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Date Posted: Tuesday, February 22, 02:38:53pm
Author: JayBee
Subject: Responding to everyone above (long post warning!)...(r)
In reply to: Mary 's message, "OK, it's too quiet around here. Let's talk about Madeline!!!" on Monday, February 21, 05:37:04pm

All of you raise great points, but for the sake of saving space on the board, I’ll answer everyone in a single post.

First of all, I agree with everyone that Madeline was very much a survivor and had (or tried to have, at least) a contingency plan for everything. One would assume, then, that she *should* have planned for something like a negative review.

I should be upfront in saying that my belief, honestly, is that she *did* plan for such an event -- and the “suicide” was part of the execution of that plan. Yes, we saw her “die,” but as we know from long experience watching LFN, what we *see* isn’t necessarily the whole truth. ;-)

I therefore choose to believe -- and think it’s at least consistent with what we saw onscreen -- that the suicide was faked. In fact, one could conceive of all sorts of different scenarios in connection with a faked suicide: that she fled Section altogether, for example, or even that her “sentence” from Jones had been given to her ahead of time (maybe even in the brief interim between the arrival of “Jones” at Section and the commencement of her review), with orders to carry out the “suicide” in the manner she did as a means to have her transferred to wherever she was going to be sent, covertly. There are a zillion possibilities (which makes for many, many plot options in fanfic!).

I get the impression that a lot of people are as firmly convinced of a faked suicide scenario as I am, because I’m certainly not the only person to have written stories in which she turns out to be alive and well post-S5. (I always love reading them -- and encourage people to write more! A post-S5 story without Madeline just makes me too sad to want to read, I’m afraid.)

Having said all of the above, however, let’s assume (against my wishes!) that what we saw onscreen was really the whole truth -- that she really, truly killed herself. Why might she have done so?

First, what about those contingency plans she should have had in place? Well, perhaps the particular circumstances of Center’s takeover made her plans impossible to carry out. As Mary suggests, she might very well have had contacts at Center whom she relied upon for advance warning about things like that -- but what if Jones kept the impending lockdown at Section One quite secret until the last minute, anticipating the danger of leaks? After all, I got the impression that most people who *worked at Center* didn’t even know his real identity -- it wouldn’t surprise me at all if most of them didn’t know a review of Section One was commencing, either. So, number one, she may have been genuinely caught off guard, anticipating a better warning -- which never came.

Furthermore, if her plans relied on help or assistance from people within the organization -- calling in favors from people at Center or Oversight or whatever else it might have involved -- those plans might also have been scuttled by the particulars of the review as it unfolded. After all, the show gave us the impression that the idea of Jones himself showing up to take over Section was virtually (if not completely) unprecedented -- she may therefore have anticipated the possibility of a review, even by Center instead of Oversight, but might have based her plans on the expectation that it would be carried out by a subordinate of Jones. In such a situation, getting allies to try to pull strings on her behalf might work -- but when it’s Jones *himself* who comes after you, no amount of “connections” or allies would necessarily be of any aid -- those allies may be rendered unable (or unwilling) to help in the face of the top dog’s wrath.

So, in terms of “internal” (i.e., involving people within the organization) contingency plans, she may very well have found herself at a sudden loss of options.

What about “external” options -- getting help from people outside Section, or trying to flee Section altogether? Setting aside the fact that that’s what I’m firmly convinced she did (LOL), I can try to come up with explanations for why she wouldn’t try to do so. First of all, again, the circumstances of the takeover by Jones may have prevented her from carrying out any preexisting plan -- no advance warning, probable monitoring of her movements (if not outright detention) after Jones’ arrival, etc. So whatever arrangements she may have had in place for escape may also have been thwarted.

The toughest question to answer, for me, is why she didn’t wait a little bit. She could have at least waited until Jones was ready to announce his decision before she carried out her suicide, and that could have bought her more time to recover from the shock of events, to think things through, and potentially to regroup and devise a new strategy to replace whatever plans of hers had fallen apart. In answering this, I think sk’s “perfect storm” analogy is very useful: she didn’t wait, because the confluence of events happening at that precise time hit her at the worst possible moment -- for a long period of time, she had been on the receiving end of a long series of personal and professional blows that were pushing her closer and closer to her emotional limits, and perhaps the review finally shoved her over that edge. After all, while she may have ordinarily been a very thoughtful and calculating person, she also demonstrated a surprising capacity for rash and impulsive decision-making when under strong emotional influences. Her behavior in HHNF is the salient example here -- under the influence of whatever emotion-amplifying procedure she had undergone, she chose to desert Section and shoot her way past Operations to do so -- very un-Madeline-like behavior! In this case, she didn’t have the medical procedure to trigger such a rash response, but the anger, fear, resentment and stress she was experiencing may have put her in a similarly reckless mindset.

One could also argue that the suicide was a long time coming. While she may have been very strong and resilient, everyone has their limits, and hers were certainly tested during the full length of the series. First, she held an extremely stressful position, even by the standards of Section. As a person near the top of the hierarchy, she was responsible not just for her own mistakes or failures, but for those of everyone in Section. Her position was also very high-profile, which comes with a great deal of politics and makes her a convenient target of blame (or rivalry, or of enemies of Operations who would attack him through her). She had to deal with the stress of being subject to extremely high demands while exercising fairly limited control over events -- and while she struggled to control as much as possible of her environment (maybe even to the point of being pathological in those efforts), in reality she was highly vulnerable to the decisions of others, as the review no doubt reminded her in the most unpleasant way possible.

As early as S1, we see evidence of that pressure starting to get to her -- she confessed to Nikita back then that she worried about being strong enough to keep going. As the seasons progressed, that feeling must have grown worse and worse. Unlike someone like Nikita, however, she held a position that inhibited her from seeking any effective emotional support. Nikita had people like Walter to talk to, but who could Madeline turn to? No one -- her unique position within Section’s hierarchy left her too isolated: she really had no peers, only superiors and subordinates.

Things got even worse after S1 -- not only were the politics at Section/Oversight becoming more high-stakes, she suffered some personal blows that must have made it even harder for her to cope. (I’ve discussed them here ad nauseam before, so I won’t go into detail -- one example, however, would be her final meeting with her mother -- a truly demoralizing experience, I would imagine, and one in great contrast to the semi-reconciliation that Nikita was able to achieve with her own mother.) It thus doesn’t surprise me, then, that by S3, we were starting to see some personality changes in Madeline -- she grew colder, more rigid and controlling, less flexible and tolerant. In the absence of any support system she could turn to, shutting down like that was probably the only viable strategy to enable her to continue to function, but it had great costs -- and ironically, it eventually led to her becoming less rational and making poorer decisions, which in turn made the pressure worse.

Given this as background, the review and the humiliation that came with it simply may have been the last straw. Had the review been conducted in a somewhat different way, with some respect paid to her very genuine contributions and sacrifices for the organization, she may not have been so overwhelmed with bitterness and anger and perhaps might have maintained the presence of mind to act less impulsively.

That last point raises some questions about the way the Agency -- and by extension Jones -- managed its personnel. I think it would be natural to expect that people in high-pressure positions like Madeline’s might be vulnerable to exactly that kind of stress-related impairment over time -- the failure of Center and Oversight to put into place methods of detecting such problems and intervening to provide assistance is just as bad, in my opinion, as the similar criticisms raised against Madeline and Operations in the way they managed their own employees. In both situations it led to the organization squandering resources that they could have, with better management, saved.

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