Anybody who has followed Priyanka Chopra’s career knows that her success story is one for the legends, yet no other figure creates such polarizing opinions as she does. Say what you want about her, but she is made of grit and steel, and for all her charm, a lot of what she says and does comes across as nails on a chalkboard cringe. Look at Citadel, for example. A series made on the second biggest budget, and our desi girl is starring in it, looking like a million bucks, but why on earth would she make herself sound like that throughout the episodes? Her voice is husky, to begin with, but why has she lowered it even further to the point of incoherence? We can’t blame her for the bad writing of the series, and neither can we fault her for signing up for this, but we will blame her for the awful execution of her character. It is especially disappointing since she is one of the few people who is both an actor and an entertainer, which is not very common in show business.
The limited imagination of Citadel‘s writers meant that Nadia’s defining quality, and in many ways, the only quality she had, was that of being mysterious. Nadia’s father was a terrorist, while on the contrary, her mother was a former agent of Citadel. We don’t know how their affair happened or how Nadia was born. We will probably get more of that information in the next season, though we don’t think we care enough about Citadel as a whole to want to watch more of it. Nadia Sinh is annoying, and Mason Kane is a doozy, so our curiosity about what happens next is literally nonexistent. Either way, Nadia Sinh was not just confident, but she was arrogant about her abilities. That is why she so openly challenged Mason and came across as being silly and extra to us. But their affair started soon enough, and they were together almost all the time. We could never be sure whether Nadia loved Mason the way he loved her. She agreed to marry him, but that was not enough for us. Something about her always seemed out of reach, and we believe that Mason felt the same way. As we are saying this, we are also softening towards Priyanka Chopra. If the brief said nothing else except to be mysterious, of course, she would go the extra mile, no matter how irritating it might feel to anyone. She did her job, and it is the writers’ fault (one among many) for not having given her character more dimension so that she could drop the unnecessary husk out of her voice and the deliberate slowness from her walk.
But coming back to Nadia, we suppose that when she loved someone, she did it with all her heart. We have yet to know how her friendship with Celeste started, but she seemed more committed to it than to her relationship with Mason. Nadia had known Celeste for five years, and she vouched for her as if she had known her for her entire life. Something about that felt off. A spy can vouch for someone, but that shouldn’t stop others from forming their own opinions about things. There was something weird about Nadia’s overprotectiveness toward Celeste, or should we just ascribe it to more bad writing? Regardless, when Celeste was sent for her mission, Nadia carried out her own quest under its umbrella and destroyed the Oz key. This is a way in which Nadia is similar to Mason and to Citadel. Their loyalty was only towards what they believed was right.
Nadia did not trust anyone, not even Citadel, to not misuse the power of the Oz key; hence, she had it destroyed. She also let Celeste take the fall for it, and that felt contrary to Nadia’s proud and upstanding character. Had she at least tried to tell Mason the truth in private, we would have thought differently. Nadia did not know the extent to which Mason had gone in trying to cover her tracks, but when she discovered it, there was no looking back anymore. Nadia had already agreed to marry him by this time, which means that she saw a future with him. However, knowing that he had willingly destroyed Celeste showed Nadia a new side of Mason. He may have been a ruthless spy, but now, he was also someone who wasn’t honest with his future wife. In fact, when Nadia realized his true motivations, she realized that Mason had never really understood her either. He had simply decided that he did not want to know anything about her that would make him love her less. But Mason did not realize that spending your life with a person could not be started with wilful ignorance about them. This was the act that made Nadia realize the depth of Mason’s insecurity, and she did not want anything to do with him from then on.
But their ties were far from severed. Nadia was pregnant, and she wanted to keep the child. We will never understand what it is about TV mothers choosing to keep their kids’ parentage a secret for no rhyme or reason other than pride and anger. But again, “mysterious’ ‘TV women are simply those who do not want to overshare their lives with every person they get romantic with. This sounds like a regular person in their 30s, not some unexplainable, spy-fighting woman whose mind works in complex and magical ways.
Nadia did not want to tell Mason about her daughter because she believed that his insecurity regarding family wouldn’t allow him to become a good father. She was also still angry with him for what he had done to Celeste, and it was just something she could not come back from. Nadia was right to leave him, but it made no sense to tell him about his daughter. Since Citadel Season 2 is inevitable, we are going to see Mason fight his feelings for Celeste and Nadia, with the latter learning to co-parent with the person responsible for the fall of Citadel.
