The TV Chick

Nikita returns tonight and its freshman season ended on a very interesting note. The show did a major retooling half way through the season and I have to say, I always thoroughly enjoy it week after week. I’m not sure where they will go now that Nikita and Alex are not working together and Nikita and Michael on the run. But I recently had the chance to catch up with the cast at Comic Con, and Maggie Q had some very interesting things to say about the upcoming season, Nikita’s motivations and flashbacks.

So can you talk about how things start for Nikita in season two and where she’s been and where she’s headed?
I think we’re going to open with lone Nikita and I don’t think you’re going to know where she’s going and what’s happening. Then she’s going to kind of enter a world you wouldn’t expect and then I think you may be misdirected a little. I don’t know, maybe. In the beginning of the first show. But her journey’s going to be huge this season because we don’t know anything about her. This is going to be the season to unveil who she really is and how she got where she is and why she is the way she is.

Will we be seeing more flashbacks?
Yes, definitely. That was something that was decided when Nikita was being birthed in the Warner Brothers office. It was like, we want to tell the story somewhat in flashback because there are so many characters and we want to interweave them and we also want to save story for later. We want to divulge things slowly. So yeah, we will.

How would you say Nikita’s motivations have changed, if at all?
That’s an awesome question because they have actually. We see Nikita sort of hell-bent in season one. There’s things that she just is adamant about and a cause that she’s willing to die for, basically. And now we’ve introduced this other dynamic of this person that she loves that has now happened for her, so you’re going to see a little bit of a role reversal with them, where Michael’s now hell-bent on their mission and she’s a little lit bit like “Well, what about being a couple and being normal and living on an island?” and sort of wanting to be loved and wanting to be safe and wanting to be cared for. Just experience a life she’s never experienced yet. We’re going to see a little bit more of her as a woman and wanting things that normal people want. I don’t know if that’s ever going to be possible for her, but we’re going to see that need.

In one of the early episode, we saw Nikita in her earlier days. What was it like to play a different form of Nikita?
It was so fun. It’s fun to un-learn sometimes. It’s fun to let go. It’s hard to do, actually. You have to play an innocence that you may or may not have. I really enjoyed that and so did Shane. He had a different hair-do (laughs) I laughed at him, he got mad at me, it was fun.

What do you look forward to exploring about Nikita this season?
In addition to her backstory — my thing with her is you can take any girl off the street that fits the profile of what Division wants, you can train her and you can do all the things you want to do to make her who she is, but I’ve always always wondered from the beginning about why Nikita’s the best. Why? Why does she make it through the way she did? Why is she such a threat? Why is she so good? Because it’s bizarre, because it’s the one thing that she hates the most, the thing that they turned her into but it’s the thing that defines her, it’s the thing that she’s best at, so that’s the cross that she has to bear. But that’s the big question mark for me.

Do you like playing the tougher Nikita or the softer Nikita better?
I like the softer side. There’s so many obvious things about Nikita, but the moments that matter to me, with her, really — not that they all don’t matter — but the moments that I find most enjoyable to play when it comes to her are the softer moments or the vulnerable moments when you see her actually processing emotions and dealing with them. I don’t think that that’s something she’s ever been capable of because it was not something she was ever able or allowed to do. She knows so much in one area and in another area, she’s completely innocent to how it feels to be loved and how to give and receive and how to do all the things that we can do that she can’t, but there’s so much that she can do that we’ll never know. She’s in a different learning phase in season two.

How will Nikita react to Alex’s whole situation? They are now not really working together anymore.
Nikita has great love for this girl. She really does. There’s something so deep about how she cares about her and I think one of the things that I see for my character is that when you see a young girl in a situation that is miserable and may not work and you see someone who needs to be saved — there’s a big part of herself that she’s seeing in the moment as well and I think that Nikita wants to make things right with her and it’s up to each individual to understand what it is and get it. And she can’t make Alex get it. She either does or she doesn’t. So at some point, you just got to let people go. Because their own path is the only path that they’re going to understand in the end. But because of her love for her, it’s painful for her to watch her make these mistakes. It’s like kids, you gotta let them go one day. You have to let them grow up.

How is Nikita going to react when Owen returns?
It’s such a great episode. What I like about the end of that episode is that Owen is now going to weave himself into the fabric which is Nikita and Michael and their world which is really going to be kind of like, “What?!” shocking. I’m not going to tell you how, obviously but it’s a nice thing to kind of solidify Owen’s presence in the Nikita world.

Will we be seeing Birkhoff again?
Hell yeah! I’m very excited about Birkhoff in the second season.

Be sure to tune in tonight at 8 PM to the CW for the second season premiere of Nikita!