V, 1.5 - "Welcome To The War"
WRITER: Scott Rosenbaum[SPOILERS] After some creative problems behind-the-scenes, which resulted in ABC taking V off-air after only four episodes last year, it's back to continue its first season, with Scott Rosenbaum (The Shield, Chuck) now at the helm. "Welcome To The War" had the difficult job of reintroducing V's concept and reminding us of the plot-threads left dangling last year, while at the same time giving us a feeling that mistakes are being rectified. It wasn't entirely successful, mostly because it's impossible to reassemble the DNA of a show overnight, but there were a few promising signs that means I'll be sticking around for awhile longer...
DIRECTOR: Yves Simoneau
GUEST CAST: Charles Mesure, Lexa Doig, Mark Hildreth, Nicholas Lea, Christopher Shyer, Rekha Sharma, Roark Critchlow & Scott Hylands
The general theme of the episode was seeing human resistance leader Erica (Elizabeth Mitchell) and alien ambassador Anna (Morena Baccarin) assemble their respective "teams", in preparation for the "Us V Them" war of the title and recent promotional material. The V's helped the FBI find the identity of the person who bombed a warehouse containing V flu vaccines, using preposterous technology that can reverse simulate the explosion and detect a fingerprint on one of the explosives used (yes, seriously!) Erica knows it was her resistance cell that bombed the building, but the V technology strangely incriminates a British ex-SAS soldier called Kyle Hobbes (Charles Mesure), whom they suspect is a rebel V hiding amongst humans as part of the "Fifth Column" and want the FBI to arrest. However, Hobbes isn't an alien, so Anna and Ryan (Morris Chestnut) instead recruit him to help train their cell's membership.
Anna is likewise keen to create an army to crush the Fifth Column before they become a problem, and with her backup fleet still light years away, she instead chooses the strongest male from amongst the 29 motherships to mate with. This was a rather amusing courtship and mating ritual, too, with Anna choosing a beefcake by smelling the candidates, then having unemotional sex that lasted mere seconds with no eye contact, and sprouting a mouth full of razor-sharp fangs to devour the father to nourish her babies, Black Widow-style. I assume Anna's pregnancy will be high-speed and she'll give birth to hundreds of babies who will grow into adulthood equally as fast, ton be trained as soldiers. Hopefully that style of reproduction is unique to Anna, as a "Queen", because she's not the only one pregnant...
Ryan's girlfriend Valerie (Lourdes Benedicto) is also expecting, but unaware her lover's an alien lizard from another planet (I can see the supermarket tabloid headlines now). I don’t get the impression Valerie will be giving birth to a litter -- either because she's not a Queen, or the fact the child's a hybrid means it'll follow a more human process -- but her pregnancy's definitely accelerated and already causing her to ask all kinds of difficult questions. How long before Ryan's forced to admit she's been knocked up by an extra-terrestrial gecko? I also appreciated the scene where Valerie developed a craving for a dead mouse hanging limp from a trap she found next to a bin, which was a fun nod to the original's infamous rat-eating sequence. Fortunately (or not), Ryan interrupted her before she could gobble up the rodent.Elswhere, Father Jack's (Joel Gretsch) stab wound he sustained from a V who had realized his role with the resistance, was healed thanks to V medication that involved him being injected with their mysterious R6 drug. He's unaware what that means, but has a nightmare he'll transform into one of them, but it's actually just an undetectable way for the V's to track the human population with real-time displays of their health. Erica's teenage son Tyler (Logan Huffman) had his childhood memories explored inside a special chamber, where it was revealed the V's don't have an emotional side to how their memories are recalled (is this fascination with human emotion in any way connected to Anna's ability to give her species a narcotic-like hit of "Bliss"?) It's still not clear why Anna and her daughter Lisa (Laura Vandervoort) have chosen Tyler in particular, but even more inexplicable why Erica doesn't just tell her son that the V's motivations are evil by having Ryan prove it to him.
I'm still disinterested in Chad Decker (Scott Wolf), the news anchor who suspects his narcissism and career ambition is being manipulated by Anna, who's using him as a human mouthpiece for their propaganda. He's been told he has a brain aneurism that's imperceptible by human science, but is so far unwilling to undergo surgery with the V's.
Overall, in some ways this was a confident return, but it still only really amounted to a few decent scenes, some fun moments to demonstrate the V's alien nature, and few good ideas that will hopefully bear fruit later. At least the Resistance feels slightly more plausible now. It's just difficult to find any of the actors beyond Mitchell and Baccarin particularly interesting, and even Mitchell's primarily benefiting from residual affection for her character in Lost. Baccarin's still the undoubted highlight (a marvelously creepy performance with perfect body language and line delivery), but perhaps we need to see the enemy more active and aggressive to fire our interest? I think we need more of the bald assassin who went after Jack and Erica, as all the recurring villains are playing the gentile creepiness card.
Asides
- New showrunner Scott Rosenbaum has stated his intention to give V a maternal theme, and you definitely felt the focus on mothers protecting their children and pregnancy here. I was a little perplexed to hear people react negatively to his intention here recently, but I think some subtext is exactly what V needs. I mean, Aliens had a strong maternal theme running through it, and nobody complained about that. It's what gave the action and characters depth.
- Word of advice, alien assassins: don't tell humans where your physical weak spots are during a fight with them.
- Was anyone else reminded of Cocoon when Ryan revealed his alien self by lowering his eyelid?
- I mentioned it last year, but I think the decision to use extensive greenscreen in the V mothership has been a big mistake. All such scenes looks incredibly fake and cheap. I would be far better to build some proper sets, perhaps ones that can be easily refitted to look like different areas of the ship. If greenscreen has to be used to give certain areas a sense of size, so be it, but right now it's distracting when all of Anna's scenes have the backdrop of a blurred video-game.
