Marine activists play a significant part in saving the oceans and the creatures living in them. Lea Leviant plays Mika in Netflix’s Under Paris. Mika is a marine activist who founded the organization ‘Save Our Seas,’ and it’s she who first tells Sophia about Lilith being spotted in the Seine. Mika is a young woman who had nothing but pure intentions, but her poor choices and course of action made it impossible to like the character.
Spoilers Ahead
Why did Mika turn Lilith’s tracker off?
Mika got arrested by the River Brigade when she dived in the river late at night, hoping to find Lilith. She saw the car, which reportedly fell into the river, but its driver was never found, and she noticed bite marks on the door. After getting arrested, she refuses to budge at the beginning, but when Adewale dies from a shark attack, she calls Sophia to save the day. Mika’s wish to help Lilith is noble and pure, but it’s in no way helpful for the people who are actually trying to deal with it. Sophia and the River Brigade tried to confirm Lilith’s existence, and when a couple of officers dived into the water to check, Mika insisted that Ben should turn the tracker off. This led to a huge scare between the divers, and Mika doesn’t think about it at all. Mika actually thinks that the cops are going to kill Lilith, not the other way around. She snoops around the spot like a ridiculous teenager, and Sophia sees her before she runs off.
What does Mika do when Sophia confronts her?
Sophia tried to make Mika understand that Lilith isn’t an ordinary shark, but rather an extremely dangerous one and a maneater. Having firsthand experience of Lilith’s behavior, Sophia wasn’t wrong. Mika behaves rudely with her and tells her that she’s just another shark who got lost in the Seine, and it’s her responsibility to get her back in the ocean. Mika thinks Sophia is responsible for her crew’s deaths, and that they never should’ve gone to the ocean anyway. This shows the lack of emotional intelligence in Mika and the little to zero empathy she has for other people. Mika actually wanted to help the whales and sharks, but she stopped caring about the humans along the way. The way she behaves with Sophia is not different from how she behaves with Ben, her girlfriend, who always supports her through all the eccentric decisions and whatnot.
How does Mika tell the world about Lilith?
Mika decides to gather help for her mission to save Lilith and posts a video asking for the same. In the video, she talks about how humans kill millions of sharks every year just for their own profit, and she blames the generations before her for making this world a nasty place to live in. Mika presents good points on animal cruelty and urges us to stop the brutality on sharks. She then proceeds to talk about Lilith being lost in the Seine and how important it is to guide her back home. Mika’s actions and words might come off as ‘woke’ to some people, but I don’t think any of her points are baseless or invalid. What Mika wanted the world to do was the right thing, and obviously a teenager chose to do it in the wrong way, and you can’t blame her for it. Mika managed to get a lot of people behind her after posting the video, and in all honesty, it’s a powerful message for the people to wake up and save the planet.
How does Mika die?
Mika gathers the people who volunteered to help her and makes Ben reactivate the tracker on Lilith. Lilith was hiding in the Catacombs of Paris, which is a tourist destination in real life. Mika planned to lure Lilith to her using sonar and then guide her out of the Seine and back to the ocean. Ben gets worried about her and tells Sophia and the River Brigade about her plan, and when they approach to evacuate the crowd, Mika loses it. She thought that what she’s doing is completely safe, and sharks don’t attack humans, despite Sophia warning her to come out of the water. Soon Lilith shows up, and she has company this time. Lilith had given birth to a baby shark, and both of them started to circle around Mika. Mika tries to pet the baby shark, which was the dumbest thing I’ve seen any character do on screen in a long time. Sophia realized that it’s Lilith’s nest and they shouldn’t be here, but Mika still refused to pay any attention to her. When Adil jumps in the water to drag Mika out to safety, Mika resists and swims away from him. But her constant bad decisions do bite her eventually, and Lilith eats her while everybody watches it happen helplessly.
Her death was just the beginning, and the gathering soon turned into a massacre, thanks to Lilith. Mika’s lover, Ben, had to pay the price of loving her as well, and she drowned in the water after being stomped down by the stampeding crowd trying to make it out. This marks the beginning of the downfall of Paris, and one could argue it could’ve been prevented if Mika didn’t interfere with Sophia and the River Brigade’s original plan to capture Lilith with the help of experts.
