In the film version of Nikita, a young, drug-addicted street criminal named Nikita commits murder and is spared from a life sentence by being recruited, upon threat of death, into a clandestine crime-fighting organization. She is taught to be a polished and proper lady, as in Shaw's Pygmalion, but also a professional assassin and spy. Her employer requires complete commitment, and she is unable to have a normal personal life outside of her work.

     The TV series follows this plot, but with a crucial difference. The TV series does begin with Nikita's arrest for murder, but in this case she is not guilty (and not a drug addict). As we learn in a much later episode, she has been framed by her soon-to-be employer, a top­ secret espionage agency called Section One. This device provides the TV program with a moral problem not present in the film, but exploited with great skill by the producers through the entire run of the series. Nikita (Australian actress Peta Wilson) begins the TV series as a troubled young adult, but she is not a murderer. 

     Section One forces her to become one. Her colleagues in the organization are antiheroes fighting an endless supply of terrorist villains, ostensibly the true forces of evil in the world. However, Section One itself operates entirely outside the conventional limits imposed by law. One of the cruxes of the series is that the heroes often commit worse atrocities than the villains. Nikita's struggle to retain a sense of right and wrong inside the amoral octopus that is Section One provides the basis for powerful and thought-provoking episodes. Section One is headed by a character known as Operations (American actor Eugene Robert Glazer), who serves as a surrogate, unforgiving father of sorts for Nikita. (In a much later episode, we learn that his real name is Paul.) The "mother" in this scenario is Made­line (Canadian actress Alberta Watson), an expert at prisoner interrogation and mind games. The heir apparent to Operations is Michael, the most deadly Section One field agent, played with minimalist intensity by French Canadian Roy Dupuis. All are damaged people with traumatized personal histories revealed in particular episodes. Together they constitute a dysfunctional pseudo-family, stuck with each other's treacheries in a world largely of their own making.

     Nikita and Michael (her recruiter and principal trainer) fall in and out of love throughout the series. Sometimes he corrupts her; other times she redeems him (and potentially Section One as a whole). At the end of the series, in a development long foreshadowed, Nikita ascends to the command of Section One, but it is unclear whether she has by now become totally corrupt herself or has enough residual goodness to save Section One from its depravity.

     Thus Nikita is a story of heroic but perhaps futile individual resistance within a totalitarian collective. In this respect, the show is reminiscent of The Prisoner, and indeed Nikita spends much of the series plotting her escape, turning the tables on her captor-bosses, and trying to discover the true identity and purpose of Section One. Nikita updates The Prisoner's comment on East-West moral equivalence in the cold war era to a similar meditation on the ethics of antiterrorism vis-a-vis terrorism itself.

     Like The Prisoner's Number Six, Nikita is, in effect, kidnapped. Unlike Number Six, she is an innocent, civilian female. The series takes double advantage of Peta Wilson as spectacle, drawing upon both her sex­ ual allure and her displays of violence. At the same time, she maintains a stereotypically female vulnerability. In the midst of a stunningly warped realpolitik, Nikita never entirely loses her innocence, even though she must often keep it hidden. She is a complex character in a complicated situation, as well as a female in the traditionally male genre realm of the spy and action hero. Similarly, her liaison with Michael combines the pleasures of a steamy romance and frequent rescue scenarios with the ever-present possibility of a double­ cross by either party (although, curiously, it is Michael who is most often in the "femme fatale" position).

     Physically, Section One headquarters is labyrinthine and apparently underground, a sort of high-tech dungeon and panopticon for the mostly dronelike apparatchiks who work there. It is antiseptically black, brown, and gray, yet somehow dazzling to the viewer's eye: a self-contained, menacing fantasy backdrop for startling intrigue. In the occasionally glimpsed bowels of the place lie torture chambers, supercomputers, combat training areas, and laboratories for genetic en­gineering and other horrors. Nikita's struggle to learn the truth about Section One seems all the more challenging because of the program's claustrophobic workplace setting, in which evil becomes banal in a way not usually encountered in television drama.

     The show attracted a cult following, especially among female viewers. It also served as a high-profile example of quality programming for the often­ marginal USA Network. When the series was prematurely canceled in 2000, the audience rallied and persuaded USA to bring the show back for an abbreviated fifth season in 2001 to wrap up loose ends.