There be lizards here captain!
V2 (not to be confused with V8)
(Some spoilers here, you’ve been warned)
A review by Jessica Dwyer
Kenneth Johnson is responsible for some of my best childhood memories. My love for the man is not a secret. He rocks and he created something amazing in the form of V. An allegory for the Nazi regime of Germany using alien lizard people. I know it sounds insane, but it actually worked and worked really well.
The Visitors uniforms with an eerily similar swastika design, their resonating voices, the way you just knew something was up, but didn’t quite figure it out until that epic face ripping happened. Then there were the sympathizers who betrayed their human brethren and the good aliens that tried to help the humans fight. Resistance and the power of those who fight oppression, that was the story that was told in Johnsons epic two mini series and the short lived series that those spawned.
So now, with Lost getting ready to end its run ABC takes NBC’s sci-fi classic into its home and modernizes it with a post 9/11 sensibility. It’s all about the conspiracies now and fear mongering. And according to this new take…the Visitors have been here all along. So yes, they also decided to borrow from John Carpenter’s They Live a bit as well.
I didn’t have the time to catch the premiere at Comicon, so I waited until it was shown to the masses last night on ABC to view the most widely hyped new sci-fi series to hit network TV this season. What did I think? Well sadly I was pretty disappointed.
Firstly, the premiere should have been two hours long…at least. This should have been a 4 hour event ala 24, but the fact is ABC is only showing 6 or 7 episodes before the Olympics start and they shelve the show for a couple of months. But one of the biggest problems was the fact that things ramped in the course of an hour from “Holy crap, there are aliens!” to “Wow, look at my I love V’s Tshirt!” and “I don’t trust them stinking aliens!” In the original series we actually had some build up to this. Now granted, the joke running around the nets is “Spoiler: Their lizards” but still…why not give us some story before hopping right into that aspect of the show?
Another thing is the loss of the whole creepy Nazi like factor and instead making them more messiah/help in the time of need. Granted that may be more timely, but beating us over the head with the imagery of a cross falling down while the mother ship arrives to the terrifying musical crescendo response to “Your talking about universal healthcare!!” (and no I’m not making that up) started getting really old fast.
They’ve also managed to change the entire meaning of the V everyone remembers from the original show. The dripping V logo was actually meant to be a slap in the face of the visitors (who in this new series call themselves that readily) and stood for Victory against the invaders. In this new series the V logo stands for the Visitors themselves. They came with a ready made trademark? How industrious of them.
Having the aliens setting up the invasion for so long as well, with them having infiltrated society makes no sense either. For one thing one of the major plots of the show it seems entails a sympathetic alien who has fallen in love with a human woman and plans on marrying her. If you believe the mythos of this new series the aliens have been doing this type of thing for years. Wouldn’t their human partners have noticed the scales on their babies? Junior doesn’t look like the mailman, but more like the Geico Gecko.
The special effects are nice though. And I like the fact they’ve tried to take the designs from the original show and modernize them. The shuttles for example have a similar look. But in the end, the show feels overly rushed and not thought out well. There are too many issues with the plot which is laden with heavy handed attempts at relevancy and not enough story and characterization. Johnson is listed as a writer for the story of the pilot…but if you notice on his site, he really had nothing to do with it. And it shows. Johnson wants to make a big screen version of his stuff and he’s got a V sequel in print (The Second Generation).
I’ll tune in for another episode and give the show one more shot, but I can see this not returning to ABC once they shelve it.