| 209 - Open Heart |
| Writer/Director |
Elliot Stern / René Bonniere |
| Michael's POV Onscreen:
11 minutes
|
Michael is interrogating a
prisoner in the White Room, a surgeon who has recently performed an operation on a Red
Cell operative to create a human time bomb. Michael needs to find out who the patient was
in order to find the intended target. Nikita has to go undercover with a known Red Cell
operative, Jenna Vogler, who was in the operating theatre at the time. As Jenna is
currently in prison for drugs offences, Nikita gets herself arrested and sent there.
Michael poses as her lawyer to gain access to Nikita and pass her details of her planned
escape route. Back at Section, whilst interrogating Jenna, Michael is the only person to
realise that Jenna herself is the human time bomb, and that Red Cell’s end game all
along was to detonate a bomb in Section. |
| Michael Moments |
The lean into Jenna’s in
the White Room to deliver the oh-so-gentle but deadly ‘we will break you’ line.
Watching Nikita trying to connect with Jenna whilst in the White Room, great close-ups of
a Michael almost embarrassed to have Operations and Birkoff overhearing Nikita admit her
attraction to Jenna. |
| Words of Wisdom |
"Identity of the carrier?"
"Unknown." "Target?" "Unknown." "Time of
detonation?" "Unknown."
"A ‘uman being was
turned into a walking time bomb."
"We
will break you." |
Performance Rating
 |
Maybe it was this reviewer’s
imagination, but Roy seems almost embarrassed by this turgid male wet-dream fantasy of
life inside a women’s prison. Stunning close-ups aside, not even the presence of
director René Bonniere, usually a guarantee of some exceptional work from Roy, can lift
his performance from anything more than a run of the mill, it-buys-me-another-few-trees
act. The only bright spot in the whole sorry episode is trying to spot the LFN crew
members whose photographs are flashed before Jenna’s face whilst she’s in the
White Room. |
