The Third Estate Sunday Review focuses on politics and culture. We're an online magazine. We don't play nice and we don't kiss butt. In the words of Tuesday Weld: "I do not ever want to be a huge star. Do you think I want a success? I refused "Bonnie and Clyde" because I was nursing at the time but also because deep down I knew that it was going to be a huge success. The same was true of "Bob and Carol and Fred and Sue" or whatever it was called. It reeked of success."
Sunday, December 29, 2013
TV Program of 2013
On the last Friday of this year, The CW aired the final episode of Nikita.
And, in season four, Nikita became the show of the year.
The spy saga focused on the efforts of Maggie Q's title character to bring down the rogue government spy agency Division. In season two, especially, this involved the pursuit of black boxes which stored data about Division's illegal activities.
There was also a senator who it was thought could help.
The senator was killed.
Nikita and company spent more time trying to keep the public from finding out about the black boxes and the data they held than almost anything else.
Along the way, the show noted the impact the Occupy movement was having.
In season three, Nikita and company took over Division. But things did not get better.
And the idea that someone could save them became even less likely.
In the final season, season four, a new senator appears, one who can help.
He tells Nikita they can work this out quietly.
But she's learned over the years that it doesn't work that way.
Everyone let in on the secret actions either gets killed or gets co-opted.
Freedom is only possible by putting it all out there, informing the press, informing the world.
As an added bonus, computer guru Birkhoff takes Shadow Net, the thing he's used to help Nikita throughout the series run, and makes it available to all so that everyone can be secure online and dubbing it "open source anarchy."
Over four seasons, Nikita and company struggled with the issues the country struggled with.
And we could all learn a lot from the show and from Nikita's eventual conclusions that information shared free people while information hidden imprisons us all.