January 4th (Tuesday)
Caprica, SyFy, 6pm Final 5 episode marathon
V, ABC, 9pm Season 2 premier

January 7th (Friday)
Young Justice, Cartoon Network, 7pm Series Premier
Merlin, SyFy, 10pm Season 3 premier

January 9th (Monday)
Bob’s Burgers, FOX, 8:30pm Series premier
The Cape, NBC, 9pm Series premier

January 14th (Friday)
The Ricky Gervais Show, HBO, 9pm Season 2 premier
Funny or Die Presents, HBO, midnight Season 2 premier

January 17th (Monday)
Being Human, SyFy, 9pm Series premier

January 21st (Friday)
Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Starz, 10pm (Prequel series premier)

January 27th (Thursday)
Archer, FX, 10pm Season 2 premier

February 28th (Monday)
The Event, NBC, 9pm Midseason return

April 1st (Friday)
Camelot, Starz, 10pm Series premier

April TBA
Game of Thrones, HBO Series premier

June TBA
Falling Skies, TNT Series premier

The background is delivered via Chad Deckard’s investigative reporting (at Anna’s request) and the resistance group’s own snooping around.  After hearing stories about the Visitor’s Healing Centers, Chad is allowed to do a story from within one.  Other threads lead us there as well, including one in which Ryan’s fiancée finds out not only can her heart condition be cured, but she’s pregnant.  Valerie Stevens is Tyler’s counselor and when she brings up the Health Centers, he says he can probably get her in.  Everyone says the wait list is long, but I’m guessing that’s a ruse to drum up interest.

Anna has made an announcement as well.  The people of the Earth, if they want, will be given a vitamin injection that will supercharge their immune system.  This is in a effort to not only provide health care, but preventative care as well.  The Fab Four don’t buy it and at Ryan’s suggestion they track down a known V and chemist to ascertain the truth.  The chemist shoots Georgie after Georgie threatens to skin him, but then takes a suicide pill that leaves him a burning pile of ash.  They gather information that leads them to a warehouse in which the Vs are manufacturing a compound that’s harmful to humans and putting it not in the vitamin injection, but it our own flu vaccine.  They strike a blow by detonating the warehouse.

Joshua, a chief adviser to Anna and the lead medical officer, has a discussion with his right hand man about the Fifth column.  An investigation into Dale’s murder is underway and Anna wants to make an example.  The assistant claims responsibility to save Joshua and the resistance and for his trouble is skinned alive by Joshua.

Lisa brings Tyler aboard the V ship and they meet Lisa’s mom, High Commander Anna, who shows Tyler the engine room; something no human has ever seen.  Tyler had tried to talk to his mother earlier but she was distracted with work and the resistance.  He’s steadily and predictably becoming more trusting of the Vs and susceptible to their machinations.  But he leaves his computer open and Erica intercepts a message from Brandon saying he’s jealous Tyler got invited to the mothership.

Jack is turning out to be a surprise as he is quite adroit with his fists and at the end we see him opening a cabinet in which is stored an American flag, several medals and a gun.  His reverie is short lived as the man he decked at the warehouse sneaks in under the guise of a sorrowful parishioner so he can get all stabby.  Jack lies bleeding under the crucifix.

Chad’s bio-scan for TV to show the world how cool the V’s technology is has turned up the fact that he has an aneurysm in his brain that will kill him in six months.  It’s treatable.  Chad wants a second opinion.  Anna performs a ritual that involves her getting naked and talking through light to her people and some people on Earth about living in the now and believing in goodness.  Lisa called it a gift; bliss.  Even Joshua, wheeling a cart of bloody tools, seemed to appreciate the serenity.

Anna likes that Tyler is smitten with her daughter and how cool their ship is and tells him it’s only the beginning.  We zoom out into space, out of the Solar System into the Oort Cloud where a few hundred other V ships approach menacingly.

It was all about who to trust.  The fifth column lives and Anna is well aware of it.  Anna trusts in her assessment of human predictability.  Chad Deckard doesn’t trust his own eyes.  Erica doesn’t trust her son but she trusts Ryan, whom she knows is a Visitor.

What strikes me about the show overall is the production value and how it’s still inconsistent.  The external shots of the V ships is excellent.  They look like they’re part of the NY skyline.  Inside the ships everyone seems to be floating on a different plane and all reflecting light from different, diffuse sources.  It’s like really bad cubical lighting.  The sound quality and overdubbing for the few times they need it is also quite horrid.  Remember in Star Wars, the first time you heard Aunt Beru speak and you thought, “Well crap, that’s not her real voice.  Oh well.”  That happens 5-6 times each episode and it really pulls you out of the show.

The camera work, however, is nice.  It plays fancy with the high and low shots, tilting the camera this way and that.  It’s meant to unnerve you and force you to look at everything in different ways and it works.  They may overdo it a little at times, but for the most part it’s becoming the style of the show.  The cinematographers and photo directors are quite in tune with their schooling and how to frame shots and move from one shot to the next.

Hopefully we’ll see John May soon.  Though I have a feeling he and Ryan are the same person.

Three and a half (out of five) Anna heads.

This is a learning episode.  It helps us learn a little more about the V’s.  It helps the characters learn more about each other.  And it helps the show learn how to tell a story and find its voice.  We learn that Cyrus (seen on a business card by Ryan and his fiancée last episode) is a former college of Ryan’s in what was known as the Fifth Column.  Georgie resurfaces and goes to Ryan who says they must build the resistance back up, using the Fifth Column’s mythical leader John May to help.  He says he’s got someone he can talk to.  Cyrus (played by Charlie Jade‘s 01 Boxer, Michael Filipowich) has a lot of contacts and could be a big help find John May, but when Ryan goes to visit him, Cryus hits an alarm and tries to hold Ryan there until the Visitors arrive.  When they do, Ryan is gone, Cyrus is toast, and “John May Lives” is spray painted on the door.  Marcus is displeased.

Erica meanwhile has signed up, or has been ordered, to provide protection at the Visitor Center during the handing out of visas and the arrival of the selected V’s.  She gets a tip that there might be violence.  Protests are constant, fueled by one woman’s story of her fighter pilot husband who died when the V’s arrived.  Anna wants to talk with this Mary Falkner face to face and so she goes to meet the V high commander.  En route, Anna steps out of a small side corridor, intercepting her before they make their public appearance.  When the Mary reemerges, she’s minus her vitriol and says the Visitors are all peachy keen.

Prior to this, a gunman is at the Visitor Center and attempts to take out Marcus.  Erica intervenes and takes the assailant out which pleases Marcus.  The man is taken away and Erica shakes Marcus’s hand.  As she mentioned earlier to Father Jack, she could be helpful to their cause working from the inside.

Father Jack relieves Erica of her scanning through a huge packet of names, looking for survivors from the last meeting.  After apparently a day’s long search, he finds George Sutton.  He tracks down the address to a run down apparently with news clippings of a family murder pinned to the wall.  A woman enters saying George doesn’t live there anymore, wonders if the priest is there to counsel him after allegedly killing his family and blaming it on aliens.  Later, Georgie arrives at the church and at gun point Jack tells him he was the one with the photos from the last meeting.  Georgie agrees to get together with Ryan.

Tyler is still wearing his V jacket, is temporarily kicked out of the Ambassador Program but is allowed back in later.  There’s a scene where Lisa is visiting him and they’re making out and Erica comes home.  Rather than be busted wearing V jackets, Lisa takes her uniform off so it looks like Tyler was just busted nearly doing the ET nasty.  Erica is shocked, but not displeased.

Dale is alive and kicking aboard a V ship.  A medic named Joshua is helping him recover but Dale doesn’t remember much about his fight.  Joshua says that’s normal and they go through a computer holographic construct to regain Dale’s memories.  After a few scenes of him not recalling anything, he figures out he was an FBI agent and a V plant for nearly 20 years.  Finally he remembers that Erica was the one who “killed” him and she also saw his face.  When he makes like he’s gonna wreak his furious vengeance upon her, Joshua injects him with something and says, “The Fifth Column says, ‘Hello.’”

Father Jack, Erica, Georgie and Ryan all meet at the church and kind of stare at each other, obviously mistrustful but wanting to start this resistance thing before it’s too late.  Lisa arrives about the New York mother ship and meets Anna, tells her she wants Tyler.  Then calls Anna mother.  Chad reports on the assassination, but then talks about his upcoming exclusive interview with Mary Falkner.  Anna blinks a lot.

Snaptastic.

Again, this was a learning episode, but a good one.  A lot was revealed and while some of it was expected, if not completely obvious, some was not.  Personally I had hoped Michael Filipowich was going to be returning as I enjoyed his performance in Charlie Jade but being whacked early for being a traitor of a traitorous organization usually means “guest star” billing.

And is Dale dead?  Hard to say.  A metal stake to the side of the head and then through the chest (though not the heart, learn your alien physiology people!) wasn’t enough, I don’t know if some wimpy little drug cocktail will be enough.  I’m sure he’ll return to kill Erica.

Tyler is still a doofus.  I watch enough tween shows with my 8 year old daughter to know what decent teenage acting is like (it’s an arduous task.)  V‘s writers need to watch some as well.  Tyler is wholly 2 dimensional.  Of everyone, his will be a tragic story of family betrayal and as of yet I couldn’t care less about him.

If rated on the sheer number of times I said, “Crap!  I didn’t see THAT coming,” this episode would have been given more Anna heads than I’m allowed.

Four out of five Anna heads.

Agent Erica Evans and Jack Landry see a V ship arrive and begin cleaning up the massacre that was the resistance movement.  She calls 911, which is intercepted by the V’s, and another floating crystal ball of death chases them down.  Thus we start the long fight against the attractive but creepy visitors using nothing but deceit and bad acting.

We don’t know who could be a V, much like we don’t know who could be a Cylon or an Other.  While we don’t officially know what the V’s have in store for humanity, we do know they aren’t telling us the full truth.  There’s been a resistance for many years and we know there are more turncoats like Ryan.  The V’s, then, are hiding something.  That breeds mistrust and we see that Erica, now partner-less and struggling to come to grips with Dale’s real identity, walks through her job in a fog.  Her boss and her office are worried about Dale, but she can’t tell them the truth and has to play it off like he’s missing, then later that he is a traitor working with a terrorist cell.  Erica’s boss let’s her know of a DEA drug investigation that was nearly compromised, so her story of Dale being a traitor wasn’t far off.

We’re introduced to a couple new characters, including Agent Sarita Malik (Rekha “BS:G’s Tory” Sharma) who is investigating things in relation to V’s.  It’s a special task force, but given Sharma has already played a Cylon (oh, did I spoil that?) it makes watching her as a new character investigating the Visitors seem a little awkward; as though she has TRAITOR stamped on her forehead already.  It’s like watching Helo on Dollhouse and waiting for him to make out with the actives…oh.  Or like Saul on Dollhouse and waiting for him to drink…wait.  Or Apollo on Dollhouse…I’m sorry, wrong show.

Agent Malik on V talks to Father Landry about the man who gave him the photos.  He plays dumb and doesn’t mention the photos, remembering Erica’s advice on trusting people.  Anna is pitching her desire to travel freely on the Earth via travel visas.  So far only a couple countries are holding out, including the US.  Interviewer Chad feels he got played by Anna’s non-interview and plans on getting a bit of revenge.  He sets up a debate panel asking why people didn’t trust the V’s.  Anna’s not happy.  She and her assistant Marcus try to bully Chad but he stands tall and tells them he’s not their play thing.

Tyler and Brandon are stupidly enamored with the V’s and Lisa in particular.  Tyler punches a protester and Lisa suddenly isn’t so hot on him.  She says she can’t see him any more.  He and his bike are sad.

Ryan visits New Jersey and another traitor, Angelo, who has a V med kit complete with ooze gun to help Ryan’s wound.  He then drugs him and leaves, calling him later to tell him to be careful with his human girlfriend.  Angelo rattles off some of her historical data and says if he can get to her, anyone can.  Later in their home, she sees a photo that’s upside-down and turning it back over reveals a business card with Cyrus and an address.  He plays it off, she doesn’t seem to me mind.  His arm is nearly healed thanks to the goo.

Erica thanks Tyler for not getting involved with the V’s (or at least lying to her about it.)  He pulls up Lisa’s picture on his phone.  Erica shreds a picture of Dale.  We zoom up to the V’s ship where Dale is resurrected on a lonely table.  So at least Alan Tudyk will be back.  Where’s Georgie?  The character I liked the most is gone and in his place we have a weirdly robotic yet easily amused Agent Malik.

At this point I still want to see all the disparate story lines develop.  I’m still interested in the characters with the exception of Tyler and Brandon and Lisa.  I realize why this part of the story exists and I know it ties into the everyman or grassroots idea of humanity versus aliens.  Tyler is optimism and naivete and everything the V’s want.  He’s a yummy morsel of a human and they can’t wait to eat him up.  It’s his job to be brainwashed.  But the performance is unbelievable and the writing is lacking.  It feels like their dialog is written by 50 year old German nuns whose only exposure to American youth was through beach party movies with Frankie and Annette.  Lisa is serviceable, but if I have to hear another pandering to the youth line like, “Dude, two words: Awe Some!” I think I’m going to have to take a hostage.

Erica is still hard to figure out and I believe it’s Mitchell’s delivery or the lines she’s given at times.  Her interaction with Father Landry in the FBI office is fantastic.  Her interaction with Father Landry outside the federal building later is horrible.  The dubbing, the quality, the believability.  If I can say one thing about V, it’s that its inconsistencies are consistent.

Two and a half out of five Anna heads.

(Review contains spoilers, if you don’t want to be spoiled, never saw the original series, don’t expect the aliens to end up being villainous lizard people, please don’t read on.)

Originally aired in 1983, V was a two part miniseries running on NBC.  It was followed by a sequel mini series in 1984 and then a regular series that ran for 19 episodes until 1985.  This reimaging (which has been the catch phrase of remakes since BS:G) focuses on the same principle plot points:  Aliens from another world visit Earth under the guise of peace and cooperation.  Their cover story is they have no home and need resources which are abundant on Earth and once they are replenished they will leave.  We come to find out that they are not what they say and a resistance forms to drive the aliens away.

ABC hyped the coolness right off this show.  When it first started putting out ads for it, it was exciting, but you couldn’t go a single commercial break without seeing Scott Wolf say, “Excuse me?”  When it finally aired, my first comment was, “Really?  It’s only an hour?”  To which a friend responded, “Hey, you don’t mess with my Dancing with the Stars.”

Truth.

I watched this on my DVR after waiting the traditional 20 minutes in respect for the TV gods and so I could fast forward through the commercials.  However, between the DVR skipping and jumping to different spots (well done Suddenlink) and the kids needing to be fed and bathed, I had to watch it in starts and stops.  At one point I had to let the recording finish and start over.  My reaction, then, was unsettled.  Whether or not I gave the show enough of a chance at this point is academic.

Without further ado, meet our story lines.

Erica Evans (Elizabeth “Lost’s Juliet” Mitchell) is an FBI Agent (of course) who is investigating terrorist cells with her partner Dale Maddox (Alan “I make everything I’m in a little better” Tudyk.)  Erica has a teenage son Tyler and he has a best friend Brandon.  They’re in a clinic after being in a fight.

Chad Decker (Scott “Party of Five” Wolf) is a news anchor who really wants to be a reporter but the network won’t give him a shot.  When the Visitors arrive, he makes a joke and suddenly becomes the news liaison to the Visitors.

Ryan Nichols (Morris “Yes this is my name” Chestnut) plays a banker or clerk (his abc.com bio says “business man”) who is buying a ring and getting ready to propose to his girlfriend Valerie Holt (Lourdes “24″ “NYPD Blue” Benedicto.)  He’s being hounded by an old acquaintance, Georgie Sutton, who wants him to come back to the operation.  Ryan tells him to shove off.

Father Jack Landry (Joel “The 4400″ Gretsch) and his mentor (I don’t know how priest hierarchies work) Father Travis are arguing over the fact that no one comes into church any more.

And along come the visitors.

Anna (Morena “Firefly” Baccarin) is the leader of the Visitors.  They arrive on their giant space crafts which they stole from the Independence Day aliens and hover over several dozen major metropolitan cities.  Why is it aliens love to hover over major cities?  Wouldn’t you want to land somewhere or stay in orbit and send down smaller craft?  It seems like a perfect way to scare people and waste a lot of fuel.  Yes, they’ve perfected the technology behind gravity manipulation, but it still seems a bit showy.

Anna calms the people by saying, “We mean you no harm.  We are of peace.  Always.”  The once panicked humanity actually applauds the giant jumbotron screen in the sky.  Anna gets Chad Decker to do an interview but doesn’t want any negative questions.  The Visitors were once like humans in their emotions but have since learned to control it and realize that negative emotions are wasteful.

Meanwhile, Agents Evans and Maddox are investigating a terrorist cell.  They noticed a certain group’s activity increased after the Visitors arrived, rather than decreased like all the others.  They go to track some leads but are one step behind at each turn.  Finally a clue leads them to a resistance meeting led by Georgie Sutton.  Erica and Father Jack are both there and suddenly a floating shrapnel bomb explodes and kills several people.  The hideout is then raided by people wielding bladed weapons.  They start tearing down resistance members.  Erica is attacked by her partner and when she hits him with a metal bar, she sees reptile skin under his human skin.

Erica’s son Tyler is smitten with a recruiting hottie named Lisa (Laura “Smallville” Vendervoort) and forges his mom’s signature so he can be part of the Visitor Youth something or other.  As his mom and Father Jack are escaping with their lives, he’s accepting a toast at the first meeting of the Visitor Community Awareness shindig.

Oh, also?  Ryan is a visitor and helps Georgie escape.  He’s a traitor.  The visitors have been here for decades.  This “arrival” is just the last phase of their plan to take over the world.

I have to go back to the quote at the beginning of this post.  I rewound several parts of this first episode because I missed something truly integral to the rest of the show.  I mean, if you blinked you missed the whole reason Agents Evans and Maddox were investigating an underground storage area.  You missed Georgie’s speech about who the Visitors really were.  You missed the recruitment pitch by Lisa and the interview post mortem by Chad and Anna’s first in command Marcus.  It was a breakneck pace and at the same time it moved too fast for me to appreciate what was going on.

The comparison I have to V is to the recent film District 9 in which an alien race becomes stranded over South Africa and are forced to leave their ship and live on Earth in a refugee camp.  At the beginning of the movie, we are told the entire back story in news clippings and interviews and it takes about 15 minutes.  Comparatively, in Independence Day the entire invasion takes place over just a couple days but also spans the full movie until they are fought off right at the end.  V took this unsure middle ground where the ships show up in the first couple minutes, but then we spend the rest of the time in an unsure time machine.  The only part that gave any indication of how much time had past was half way through when we see the caption “Three Weeks Later” but by that time I was already confused as it seemed much more time had past or none at all.

This treatment could have been given a better chance had it run two hours.  I’m not saying that because I think Dancing With The Stars is a waste of my time, but because it was hard keeping up with everyone.  You have 40 minutes to introduce four different plots, 8 major and several minor characters AND an alien invasion, something’s going to get lost.  And in this case it was the identification I had with anyone.  What also suffered was the writing.  Because we only get a few short moments with each character, their lines have to be jam packed with emotion, meaning and clues.  We don’t get the film approach to dialog that can be drawn out to explore the full range of an actor’s abilities; we get sound bites that are awkward and stiff.  Even Mitchell, who is great in Lost had some lines that were just flat.  Alan Tudyk was only mildly interesting.  The rest of the cast was fairly boring.

I will make an exception for Georgie, played by David Richmond-Peck.  He had the typical task of being the Resistance leader and in doing so had to deliver conspiracy and paranoia in a limited space, but I feel he did a bang up job.  His revulsion but ultimate need to remain close to Ryan was painted skillfully on his face and the indoctrination scene with Erica could not have been handled better.

There was a lot that didn’t make sense in the show.  Early on when the alien ship first arrived, the army was already in place to section people off in some random order, but right out in the middle of the streets of New York.  There was no reason given and there was no obvious need to do so.  Erica and Tyler were a family without a husband and dad and yet despite the arrival of another life form, they can’t work out their mistrust.  Also, despite the arrival of aliens, Agent Evans continues to work on terrorist threats.  Little things like that make me pull my hair out.  I don’t know about you, but if an alien ship started floating over Austin and Morena Baccarin came out, I think I might quit my job and go wait around by that ship.

This series is going to be set up as a constant fight between the Resistance and the Visitors.  It can’t go forever and one side will have to win.  But they crammed the entire fight into one episode and now instead of any meaningful discovery, all we have left is the fight and I’m not sure I can deal with 17 episodes of rebellion.

Three out of five Anna heads.