Welcome back to the second of episode of the rebooted V. A kinder, gentler V with a better effects budget. Our trusty Comcast episode synopsis tells us that: "A seeker among the visitors tracks Erica and Father Jack. Chad seeks redemption by investigating the aliens ahead of his next newscast while Law Enforcers press Erica for information concerning Dale Maddox’s whereabouts." I am assuming that “seeker” used in this sense is that floating V spy-bot and not the teen boy from that horrible adaptation of Susan Cooper’s award winning youth novel The Dark is Rising.
Sounds like an exciting evening of network television doesn't it? So what are you waiting for, make the jump and let’s get to the details.
Ok, now that you made the jump and we have captured your page view in our little counter there at the bottom of this review, I gotta tell you, I’m not sure how good I am going to be at this. At first when R3 asked me to handle this responsibility for the site, I thought “sure, why not, it’ll be a breeze!!” – I have a soft spot in my heart for the original and how hard could it be, I just gotta’ recap what happened and crack some jokes along the way. I mean if they can pull it off on Entertainment Weekly Online with little to no strain then certainly I can do it too.
The one thing I didn’t take into account in all of my brilliant planning is how glacially slow this thing is paced. Holy cow can we have any more ominous music with any less occurring on screen? I am hoping that we are just still in the “Portentous” ™ part of the show and soon we will move into the Lizard people eating hamsters part. If I have to sit through another hour of knowing looks or suspicious glances or paranoid dissembling I will seriously… do I don't know what, but it will definitely not be completely pleasant. It might even approach the standing of possibly impolite.
This week, I am not sure how much new information we learned without moving the plot discernibly forward a whole lot. The US Government has put together an alien investigation team called the Visitor Threat Assessment Joint Task Force that is headed up by the FBI. Erika takes a shower and tries to come to grips with the fact the Vs are lizard people and her partner of 6 years was one of them. Anna, the leader of the V is a bit of a fashion plate and likes to check the latest international fashions (I would like to get a better understanding of how she is the leader of the V – I hope that they have put some effort in V society world building. At this point I am seriously doubting that they have put a ton of time into fleshing out the V backstory). Party of Five guy risks upsetting the V while trying to position himself a little bit better politically by broadcasting a non-biased look at the V.
Maybe this is part of the show’s producers’ political subtext – like the call out of the proposed V universal health care system to buy favoritism amongst the general earthling public from the pilot episode. Party of Five could be the show's analog of Larry King or something – a crusading newsman who is really nothing more than an entertainment reporter that apparently believes he drives public opinion.
I am a bit creeped out by the ease with which the V – that have been clearly established as a non-human, but humanoid reptilian type of race – are physically attracted to real humans. We got Ryan, the athletic African-American guy that we learned in the Pilot episode is a deserter V who is deeply in love with a human female and is planning on marrying her, even though he is a Lizard. And we have the thoroughly unlikable and shallowly portrayed teen Erika’s son who is smitten with a hottie blondie V who apparently harbors reciprocal feelings. And Erika’s former partner, Firefly’s Alan Tudyk, who we have already established as one of the V, has been happily married to a human for years.
It is like we have huge spaceships of aliens hovering over all of our major cities and they are completely populated by Human Fetishists.
Heheheh, just totally unrelated – what if the book To Serve Humans turned out not to be about how to cook humans as food but was really about how to out-dance them?
Anyway, have I mentioned how much I hate the Erika’s unlikable teen son story line? Well, I really do not like it. You can see a weird mixture of pre-emptive pandering to the studio and actual studio notes written all over him and his overweight faux nerd best friend.
The big issue that I have with the pacing of the show is that I am never sure how much time has passed – I get the impression that a lot has happened because everyone moves to multiple locations during the span of the show and talk to many people, but looking back over the episode, I get the impression that everything basically happened in one day. It is kind of like Heroes in that regard. A complete lack of internal timeline.
The show does have the importance of ending each show with a cliffhanger type of scene – tonight’s was relatively expected but it was still a great ending to give us all hope for next week’s episode. Only two more until it goes on extended hiatus.
The most disappointing thing though for me in tonight’s episode was that, even though it has an Erika shower scene, I just wasn’t as taken by her this time as I was last week.
Well there you have it. I really feel, for some reason, that I am being too hard on this show – but I really am not sure where. My main criticisms I feel are all pretty solid: poorly paced, clichéd teen characters, lack of any real subtext or depth, no thoughtful V society building, and an emphasis on romantic entanglements when we should be focused on alien lizard people trying to eat our brains.
What are your thoughts? Am I wrong? Am I being too tough on the show? Am I missing something? Will Erika be back to her sexy self from last week on next week’s show?
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| Republibot 3.0 I'm really sorry to hear that. She's in our prayers. 2 days ago |
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| neorandomizer All things being equal I can go for a cosmic reboot. 3 days ago |
| Republibot 3.0 but he has no other genre credits." It seemed like a cool idea to me. 4 days ago |
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Comments
27 June 2009
5 min 31 sec
Just watched this week’s V and if mankind’s future is in the hands of the idiot priest and the milf FBI chick we are doomed. I still think this is alien invasion lite but it is not totally unwatchable like the 80’s original was. You could make the V’s a new political party and not have to change to much of the show which is probably want ABC wanted to bad for them it’s a Democrat in office and not a Republican because it does imply that the party in power is penetrated by the V’s.
I can do without the Quisling teenage rebellion crap but I understand it’s for the ratings. Hopefully he will learn the lesson all males learn (The little head always gets the big head into trouble) or gets killed quickly. As for Quislings the reporter is someone on the I hope he gets killed list.
This is an OK way to kill an hour but it is unremarkable I can’t even remember the characters names.
27 December 2008
11 min 23 sec
My favorite is the Cockatrice, which is half chicken and half snake. It's what happens when you take a snake's egg and let it be raised by a chicken. Ah, the midieval mind!
Yeah, I think it's icksome as well: there's no getting around the fact that some puzzle pieces don't fit together, and even if they do, it's somewhat disconcerting if the pictures on 'em are different. (This one's a happy disney princess! That one's a rat eating roadkill!) It's definitely perverted, and since there likely ain't any aliens anyway, and if there are it's so unlikely that they'd look anything like us that such couplings are unlikely to actually happen. I don't think "Open Mindedness" is really called for here, we're just dealing with someone's sweaty deviant fantasy.
2 January 2009
13 hours 12 min
I just find the whole premise kinda icky - since it is basically intergalatic bestiality. I mean I am pretty open minded, but I still got a ways to go to get there.
Also, it hits close to my other icky animal thing - mythological hybrids. Those things dont make sense - a Centaur? It has six limbs!!! How did it get six limbs?? It has half a man for a head, and pretty much 7/8ths of the remaining horses body as well!! And a Gryphon, the whole front part of it is pretty much 2/3rds of a bird and then the back 3/4ths is a lion!!
Do animal "lovers' not understand math?
27 December 2008
11 min 23 sec
Yeah, but you don't evolve IN to having copper-based blood if you started out with iron-based. They initially felt similarity between humans and "Vulcanians" as they were originally called was just coincidental, then did the 'preservers' retcon later on.
I do think you can do an alien invasion story that makes sense. Footfall wasn't bad, despite the anticlimactic ending. The original V made absolutely no sense, however, particularly given the costs of transporting food, and of course the prevelence of water and other resources in space. Easier to mine the Oort Cloud than to mine a planet.
27 June 2009
5 min 31 sec
I know it was a throwaway line when they used it but TOS did mention on more than one episode that some ancient race spread humanoids throughout the galaxy so I guess you could argue if you had no life that all the humanoids had a common ancestor. No matter how dumb that is the idea that a lizard and a human can have kids is just bad writing at its worst.
V like most alien invasion stories fails the logic test. Why would a space fairing race flyby all the free stuff in space to get resources from Earth. If we are just chow to them then there must be a planet where the cows don’t have nukes and if it is just to find a new home like in Footfall why not just ask why risk a fight they could trade technology for land. The only alien invasion story that made a kind of sense was the Puppet Masters (the book not the movie). Alien invasion only really works as metaphor there is no real logical reason to invade a planet unless you are just an ahole.
2 January 2009
13 hours 12 min
I can't really speak for the stunt casting aspect, though I know there is a lot of easy casting going on to give new shows instant fan buzz - but the only show that R3 mentioned that I have seen the whole run was Firefly and I did that on DVD after seeing Serenity in the theater.
I have watched at most 1.5 episodes of Lost, and possibly 3.25 episodes of BSG.
Lost was just too inscruatable for me to follow and I am part Chinese so take from that what you will and BSG was just way too soap opera-y for my tastes.
I will probably take a stab at Lost again on DVD at some point and go from the beginning after it has completed its run, but I am not as optimistic about BSG's chances that way.
27 December 2008
11 min 24 sec
Thus there's no end of hybridized species in the Trekiverse, for instance. I'd hoped we were past that, of course. B5 had an alien (G'kar) who was a marsupial reptile who had a thing for human and Centauri women, as well as presumably his own species. Judging from the reaction of others when they see evidence of this, G'kar is thought to be kind of a pervert by his own people, though they never really played this up much, and then only in the early episodes.
Evidently G'kar did have a partially human child as an attempt to re-introduce the telepath gene in to the Narn species after it'd been bred out of them, though they mentioned that this was going to be an extremely expensive process involving lots of medical technology, cloning, and whatnot.
So that's handled a bit better there, but I totally agree that it's just dumb.
Yeah, I guess it's typecasting. R2 calls it "The Stargate Genre Actor Retirement Program," though, since they were the first ones to really do it to excess.
27 June 2009
5 min 32 sec
I have not watched this episode yet do to real life getting in the way but it’s on the DVR so I will get to it. One thing though did the writers like cut biology in high school the last time I checked a lizard does not have the gear to swing with humans unless they just like to watch the monkeys do the mommy daddy dance.
It seems this is common in some sci fi where somehow aliens can have sex with humans and produce children. It’s dumb and way to kinky for me and I’m an ex sailor so it’s hard to creep me out with sex.
R3 it called typecasting.
27 December 2008
11 min 24 sec
Yeah, it was slow, and yeah, some parts didn't seem to jell, and yeah, I agree, the teens are terrible (Though the blonde alien chick is undeniably va va voom), but I do feel it was a considerable improvment over last week.
I, too, have a problem with the sexual attraction between the Vees and Humans, though to be perfectly fair, that's a problem I had with the original show as well. Remember one of them impregnated a human, who later gave birth to "The Starchild" or some such nonsense? Bugged me then, buggs me now. Turns out they're not carnivorous reptiles this time out, they're just bored, creepy swingers looking for a new thrill. "Well, I've already buggered the bug people of planet Bugulon-Beta, so I don't know what's left...oh...fleshy mamals? Well hot damn! Wait here while I go get the rubber sheets..."
I suspect there actually *will* be a bit of worldbuilding on the part of the Visitors, simply because they've been acting as the illuminati (As you pointed out last week) for seven or eight years now, and apparently there's a fair number of deserters or defectors. Also, we're told that the Vee plan got moved up considerably - they're not supposed to have made overt contact yet - which raises the question of 'why'? (My hunch: The Vees lost a war, and are on the run. They seem a bit more desparate and intense than they should be if they're merely cattle ranchers)
Stunt Casting # 1: How cool is it that Wash is actually in the show, even if only as a recurring character? I was told he was only in the pilot.
Stunt Casting #2: The indian lady for the FBI Joint Visitor Assesment Whatever was played by Rekha Sharma, who played Tory Foster in the last two and a half years of the new Battlestar Galactica http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0788907/
So basically we've got Juliet from Lost, Wash from Firefly and Dollhouse, Inarra from Firefly and Stargate SG1, and now Tory from BSG: Basically it would seem that if you can get a part on an SF show these days, you're set for life, and can instantly get a job on any other SF show, huh?