You have to know *both* shows for them to make sense, which rules out a lot of these stories for me. If I had known before I started them that they were crossovers, I would have skipped them and chosen a few of her other stories.
[...]through S2, I was still thinking in terms of 'let's all finally band together to bring down the big bad" when it came to thinking about some of my very first story plot-lines. Tension yes, but still thinking that some kind of 'band of brothers' bond might emerge.
S3 pretty much killed that (though why the end of S2 didn't - I couldn't tell you....).
I think that direction *was* still plausible even after the ending of S2. Nikita had, after all, chosen Section, albeit reluctantly. At the time, I also believed that both Michael *and Madeline* recognized that fact -- I took Madeline's urging Operations to refrain from cancelling Nikita outright as a way of buying Nikita time until Operations cooled off and could see things more objectively. I ended that season hoping that the following one would explore a new, unwary truce between a now-more-mature-and-less-prone-to-black-and-white-condemnations Nikita and a Section that was coming to value her strengths more and more.
S3 completely threw all of those possibilities away, of course. Argh.
