Cancelled Well Before It Ought To Have Been, V Season Two Impresses!

The Good: Decent character development, Much of the acting, Special effects, Great storyline
The Bad: Character inconsistencies, Little bit of acting, Lack of resolution.
The Basics: With only ten episodes, V Season Two ramps the viewer up to . . . an abrupt end.


Stylistically, I am deeply tempted to begin this review and then, mid-way end it without explanation or a final rating. That would mirror what, quite unfortunately, happens with V Season Two. My wife and I recently rewatched V Season One (reviewed here!) in advance of her presenting me with season two as an Easter gift. While this usually would be considered a great gift, the two-disc Blu-Ray set left both of us ultimately depressed. While I missed the first few episodes when they originally aired, the entire season was new to my wife. As the show progressed and after virtually every episode, my wife turned to me and said, “This show is so smart, why did they cancel it?!” to which I always responded, “Wait until you see where they left it!”

The thing is, when the season gets to its abrupt conclusion, it is hard not to feel sour, especially when one considers that shows like Gray’s Anatomy stay on the air for years and new shows like GCB and Don’t Trust The B In Apartment 23 are nowhere near as smart as V was. And the cliffhanger makes it impractical to simply finish the series off with a single movie, a la Firefly and Serenity. The result is a pretty wonderful ten-episode season that is virtually impossible to recommend as enthusiastically as it ought to be.

Picking up shortly after where the first season ended, Anna’s release of a compound that is turning the sky red has the world on edge. After a week of Red Sky, a rain falls and while it does, Erica Evans uses her son Tyler to get her aboard the New York mothership and establish contact with Anna. Anna reveals Red Sky to be a way for the Vs to revitalize the environment of Earth and strengthen the biosphere. Erica is, naturally, skeptical and it does not take long for her to confirm that the Red Sky boosted the potassium in the food chain, which the rebels, now aided by a scientist Sid, soon learn means that the Visitors will be able to breed in humans.

As Tyler continues to distance himself from Erica, Lisa takes more risks for the humans and Ryan comes under the thumb of Anna, who has the now-resurrected Joshua give his baby an illness only Anna’s bliss may cure. But even as Chad Decker joins the fight on the ground and inadvertently plays Anna’s pawn in a mission to keep the Catholic Church from endorsing the Visitors, Anna’s control begins to waver. Locked in the bowels of the New York mothership is Diana, Anna’s mother and when Lisa learns she is still alive, the Resistance has real hope for the first time in a long time. But that hope is quickly jeopardized when Anna realizes the true strength of Ryan’s hybrid child . . .

Even writing about the second season of V is enough to get me riled up. The show, heavily serialized, built extraordinarily well upon the first season and upon each episode in the second season. With twists and turns around almost every virtual corner, V was getting better and better when it was abruptly canceled. And, on the subject of the virtual corners - V employed mostly virtual sets from Zoic Studios – the special effects in the show continued to get better and better as the season progressed, making it even more gripping as it fleshed out a disturbing new reality.

The cast for V remained fairly stable, though there were significant casualties, mostly in the climax of the series. To better understand how the show gripped its audience, it helps to know who shaped the world of V. In the second season, the principle characters include:

Erica Evans - A smart FBI agent, she is now the head of the Anti-V Task Force, which roots out threats to the Visitors. It does not take long before she discovers that her partner is a Visitor and after dispatching her, she is troubled when an old friend joins the team and potentially makes her life more difficult. Feeling her grip on Tyler slipping, she calls in Tyler’s father as an act of desperation. Following a disastrous hostage situation, she finds herself in command of the worldwide Fifth Column defending the planet against the Visitors,

Ryan Nichols – Utterly trapped by Anna, he is forced to work against the Fifth Column in order to try to save his daughter’s life. When he betrays Erica, Erica kicks him to the curb, giving him very little to fight for other than his daughter’s life,

Father Jack Landry - A Catholic priest, he brings Chad inside the Fifth Column. When his anti-V rhetoric leads to a suicide bombing that kills Visitors and humans, he is laicized. Living in Hobbes’s bunker, he remains the heart of the Resistance and does what he can to keep Erica focused and human,

Chad Decker – Having seen that the Visitors are torturing those who are a part of the Live Aboard program and discovering that the Visitors themselves have a resistance movement, he joins Erica’s Fifth Column cell. Still using his access to get close to Anna, when his show’s ratings begin to slip, he gladly takes on a co-anchor who helps him get the truth out,

Kyle Hobbes – The arms dealer continues to dig into why the Visitors want him out of the way and he searches for Sarah, the woman they claim is still alive and they have access to. He helps Erica fight against the Visitors with an appropriately brutal sensibility,

Tyler – Now eighteen, he becomes the first human to pilot a Visitor shuttle. But his genetic irregularities are soon revealed to be not only the result of Visitor tampering, but a key part of their longterm goals on Earth. As he romances Lisa, he unwittingly performs a vital function for Anna. Rejecting Erica, he spends most of his time on the New York mothership,

Sid - A young scientist who discovered a Visitor body that was over fifty years old, he is up to speed on what the Visitors seem to be doing on Earth. His studies allow Erica to sabotage a Blue Energy reactor and almost keep up with the Visitors as they harvest human DNA,

Joshua - The Visitor medic appears to have no knowledge of his life before being shot. As a result of forgetting his time as a Fifth Column member, he aids Anna in accelerating the growth of her final Queen Egg and unleashing her progeny,

Lisa - Anna's daughter, she has real love for Tyler. Bearing the fear that Joshua might remember her part in the destruction of Anna’s army, she leaves the ship as often as possible. Upon witnessing Anna returning from the dungeon, she finds a surprising ally in Diana,

Marcus - Anna's ruthless security chief and chief lieutenant. He watches Anna lose her grip on more than one occasion. Believing she is being corrupted by human emotions, he bides his time, trying to keep her focused on their mission,

and Anna - The leader of the Visitors, she has the ability to tap into the Visitors' hive mind with a Bliss that keeps them in line. Following the outburst that led to Red Sky, she moves Concordia ahead and prepares to land the cloaked ships which will be the final part of the invasion of Earth. All the while, she torments Diana, keeps a close eye on Lisa and takes Ryan’s daughter in in a way that makes the child identify her as its mother!

The acting in the second season is largely excellent. Charles Mesure and Christopher Shyer stand out for their performances as Hobbes and Marcus. Shyer does cold and creepy with an expertise that makes me eager to find other things he has been in. And while Mesure is clearly used sometimes simply to appear without a shirt, his portrayal of Hobbes as the ultimate pragmatist is excellent.

Much of the show hinges on Elizabeth Mitchell and Morena Baccarin. Mitchell, unfortunately, plays Erica much the way she played her character on Lost, so she alternates between talking in whispy, quiet tones, shouting and emoting simply by opening her eyes very wide. Baccarin, on the other hand, gives Anna a decently long arc. She is not simply presenting Anna falling apart and thus, the character works exceptionally well because she slowly peels back the character’s resistance to human emotions. It is the slow burn of Baccarin’s performance that makes Anna’s character move in the final episode one that it makes sense for Lisa to buy into.

The real acting winner, though, is Joel Gretsch. Gretsch plays Father Jack Landry and in the second season, he steps out of any lingering shadow he was in from The 4400. Gretsch alternately plays a priest with an iron backbone and a deeply hurt man from whom everything he cares has been stripped. The way Gretsch looks at Mitchell’s Erica speaks so much about his humanity and the longing he has to cling to all that is good. Gretsch makes Landry the one to watch over the course of the second season!

Now on Blu-Ray, V Season two comes loaded with deleted scenes, a blooper reel and two featurettes, none of which satisfactorily explore how such an amazing show could get shitcanned. Usually, I would advocate waiting until the whole series is out or a film follow-up was being developed to purchase a season like this. But, with ABC Productions holding all the cards in this case, that possibility seems exceedingly remote. Buy it while you can find it!

For other parts of the V Saga, be sure to check out my reviews of:
V
V: The Final Battle
V: The Television Series

8/10

For other television reviews, please visit my Television Review Index Page for an organized listing of all the shows and seasons I have reviewed!

© 2012 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Smart, Tense And Predictable To Science Fiction Fans: V Season 1 Is A "V" For Our Time!

The Good: Excellent plot, Interesting characters, Good mood, Great acting, Decent effects
The Bad: Somewhat predictable to seasoned science fiction fans.
The Basics: V is reimagined in contemporary times where aliens visit Earth for sinister purposes only to have a resistance learn that they have been among us for some time!

I'll admit it, I was one of the many who let out a big groan when I heard that V was returning to ABC as a weekly television series. Don't get me wrong: I love the original mini-series V. I even like V: The Final Battle. But my experiences has been so soured by the 1980s television series V that did not want to see just how ABC would butcher the mythos of the classic science fiction series. After all, one of the hallmarks of V was that it was smart science fiction, not special-effects-driven sci-fi. So when the pilot episode aired and it was clear that the new television series V was not a continuation of the classic V, but rather a complete reimagining of it, I warmed up to it very quickly.

Even so, the first season of V on DVD and Blu-Ray reveals for fans of the series and science fiction in general its true weakness, which is that it hinges on a few key reversals which fail with the element of surprise. Indeed, when the resistance within the Visitors society - the Fifth Column - is introduced, I called one of the most important members of that group and as the season was coming to a head, my wife turned to me and said "Hey, you were wrong." As the last frames (literally) of the season played, though, she turned to me and said "Oh my gosh! How did you know?!" Quite simply, the first season of V is working on a pretty tight formula which is likely to be familiar to fans of genre works as opposed to truly audacious or original.

That said, V The Complete First Season is entirely enjoyable. The first aspect that makes it such a winner is that it is surprisingly smart. Far too often in science fiction film and television today, stories are driven by special effects and they fail to tell a truly compelling story. With V, the producers have tapped into the paranoia of the day and crafted their story around current issues, most notably paranoia about terrorism. While this might make the current incarnation of V dated in twenty years, right now it remains cutting edge and the overall story feels fresh even if some of the reversals and attempts to thrill the audience are not.

Erica Evans is an FBI agent working in a counterterrorism task force in New York City, raising her son Tyler on her own. While she and Dale work to expose terrorist cells planning subversive activities, Tyler acts out as most teen boys do. But then giant ships enter Earth's atmosphere and begin hovering above major cities, like New York, Tokyo and Moscow. Erica is immediately suspicious, especially when she notes that terrorist cell activity plummeted, save one group which actually became exceptionally more active when the ships arrived. Also on edge is Father Jack Landry and Ryan Nichols, a newlywed man who has intimate knowledge of both the cell Erica is investigating and the spaceships which have arrived. Almost immediately, the people of Earth are contacted by the ships.

The aliens look human and they call themselves the Visitors. Led by the charming Anna, the Visitors seeks to replenish their ships' stores in exchange for the humans using some of their technology. But Landry has his doubts about the Visitors and he and Erica end up at a meeting led by Georgie Sutton, who reveals that the Visitors have been here for quite some time and that their agenda is a sinister one. The meeting is broken up by a Visitor device which kills almost everyone and exposes Erica's partner as a Visitor. While Anna launches a charm campaign, primarily using news reporter Chad Decker, Erica, Father Jack, Ryan and Georgie establish a resistance cell to try to learn about and thwart the Visitors.

This soon becomes a two pronged war for Erica, though, as Tyler becomes smitten with Anna's daughter, Lisa. While Erica is forced to work with the Visitors to protect them and she is disgusted by the way humans are being manipulated through free healthcare and other technologies, Anna and her lieutenant, Marcus, begin eliminating the threats to the Visitors, from human terrorists like Kyle Hobbes to Visitors who have human sympathies. While Erica tries desperately to stop her resistance cell from being exposed, Anna decides to make an army of Visitor soldiers to prepare to subjugate Earth if it turns against her.

The first season of V is both properly ambitious as a story on its own and a setup for the entire series which works well to keep viewers interested and provide us with some faith that the first season shall not be the best of the series. The writers are particularly smart about human psychology and the use of the Visitors to prey upon basic human emotions is exceptionally smart. As a result, Erica and her team are continually hamstrung by the fact that their efforts are going to be unpopular with the masses, even as they try to save them. Similarly, Anna is a master manipulator and her understanding of how the human mind works is exceptional, allowing her to play off the public sympathies.

One of the key figures that has a turbulent relationship with the Visitors in this regard is Chad Decker. Decker is plagued by very basic human ambition, which Anna realizes almost immediately when he makes a pass at her amid other reporters' more scathing questions. Anna quickly plays off Decker's desires for fame and fortune, but she is unable to account for his own sense of integrity and spite. So, when Anna punishes Chad by withholding access, Chad becomes more free to report on the anti-Visitor sentiment. This leads Anna to arrange more elaborate public relations events both to rally support for the Visitors - opening health clinics using Visitor technology - and against anti-Visitor terrorists, like the shooting down of a Visitor shuttle filled with human civilians.

V employs a sufficiently diverse range of characters in its first season and that helps the stories flow with a surprising sense of realism. More than just simple science fiction, the first season of V plays well as a drama with a sense of urgency and understanding both for the times we live in and the motivations for people around the world. While the scope of V is frequently more focused on Erica and her cell in the New York City area, Anna is often in contact with leaders from other nations and she makes presentations to the United Nations and heads of state around the world.

Like most decent dramas, V is focused primarily on characters. In the first season, the principle characters include:

Erica Evans - A smart FBI agent, she is working to raise her son Tyler when the Visitors arrive. She is perceptive when it comes to the minds of terrorists, which allows her to quickly infer that the Visitors are a potential threat to humanity. She manages to use her position within the FBI to redirect suspicion from herself and her friends when they begin acting out against the Visitors. But when Tyler becomes interested in the Visitors' "live aboard" program, Anna realizes Erica's Achilles' heel,

Ryan Nichols - A smart businessman and a Visitor who was sent in advance as a sleeper agent. He helps Erica with her resistance even as he is hunted by the Visitors for going rogue. He is a friend of Georgie and he knows what Anna's ultimate goals are. He is immune to the Bliss Anna has over the Visitors,

Father Jack Landry - A Catholic priest who rejects the notion that the Visitors must be god's creatures, too and he urges caution to his parish. As more people turn to the Visitors instead of the church, Landry has time to aid Erica in exposing the Visitors. He is used by Chad Decker to get into the resistance,

Chad Decker - A manipulative reporter whose career is on the slide until the Visitors arrive. He forms a rapport with Anna and begins a chess match with her and her security chief, Marcus, over how to manipulate public sentiment. His sense of gamesmanship is trumped, however, when the Visitor medics diagnose him with a future aneurysm which they offer to treat in exchange for his compliance,

Valerie - Ryan's human wife who, rather miraculously, has become pregnant,

Tyler - Erica's teenage son, he is rebellious and has issues with both his mother and father. He sees the Visitors as a way to straighten out his life, especially Lisa, whom he becomes rapidly enamored with,

Georgie Sutton - A paranoid man who has known about the existence of extraterrestrials on Earth for some time. He tries to expose the Visitors and his group is slaughtered. Rescued by Ryan, he helps Erica and the resistance,

Joshua - The Visitor medic aboard Anna's ship, he is a part of the Fifth Column and does not believe in Anna's agenda. When he is forced to test the Visitors for human sympathies, he discovers a weak link in Anna's command structure and a tool for the resistance,

Lisa - Anna's daughter, she is part of the mission to win over human youths. She begins to manipulate Tyler for Anna, but soon develops real feelings for him, a condition which puts her in danger,

Marcus - Anna's ruthless security chief and chief lieutenant. He is brutal in his attempts to suppress the fifth column and advance the Visitor's agenda. He is the only one Anna truly seems to trust,

and Anna - The leader of the Visitors, she has the ability to tap into the Visitors' hive mind with a Bliss that keeps them in line. She impregnates herself with the eggs of the soldiers and looks to make a brood in advance of an armada's arrival. She is clever and sexy and represents a grave threat to Earth.

V works quite well in its first season because of the acting. Elizabeth Mitchell discovers life after Lost (click here for my review of that series!) where she played Dr. Juliet Burke for three seasons as Erica and she illustrates a real ability to act by presenting a character who is very different from the one that brought her to the attention of most genre fans. Erica is smart, in control and efficient; Mitchell dumps the spaciness and uncertainty of Juliet to make the character work completely.

Similarly, Morena Baccarin is great as Anna. Best known to genre fans from her role on Firefly, Baccarin returns to television in the passionless role of Anna and she is perfectly cast. Indeed, most of the Visitors are cast with a sense of reptilian appearance, but Baccarin looks especially slick and cold as Anna, making the viewer invest completely in her inhumanity. She plays off Laura Vandervoort (Lisa) perfectly and the pair has a great, cold chemistry about them.

But while many might say that Christopher Shyer steals the show as Marcus, I say Shyer - like Joel Gretch, Scott Wolf and Charles Mesure - is merely the product of genius casting. Morris Chestnut (Ryan) and David Richmond-Peck (Georgie) are the ones to watch. Richmond-Peck calls the viewer back to a time when geeks were cool (like with David Duchovny in the early seasons of The X-Files). Georgie is played out as an appropriately fractured character and Richmond-Peck is believable and easy to empathize with as a result. Chestnut is incredible as Ryan and when V goes off the air, it is hard not to imagine him having a bright future as an action hero actor. The way the two play off one another is great.

On DVD and Blu-Ray, the first season of V features commentary tracks on a couple of episodes as well as featurettes on the special effects and reimagining of the series. As well there are entertaining bloopers and deleted scenes which flesh out some of the key episodes.

Ultimately, V The Complete First Season is one which fans are going to want to pick up in advance of the show returning to television in late November. For those who missed it in the first run, the DVD set is great because the story plays well back to back as it is tightly serialized. This is one of the best first seasons of any show I've seen in recent memory.

For other V works, please check out my reviews of:
V
V The Final Battle
V The Complete Television Series

8/10

For other television reviews, please visit my index page by clicking here!

© 2010 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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From The Annals Of Just Plain Terrible: V: The Complete Series Is Bad Television/DVD!

The Good: I've got nothing
The Bad: Acting, Character development (or devolvement), Plots, Special effects, Everything!
The Basics: Following the Liberation of Earth, the Visitors return for one of the worst-ever series' on television and now DVD.


V is a classic science fiction mini-series that made an allegory of oppression and dictatorship by introducing apparently benevolent aliens (The Visitors) who come to Earth under the guise of friendship to rape the planet of water and use the people as food. Because of the success of V (click here for that review) they followed up with V: The Final Battle (reviewed here!) which chronicled the Resistance on Earth as they attempted to liberate the planet from the Visitors, who were now mostly exposed as the villains they were.

Yet the passably good V: The Final Battle was not to be the end of the saga. Regrettably, a television show was made of the events that followed V: The Final Battle and it is now on DVD as V: The Television Series. If you wish to save yourself the time on this review, here's the advice: Run! Don't bother getting this DVD set. It's appallingly bad. It makes one wish they had never seen V, never gotten invested in the characters from the mini-series (both of them), makes one wish the '80s would just stay off DVD and die.

Now, I can see how V The TV Series ended up on DVD. I take the blame. There were people like me who loved V, enjoyed V: The Final Battle and were intrigued by the concept of V: The Television Series but did not have cable or bootlegged copies of the series on tape. There were those of us curious enough asking, "How could they possibly make a television series of this after V: The Final Battle?" The short answer: they couldn't. At least, not the way they did.

A year after the liberation of Earth, celebrations are going on around the world and those characters in the V universe that we know are adjusting to their new lives. One might imagine that unemployment is no longer a problem, whatwith the populations of people abducted by the Visitors for use as food. Mike Donovan is muckraking as a reporter once again, working to cover the trial of Visitor leader Diana. Julie Parrish is part of the team working to unlock the secrets of the downed mothership and Robin has gone into hiding with her alien/human hybrid daughter. Elias and Willie have opened a restaurant and Elias is working on being a legitimate businessman.

On her way to her trial, Diana is set free and escapes, alerting Visitor ships that are waiting behind the moon. The Visitors return and the Resistance must start again. There are new complications now, though. The Visitors do not have surprise on their side and humans must compete with each other, most notably businessman Nathan Bates. Nathan is extraordinarily wealthy and is able to negotiate a simple deal with Diana. The Visitors can do what they wish anywhere in the world they want, but Los Angeles is a neutral territory.

Through Nathan, the Visitors devise a new strategy; using humans against each other. They play off ambition, they use humans to enslave other humans in areas that the red dust bacteria still prevents them from moving and they begin a desperate hunt for Elizabeth, Robin's daughter.

V The Television Series starts on shaky ground. V: The Final Battle ended fairly decisively, though with a bit too much science fiction mysticism for my tastes. Restarting the series with the Visitors coming to attempt to take over again after the resources they came for are largely contaminated, is a rocky path. When in the first few minutes of the first episode they reused special effects shots from the original mini-series, it became clear this show did not have the budget to pull off the quality of work the prior movies had done.

Unfortunately, this does not have the writing to pull off the quality of stories that one might expect from this franchise. Lacking entirely in the social and political metaphors of the original V and missing out on the purpose and action of V: The Final Battle, V: The Television Series quickly devolves into the worst, campiest science fiction melodrama I've ever seen. And yes, that includes Blake's 7, which had its moments.

First off, the television series is clearly geared toward a younger audience. Mike Donovan and Julie Parrish - costars of the first two movies - are focused less on than Robin, Elizabeth - who suddenly metamorphosizes into a barely legal young woman - and Nathan Bates' son, Kyle. They develop a silly love triangle. Similarly, on the Visitors' end, Diana is balanced by a poofy-haired blonde commander named Lydia and as the series nears a close, the two compete for the affections of Charles, a close attache to the Leader.

The series features several car chases used to fill time in the weak scripts. It seems every one of them involves a hubcap falling off the car, apparently the mid-80s sign of a vigorous, fast and exciting car chase. So, we have young, supposedly-hot things zipping around in poorly constructed cars trying to save the world. Woo-hoo.

Is it all bad? Just about. Ham Tyler, easily my favorite character from V: The Final Battle soon resurfaces to supply the new Resistance with gadgets and paramilitary expertise. Unfortunately, he is tamed and his character is eventually dropped along with half the cast in the latter half of the season.

Indeed, more than Kyle - who gets quite a bit of airtime -, Nathan Bates has the most potential in the show and he is part of the wholesale cast cut mid-season. Nathan is played by Lane Smith, who seizes the role of the businessman/scientist with gusto, playing the strong-armed negotiator quite well. But, again, he's not a young skinny thing, so he got bounced.

Having seen the V movies, there is nothing but disappointment for the acting in V The Television Series. No one gives a reasonable, or even passable performance. The characters are gutted and this is just plain camp, but in the most unpleasant sense. I could not go back and do Mystery Science Theater to this it was so painful to watch.

And there are big issues as far as the story, etc. goes. The Visitors no longer have their distinctive sounding voices (they vibrate in the movies), Julie and Mike's relationship seems to die a quick death and the voices of experience from prior guerrilla movements are absent from this incarnation.

As for the DVD, there are no bonuses, no extra, nothing to justify this medium other than the opportunity to see this "work."

Save yourself the time, money and energy and enjoy V and V: The Final Battle and allow yourself to believe that nothing comes after that in the saga. I only wish I could.

For other science fiction invasion stories, please check out my reviews of:
Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
"Operation: Annihilate"
Wizards

1/10

For other television show reviews, please visit my index page!

© 2010, 2005 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.



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Less Meaning, More Action When V Comes Around For The Final Battle

The Good: Interesting characters, Good acting, Tension, Plots
The Bad: Lack of social messages from V, Very hokey conclusion
The Basics: With Earth under siege by aliens who want to harvest humanity, a small resistance works to liberate the planet.


When V aired in 1983, Kenneth Johnson had created an amazing epic with long reaching social messages. It was the biggest mini-series to air up until that point and it remains as one of the triumphs of television movie making. Given where V (click here for that review!) left off, at an ambiguous point where Earth is under siege by the extraterrestrial Nazis known as the Visitors and the Resistance is looking to the skies for any help that might arrive, a sequel was almost inevitable. Instead of a four hour mini-series, this time, it's six and it is somewhat inappropriately (given that there was a television series that followed this) titled V: The Final Battle.

Mike Donovan wakens from a dream where he tries desperately to rescue his son from the Visitor's mothership to the real nightmare, a botched raid on a human processing plant that fails due to the lack of sophisticated weaponry. The Resistance, as Julie notes, needs a victory and a big one at that. As Robin's pregnancy begins to show - especially in the form of a strange scaly ring around her neck - Julie and Donovan conceive a plan; they are going to hit the Visitors on prime time television. During the airing of an important medical announcement, the Resistance infiltrates the assembly and tears John's face off and the transmission is not stopped!

The price of their stunt is losing Julie, who is captured by Diana, the scientific leader of the Visitor expedition. She is determined to convert Julie, using her mind control chamber of horrors only briefly seen in V. While she is captured, Donovan plans a rescue mission and the Resistance takes on an arm's dealer and technical expert, Ham Tyler. Tyler adds tension to the group and when Julie is rescued, the three do their best to work together to save Earth. Robin gives birth to twins and in them there is the potential for the Resistance to claim Victory!

Gone are the social messages of Kenneth Johnson's V, replaced instead with more characters who are attempting to solve the big problem. Gone too are characters like the ones played by George Morfogen and Bonnie Bartlett, which makes sense because they played cerebral characters who were part of the social messages of V. Perhaps the new writing team that conceived V The Final Battle decided the "persecute the scientist" plot of V was all done and buried and that is why they did not mention it in the sequel. Either way, V The Final Battle ultimately is a story that tries to bring some resolution to the many many problems posed and left in V.

That is not to say that V The Final Battle does not do it well; it does. Well, it does everything right up until the very end, when the piece takes an absurdly abrupt turn toward the metaphysical and spiritual. It's a difficult ending to accept after five and a half hours of gritty reality wherein people live and die in very real ways.

Here, the main characters of V have even more to do and there is a sense that they grow and change, which is ideal. Mike Donovan begins this installment with an obsession about finding and rescuing his son. As a result, he puts Visitor Spokeswoman Christine Walsh in a compromised position and he's forced to make a hostage trade for his son. But after all of the effort, all of the hope Donovan had in rescuing Sean, he is forced to deal with the possibility that his son has been converted and that eats him up.

Julie continues to grow as a leader, which opens V The Final Battle quite well. Her experience in the conversion chamber leaves her deeply shaken and troubled. She has a pretty legitimate fear that she has actually been converted and she does everything she can to attempt to prove her suspicions wrong and distance herself from the Resistance. Hers is an almost tragic tale of how much she has lost of her security in the war against the Visitors.

Robin becomes an even more important character this time around as she gives birth the the first human/alien hybrid and the results are reasonably terrifying. Fortunately, actress Blair Tefkin is a professional. She has incredible range of facial expressions and emotes wonderfully through her body language and eyes in a way that is easily convincing to the viewer that everything Robin experiences is real. When Robin becomes empowered, the results are terrific and Tefkin delivers astounding quality then.

Similarly, David Packer once more brings the treacherous Daniel Bernstein to life as a realistic youth obsessed with power. Packer keeps Daniel edgy and creepy and there is an air of unpredictability around the performance that makes the character seem truly dangerous in every scene he is in. Bernstein reminds us that even when the villains are obvious, individuals will act in what they feel is their own best interest; Packer reminds the viewer how fun such a character can be to watch.

There are other notable actors and performances in V The Final Battle: Jane Badler gets a whole lot more screentime in this outing and uses it quite well as the menacing Diana, Neva Patterson plays Donovan's nefarious mother with horrifying coldness and Jason Bernard brings Caleb to life with irritability and inner strength. Indeed, this is one of the best ensemble casts, though much of the series comes down to the performances of Marc Singer and Faye Grant who play Donovan and Julie.

The wonderful thing about Grant and Singer is that they each have a wealth of charisma that they infuse in their characters. There's never a moment the audience fails to believe in either one as a viable individual. And even better, Grant and Singer have wonderful on-screen chemistry that only serves to enhance their blooming relationship as characters.

So, will V: The Final Battle be remembered in the same vein as the socially important, expertly executed V? Not likely. But it is certainly a worthy follow-up and entertaining. And for those who watched V, there is a need for some resolution. V The Final Battle, at the very least does that. At best, it tells a decent story with style.

For other invasion or invasion-like stories, please check out my reviews of:
Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters
Zombieland
Watchmen

8/10

For other television and movie reviews, please check out my index page.

© 2010, 2003 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.


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Extraterrestrial Nazis Invade the 1980s: V Is Smart Science Fiction!

The Good: Excellent use of ensemble cast, Wonderful characters, Great plot, Messages and themes.
The Bad: Nothing serious, though some aspects may seem dated.
The Basics: In the epic drama V, aliens come to Earth to exploit our resources until humanity gets wise of them and tries to combat their tyranny.


One of the complaints a lot of people have with science fiction is that it never seems real enough to them. People growing up on science fiction today have a good point. But in previous times, there were science fiction epics that were worthwhile, that bordered on drama because they were about people and compelling issues that were more related to every person than making movies filled with special effects. V is the perfect example of one such science fiction/drama outing. And thankfully it is now preserved on DVD.

Set in a 1980s that never quite happened, V finds reporter Mike Donovan covering a story of resistance fighters in South America when a huge extraterrestrial ship appears. It is one of fifty that appear over major cities worldwide causing a panic. The panic is stopped when the Visitors reveal themselves as human-shaped individuals who have come to Earth for a compound that exists here that they need for the survival of their planet and race. The Visitors offer to share their wealth of knowledge in exchange and are, for the most part, embraced by the people of Earth.

But some of the humans are suspicious, including Mike Donovan. Mike's assistant Tony soon finds cause; when the Visitors begin persecuting the scientific community, Tony reveals that a Nobel Prize winner has been somehow altered and is now signing paperwork with his opposite hand. This seeming innocuous tell seems to be the only definitive link to the strange behavior of several prominent scientists who reveal a conspiracy against the Visitors in the scientific community.

As the world turns on scientists, Dr. Julie Parrish realizes that the Visitors have something to hide and she becomes determined to figure out what their secret is. As scientists begin to disappear and the public persecution of them grows, Julie and her friend Ben Taylor team up to form an active resistance. As Mike Donovan becomes a wanted man, a whole town disappears, his mother becomes a collaborator and the world wakes up in a state of alien-imposed martial law where those who resist are killed. Or worse.

V has one fairly minor flaw and that is it's easy to look at the mini-series and say that it is dated. In one way, it certainly is. The characters - and there are many - are walking around in tight 80s jeans with poofy 80s hair. It's the 1980s. They make no attempt to disguise that. So, then, V becomes a piece of historical fiction as well as science fiction/drama. Anyone who can open their mind to that will be opening their mind to something quite extraordinary indeed, because this is a worthwhile film.

Outside that, the reason V endures is because it has messages that will always be relevant. V is about not surrendering our civil liberties, it is about the importance of the people and their responsibility to rise up and stop tyranny wherever it exists, no matter how sweet or kind the packaging may sell it as. These are lessons many of us could use refreshing on with the current political climate. The Visitors are tyrants and the resistance that rises throughout the film rightly observes that the Visitors cannot destroy humanity unless humanity gives up and allows them to. V is about fighting absolute power, even at the expense of one's own life. In V, the cause is the survival of humanity and the characters risk everything for the greater good.

The reason the Visitors fear the scientific community, of course, is because they are lying to the people of Earth. They are not what they appear to be in terms of appearance or motives. The Visitors, as Donovan learns, are actually reptiles hiding underneath suits of latex that allow them to appear human. This is a wonderful metaphor for their deceptive motives, as the way they sneak and eliminate their threats quietly, in the shadows, is very reptilian and equally concealed. And that's how true power maintains itself; killing the competition in the dark and quietly.

V has a huge cast because it has a wide variety of characters. They range from the rogue reporter Mike Donovan to the anthropologist Robert Maxwell. They encompass a thief on the streets named Elias Taylor to a Holocaust survivor named Abraham Bernstein and his family. And they are not all nice people: Daniel Bernstein is an ambitious youth who joins the Visitor's youth league and becomes a part of their military force, Eleanor Dupres - Mike's mother - is a wealthy socialite who sees the Visitors as a way to gain power in the world and Kristine Walsh rapidly becomes the mouthpiece for the Visitor's anti-scientist agenda and propaganda.

The highlights of the cast are Michael Durrell, George Morfogen, Faye Grant and Marc Singer. Durrell plays Robert Maxwell and the role gives him the chance to explore his range in portraying Maxwell as a cold scientist and a loving father. Durrell has a complex character and his acting is filled with a depth to support that character. Similarly, George Morfogen appears as a father who simply does not want to get involved. He realizes how deeply he is involved when he discovers he cannot speak freely in his own house. Morfogen uses subtle facial expressions and eye movements to capture the character's growing sense of wariness in a way that makes him seem very realistic.

But much of the acting comes down to the strength of Marc Singer, who plays Donovan, and Faye Grant, who plays Julie, by simple virtue that these two have the most airtime. Singer is charismatic and built in a way that makes us believe in the various physical acts he endures in the film. Grant does an excellent job portraying Julie as an intelligent, charismatic individual on the threshold of being a great leader. Her command of body language is particularly impressive throughout the piece and sells the viewer on her character in the various stages of development.

One of the beautiful things about V is that it is long. Writer/Director Kenneth Johnson rather wisely decided not to dumb down this story, instead opening it up and trying to encompass as many different perspectives and characters as possible in the four hours. V is a triumph of how good science fiction can be when it has a message and is not afraid to tell a story with strong characters instead of state-of-the-art special effects.

On DVD, V comes with a commentary track and a huge behind-the-scenes documentary which investigates just how ambitious the project was. It's informative and it pushes the programming up into perfect territory.

For other worthwhile science fiction television, please check out my reviews of:
VR.5
Star Trek
Lost

10/10

For other television reviews, please take a look at the organized listing on my index page by clicking here!

© 2010, 2003 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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