#love it when irina takes sydney with her and it results in sydney and sark becoming carbon copies of each other.

[juliareed]

Sing, sing, won't you sing for me? Beast in your belly, you've got to let it breathe Breathe for me

[mimeparadox]

Alias vs. Nikita: Sydney Bristow and Nikita Mears: On Ethos

It took Danny for Sydney to even consider that SD-6 was not what it claimed to be.  

All told, the core premise of Alias is not one that stands up to scrutiny. In order for SD-6 to successfully fool nearly its entire staff into thinking that it was legitimately part of the C.I.A., the organization would have had to be either identical to the C.I.A., which presents myriad problems; its members would have had to be not nearly as innocent or patriotic as Alias pretends they are; or not nearly as perceptive or paranoid as spooks are required to be.

Unfortunately, there is ample evidence that the latter (*1) is true. Consider, for example, how the existence of the Alliance is common among SD-6 members. Somehow, despite the fact that the cartel is precisely the sort of threat a group like SD-6 would be designed to handle—“the very people I thought I was fighting against,” Sydney claims—nobody ever finds it weird that SD-6…never actually fights it. More relevantly, there’s the fact that SD-6 had a policy of eliminating security threats, which agents knew about and apparently considered to be part and parcel of what it meant to work for the C.I.A. If anyone had doubts or suspicions, they were more than happy to set them aside as they did crimes. And Sydney was no different—until Danny.  

Danny Hecht’s murder was the first crack in the mirror; Daniel Monroe’s was the last straw. His death may have led Nikita to escape Division, but as the story makes clear, she already had an established history of questioning, and even covertly disobeying, her superiors. What’s more, it was not personal tragedy that led her to seriously question Division, but rather, the things she was asked to do. Therein lies the first key difference between Sydney and Nikita: they view the world through drastically different prisms.

For much of Alias, Sydney approaches the world through a tribalist perspective, dividing the world into two: those who are with her, and those who are not. Us vs. them. Right and wrong are determined not by the morality of an action or the contexts under which it is performed, but rather about who does it. Espionage is good when performed by the United States, but not when performed by an enemy. Lying to one’s friends and attempting to undermine their life’s work is forgivable when she does it, but not when someone like Lauren does.

For much of Alias, this binary thinking undergirds Syndey’s entire moral philosophy. There was nothing objectionable about SD-6 until it stopped being her tribe, after which she comes to hate it without qualms. The C.I.A. may be just as bad as SD-6 (or it would be, in a show more determined to explore its premise and or show the U.S. in a more critical light), but its actions can reflexively be excused away or forgiven. A.P.O. is as clear an illustration as one can get of this dissonance: explicitly designed to mirror SD-6, it is an admission that Sydney’s problem with her former employees had less to do with anything they actually did, but with which team they played for. Conversely, her loyalty to the C.I.A. has less to do with what they do and more what they do for her: while Sydney will likely never outright turn against the United States, she’ll bite back when she thinks they are a threat to her or her loved ones, without ever considering it to be a betrayal of her beliefs—blackmailing and extorting the  government are okay when she does it.  We see this in a smaller, more personal level with Sydney’s parents, whose actions Sydney considers unforgivable until she is convinced that they were done for her benefit.  Once this happens, their many crimes prove very easy to get over. 

One could argue, correctly, that Nikita is also all about doing the most for her loved ones: more than once we are shown that she is the sort of person who chooses her family over the world. However, her ethos is ultimately and fundamentally non-tribalist, and it is precisely this quality which led to her turning against Division. While Percy and Amanda and Michael did their damnedest to make sure their agents’ first priority was Division itself—us vs. them—Nikita never bought into that narrative, continuously choosing others—Ramón, Alex, Stefan and Ari Tasarov, Daniel, herself—over the organization.

Additionally, one of Nikita’s trademarks is the ease with which she makes allies, and her willingness and ability to work with others, even when their agendas do not align. The fact that Michael and Alex were working for Division did not stop Nikita from assisting them when necessary.  Similarly, Owen joining Gogol frustrated Nikita, but it did not cause her to turn against him. It’s why she was able and willing to rejoin Division, once Percy and Amanda were driven out: just because someone is against her doesn’t mean she can’t work with them—there may be an “us” and a “them”, but not necessarily a “vs”. For Nikita, the world is complicated and requires compromise: purity is a good way to get jack squat, and condemning people for making those compromises when she herself has done the same would require condemning herself.

If only Sydney thought the same.  Shockingly for someone in her field, Sydney is consistently terrible at working with people if they’re on her shit list. And while she might argue that this is merely a refusal to compromise her principles, it’s not about that at all: it’s about a desire for simplicity where it does not exist.    

One of the chief features of tribalism is that it is not concerned with logical or moral consistency, and we see this quite a lot with Sydney’s behavior, which at best lacks self-awareness, and at worst is plainly hypocritical.  Consider how many times Sydney goes rogue, disobeying, lying to, extorting or undermining her superiors, and how it results in lasting consequences for her, precisely zero times. Consider how she spent SEVEN YEARS as one of the top agents for an international criminal organization, and how little this ultimately matters (seriously, no one ever ever ever brings it up as a potential reason why she shouldn’t be trusted, which is appallingly stupid). Another person might notice this, realize how much they’ve benefited from others’ sympathy and understanding, and treating others similarly, but Sydney, not so much. Irina turns herself in, doing the same thing Sydney herself did a season earlier? She is the worst—a traitor, even though she never claimed to be loyal to the United States. Sloane claims to have reformed? Not on her watch. Perhaps most egregiously, when it is revealed that Lauren is part of the Covenant—the group which kidnapped Sydney and brainwashed her in order to turn her into an assassin—at no point does Sydney consider that the same might have happened to her.  And not only is this mindset hypocritical, especially when she turns around and conditionally lets bygones be bygones, it actively makes her a worse spy. Because she is so often invested in not understanding her enemies, she often misses opportunities to see them as potential tools (*2). Additionally, she is often at sea when those same antagonists choose to use her.

Had Sydney persisted in her tribalist outlook throughout the series, Alias would not have worked. Fortunately, she did not, and her transition into the sort of person who could work with Sloane or embrace Rachel, who was partly responsible for Vaughn’s death, allows her story to follow a concrete emotional arc.  It’s largely accidental, but the growth is there. Ironically, Nikita’s journey goes the other way, as circumstances lead her to adopt Division as her tribe, and to take morally corrosive measures she had once condemned in order to protect it. It is only circumstance, in the form of the Division mutiny, that prevented her and her friends from becoming the very thing they’d sought to escape. And in the end, she chooses to set aside tribalism: after Ryan is killed, she chooses the world over herself.  

What is particularly interesting about this divergence in worldviews is that it’s largely unintentional: while Nikita is precisely who the showrunners designed her to be, Alias’ writers surely did not intend Sydney to be as morally vacuous and un-self-aware as she is. Even so, both characters’ ethos make complete sense, given what we know of them, and in the next part, I’ll be talking a little bit about how both Sydney and Nikita were shaped by their pasts.  

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Footnotes!

*1: Technically, the former is also true, insofar as, if we discount the security section shenanigans, we don’t really see SD-6 or its members do the work of an evil organization. The missions Sydney and Dixon are sent on are identical to the sort of missions the C.I.A. will send them on, which suggests something rather different from what the show thinks it suggests.  

*2: Case in point, Simon Walker. While he never draws Sydney’s ire the way someone like Sark does, that she never considers cultivating him as an asset despite the fact that he likes her and his relationship with the Covenant is entirely mercenary is one of the more frustrating things of that arc.