Will V be what it was ment to be?
V was written at a different time in history. A history many people have either forgot or are too young to remember. V is an Orwellian story. It began with a dedication, to freedom fighters past present and future. It opened in El Salvador, with rebels fighting communist oppression, a sight far too many have forgotten. The cold war wasn’t cold in the rest of the world.
The piece sign so many people flash came from World War II. And it didn’t really mean piece, it meant victory. Sure piece was a by product of that victory, victory over oppression and domination. But first and foremost, it meant victory. In the original story the first time you see the V it is because a holocaust survivor corrects a kid. The kid is tagging propaganda posters the aliens have put up, and the old man tells him “if your going to do it, do it right”, and he spray paints the V for victory.
I’m afraid the new V will be more about the sci fi and less about the true meaning of the series. When it aired, we all watch. A whole nation watched, because it was a story about our times. It was a fantasy about the world we live in, but the world we lived in was real and everyone knew it then. Latin America, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the list goes on. The world we lived was in danger, and a sci fi mini series showed us, through fantasy, that we are all are not so different. That was its meaning and ots legacy.
I wonder if this new show will tell the same story to a new generation. I wonder if it will teach those that have forgotten, or those that never experienced it. I’m afraid it wont, I’m afraid it will just be another Lost, another fantasy that exists only for itself.
Too many people are into genres as genres, in reality all fantasies are supposed to tell us something about ourselves. In the end they are supposed to have meaning beyond special effects and the sheer fantasy itself.
At a time when racial equality was something deadly to talk about, there was show with a black female officer, with Russian and Asian officers. At a time when we thought there where no more heroes, the archetypal story of a boy becoming a hero about King Arthur and his light saber reminded us to believe, a story about a New Yorker who sacrifices his happines to save his city made us forget about the horror a 2 dozen madmen created just months before.
What will this new V teach us, or is it just another sci fi fantasy that will be forgotten as quickly as it arrived?