The urgent music pounds most of the rest of the time, too, but never so urgently as when the big black SUVs arrive on the scene, each disgorging many men in serious shades and loose black jackets, most of them leather, with huge guns (movies and TV shows too numerous to mention).
The mean men are in search of the mutinous Nikita, and at one point, they blast away at her with about a billion bullets, and it looks like the show is over before it has even started. But we know that's not going to happen.
Just as we know that her erstwhile boss, played perfectly with an authority just beneath the threshold of apoplexy by Xander Berkeley, is dead wrong when he declares:
"For the record, I'm not gonna let a piece of street trash slow down this operation, not for one minute. All operations are 'Go,' including Black Arrow."
Nikita isn't street trash, not after her lengthy brainwashing and charm-school indoctrination by the insidious Division, but her show is trashy and fun. "Operation Black Arrow"? Give me a break.
You've seen Berkeley a million times and might remember him as George Mason, Jack Bauer's boss in Season 1 of 24 and the poor man who, suffering from plutonium poisoning in Season 2, crashes his plane and detonates the nuclear bomb safely in the Mojave Desert while Jack hides nearby behind a rock - this after his injured daughter has escaped the jaws of a marauding cougar only to find herself in the lair of a psycho pervert.
You might remember that because Nikita is aimed directly at 24 fans.
Not as ambitious nor as entertaining, it is just as decidedly unbelievable yet diverting.
Division was a pretty crummy place in 24, but nowhere near as bad as it is here, a secret government outfit controlled not by bumbling bureaucrats and our duly elected officials, but by the worst elements trying to undermine our freedoms and get all our money.
