V

I have to agree. The last episode was full of unrealistic scenarios and reeked of cheesy writing. The scene you're talking about is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen on a tv show. Then of course they had to follow up with another scene where Erica shoots the V trying to strangle Ryan. They take ten seconds to pause just so to make sure the audience can keep up. We fucking get it. They're 'even.' She trusts him - whatever.

- Erica's son is such an awkward faggot I literally feel the need to turn away from the tv.

- "Hey guys, we made a difference today." Lines like this show how lazy and untalented the writers are. So cheesy and lame.

- Why don't they try to capture ONE V and skin him? It would prove they've been lying to everyone and draw more members to the resistance. Yeah, I know they're all fanatics and will try to swallow their suicide pills, but there's dozens of ways to incapacitate someone. Revealing the true face of the aliens would have been the first step for any competent resistance.

- I just don't really like any of the characters. The dialogue lacks humor, depth, resonance, or anything meaningful other than driving the plot forward. And worse, when they attempt to show depth it just makes the characters less compelling. Everyone hates Tyler and the priest's constant struggle between wanting to be a man of God and a soldier is tiresome. Besides it being blatantly obvious what the right thing to do is, the show didn't need any more whiny pedantic bullshit.

If they postponed the show to clean it up I can certainly see why. I'm guessing that the V's overall plan for humanity is to enslave them. It ties in well with all the medical tests they're running and the vaccine they want to administer. Plus, it seems like Anna is already doing something similar with her own people via the bliss.

Edit: On second thought Mr. misfire did want to skin one and Ryan has somewhat legit reasons because of his fiance. Still, Erica and the priest should have been trying to do this. It's the most obvious course of action and there is no rational explanation for not doing it.

 

I think Doc Jensen put it best in his most recent Lost article: "Let's take a moment and shoot furious eye darts of blazing indignation at her new show, V, for completely letting Mitchell down with mediocre material."

 

The 5th episode is out. Seemed like more of the same to me.

 

Saw the new ep. and the catch up one before it since I missed all but the first.

I thought it was good but not on par with Lost. Yes, the kid hanging out with Anna's daughter is a fuck tard, but I wouldn't most of us just want tap dat ass too?

It was wild seeing Anna "mate" (2 seconds?) with the other V. Reminded me of how Praying Matis' mate (female kills the male) and Baraka from Mortal Komat.

I'll watch to see what they do to the humans. Slaves? War? Food? Breeding?

 

It was, to e honest, mediocre so far. But Juliette is on it, and I will watch anything with that pretty face attached.

I just hope it doesn't make me regret it, like Heroes.

 

I remember the original V, and let me tell you that just changing the meaning of "V" pissed me off from the onset (It originally meant "victory".)

What I also remember about the original series is that the miniseries (first 10 hours) WAS AWESOME! It sucked you in. It had the arrival, the discovery that the aliens were not so human (in the first episode!), a rebellion forming, and the Star Child. The series itself was not good, and I never really got into it.

I think they are trying to loosely retell the miniseries and expand it out to an entire season, which is a horrible idea. This new series moves slowly, has too big of a cast at this point, and is not leaving the audience wanting more. The greatest thing we've seen is Anna devouring her mate, and that was lackluster. In the first episode of the original series, the following happened, but we've had 4 episodes of nothing until that Anna scene:



When I hit puberty, I began my quest for a girl just like her.

 

This last ep was actually quite engaging.

I want to know what the "truth" about Juliette's son is. I want to know what happens to Georgie. The previews intimate that he'll give up names, but everyone knows that bull. He's the most hardcore anti-V that's not actually a V.

Over/Under on how long until the V doctor dude gets caught/has to leave the ship: 5 episodes.

I swear, Juliette's kid does really look like a great combination of her and the dad guy (though I have a sneaking suspicion he's not his).

That tail in the belly of Ryan's gf was creepily Alien like. I'm looking forward to a chest-burster. At least they didn't mate by face-hugger.

How in the fuck did Georgie get on the ship? They went through a big elaborate scheme to make sure Ryan got on, with the uniform, the fingerprints, the I.D. all working together with the body temp. Georgie was apparently able to just walk in, because... Um, why, again?

 

I think last night's episode may have been the end of my brief love affair with this show. I expected more following the hiatus but even the slight improvements in pacing and plot development can't make up for the shitty characters and lazy writing.

It's probably not a coincidence that my patience is even more testy following a 3-D viewing of Clash of the Titans this weekend. That film is a perfect example for not reimagning classics; it failed to improve on any relevant aspect of the original save for action and special effects...which wasn't hard to do in the first place. Similarly, this version of "V" has missed or outright ignored the story elements that made the original mini-series so captivating.

Case in point: the "Visitor youth" character filled by Tyler Evans in this version that was played by Daniel Bernstein in the mini-series. In the original, Daniel is a neighborhood dork with poor social skills that embraces the Visitors with naive hope and optimisim because he sees the invaders' way of life as preferable to the one he's failing at now. The fact that his family was Jewish and his grandfather was a holocaust survivor made it all the more sad that such a mean and petty kid ended up in a position of authority that threatened the lives of the Maxwell family (complete with their own teenage shithead, Robin).

Tyler Evans, on the other hand, seems motivated mostly by mommy issues and his own dick...neither of which I find interesting or compelling. And the whole "Peace Ambassador" program (with its stupid varsity letter jackets) is nothing more than watered-down, PC version of the militant VY that attracted the kinds of fools that helped the 1980's Visitors establish a cadre or humans willing to help the lizards commit atrocities. It's not difficult to guess that these Peace Ambassadors aren't going to ever be issued laser pistols and expected to kill resistance members the way Daniel willingly shot and killed his old neighbor Ruby. It's just a stupid, seemingly-required plot element that doesn't want to serve the same purpose the original story required but that some producer felt needed to be inserted to produce a sense of parallel to the orignal...completely missing the point in the process.

But of course, the larger problem starts with the 2009 version of the Visitors themselves. Whereas the original series' aliens came to Earth in a cold-war inspired vision of a uniformed military force the current visitors arrived en masse dressed like color-blind yuppies...a conceptual change that in and of itself isn't bad except that it undercuts the change by unnecessarily adding that some Visitors had been on Earth the entire time, living among us as sleeper agents. They are also, apparently, fucking everywhere which is apparently evidence none of these writers watched Sci-Fi's/SyFy's "Battlestar Galactica", a show that handled the matter in a much more effective and suspenseful manner by building in the concession that there were only 12 humanoid Cylon models.

The original Visitors also had a much different approach to accomplishing their mission. They came to Earth under the auspices of mining innocent minerals they needed in exchange for medical and technological advances. But, they came down in shuttles and integrated themselves in exisiting factories and were forced to work side-by-side with regular workin' folk in a development that highlighted human xenophobia. The rank-and-file visitors were ordinary aliens just looking to earn an honest living (Willie!) and brought with them a full range of emotions, too. It's this last point where last night's episode started to lose me.

Whichever writer came up with the idea that the new V's were going to be fundamentally different from humans because of "feelings" should be strapped into a Clockwork Orange chair and forced to watch every "Star Trek" franchise episode that dealt with some Vulcan or android wrestling with emotions so that it can hammer into their skulls that this road has been driven over ad nauseum. And then, for good measure, a few select episodes of BSG can be peppered in showing the Cylons at their emotional best. (There's a reason why Cavils and D'Annas are far more interesting that Simons and Dorals.)

I could go on and on about why this series is inferior to the original mini-series but what really makes me upset is that this show doesn't look like it wants to get better. It's doubling down on plot contrivance vice character development, and it started off in the hole because its characters were weak to begin with. Erica, Ryan, Kung Fu Padre, Tyler, Chad Decker, the chick pregnant with the little tadpole...they're all boring at best or stupid at worst. Anna is the sole character that evokes any kind of interest and that's probably more by accident than design (Morena Baccarin is fascinatingly creepy). I'm not even sure the addition of MICHAEL! IRONSIDE! could save this show at this point, and that guy can pretty much make any show better with nothing more than a raised eyebrow.

I'm sure I'll keep watching for the rest of the season, if for no other reason to see what direction they think they can go to salvage the series. But I'm not hopeful, I just pray they don't drag this thing out for years the way NBC did with "Heroes". They should let it die on the vine if it's not meant to be.

 

I think I may very soon join you.

Hey, in case anyone is still watching..."V" isn't even fucking pretending they have any writers or producers anymore. They've apparently just cut-and-pasted various elements of other shows, including bringing both Michael Trucco (Sam Anders) and Rekha Sharma (Tory Foster) over from the "Battlestar Galactica" set to reprise their roles as "humans in disguise". Gee, that's a stretch. I didn't realize Vancouver had so few employable actors these days. At this rate, I can almost guaran-fucking-tee we'll see Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol) and Michael Hogan (Colonel Tigh) show up as Fifth Column resistance fighters before the end. And as awesome as that would be in and of itself, it's discouraging since I've already seen that show and seen it done much, much better.

I wish recycling Cylons was the worst part of it, though. God...this show is bad. Really bad.

 

I think I'm with you fellas on this. I truly have tried to watch this show and give it a chance. The characters are wooden and annoying. The plot plods along with the worst pacing. The big reveals of things seem obvious from space. Even the actress who plays Anna has been at the top of my 'goddamned' list for about 4 years now can't redeem it for me. Morris Chestnut has got to be the worst actor ever. Especially comparing this story line to the original I simply shake my head.

 

I had to clean out the DVR box when I ran across this gem.
Is this some kind of weird social experiment that the TV execs are doing?
"Lets spend some money on special effects, and see how dumb we can make a TV show about advanced reptilian Aliens who invade Earth."
How do you fuck this up?
I propose that ANYONE on this board, with three of his jackoff friends, could come up with a better storyline.
Drunk. And stoned. On acid. While jerking off. In a circle.

They should just bring back Michael Ironside and have him kill everyone.
Every last fucking one of them.

 

Even though the death knell hasn't sounded yet, it's probably not too early to start the post-mortem for television posterity.

Top 5 Reasons This Show Went Wrong:

- The Visitors have been here all along. The most important mistake because, really, most of the other shit rolls downhill from here. One of the underlying premises that original story/concept is that the Vs were outsiders that had to integrate with closely with humans because they needed "help" to produce their fake mineral. This allowed for Visitors like Steven to charm his way into Eleanor Dupree's (Mike Donovan's mother) graces and to sow the initial seeds of distrust for people like Donovan and Robert Maxwell to become suspicious. Part of this suspicion stemmed from the fact that the Visitors were obviously alien, unlike now when...

- The V's look and sound like us. The first V's were noticeably alien, at least by 80s television special-effects standards; they spoke with strange voices, wore sunglasses because their eyes were sensitive to the light, and they scared birds when they walked by cages. The current aliens (if we may refer to them as such, since ABC obviously won't) actually seem to have no discernible extraterrestrial features unless you hit them with a pipe. But I suppose that makes perfect sense, since it would allow them to blend in with Earthlings all the more easily seeing as how that's their ostensible plan anyway (see above point). However, their sneaky lizard ways become confusing when you consider that this new series is beating us over the head with the notion that...

- V's aren't supposed to have human emotions. When you forgo the presumably politically incorrect physical means of distinguishing the Visitors by voice and wardrobe, this does seem like the go-to science fiction staple. Of course, one of the most recent sci-fi series hits ("Battlestar Galactica") made its bones by turning its evil aliens into some of the most emotional and interesting characters in the show so I don't know why this series is so (ironically) eager to turn their hot-blooded lizards into cold, heartless robots. Furthermore, the only two really convincing Visitors are Anna and her Stanford Blatch-BFF Marcus (both are blessed/cursed with creepy countenances); the rest of the Visitors look like really, really shitty actors. Speaking of which...

- Morris Chestnut was a fucking horrible casting decision. It's not even that he's a bad actor, he's just the worst possible fit for this role. Hmmm, how do I say this without sounding racist? The most critical lizard in a show about lizards from outer space...the one the viewer is actually supposed to like and the one that drives the central tenet of the narrative (a resistance)...can't walk and talk like a character from a Tyler Perry movie. I know the story has tried to build-in a lot of excuses as to why Ryan doesn't appear hatched from the same egg as Anna, Marcus, or Lisa but even with all the writers' help it's extremely hard to suspend your disbelief long enough to buy the idea that he's some alien rebel. But when it comes to unbelievable, that's just the tip of the iceberg since...

- No one seems to have any idea what the resistance is fighting for. Erica hates the V's because her son likes them more than her. Kung Fu Padre hates the V's because his parishioners are confused. Kyle hates the V's because he's a hastily-conceived post-hiatus character. Ryan hates the V's because...actually, why does he hate them? Seriously? At least the Fifth Column in the original series (represented wonderfully by Martin and Barbara) were conscientious military objectors of their unseen Leader's empirical ambitions; That sort of thing made sense to the viewers. But, these reptiles are apparently mindless "Bliss" junkies who are either automatons or free-thinking moles like Tory Foster. How that makes sense is beyond me.


(Damn, I wish I were still in college. I could easily turn this post into an A paper.)