The TV Chick

Nikita is back tonight! I’m very interested to see how this season shapes up and how Birkhoff and Owen and other returning characters factor in. I recently got the chance to catch up with Executive Producer Craig Silverstein at Comic Con, where he previewed the big premiere, talked black boxes and new characters, and Michael and Nikita.

What can you tell us about the black boxes this season?
The black boxes — there’s either three or four left, depending on who you ask. And so, they definitely want to find the rest of them but their goal has shifted a little bit in this season. They are going to try to take down the people above Division, of Oversight.

Will you be introducing any new characters?
Yeah. There’s going to be a character named Shawn, who comes in from Oversight, in the wake of everything, who decides they need a little bit more oversight. So they send him in. He’s kind of like the Colin Farrell character in “Minority Report,” he’s played by Devlan Casey, who’s looking for flaws in the system. He might be a potential love interest for Alex. It’s going to be someone from her world.

Can you tell us a little bit about Percy’s next moves with everything that’s happening with Division and Oversight?
I’ll say that Percy might not be moving around a lot. He may be confined to an area in Division, and it’s probably one of the coolest sets we’ve built on the show.

Do we see Birkhoff again and what can you tease about that?
Yes. Birkhoff is not in Division anymore. But I really don’t want to see more than that. It’s answered in the first episode.

Are we going to learn more about Percy and Amanda’s past?
Yeah. There will be some origins of Division this season.

You mentioned the people above Nikita, and one of them is from the old La Femme Nikita series –
Yes! Alberta Watson.

Will we be seeing more of her or anyone else from the original series?
You’ll be seeing her in episode one, right away. The whole season is about the black box because Nikita and Michael have one. They came away with Percy’s black box at the end of last season. Michael actually clobbered him with it, made Birkhoff decrypt it. So this season is about digging into the black box, finding all the secrets on it and trying to clean them up, one by one and everything is on this box. I’m not saying there are aliens at Roswell, but if there were, they’d be on the black box.

Will we see more guardians?
They’ve all sort of spread to the wind. And that’s sort of in the background. We start to deal with the idea of those people in episode two, actually.

Are there any ways to bring back the people from the first season, like Owen, for example?
In episode two. Owen returns.

Has he progressed at all with his mental state?
I’ll leave that, because it’s so early, I’ll let you see.

What are Amanda’s next moves, now that she’s in a precarious position of power?
Well, she is running Division now and is trying to turn Division into her — it looks like she’s trying to turn Division into a more principled place, to get it back to basics. No more missions on the side. She is trying to be Oversight’s good girl but I think Amanda’s scarier than Percy, so eventually her true colors will come forth.

Is Alex receptive to having another love interest right now? What state is she in?
She’s not receptive to it at all. She’s not looking for that. (Laughs)

What is she looking for?
What she is looking for is the man who ordered her family’s death. The man who controls her Father’s empire, Zetrov, this huge, multi-billion dollar empire that she is the heir to.

Is there a possibility of any sort of reconciliation between Alex and Nikita? Or are they going to be working at cross-purposes at the beginning of the season?
They start that way at the beginning of the season but then it’s a sine wave.

Do any of these characters trust anybody?
I think Michael and Nikita trust each other. I think that Amanda certainly doesn’t trust anybody. Alex has been betrayed by everyone she’s really ever been close to, so she has major trust issues. So, yeah, trust no one.

What can we expect in terms of Nikita and Michael’s relationship?
They’ll be wrenches. I think smooth sailing is pretty boring. So, it’s about how does something come up between them that is not annoying. I think we found that but that will take a while to develop.

Was there anything from season one that deviated from what you originally envisioned?
The only thing is that Michael and Nikita got together a little faster than I originally thought but everything else pretty much came out according to planned.

What do you feel encouraged Michael and Nikita getting together faster?
You make a plan in the beginning of the season. You have twenty two episodes up on your board and when you start watching what’s coming back, you start to react to the film. And what I was reacting to, is it seemed like people didn’t know where Michael was coming from and they didn’t like it. They’re like, “What is the deal with this guy?” So it was like, “Pick a side, Michael.” It was just reacting to the story that we were watching. You write it, you shoot it and then it starts to tell you what it is. You can plan for what it is, but it turned out very similar to what I originally planned, but that was one thing that came a little bit faster.

If you could say what the overarching theme of season two is, what would it be?
The overarching theme for this season is Michael and Nikita righting wrongs as Alex heads from right towards wrong. And it’s also home. Every character in the show is searching for home, in their own way.