home invasion, end of story." In return, Percy asks Jack to get an Intelligence bill passed so that Division will continue to be funded. Percy tells him to call a meeting tomorrow night and persuade the committee members to vote for the bill. Nikita makes her escape just before Roan can discover her.
Birkhoff walks into Percy's office without entering a code or even knocking first. Percy regards him as a gnat flitting about his nose. "That target from yesterday," Birkhoff says. "She's still dead, right?" She just clocked in at work. They rush down to Ops to work their surveillance magic. The trace her key card and see Nikita getting off the elevator. Percy once more is perplexed as to how Nikita is in on this. Nikita makes her way to Anna's cubicle and starts searching through her files. A dweeby redheaded cubicle drone tries to hit on her but is lured away by another drone's promise of donuts. Mm, donuts. Nikita finds a note for Anna's OB/GYN appointment and calls the doctor, pretending to be Anna. The doctor tells her not to worry about her pregnancy-related nausea. (The pregnancy is news to Percy.) The doctor also says the results of the paternity test aren't in yet. At the same time, Percy is sending Michael after her and Birkhoff alerts security to Nikita's presence.
Nikita sees guards coming for her and goes into action. First she hides in plain sight by pretending to give the donut dweeb her phone number, then surreptitiously trades key cards with him. As she moves through the office, she builds a disguise. First she snags a pair of sunglasses from someone's desk, then a trench coat that happens to fit her perfectly. She knots her hair into a bun, then calls 911, saying she heard screaming from Anna's apartment. The guards follow her into a stairwell. Birkhoff gets an alert that police have been dispatched to Anna's address and realizes they'll do an autopsy and link the baby to the senator. Percy's not worried, as he has a backup plan. Meanwhile, Michael busts into a conference room, gun raised, but finds only the donut dweeb instead of Nikita. Michael finds the planted key card and tries to hide an impressed smile. He doesn't quite succeed.
Two cops enter Anna's suspiciously fabulous apartment but find nothing amiss. Outside, they find Roan wheeling a large trashcan to the curb. Taking him for a suburbanite, they ask him if he heard any screaming. Roan plays innocent while looking really, really evil.
Charm School. Tom is in his quarters, making a mess of his tie. Alex comes in and helps him. She apologizes for earlier as she knots his tie for him. "They said she was a security threat," Thom volunteers. "They wouldn't have put a hit on someone if they weren't sure." He's trying to convince himself as much as Alex. It's not really working. "She saw my gun and she didn't even scream," he says. "I just don't know why she didn't scream." He sounds like he's going to cry.
Nikita pays a visit to Anna's parents. They seem like a perfectly chipper, middle-aged couple until Nikita informs them their daughter is dead. Incredulous, they try to call Anna but can't reach her. Why haven't the police called them? "The people who did this are above the law," Nikita says. She gently tells them that Anna was pregnant with Senator Jack Kerrigan's child. He had her killed to keep the affair quiet. Nikita asks them to get their daughter's prenatal paternity test to prove the affair. At the same time, she notices two family pictures on the mantel. The pictures are nearly identical, making Nikita a little suspicious, but not so suspicious that she notices Dad sneaking up behind her. He slips a wire around her neck and yanks hard. Mom grabs Nikita's hands, preventing her from fighting back. "We have to call this in," she says in Russian. "After we dump the body," Dad agrees, also in Russian. Luckily, Nikita doesn't need her hands to fight. All she needs is her big ol' head, with which she bashes Dad in the nose. She kicks Mom across the room. There's much guitar-driven fighting. At one point, Nikita turns a vacuum hose into a makeshift weapon and it is awesome. She kicks Mom into a glass table. Mom falls to the floor, a chunk of glass protruding from her belly. Dad knocks whacks Nikita with a vase. Surprisingly, this knocks her out.
She wakes up sometime later, tied to a chair. A new man enters the house, obviously pissed at Dad. "I thought she was FBI," Dad says. "But the way she fights... Look what she did to Irena." Irena, lying dead in the corner, is also pissed. The new guy, who looks like if Peter O'Toole and Timothy Hutton somehow had a baby together, chastises Nikita for making a mess. Nikita figures everything out for us: "So, Anna was spying on Senator Kerrigan, her parents were her handlers, and you work for Gogol." The new guy tries to make a Google joke, but Nikita knows Gogol is a Russian mercenary operation. Further, she recognizes him as Ari Taserov, a high-ranked member. She rattles off his resume, which includes working for the KGB. "You were my target once," she says. "In '06." "Division tried to kill me in '06?" he asks. Yes, but she didn't take the shot because Ari's young son was with him. Anna's fake Dad aims a gun at Nikita's kneecap, but once she tells them her name, they back off.
In a Division conference room, Percy and the gang are listening to a recording of Ari and Fake Dad's conversation, thanks to a wiretap. That Anna was a secret agent assigned to seduce and spy on Jack came as a surprise to Division. Thom is at the meeting, too, learning this for the first time. Percy assumes that Ari Taserov's mission will be to terminate Jack. "We cannot let that happen," Percy says. Everyone but Michael leaves with their assignments. Percy seems genuinely concerned about losing not just a senator's influence, but a man he trusts. But he's still pragmatic: When Michael suggests calling off the meeting tonight, Percy refuses because their funding is at stake. "And you're convinced Ari's going to take out the senator?" Michael asks. "It's what I would do if I were him," Percy says. "It's the rules of the game." He actually looks sad.
Back at the Russian house of cards, Ari is impressed that Percy sent the famous Nikita to kill him once upon a time. Then he makes a dig at her for falling in love with a civilian, like Anna did with the bartender. "What is it with female operatives that draws them to weak, easily manipulated men?" Nikita strains against her bonds. He says her rage makes her perfect for "the rules of the game." That he and Percy both use the same phrasing in the episode can't be a coincidence. Ari wants Kerrigan dead, but since Gogol can't do it without causing an international incident, he's going to make Nikita do it. He injects her with a toxin that will kill her in twelve hours. The only way to get the antitoxin is to kill the senator. He tells her where to meet them later that night. As soon as she's loose, she messages Alex with the name of the toxin and tells her where to find the antitoxin in Division's medical facility. Alex says it's impossible because it's always locked down. "Alex, there is no other way," Nikita says. "Michael will be activated on the op; plant the pill on him." Alex promises to come through for her.
And come through she does! She goes to the training floor and gets herself into a sparring match with a guy. She puts up a vicious fight, spurring him on until he grabs her by the wrist and flips her to the mat. She cries out in pain. She's taken to medical, where the doctor thinks it's just a bruise. She convinces him it's more. When the doctor leaves to get the X-ray machine ready, she rifles through the drug cabinet until she finds the pill Nikita needs. Later, she goes looking for Michael, but finds Thom instead. He says Michael has left already and he's about to join him. Then he goes to a totally unlocked, unguarded drawer and picks himself out a gun. Division, you suck so bad sometimes. Before he leaves, he tells Alex that the girl he killed was a Russian spy. "So she wasn't innocent," Alex says, visibly softening towards Thom again. She kisses him and slips the pill into his jacket pocket. When the kiss is over, she says, "Be careful," as she knows what he's really heading into. It probably takes all his spy training, but he manages to walk away.
Nikita waits at her predetermined meeting spot. She gets a message from Alex, telling her where to find the pill. "Just look for the adorable guy with the mile-high hair and ruddy cheeks!" She doesn't say that, but she should. Anna's fake dad picks Nikita up in one of the show's endless supply of black SUVs and gives her an earpiece so that they can communicate. He scolds her for her leather outfit, which won't exactly blend in. He drops her outside Regal House, where she promptly corners one of the perimeter guards. She turns off her earpiece. Under Nikita's instruction, the guard tells Michael that he's found an SUV with monitoring equipment. Nikita knocks him out. Michael advances on the SUV and shoots Fake Dad through the window, twice, in the chest.
Nikita busts into the kitchen where Kerrigan is now being held. Only Thom is guarding him, so the fight is over pretty quickly. Once Nikita knocks him out, she finds the pill and swallows it. Outside, Michael listens in on Fake Dead Dad's headphones and hears Nikita with the senator. He orders his men back inside. Nikita has a gun on the senator. He blabs about Anna and the pregnancy and the killing, which is all neatly captured for posterity, thanks to Fake Dead Dad's monitoring equipment. Nikita peels out of her leathers, revealing a sleek little red dress. By the time Michael and the other agents get to the kitchen, Nikita has already joined the party with Kerrigan. Arm in arm with Kerrigan, she chats with some old-fogey senators, politely but sharply criticizing their politics. Michael joins them. "Senator," Nikita coos, "this must be the protection detail you told me about!" Michael gets sucked into a military discussion with the fogeys while Nikita and Kerrigan slip away.
Outside, Nikita pulls out her gun again and keeps it trained on Kerrigan. She gets into Fake Dead Dad's SUV, holding Kerrigan through the window as a shield so that the Division agents can't shoot her. Once she's far enough away, she shoves Kerrigan away from the window and makes her escape.
The day, she revisits Anna's boyfriend at the bar. A TV broadcasts the news about the "leaked" recording of Kerrigan's dirty deeds. Yoshi comes running up to the boyfriend. "Custody of the innocent bystander goes to you," Nikita says. Even with many kisses from Yoshi, the boyfriend is sad to think that everything in Anna's life was a lie. Nikita assures him that he was real to Anna, that he reminded her of who she wanted to be. She doesn't go into another dead fiancé story, but you can tell she's thinking about it.
As Nikita leaves the bar, she finds Ari sitting in a parked car across the street. She walks up to him, unworried that he'd kill her in the open. He tells her he knows about Percy's black boxes and offers her Gogol's resources to take down Division. No deal. She knows that if they took down Division, Ari would just take over. "The bastard stepchild kills his father, then takes his place." Ari looks displeased. "Remember, I know where Gogol came from," Nikita says. Ari tells her Gogol will come to power regardless. "If it doesn't end with Division, when does it end?" he asks. "I'll let you know when I get there," she says with a smile. Ratings willing, she has a couple of seasons to figure it out.
Discuss this episode in our forums, then see why we think this show is ridiculous and ridiculously awesome. And see what our vlogger thinks of Nikita when he has No Prior Knowledge, below!
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