#nikitaweek

If I’m late for a day five post, it’s because “favorite Nikita relationship” is almost impossible to answer. I mean really. I could make this post about Nikita’s relationship with Alex, Michael, Birkoff, or even Amanda, because those are all magnificently developed and distinct relationships. Only Person of Interest has comparable chemistry between all its core characters.  So if I’m choosing Ryan, it’s largely because I suspect he won’t be chosen by many others.

A frequent complaint about television is that there is an alleged lack of platonic relationships between opposite-sex dyads. Nineteen times out of twenty, If a man and a woman interact at any level beyond small talk or as co-workers, it’s because the writers consider them potential love interests. More often than not, this makes these interactions harder to enjoy, as they become exercises in waiting for the other shoe to drop. These scenes stop becoming about themselves, but about set-up for something that we’ve seen a million times before.  

There’s a bit of that in play with Ryan Fletcher’s introduction; I understand from the chatter in the old Television Without Pity boards that he’s something of a network mandate character, and he’s very much introduced as a potential love interest, what with his second appearance ending with Nikita kissing him, his third with him kissing her.

And then…well, that’s the end of it. The very next episode begins an arc that resolves the romantic tension between Nikita and Michael, and Ryan is never placed in the position of love interest again, making their dynamic all the more interesting.  

Alias had Will Tippin. Played by a pre-superstardom Bradley Cooper, he was the third leg in the central love triangle between himself, protagonist Sydney Bristow, and other love interest Michael(!) Vaughn. Sydney’s best friend from college, he was the regular guy, who approached all the weirdness from the point of view of a journalist who understood that something weird was going on, but didn’t know what.  

While Will was a fun character, he was least fun as a love interest, which the series eventually noticed. Eventually, his role shifted away from that, and into a stint as a C.I.A. analyst before he was written out. He came back though, and at this point, he became a singular character: the one person from the outside world that she nevertheless had complete trust in, and whom she could interact with with no angst.  The one who could always make her smile. Curiously, the episodes where he guests stars feel more significant than the ones where he was there as a regular character.  There’s more weight to them.  

Ryan is like that, to Nikita. That he can pull a gun on his fellow agents for her and smile almost feels unearned, but dammit if it isn’t gorgeous. He’s so determined. She’s so grateful. They’re so important to one another, and they’re not dating and have no interest in doing so. They’re “just” comrades, and that’s what comrades do.  

Things don’t go as expected, however: Fletch dies and then he lives and then a series of events makes him into her boss. Their relationship in season 3 becomes more fraught, as their priorities and responsibilities begin to diverge, and yet that trust is still there. If Nikita gets as close as she does to becoming Michael to Ryan’s Percy, it’s because she trusts Fletch completely; if Fletch lets himself slip, it’s partly because he trusts Nikita to catch him before he falls. Neither is precisely correct, in the end, but their relationship is strong enough to survive everything, even the fall of Division and the failure of the mission they’d set for themselves.