If you ever see me skulking around suspiciously on the street or in an airport where I suddenly run and jump over hurdles, slip into a crowd, scan the vicinity, flipping through multiple passports (albeit my existing one, and all my old expired ones), chances are you aren’t watching Mainak acting nuts — you’re witnessing rogue agent Jason Bourne, a CIA assassin suffering from extreme memory loss who must figure out who he is. Laugh at me all you want, I don’t care. (Actually confront me about this in public, I’ll outright deny it because, of course I do care if you laugh, and secondly a real CIA badass would never blow his cover.)
 
From Bourne to Nikita

So to say I’ve always been an ardent Bourne fan is, as you can see, an understatement. I must have seen The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Bourne Legacy and Jason Bourne 1,000 times each, hoping some day I’d find Bourne in a TV series so I’d have more to watch. And then I found Season 1 of Nikita (2010) this year, a TV series with spy stuff and good action. This is the second adaptation of the 1990 Luc Besson film Nikita, the first one being La Femme Nikita on which this series was based.
 
My female Bourne 

Nikita was conceived by the producers as a mini version of James Bond or Batman. But to me, I saw her as a female Bourne... which means I struck gold, as I had 22 episodes of watching this former bad seed abducted by a shadowy government agency, trained to knock off key targets. She’s gone rogue and now, after a three-year hiding period, is back to bring down the organisation Division that trained her. Like Alice in a darker Wonderland, Nikita’s instructed to “Eat this”, “Drink that”, “Kill this”, “Steal that,” which starts her on her journey of self-discovery. 
Through Alex, Nikita’s protege and friend, this series does justice to the origin story of Nikita, which has a dark fairy tale like makeover story of taking a girl and changing her life and her identity, much like My Fair Lady or Pygmalion except here she’s transformed into a beautiful killer who also seeks revenge against Division for the massacre of her family.

No Gossip Girl with guns this

But don’t get me wrong, this is no chick flick. Nikita has the dark brooding tone of the Bourne movies, and was evidently pitched like that to the network by the producers who said: “This is not going to be Gossip Girl with a gun”, which in my opinion would have been a horse of a different colour, as I love both chick flicks and action flicks... but I think mixing these two watertight compartments should be done with much caution, as you could alienate the dudes and piss off the girls in one fell swoop. 

So now with a chick Bourne, I have more to dream of thanks to network television. And with three seasons left I guess I have a lot stocked up for this Christmas holiday season and for the years to come to daydream about being a CIA agent. Thank god I don’t have to wait for Matt Damon to sign another Bourne film.

Just one click away

See this is what I love about being an audience in today’s world. When you like something, you hate the waiting period. Television to cinema is like WhatsApp to letters. Back in the day when you liked a girl, you sent her a love letter, and it took weeks and months to know whether she liked you back. Nowadays you can hook up or get dumped or dumped over WhatsApp in seconds.

Similarly now when you like a certain kind of film, you don’t have to any longer sit around wondering “are they going to make a sequel”, “will they ever make another film like this”, “when will Warner Brothers reboot the Batman series, considering most of the world didn’t take to Ben Affleck”, as there’s always a good TV show one IMDb click away. Like last year, I saw a dark indie film called Room, about a kidnapped young woman held captive with her son in a room, which was so brilliant that it not surprisingly ended up becoming an Oscar contender. When I finished watching it at least three times, I daydreamed: “Wouldn’t it be nice if they just made more films like this!” 

And low and behold, as I looked up the amazing caste on IMDb, particularly Joan Allen, who was acclaimed for her role in Room as a mother reunited with her kidnapped daughter portrayed by Oscar winner Brie Larson. Joan again plays a former stay-at-home mom who becomes a small-town politician whose younger son suffers a similar ordeal of being kidnapped for a decade, then reappears, at 19, after having been presumed dead in ABC’s The Family. As I watched The Family I found it was almost tailor-made to make my dream come true as it took off from the idea of Room and turned it into a political family drama thriller. To me The Family was an extension of Room. 

Let’s not nitpick about how one’s an Oscar film and the other’s just a TV show that got cancelled due to mixed reviews. Room was great, but it’s a one-off film and I wanted more... and The Family gave me just that... the same kind of quality more or less, with the quantity of episodes! They have such similar themes like kidnapping and parenthood, more specifically motherhood, as a mother and child in a locked room shines a spotlight on the everyday heroism of being a mom in Room, while The Family is about a strong matriarch dealing the best way she can in a family crisis juggling motherhood with a busy career. 

I don’t know what some of the critics were whining about. I for one was at the edge of my seat at the end of each episode of The Family and couldn’t help myself playing the next episode and the next even though I knew there wouldn’t be another season, thanks to those damned hard-to-please critics. Stop judging so harshly! We want more shows like The Family! 

Enter Daredevil, a flawed superhero

Anyway, thanks to this unbridled binge there came another gestation period where I was trying to figure out what to watch. I still had to wait five weeks for the Spider-Man: Homecoming movie to come out. Same problem, Spider-Man comes every four years. And somehow ever since the Avengers got together, the comic book movies were not keeping me afloat the way the old-fashioned Batman-Iron Man used to — a superhero story fixing a very normal crooked world. But thanks to Netflix, they gave me a 13-episode alternative with Daredevil which concentrates on very good old-fashioned storytelling.

Unlike a Superman who’s too goody-goody, with Daredevil, we got a flawed superhero. Sure when he puts on the mask he has noble intentions but those intentions get warped along the way. Charlie Cox, the actor who plays Daredevil, describes him as a guy who, if he’s going to deal with some bad guys, is not going to stop until he’s done. And he might not even stop then. 

Being extremely flawed myself, I’d pick a flawed anti-hero over a perfect superhero any day of the week. Besides, Daredevil’s completely blind, using his heightened senses to fight crime in the pitch of night on the streets of New York and I’m practically blind with thick glasses, using my klutz instincts to bump into things in broad daylight on the streets of Calcutta... you can see why I took to him immediately.

Confessions of a bedroom agent

But yes, while I love Daredevil, you can’t stop me from catching the next Spider-Man flick no matter how sucky it turns out, as long before my undercover years in the CIA, I was fighting crime in my bedroom in unflattering blue tights, a red monkey cap and socks, climbing imaginary walls, shooting imaginary webs, to combat (in my head) the not-so-imaginary bullies in school, taking refuge in my imagination fed by books, movies and now... thank god, great TV shows that are just the ticket to turn a bad day around.