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4.9 Down a Crooked Path

Operations: "In spite of all our preventative measures, it seems that George has finally found a way to get rid of us."

At the start, I thought, oh no. Haven't we already done a plague episode? Instead, it was worse than repetition: it was our very first clip show. I don't mind an occasional clip show if it has a cohesive theme and introduces even a little new information. But this one didn't even make sense.

In the first place, it was out of character for any of our characters, especially Operations, to just follow orders, no matter what -- especially when they weren't sure if the process was reversable. Yes, let me just lie right down while you completely wipe my memory. That'll happen. And I'm just going to skip right by the complete impossibility of downloading someone's memory and uploading it again.

In the second place, as much as I love our main characters, it was just too weird that the neural scrapes were carried out on just the six of them. Section One is fairly big. We could justify it by George's "Black Directive" targeting only those six, but if that was the case, why was George targeting Birkoff and Walter?

In the third place, and here was where the episode just completely broke down for me, there was no logical structure to the memories that we were seeing. We got:

-- Operations remembering Vietnam, Corinne and Stephen.
-- Nikita reliving her upsetting early days in Section, and Michael manipulating her in "Escape."
-- Madeline remembering her mother, and Operations when he was at the point of death.
-- Michael remembering Simone and Adam, and the cage scene in "War" where he (almost) told Nikita he loved her.

Those were somewhat consistent. They were all upsetting emotional moments, and mostly about people that they loved. But Walter's were mostly romantic memories about Beverly. Shouldn't they have been about Belinda, and about his inadvertent betrayal of Birkoff? And Birkoff's memories were about his crush on Nikita, his affair with her double, and his successful mission in "Into the Looking Glass." And since George was going for tactical information, shouldn't they have been forced to remember moments in which they showed operational expertise?

Finally, I don't really understand what happened with George in the end. Does this mean he's been brainwashed and is now under Operations' control?

There are good clip shows out there. This was not one of them. One out of four stars,

Billie

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