Halfway through tonight’s episode of V, I was all fired-up and ready to slam it on the AV Club for the third week running when a funny thing happened – the plot started advancing. There were some honest-to-goodness twists! The resistance gained a name, and some new members! And hell, Lauren Vandervoort even took her clothes off. I don’t think V’s out of the woods yet – it still feels too small-scale considering its theme and most of the dialogue just falls out of the actors’ mouths – but with one week to go, progress is being made.
It took a half-hour of slow-as-molasses bullshit to get the “A Bright New Day” started, though. The biggest snore came as Erica was assigned by the feebs to protect the Vs after death threats were made against them – which makes absolutely no sense at all whatsoever. I understand that the Vs now have tourist status and are technically under U.S. jurisdiction, but hello, they’re aliens in motherships. I’m sure they have their own very capable security measures.
Erica, capable fed that she is, proves excellent at her job – she totally figures out that someone stole a V jacket and pinpoints the attacker when he draws two huge guns and points them at the man-V (I forget his name) in slow motion. Nailed it! The Vs are very impressed and as such, she gets an in with them, sort of. It’s more of a “we’ll call you,” but she gets to look behind the curtain of their dull, CTU-style headquarters and finds a surveillance room with lots of floaty red boxes. The Vs are monitoring us…through the jackets they’re distributing! Pardon me if I didn’t find this creepy. Considering the modern surveillance society we all live in, I’d be a little more impressed if the Vs were watching traffic cams and stuff too. Instead, we have to be near a jacket for them to have their eyes on us?
I didn’t really understand Erica’s motivations in making an effort to help the Vs, either. She tells Father Jack it’s better that they don’t get shot and accrue more public sympathy, but what if the assassin totally shoot their faces off on live TV, revealing the scaly skin beneath? Now, it turns out that the assassin was a V agent himself and it was all a ploy to accrue sympathy, but she didn’t know that!
Our other main resistance fighter, Ryan, bids goodbye to Ms. “I’m just collecting a paycheck” Lourdes Benedicto and contacts another V traitor for info. But otherwise, the scene plays exactly. The same. As it did last week. Ryan says “hey dude, help a lizard-alien-traitor out!” The other guy says sure, then double-crosses him two seconds later. On the plus side, we learn some new stuff. The V traitors get a name – THE FIFTH COLUMN. Ooh. They have a mysterious leader, called John May. Cyrus (the other traitor) tells Ryan he’s been promised “reconnection” to the “bliss” by the Vs, as long as he turns in Columnists (that’s what I’m callin’ em). Now, I’m not a die-hard Trek nerd, so apologies if my memory is hazy, but that sounds a bit like the Dominion from Deep Space Nine, right? Odo was severed from the great linky-thing, which was basically like a thousand-person orgy of writhing minds linked together. Is this why the Vs all whisper to each other like they’re in softcore porn?
Anyway, it’s just allusions and conjecture at this point, but maybe that’s how Anna keeps everything so uniform. Less certain is: does she has the same effect on humans (mind control) or is she just so damn charming? Anna’s charms defuse a Cindy Sheehan-type protestor whose husband was in the F-15 that crashed in New York in the pilot episode. Just by talking to her in a reasoned way, the protestor backs off, and praises the Vs message of peace. Did Anna use her BLISS powers, or is it us, the humans, that are fools? Either way, Morena Baccarin, still the star of the show, got the best moment of the episode, a cute-n-creepy montage of her rehearsing the most sympathetic way to apologize.