The Michael Files - Season Five

The Michael Files

Plot Michael's screen time over the entire season

501 - 504 Waiting For Season 5 Michael
505 - The Man Behind The Curtain
506 - The Evil That Men Do
507 - Let No Man Put Asunder
508 - A Time For Every Purpose

There is a Chinese proverb that says ‘be careful what you wish for’. We wished for, and got, a 5^th season, but did it solve anything? Perhaps those wishes, and the massive effort behind them, would have been better spent elsewhere… The cancellation of the series during Season 4 hit the fans hard. Vastly empowered by internet communication, a self-appointed ‘First Team’ marshalled the masses into a militant force, hitting the enemy where it irritated, if not exactly hurt - in their mail boxes. The top brass of both Warner Brothers and USA Network were targets for a constant bombardment of emails and normal post, as were other media organisations. In the face of such relentless attrition, TPTB eventually called a truce, and just as Season 4 was about to wrap forever, its reprieve was announced. Victory celebrations were short-lived, however, when the terms of the peace treaty were revealed. The 5^th and last season was to consist of only eight shows, and promised rather optimistically to tie up a lot of the loose ends in the storylines. The five core characters would not all be returning for all of the shows, and that included Michael. Shock. Battle lines were again drawn up. Hell was unleashed once more, this time to insist that Roy appeared in every episode. A previous campaign, involving sending dollar bills as an ironic response to financial disputes, was revived using mock currency printed with Roy’s face. There was no end to the inventiveness. Except, perhaps, in interpreting the signals that were coming out of Roy’s agency. Inevitably the word was that he was willing to do the show; in such a climate anything else would have been professional suicide. But the fact remains that his contract remained unsigned till the last possible moment, that he had ‘mourned’ his character as though he had no intention of playing him again, and that he got away with doing the bare minimum, with his first directing opportunity thrown in as an added incentive. With some time and two other parts to distance him from the immediacy of LFN, he began to speak even more frankly than before about his need to catch the first plane back to Montreal every weekend. He spent the following year proving that point by staying home, and also working on prestigious projects more likely to regain him recognition amongst his peers in his native land. Weigh all that against yet another season of slog on a show that had long since begun to decline, and you might forgive him for thinking that he had done as much as could be expected of him.

Roy’s absence, for whatever reason, was a constraint on the writing. The many references to Michael in the first half of the season were almost entirely superfluous, inserted to insure against those angry fans drifting away. When he eventually did return he was back with another agenda, encountering a very different Nikita. He was on his way to becoming a full-time child-minder, she was heiress-apparent to the supreme authority. The one-time idealist was now jeopardising global security for the sole purpose of securing his son before retiring to suburbia. Nikita’s few attempts at humanising Section were patently unsuccessful, and despite her many protestations that it was not what she wanted, she could have made it to the top on the strength of her power-dressing alone. So we had closure in the form of a total role-reversal. Not too different from Four Light Years Farther after all, just a little bit more consolidated and a little bit more amicable. In fact, Season 5’s purpose was to spell out a lot of unresolved stuff , in a show where ambiguity had been practically a hallmark. Given the position at the end of Season 4, Season 5 was never going to perform the miracle of restoring the series to its earlier glory. Roy being in every episode wouldn’t have made it any better – just more palatable.

Footnote: As Season 5 had not aired in the UK at time of writing, all captures are taken from USA Network broadcasts copied by my cherished US tape fairy, to whom I am forever grateful.

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