"I didn't think about it, I was pleased to be finished."

Peta Wilson thought she'd left the Toronto set of "La Femme Nikita" in May for the last time, closing a chapter in her career and going on to new projects.

"It was sort of mutual for all of us: Fine, great to be moving on to the next thing."

But weeks after the cast and production-crew members had dispersed, their phones started ringing. They were asked to negotiate deals for some new episodes -- their characters were to report back to Section One for another covert anti-terrorist mission.

And on Sunday, a specially prepared coda to the "La Femme Nikita" series will begin airing on USA Network. Eight new episodes have been made with an eye to tying up loose ends in the long, moody run of this sexy thriller.

Wilson says the company had parted ways in May with no hard feelings and a good long run under their belts. "No drama -- 'That was great, nice run, that's it' -- that's how I felt about it."

Almost as stealthily as the show's black-clad Section One agents move in and out of terrorist cells, USA Network and Fireworks Entertainment Productions had infiltrated a dark corner of cult-hit consciousness. "La Femme Nikita," after four years, could hold its own for sheer mannerist distinction in television melodrama with Patrick McGoohan's 1967 phenomenon, "The Prisoner."

Producer-collaborators Joel Surnow, Jamie Lee Rock and their associates started with filmmaker Luc Besson's 1990 "Nikita" and created an unforgiving world of futurist espionage: The sexually toned power plays going on inside Section One have always been far more threatening than the explosive missions carried out against enemy operatives in the field.

Much as McGoohan came out of "The Prisoner" forever tied to its fanciful coastal setting, The Village, in Portmeirion, Wales, Wilson flew to Los Angeles last summer as an enduring icon of the chilly beauty of Section One. The ebullient, athletic Australian -- while aging from 26 to 30 -- had put herself onto the international map in this constantly shifting, soulful-operative role.

In earlier interviews, she has spoken of predictably torn feelings about "Nikita" -- a show that has both made her and typed her. "Creatively, television isn't the best medium for an actor," she'd told CNN.com at the end of the show's third season. "In TV, there are only so many squares for a circle to roll around in."

Nevertheless, Wilson's work so far is largely rolling around in those squares. In addition to playing a role in the four-hour "It's a Girl Thing," set to air on Showtime sometime in the coming months, "I'm developing a pilot now to shoot for NBC, shooting in March. By later in January it'll have a title. I'm taking the script home with me" to Australia "to read while I'm there."

And having often described a performance school she'd like to establish for "at-risk" youngsters, some of Wilson's goals aren't in acting at all. Psycht is a new line of watches that Wilson says she's introducing with Jasper Sceats, son of designer Jonathan Sceats. Wilson says she hopes the watches may be out later this month at Barneys and other retailers.

But as eager as Wilson is to get on with her career outside "Section," as its characters and fans call it, these past months of taping may have seemed to mimic the show's many scripted comments over the years about how operatives have no life outside Section.

"I was definitely surprised. I think it was about six weeks, seven weeks after we'd wrapped the last season before they told me" that, in reality, "La Femme Nikita" wasn't over after all.

The rest of her career would go back onto hold. Her new assignment: "Basically answering all the questions of the fans."

Wilson is moving pots and pans around her kitchen as she packs up for a trip home to Sydney, to her seaside family and life there. Boyfriend and filmmaker Damian Harris is off to his own family for a bit in England. (The film they made together with Ellen Barkin and Julian Sands, "Mercy," was released last winter but found little traction outside the video-rental stores.)

A certain finality is ringing in every slam-down and placement of a utensil with which she punctuates her conversation. "I mean, that's what it was. The characters are the same. Nikita -- you've seen her evolution over four years -- she's like a phoenix, she's come into a phoenix status," rising from the victimization of the role's inception to, at the end of the fourth season, an unexpected operative, herself, of the over-agency: Center.

"I think it's a natural progression. She's become 'what it is' -- you don't kill that many people and not become a little hardened. She evolved into something else."

Wilson agrees, in fact, that this parallels the character created by Anne Parillaud in Besson's 1990 film, too. By the movie's end, Parillaud's Nikita shows little of the naïveté she had at the outset. Wilson says she felt, however, that the progression was complete for her own television Nikita last summer.

"I liked the way it ended, personally, but the fans" -- a pot clangs down -- "the fans objected. They didn't like that I didn't look back at Michael," Nikita's love interest played with show-styling impact by Quebecois actor Roy DuPuis.

The fans are restless

"Back by popular demand" is a phrase you've heard before. It's nothing new. There may have been no fonder advertising poster slogan in vaudeville days as hopeful hacks rolled back into towns they'd played too many times before. The marketing instinct being what it is, there may well have been revivals of Aristophanes' plays in ancient Greece announced as "back by popular demand."

And USA Network -- which gets credit for taking a gamble on "La Femme Nikita" and sticking with its edgy grace for four years -- is sparing no effort in beating the "back by popular demand" drum.

It's no Section secret that there's a tremendous fan base out there for the show. Producer Rock has talked about monitoring the many "Nikita" sites' chat rooms and message boards to see how parts of various episodes were playing in Poughkeepsie and all points cyber.

According to the network, more than 25,000 letters and e-mail messages from some 40 countries descended on USA Network's offices after the fourth season of "La Femme Nikita" concluded. The effort was led by a fan cell that called itself First Team.

First Team and cohorts had watched Section One's ace mission strategist Madeline (Alberta Watson) commit suicide. Communications master Birkoff (Matthew Ferguson) had done the same, but had been replaced by his twin brother Jason. Section One chief Operations (Eugene Robert Glazer) was assigned to a biblical seven more years' labor in Section One. Munitions expert Walter (Don Francks) was dispatched to teach at "the Farm." And arch-operative Michael (Roy DuPuis) had been rescued from a suicide mission but then left to his own devices by a newly glowering Nikita -- who'd turned out to be the right-hand woman of the triumphant Mr. Jones (Carlo Rota).

Not good enough, USA Network says, for the fans.

At one point in November, network officials say, the company's viewer e-mail address was temporarily shut down by the overload.

Some fans bought a full-page ad in the Hollywood Reporter, campaigning for more "Nikita" episodes to tie up ends they thought were unacceptably loose when the fourth season ended. One fan sent the network a television. Four VCRs arrived. More than 100 pairs of sunglasses were shipped to USA Network. Sunglasses have held a chic spot in the show's urbane imagery and communications tech -- and they were a decor motif on Wilson's early apartment-interior sets.

Money was flung at the company -- USA Network reports getting some $3,000 from fans and handing it over to charities. Someone sent in cookies baked with actor DuPuis' picture on them. Someone else printed about $100 of fake dollar bills picturing him.

Maybe more tellingly, the network says 24 percent of "La Femme Nikita"-watchers live in households that make more than $75,000 annually. That places the "Nikita"-rati on a par with the relatively upscale audiences traditionally drawn to the Arts&Entertainment network and Discovery. And ratings for the show when it ended were going the right way: They were 61 percent higher at the end of last summer than at the beginning.

Some 60 percent of the "La Femme Nikita" faithful, the company says, falls in the 18- to 49-year age bracket, beloved of advertisers. And 27 percent of "Nikita" households are led by college graduates, considered another big plus on Madison Avenue.

In other words, USA Network felt there was easily enough meaningful audience to support some question-answering additional episodes of the show.

"The fans wanted to know," says Wilson, "how I was going to take care of Michael" after Nikita had saved him in the fourth-season finale. Presumed dead by both Section and Center, Michael indeed finished up in a bind as Nikita stalked off through a yellow-luminous glade.

"I'd always loved him," Wilson says. "But I had to walk off from him like that -- one of us had to sacrifice."

Not good enough, USA Network says, for the fans. "So the new episodes just answer a lot of questions."

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