By Jason Apuzzo. I just wanted to remind those of you who are enjoying ABC’s V that the show is back tonight, in what promises to be an interesting episode. Previews for the show (albeit not the one below) have shown a suicide bombing taking place during this episode; plus, the colorful Jane Badler – who played the alien leader in the old series – returns in this episode, something teased in the season premiere.
Also today there’s a new interview out with actress Morena Baccarin, who plays the Visitor queen, Anna. SPOILER WARNING: Baccarin reveals some tantalizing details about how the show’s storyline will be developing – including what cast members from the original series will be returning, and in what capacity; and, furthermore, it’s revealed that the producers have planned-out the storyline of the series through a hypothetical third season, a season which may or may not happen depending on ratings.
Click on over to Collider for more details. I’ve also embedded a preview for tonight’s show below.
[UPDATE: Having now seen the episode, I was not happy with it at all – and my earlier fears about the ‘suicide bomber’ subplot were validated, alas. Although there were aspects of the show I liked – particularly the speculative elements about the human soul, and Jane Badler’s juicy performance as the alien queen’s mother – I was very disappointed by the overall arc and purpose of the suicide bomber subplot. Its purpose seems to be to show that ‘desperate people in desperate circumstances’ will turn to terrorism, even – as we learn – an ex-Israeli Mossad agent. Memo to ABC: the Mossad fights terrorism, and doesn’t practice it. Had the leader of this rogue, suicide-bombing branch of the show’s ‘Fifth Column’ been a Chechen or a Russian, I think it would’ve been much more believable. As it stands, however, having its leader be ex-Mossad feels like a cheap shot toward the Israelis. Also: having the actual suicide bomber himself be a Catholic parishioner who is ‘inspired’ by Father Jack’s words was in extremely poor taste. What a disappointment. Two shows in, and my enthusiasm has already cooled.]
Posted on January 11th, 2011 at 2:26pm.
Good episode! Love the evil Mom…
I too loved the evil Mom – kept in the basement! – but I was not otherwise happy with the show. I’ll post an update about that above.
I think it took me most of the episode to wrap my head around a former Mossad agent training suicide bombers, but then I was just left with a sickening feeling in my stomach.
Here’s what we learned from V so far, in a sociopolitical sense:
– It’s now okay to examine collectivist ideologies like socialized healthcare and the global warming hoax.
– But Islamism is STILL a sacred cow, while Judea-Christian beliefs are easy targets — so much so, that the writers will make suicide bombers out of Jews and Catholics! I can’t even write it without laughing.
– And I guess American foreign policy in WWI with “the bomb” served to attract a greater evil than this world could possibly imagine. But then again, the end of WWII gave way to the Cold War, so maybe I can go with that imagery if I squint hard enough, but I sense that’s not what they meant.
My time is valuable, and I don’t think I’m going to die if I don’t find out what happens on V — even tough it’s amassed a fair amount of goodwill.
Agreed on all points. What a complete bummer this episode was. And, ultimately, this is a perfect example of why I can never quite give myself over to network entertainment – the sucker punches always come. It’s just a matter of time.
It appears that V may be heading the way of 24, only faster …
Those are good observations…I’m just hoping it’s going to not end up with that POV. I didn’t catch the atomic bomb line. The suicide bombers…I was thinking WHAT,why tack left now; surely they don’t mean it that way. First you have a “good” priest, then Catholic suicide bombers? Doesn’t make sense.
Guess I’m just hoping against hope.
We’ll see what happens. It’s also worth pointing out that they have a lot of different writers working on the show, so this could end up being an aberration.
It was certainly insulting, but the most aggravating part is that the writers probably thought they were making some profound statement about how people act in desperate situations. I complained about this before the episode aired but the same thing happened during the New Caprica arc on Battlestar Galactica.
Suicide bombers aren’t as complex as TV writers seem to think they are. They aren’t worthy of this kind of critical examination.
I’ll keep watching, the show still has a lot of positives stacked up against few negatives, but I just hope this doesn’t indicate a new trend.
Agreed, BlackHawk. [Sigh.] Very frustrating.
This is awful news. On the strength of your last piece on V I went out and bought the first season, watched it, and generally loved it.
Although, I have to say I got a distinctly bad vibe at the end of the season – not sure why, I just felt something was “off” – I felt Ryan was acting ridiculously, first of all (was he really so shallow that he thought “human emotion” = “bliss-on-earth”? I thought he understood that pain and loss came with the package). Secondly, they were too vague on what exactly Hobbes was doing (he’s my favorite character, fwiw), but to believe for a second that after understanding just how much destruction these aliens are capable of he would turn short-sighted craven mercenary again… too much for me. I really hope they don’t take Hobbes in that direction.
Finally, and above all, they started to bang the terrorism drum quite hard in the final two episodes. The show began with the understanding that the Fifth Column was engaged in a just “war.” By the end of season one that was thoroughly muddled and Hobbes explains that “Like it or not, we’re terrorists.”
I hope you at least watch the next episode and give us a report – I’m on the fence now and have missed the first few episodes this season.
Thanks for your comments, SeeSaw, and I’m feeling awful for having recommended the show just before it started going in this other direction. Even as I was writing that earlier piece, I just had the feeling that somehow it all couldn’t last – you know? But I’m still required to tell people about what’s out there – and I had never really done a full report on V, so I felt obligated to tell people how much I’d liked it.
For professional reasons, I’m likely to keep watching the show for now. It should be pointed out that this is a show with many twists and turns, so perhaps some of these problems will be resolved down the line – or things will be revealed as more complicated than they initially seem. The show has earned a little slack from me … but not much more, frankly.
Thanks for the reply Jason –
No need to feel any regret – the overall edge of the show DID warrant your (justifiably apprehensive) enthusiasm, and I’m happy you got me to get off my butt and give it a shot. Overall, I was amazed at what I saw in the first season, and even with some lefty cheap-shots here and there (mostly about Iraq), what the show managed to get away with consistently, especially with regard to health care, green nonsense, and the media, was enough to make my jaw drop.
But it really is intriguing – I kept wondering if the writers actually understood what they were doing. It really did seem by the end of the first season that, yes, in fact, they did understand (despite what I saw as some muddle at the end). So even if the show goes rotten, “We’ll always have Season One.”
But what at tragedy that would be – it’s one thing to get yet another lefty show from start to finish, and entirely another to get a show that promises to be a kind of Brave New World-type statement, a lone, sane, genuinely brave new voice in the howling wilderness of Planet TV, fizzle out and cower into stereotypical mush and moral equivalency.
By the way, do you have any info. on who wrote the last episode? I’d like to see if he or they wrote any in the first season. Just curious.
SeeSaw, thanks so much for your comments. Your assessment of V‘s potential as a “Brave New World-type statement, a lone, sane, genuinely brave new voice in the howling wilderness of Planet TV” is absolutely spot-on, and is actually why I was much more interested in the series than in, say, 24. V‘s ambitions are so much greater – so, indeed, the ‘loss’ here would be correspondingly greater.
I’ve noticed in passing that they have several different writers on the show – which makes sense for a show of this scale, but I don’t know about the last episode, specifically. My sense is that there must be some supervising figure keeping an eye on all this – a show-runner – but I don’t know precisely who that is, because there are so damn many ‘producers’ listed in the credits at this point.
In any case, whatever else happens, “We’ll always have Season One”!
I watched this episode and my convictions about network television were validated. I will not waste my time with it again.
I think we’re all a bit sour with it at this point.
Ugh. Just when I was considering catching up on all the episodes (I’ve only seen two of the series).
Ugh is right.
Gah!
Why do “realistic” sci fi shows have to keep doing things like this? The whole point is to take a real, contemporary culture and face it with a fictional challenge. These shows work when they mesh with the audience, when the audience says, “yeah, it would be like that.” They don’t work when the audience rolls their eyes.
Seems as if this show is following the Battlestar trajectory pretty closely…but faster.
Agreed. It’s depressing.