Written by Alex Wilgus on November 5, 2009
ABC’s remake of the 1983 miniseries “V” debuted Wednesday night. It’s good. Only one episode in it’s already better than anything ABC has to offer, cleverly avoiding the traps a first act tends to set: overlong character development acted at mediocre caliber, slow reveals, laying an obvious groundwork for future plot twists. V bypasses all that with an explosive pilot that moves at a pleasant clip. It’s no-nonsense television and it’s a whole lot of fun though it’s not exactly breaking new ground thematically.V is Independence Day meets Battlestar Galactica. Giant spaceships roll into every major city in the world and the visitors (“Vs”) come in peace. The reward for cooperation is new technology and a partnership with the potential to end war. They begin propaganda campaigns via the media, begin seeding pop culture with their conspicuous single-letter brand and begin recruiting human youth for their new inter-species exchange programs. For a small band of concerned citizens (an FBI agent, a banker, a priest and a news anchor; all evenly spaced throughout the societal spectrum) it is clear that the Vs are up to no good. Whatever their evil schemes are, it involves seeding humanity with the most powerful weapon imaginable: devotion.
The show’s not so subtle undertones rehash our modern era’s most familiar paranoia: devotion. The ham fists start flying when a skeptical priest questions the aliens’ motives to his superior, calling attention to their unsettling pretensions of salvation (knowing looks all around). If that doesn’t get through to you the money shot of a big crucifix falling to the ground and shattering will.
V may be better than most network television, but the score is the same: the faithful are creepy and the thoughtful are the underdogs. If only that was true in the real world. Today, attacking the devoted is like kicking the crap out of a dead puppy. Patriotism is a bygone dream and Church has been silly for years now, and still we keep swatting at America’s last remaining vestments of faith and trust in higher things. The show falls into the familiar vein of perpetuating the modern litany of skepticism. Beware of people asking for your allegiance. While Obama-haters may get warm fuzzies from the “don’t trust in hope” message, the show is primarily a rerun of the familiar modern litany of skepticism. Beware: brainwashers are among us. Don’t believe in anything, trust no one but your own objective-rational faculties, and hold fast to…oh you know those good things you hold dear. Now let’s all have a vacuous moment of silence in remembrance of a time when people actually believed something enough to dedicate their lives to it because as far as we enlightened moderns are concerned, they’re all just lizards in people’s clothing.
But never mind all that. The show is a lot of fun, clearly influenced by classic Sci-Fi stories like the Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and most particularly, an episode of the Twilight Zone called “To Serve Man”. I know what I’ll be doing next Tuesday night.
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