#nikitatv

And it’s not like the trio of episodes she’s in are bad.

And yet, the character never quite works—or rather, Carla doesn’t work in the story she’s in—and like a lot of the elements that don’t quite work in Nikita, it’s hard to think of ways to tweak the story without also changing things I'd rather keep.

As mentioned, there's a lot of elements to Carla, and season 2 of Nikita is all about doing a million things at once. Even getting a fair amount of focus, all her elements never quite go on to make a story. And while some sense of pulling-into-different dimensions is intentional—she’s clearly meant to be an ambiguous, ambivalent character—all of those elements feel like dictated by the plot, rather than because they’re interesting directions for the character.

While Nikita takes quite a lot from La Femme Nikita (LFN), the original TV series, it very rarely adapted its original characters and even more rarely its original stories, making Carla unique. In that original series, she was actually two separate characters: the first of these, Adrian, was introduced late in that show's second season as “the mother of [LFN’s version of Division]”, “the only person [LFN’s version of Amanda] ever feared”, and the first person to ever successfully leave the organization. The second, Carla, appeared sporadically in the first season as Nikita’s neighbor and only civilian friend, and is eventually revealed to have been working for Adrian all along. Together, Carla and Adrian recruit Nikita as Adrian's woman on the inside in order to bring about her goal: taking down Operations [LFN’s version of Percy], whom Adrian believes has made [Division] unrecognizable, and an unacceptable danger to the world, even helping keep Saddam Hussein in power. 

While the Adrian episodes don’t really work for me, it’s not hard to see why the Nikita showrunners felt compelled to retell her story—and to their credit, this reimagined take almost works. Carla Bennett's yen for moving against Amanda now now now, to the point of being willing to sacrifice Alex, makes her a different sort of obstacle to team Nikita—Kelly from “Partners” with a lot more emotional weight. What’s more, Carla’s impatience makes complete sense, given the circumstances. Nikita, and Division alums in general, are trained to make opportunities, which means they can often afford to let go of sub-optimal ones. Not only does Carla lack this training, being unhoused is not generally a condition that allows for long term-planning or turning down opportunities when they arise. What’s more, her understanding of what team Nikita can do is, at this point, incredibly limited; why should she believe they’re capable of doing what they claim? In fact, Nikita immediately proves she can’t, admitting that she won’t be able to keep her promise to take care of Amanda “tomorrow” mere hours after she made it (under duress, to be sure, but made all the same). While the framing of the show makes it hard to be on Carla's side, it's also clear why she makes the decisions she makes.

It’s deciding to rely on Percy that makes less sense. While it provides some nice symmetry, in that original Adrian’s reliance on Nikita is also equally baffling (LFN Nikita has the backbone of a crayon in a hot car and should not be trusted with anything), it also required more exploration than the series is willing to give. Yes, Percy is far more willing than Nikita to move against Amanda in Carla’s preferred time frame—he in fact begins to do so as soon as he’s given the means to do so—but the idea that he can be relied upon to bring about a “good” Division never feels anything but delusional.

There are two chief problems here. The first is that it’s never quite clear what Carla’s ideal Division looks like, and how different it is from the Divisions seen until then: even the pre-Amanda program was creating agents who presumably put their lives at risk for the mission.  The second problem is that it is intensely stupid to believe that Percy, who brought in Amanda in the first place and had been working with her without issue for more than a decade, is somehow less culpable than her or able to change. One would have to believe Amanda is some sort of hypnotist, her influence only lasting as long as she does (*2). 

It'd be one thing if wanting a reformed Division were more clearly a lie Carla told herself, or even something she’s convinced herself she wants, and that her real ultimate goal was actually all about revenge. It’d have been interesting if “good Division” is simply “one without Amanda”, but still just as morally compromised as it ever was. But the story doesn’t actually work in those terms: not only does Carla exist in a setting where “revenge” is a perfectly acceptable motivation—it's actually “saving Division” that puts her out of step with team Nikita—the story is consistent in suggesting that she comes by the latter desire honestly. In the end, we’re left with a lot of unresolved dissonance, which sense for the season’s larger story, but doesn’t actually help her character, who ends up seeming stupider than she actually is.

(And she's not: she actually does very well for someone without Division training. It's just not especially obvious in a story where everybody else actually has that training.)

And yet, the more I think about it, the less I’m convinced this is the actual problem with Carla—or rather, it wouldn’t have been a problem, if Carla had actually been allowed to have a proper arc.

Consider her two motivations. Usually, a story where Person A seeks revenge against Person B climaxes when the two parties actually confront each other. Meanwhile, a story where the protagonist is hellbent on achieving a foolhardy goal (e.g.: restoring Percy to redeem Division) tends to climax or end when that protagonist realizes that they're not actually getting what they wanted. Neither of these really happen with Carla: her only present-day confrontation with Amanda, in “Doublecross”, happens over the phone, is tangential to the actual plot, and is something that happens not because it's important that it happen, but because it’d be weird if it didn’t. Similarly, Carla doesn’t come close to seeing what a Division without Amanda looks like: by the time Percy returns to power in “Power”, she’s been dead for two episodes, accidentally killed by Birkhoff. 

As mentioned, it’s hard to just tweak Nikita: is there, at this point in the story, a way to allow Carla to confront Amanda in person that doesn't make one character or another seem incompetent?  I don’t think there is—heck, by the time Carla’s arc ends, Nikita and Amanda haven’t been in the same room since 1.11, more than a season ago. Having Carla with Percy when he retakes Division would have been easier, but only superficially so. Even if Carla could go back to Percy, would he even keep her around? Percy has, by “Doublecross”, obtained what he needed from her; arguably, her only value is as a hostage (*3), and that doesn’t even require her being an active participant in the plot. What’s more, at this point, just what is there left for Carla to do, other than stand around, make disapproving noises, and eventually die when she realizes that oh, she was never going to get what she wanted—or alternatively, remain silent until Nikita and the U.S. government take Division (*4), which is a role already occupied by Sonya?

Carla not only doesn't get to have an arc, she also doesn't get to have much in the way of fun or interesting or dramatic interactions with the characters most relevant to her. I've mentioned that she only gets to have one present-day interaction with Amanda, but their flashback interactions are also quite limp, and more about exposition than character. While writing this, I lamented to @ArbitraryGreay about how thinking about Carla made me want toxic yuri fic between her and Amanda, set when they were both in Division, and how I could say with absolute certainty that no such fic existed. While a large part of that has to do with Nikita's relative obscurity and the fact that Carla is Black, it's also because the actual show doesn't actually try to make a case for it; it's got a dozen other, less sapphic fish to fry.

Similarly, while writing this, I've come to feel increasingly disappointed that Carla never got to properly interact with Alex, and that their stories never textually intersect on a thematic level. The Amanda > Nikita > Alex triangle is one of the show's richest dramatic veins, and the addition of Carla introduces a lot of wrinkles that should have been tapped a lot more enthusiastically—just the fact that Amanda attempts to groom Alex as a Nikita substitute, while Carla could not care less about Alex or her place in Nikita's heart, is quite suggestive. That the reason why Carla doesn't care is arguably because Nikita never fully trusts Carla makes things even more juicy. But there's simply no time or space for such an encounter to happen: after being on opposite sides of the same plot in "Origins", Alex is whisked away to Russia in "Doublecross", and Nikita never again speaks to Alex about her.

And so, Carla's chief thematically-relevant interactions are with Nikita. While this makes general sense, the problem with it becomes apparent in "Origin" and "Doublecross": Nikita is just too good in a crisis, meaning that Carla's betrayals don't bring the drama that might have been otherwise present. While I generally love "the heroes are secretly outfoxing the baddies" as a trope, I'm left half-wishing we'd known from the start that Nikita knew about Carla talking to Percy; that at least, might have led to more insight into how Nikita felt about it all. Facilitating the twist requires the episode to create too much distance between the characters, ultimately leaving Birkhoff as the one person able to confront Carla—and as much as I like him, neither character has much of particular interest to say to the other (*5).

And so Carla is killed off—and to be fair, I can understand how this is in a lot of ways the practical choice. Thematic significance or not, as storytelling cards go, Carla is, after her initial arc, not a very fun one to play, and the series has too many things going on to allow her to just remain in the background until she can be important again—see: Owen. What could have made her "fun", or worth keeping around without derailing the canon plot? I'm not sure there's an answer! Making her more competent or a better match for team Nikita isn't the answer, nor is altering her circumstances—those are what make her distinctive.

A final alternative is having her be allowed to disappear, presumably with money and a new identity, which...isn’t exactly any more satisfying. Not only will that be done with Cassandra one episode after "Doublecross", it doesn’t feel in character to have her just give up and leave, after she's gone up against Nikita twice and faced armed opponents without flinching. She'd have had to be convinced that her goals were folly, and we're back where we started.

(This is another way the show neglects to give her an arc. How does the Carla that ran away twice become the one we see in the present? There’s a difference between being a survivor and being fearless; how did the transition occur? Homelessness, the series has implicitly argued, is not enough on its own.)

That the decision to kill her off is understandable, though, doesn't mean it sucks any less. Yes, it leads to a good Birkhoff episode in “Shadow Walker”, but she deserved way better than getting killed to further his story (and only after already furthering everybody else's)—especially since the series had, with Jaden, already set a precedent for killing off its few black women once it felt felt their stories were done. Season 2's pacing may be one of the reasons its the best one, but it is not without victims.

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(*1) Would Nikita have rescued Alex in a scenario where she'd never met Carla but still somehow ended in Division? Possibly. Would she have taken Alex in and attempted to heal her? Almost certainly not.

(*2) Which, to be fair to Carla, is not actually incorrect: Amanda is very much a hypnotist, as we'll see next season.

(*3) A possibility: Percy understands that he actually needs someone to handle personnel issues at Division, with Amanda and Michael gone, and therefore he's actually being somewhat more truthful to Carla than audiences are primed to believe.

(*4) I'm not sure Carla would have had much to contribute in terms of the various arguments about Division that take place in season 3, had she made it that far. That said, I still find the alternate universe where she lives that long intriguing, in large part because Ryan's Division canonically never has or considers having someone in the Amanda role.