culture
Reel Toronto: Nikita—The Final Season
Nikita is back for one last turn at travelling around the world, kicking ass, and taking names. Or at least doing that in the Toronto area.
Toronto’s extensive work on the silver screen reveals that, while we have the chameleonic ability to look like anywhere from New York City to Moscow, the disguise doesn’t always hold up to scrutiny. Reel Toronto revels in digging up and displaying the films that attempt to mask, hide, or—in rare cases—proudly display our city.
Nikita was good to Toronto and Toronto was good to Nikita. For the show’s four seasons, we managed to portray just about any place you can think of, from the obvious (New York City) to the really not obvious (Ankara, Turkey) to the outright ironic (Toronto).
Alas, all good things come to an end and Nikita‘s final season—a truncated six episodes —aired at the end of 2013. Still, we got in a few more glances of ourselves before they left.
So, we start off here in Mumbai…
…which is obviously not quite so far afield, despite the warm colour palette.
We’re pretty sure they shot all this at Hamilton’s port.
Rather cool and unusual is this Mumbai Market…
…actually a valley behind the hockey arena in St. Catharines.
These industrial loading docks are part of the old Unilever plant at the base of the DVP…
…which we also just saw in Beauty and the Beast. Do you think he’s on the phone endorsing the “hybrid” option or is it “remove”?
They framed these downtown shots really narrow but we think this is outside the CBC building…
…especially since we cut to these rooftop shots…
…which look like they were shot there.
Red filter means India, apparently, and the blue filter means Europe.
You can see, despite the Zurich of it all, we’re actually at Yonge and Adelaide.
This lovely hotel is actually the Victoria, just a few blocks south, on Yonge Street.
Here we are in a lovely-looking lounge…
…called “Club Besson,” in tribute to French director Luc Besson, the character’s originator.
It’s supposed to be in Monaco but is actually the now-shuttered Empire Club, which used to be on Cumberland in Yorkville.
Here, we’re back in Hamilton as this poor shmo…
…gets tossed out a window of what’s actually Treble Hall.
The fourth episode has Nikita and company in hiding…
…on a military base with typical suburban cul de sac. We tracked it down and ID’d it as Mississauga’s Branigan Gate.
This is the big Green P parking lot at the base of Jarvis Street. It’s a frequent filming location.
And the final scene of Nikita actually features a nice shot of the skyline from out in the Portlands. It’s not supposed to be Toronto but we don’t really mind. Of course, this is the second Nikita-themed TV show to shoot here, so who knows, maybe one day they’ll come back for another round.