Something about this film that doesn't make sense

The whole premise is fiction - known criminals/muderers being trained by the government as assassins, so I guess the lethal injection part is just another part of this.

I always assumed that the film was set a decade or so in the future, possibly making things slightly more plausible as the criminal system could have changed.

First time I saw the scene (93-94) I assumed it was some kind of shadowy death sentence, the government simply getting rid of an incorrigible element, and knowing that nobody would miss a druggie, they knew they could get away with it.

Also, bear in mind the film may have been set 10 years BACK, at which time France had not yet abolished the Death Penalty.

M

Please note, I do not want comments from housewives, students or the unemployed.

You guys have to pay more attention:

The judge gives her a life sentence + 20 years, not a death penalty.

And later, when Bob instructs her what happened to her, he says that she is already dead and buried and that her official cause of death is "suicide".

So, what happened is this (some of it off-screen):
She got a life sentence. The people sedating her aren't officials or an execution commando, they are from the agency. They poison her, bring her back to her cell, she then "dies" and is officially diagnosed to having committed suicide. Then the agency replaces her body and someone or something else is buried officially while Nikita is transferred to the secret compartment. She is offered to become an agent and if she refuses, they'll just kill her for real without having to bother because she is already officially dead.

She's taken away to a small room... is tied down... two guys come in and quietly, ominously start preparing an injection.

With her state of mind it's not that strange that she assumes they are going to kill her.

/J-Star

there's an American remake with Jane Fonda? oh, i'm watching that








so many movies, so little time

They implied to her that they were going to execute her. Despite her life sentence, from her perspective it seemed like an ad hoc thing, like they'd just decided to kill her even though she'd been sentenced to prison. Just because the legal death penalty has been removed from the books doesn't mean that a government without it never murders anyone. Cops murder people in the dark even in places where there is no formal death penalty. It's easy to murder the poor, junkies, people of color (which Nikita was not, but still), and get away with it in societies that stigmatize those people and don't care about them. Then they call it an accident or suicide. Which incidentally was her cover story; they claimed she committed suicide.

And they kind of were killing her in a way; killing her old self, her old personality, ending her old life in order to forge a new one in which she's a slave to their interests, indebted to them for her "second chance" and doing their dirty work. They wanted her to think of it as her dying and being reborn, her old life ending and her new one beginning.

Assume they just told her mother that she had committed suicide in prison. It happens, and it makes everything else make sense. They didn't have to have a death penalty for her to kill herself and if you make that assumption then everything makes sense in that regard.