As we get nearer to the end of the year, many of our favorite shows are approaching their “mid-season finales.” A few of them aired weeks ago, and on Friday night, December 2, we’ll be seeing the last episodes of 2011 for The CW’s Nikita and Supernatural.
To promote the Nikita episode of this week, which is titled “Guardians,” KSiteTV’s Craig Byrne was one of several journalists invited to a top secret location to pick up some intelligence from Division’s favorite former operative… or, at least the actress who plays her, Maggie Q.
In person, Maggie is a wonderfully likable person who laughs and takes life with a much sunnier disposition than the character she plays on TV. And while she saves the world on TV, she also is a bit of a hero in real life, often participating in campaigns to help pets in need. You can follow her on Twitter @MaggieQ for more on that.
But really… the reason you’re here is to get some scoop about Friday night’s episode, right?
Please note: If some of the quotes in this interview seem familiar, it’s because there were several of us at this roundtable interview and we’ll surely be covering the same things! With that said, though, please don’t copy and paste this interview onto other sites.. instead, just place links to the original sources!
“Guardians” will surely involve Guardians and black boxes; it also will feature the return of Devon Sawa as Owen. His return comes on the heels of a separation between Nikita and Michael. “Here’s the thing that I like,” Maggie says. “Nikita and Michael, like I told you guys, there’s this very adult problem that was coming, and I like the problem. Kudos to Craig [Silverstein] and the writers for creating something that wasn’t cheesy. It wasn’t like ‘Oh, he looked at another woman’ or ‘Woops, she slept with someone else!’ You know what I mean? Which happens on soaps and on shows like, I don’t know, Gossip Girl, whatever. But it can’t happen on our show because the integrity would be lost, so it has to be something that he couldn’t control, that he didn’t ask for, that she can’t fix, which is maddening for someone who is in control normally. And the adult thing to do for Nikita is to not deny him the experience that she knows he’s craving, because it’s something he lost a decade ago,” Maggie says.
“And that’s so sad,” she continues, “because it’s sort of like, you can say, ‘no don’t go to her and go to him and don’t feel that way again and don’t feel a sense of family and have those things that you want,’ but can you really do that? You have to be an adult. You have to just say ‘You’re not really mine unless you want to be here 1000%, and if you still have dreams of a family, and dreams of all that, I can’t give that to you right now.’ That’s not something we can do. It really is up to Michael, really. I mean, she loves him; and he is, by rights, very confused about this emotional experience that he’s having,” she says.
“But that being said… you know when you have this struggle with someone, and it’s always been struggle, struggle, struggle, and one of my story ideas for the writers was when Owen comes back, I need him to do things that Michael never does for her,” Maggie explains. “The little things. Like, Michael doesn’t 
take her to dinner. Michael doesn’t make a bath for her. Because it’s all work — all work, all the time — and they’ve got this cause, right? So I had all of these little ideas, and they actually incorporated them. Albert Kim wrote the script, and there’s this lovely scene where she wakes up, and she walks in, and Owen’s made breakfast for her! And she’s like ‘Wha-uh…’ And he’s like ‘So, when I was detoxing, I learned how to cook, you know, because I was in parts of the world where the food wasn’t so good…’ And she’s just kind of shell-shocked. And then there’s this amazing scene, where she’s like ‘This is good… like it’s actually good! Like, you can cook!’ And in his Owen, innocent way, he’s like ‘What does Michael make for you?’ And she has nothing. She doesn’t have anything to say because they don’t make that time for each other.”
Owen’s return will surely bring Nikita face-to-face with feelings that many people in relationships face in real life. “You know when you’re in a situation with someone who you love, and they can’t aand haven’t done things for you that you need? The danger of that is now being around someone who is. Also, Owen has said in earlier episodes that he also wants out, which is something that Nikita wants, too. And he has said to Michael ‘You’re crazy. You have her and yet you’re still on the run and doing this? Don’t do it, dude. Leave.’ So they have that in common as well, which is interesting.”
Of course, Nikita and Owen don’t have everything in common… as he is working with GOGOL, Owen is definitely keeping a secret himself. “She confronts him about that in the episode, too, which is very funny because you get to see Nikita mad. Not just like stoic mad. Like ‘WHAT the-!?’ Like, WTF, caps, caps, caps! Owen, dude, what are you doing! This is the organization that wants me dead, and you’re now BFFs with Ari?!?” she says.
“There are some really great scenes in that episode,” she tells us. “I think Owen’s always been the guy who has asked her the right questions and has allowed her to emote. And what I love about his relationship with her is that he’s not being a cheeseball, and he’s not being a perv. He’s just being himself. And what I like about Episode Ten, is that in those moments, it’s hurting her. Because if he was hitting on her, it’d be easy to be like ‘Euchh. What an idiot.’ But he’s not. He’s just being something, in the moment, that she needs, and that’s kind of painful for her,” she explains. However, that does not mean to give up on hopes for Nikita and Michael. “I think the Michael and Nikita love is everlasting, certainly. But I think the problems that they’re going through right now, are so… not just real, but also genuine,” Maggie explains.
“You can’t leave someone. It’s your decision, whether you go after someone or not, and what I love is that that [story] spoke volumes about how conflicted he was about wanting a family again. I don’t think the problems are going to go away immediately. They’re going to come back… Blondie Blondie and Little Boy. I mean, they couldn’t be blonder! Beautiful, Swedish, like… ‘Oh whoops! I have a kid with you!’ It’s like ‘whaaat! No way!’ But they’ll be back. So there’s going to be some stuff that happens, and it’s going to tie in Nikita’s feelings about her own family, and what happened to her. It’s going to be nice and healing. But it takes a while for a woman to forget. We haven’t even gone into that. It’s sort of like – Nikita’s still hoping it will work, but I think that because she’s so afraid of losing him, she hasn’t really dealt with her own feelings,” Maggie says. And if Michael finds out about Owen’s visit, how will that go down? “It’s sort of like ‘well, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of you being alone with this guy,’ but then it’s like ‘well, I’m uncomfortable with you being with a woman and a kid! How about that’!” she tells us… and if we don’t like Cassandra, there’s hope. “We also may find out that Cassandra is not as sweetness and light as we might think,” she teases. Will a Nikita/Michael reunion take them to new romantic places, including possibly a shower scene together, as some fans have suggested? “I think that Shane made a joke about that once, and I think people have taken it as ‘that’s happening. He said it.’ I think he was joking,” Maggie laughs.
Beyond Owen and Michael, this season has given us new interactions for Nikita, including a more involved interaction with Birkhoff. “I loved – I call it ‘the Birkhoff episode,’ 209,” Maggie says. “Because it is. He is such an integral part of what they do, and he’s so important to their story now, because they’re a team. So I like that he had that moment of sacrifice. Because you think of Michael’s sacrifice, and Nikita’s sacrifice, and Alex’s sacrifice, but you don’t really get into the Birkhoff stuff. We probably won’t ever get into the Amanda stuff, because some people you should know less about than others. Or Percy. But I liked seeing his sacrifice for once, and seeing what he would do for the cause. He’s always making fun of it, saying ‘I don’t want this. I want out of this.’ Whatever. So, Birkhoff shines.”
“She loves him. He’s her friend,” Maggie says of Nikita’s relationship with Birkhoff. “And for me, in terms of Division, if there was anyone that she was closest to, besides being in love with Michael, he was her closest friend.” However, don’t expect her to give him an easy time for long. “When his hand heals, you’re going to see me back to making fun of him. It’s going to be great,” Maggie laughs.
Dillon Casey is one of the show’s newer recruits as Sean Pierce, and Maggie tells us that they’ll be interacting soon. “Dillon’s actually very funny. He really makes me laugh,” she says. “I didn’t really know him well, because he works with Lyndsy, so I don’t really know him, and then I’ve been on set with him recently. He’s actually a really fun guy. He is very funny. And he’s naked in the whole episode that we just finished!” Maggie also hints that they’ll all be in a very confined place together… could they end up in Percy’s cell? We probably all have to stay tuned to see for sure…
Maggie also has some interaction coming up with Sean’s TV mother, Madeline Pierce, as played by Alberta Watson. We asked if Maggie had ever asked Alberta about being the “Amanda” type character of the original La Femme Nikita TV series. “I’ve never personally brought it up [with her], but we have such a fun time together,” she says. “I love her. We just laugh in the hair and makeup trailer. It’s pretty fun. She’s such a beautiful woman. She is perfect. And she is so the ‘Amanda’ of her [time]! Because Melinda, too, is one of those people who is so goofy and dorky on her own time, you would never believe who she is [compared to] the character she plays! I love her.”
Lyndsy Fonseca’s Alex also has a lot coming up, including some more interaction with Nikita herself. “She’s going to find out some more stuff about her family, which is going to move her in that direction again. You’re going to see them work together again. It’s going to be lovely. It’s such an older-sister, younger-sister dynamic that goes on. It’s nice. And you’re going to see some really nice, tender moments with them, too, which I like,” Maggie says, telling us that their working together again may cover “a couple episodes.”
“There’s going to be a series of three episodes that run as one big storyline, where everything seems to be converging, and the impending implosion will happen. That’s what we’re shooting right now,” Maggie tells us of what’s to come in the future, when alliances will surely change and interactions will be different again. In fact, episode 13 will be called “Clean Sweep,” which will come before a “rebirth” in the season’s 14th episode. “There is going to be a new beginning. And where they’re going to go, we don’t know,” Maggie says.
Finally, at one point of our conversation Maggie was asked about Nikita’s most enduring mystery – in that glass cell of his, where exactly does Percy go to the bathroom? “No one’s ever asked me that! I think we should include a free-standing urinal. Where is it? Hmm. I’m going to tell Craig that. We should write something in where he’s like ‘well, Amanda, I haven’t gone to the bathroom in three months’,” Maggie says.
But before all of those things happen, we’ve got “Guardians” tomorrow night. What does Maggie think we have to look forward to? “It’s a really good script, and I really liked it. I would say that it depends on what you’re a fan of. I think that it’s going to put a tighter hold on fans’ hearts. I don’t think they’re going to have the solution they’re looking for, in its entirety, but it is quite an emotional episode as well,” she tells us.
Take a look at a gallery of images from “Guardians” below, and be sure not to miss the episode at 8PM Friday, December 2 on The CW!
3 Comments
Excellent! Thank you for the wonderful in-depth article. So many cool reveals about the upcoming season!
Thanks so much for this!
Very good interview. I like that Craig Silverstein lets her have so much input, and I strongly support the shower scene! ;)