By Silvia Moreno-Garcia

[spoilers ahead]

The original V is sometimes corny, sometimes laugh-inducing and sometimes quite fun. It’s a product of its time, with special effects consisting of Star Wars-like laser-guns which never hit anything properly (despite advanced technology, the aim of the Visitors sucks), ultra-obvious references to Nazism, clunky spaceships, and reptiles in disguise.

The miniseries opens in media res: TV journalist Michael Donovan and his partner are shooting a story in El Salvador in the midst of a civil war. They are saved from imminent death via helicopter due to the surprising arrival of a very big flying saucer. All around the world, similar saucers appear in front of famous landmarks. Soon, the aliens inside them reveal themselves to humanity, claiming they come in peace. They look human, wear uniforms with shiny black boots and sport dark sunglasses, and are led by John and his deputy, Diana.

Some people, like Michael’s parents and his girlfriend, are thrilled by the arrival of the visitors, sensing career and monetary opportunities in the wings. Other people, like Abraham Bernstein – a Holocaust survivor – observe the encroaching power of the Visitors with fear.

Scientist begin to disappear around the world. Soon, the Visitors claim there is a scientific conspiracy and they establish martial law to deal with this little “terrorist” problem. Medical student Juliet Parrish feels the heat, dumps her obnoxious boyfriend and goes into hiding to avoid “disappearing” just like her colleagues. Also in hiding: the Maxwells. Robert Maxwell is an anthropologist and thus in danger of being caught by the Visitors. He has an annoying daughter named Robin. Daniel Bernstein, who has become a Visitor supporter, turns his family in for aiding the Maxwells.

The Maxwells are able to get away with the help of Sancho, a gardener who smuggles them in the back of his truck. Unfortunately, Sancho is captured by the aliens, even if the Maxwells escape to safety and join forces with Juliet and other members of a newly-formed resistance group.

Meanwhile, Michael has boarded a spaceship and got quite a shock when he witnessed Diana swallowing a live guinea pig (!). To top that, he has a close encounter of the violent kind with another alien, pulling off his fake face and revealing a lizard beneath.

Michael gets away and meets the Resistance, which is led by Juliet and aided by many characters, including petty thief Elia, who saw his brother get killed by the Vs.

The resistance decides to organize an attack against the Vs so they can steal weapons. Meanwhile, Michael will infiltrate the V ship he escaped before in the hope of finding more information about the aliens’ plans. He meets up with a friendly alien who helped him escape earlier and the alien reveals the truth: the Vs have come to steal Earth’s water, use people as slaves and cannon fodder in their war against an other alien race, and prepare the rest as hamburgers.

Michael escapes, but not before rescuing Sancho and Robin. While Sancho was getting beat to a pulp, Robin had time to misplace her virginity with an alien named Brian.

Back on the surface, a coordinated attack breaks out throughout the city. Juliet and the resistance members manage to get hold of the weapons they wanted.

Meanwhile, the secret mountain camp where Robert Maxwell’s wife and other two daughters are staying is being pummeled by aliens (his fault, I may add). Michael in a stolen spaceship and Juliet with the Resistance fighters arrive in time to save the day and send Diana flying away…for now.

The miniseries ends with Juliet and the others vowing to fight on and broadcasting a signal into space, in hopes that the alien enemies of the Vs will come to their aid.

First the good stuff: the V propaganda posters with Vs hugging humans, the great matte shot showing the bodies of humans preserved in suspended animation for use as slaves and food, and Diana eating the guinea pig. There are some great scenes, like the moment when the Bernsteins realize their son Daniel may turn them in, a white-haired lady throwing a Molotov cocktail from her little shopping-cart and walking calmly away, the opening sequence when Michael turns around to see that the helicopter chasing him has fled because there’s a flying saucer behind him.

The bad: it doesn’t feel like a miniseries as much as a pilot; it has some terrible stuff like the “romance” between Michael and another reporter, Juliet’s asshole boyfriend, any lines spoken by Robin. Juliet is not much of a leader. She becomes de facto leader God-knows-why and her climactic sequence, where we are supposed to finally figure out she is turning into Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 as she shoots at Diana’s transport-ship while it heads towards her should be exciting. Only, it’s not and she’s no Linda Hamilton. In fact, most of the action sequences are pretty meh. It’s part of the aesthetic of the time. MacGyver, Knight Rider, Battlestar Galactica all had the same, cheap, rubbery look and no cinematic quality to speak of. Basically, shit explodes, lasers go bam-bam and it’s all so phoney you don’t really believe anyone is in serious danger. So yeah, it’s cheesy and lop-sided.

One more thing: race. This is an interesting point. In the original V, we have a more diverse cast than the remake. There’s an African-American family, a Jewish family, Michael’s Asian co-worker, a Mexican man. In contrast, the new V has two minorities in important roles and one who briefly appeared as an FBI agent in what could be termed a guest role. One would expect, more than twenty years after the original, the cast would look more like the cast of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, which had a very diverse bunch of actors.

This doesn’t mean that the original V is enlightened on the issue of racial portrayals. Elias Taylor is your usual African-American criminal and Sancho is the Mexican gardener and expert on people-smuggling. They’re both good people, but gardener and maid are the default profession for Mexican characters, just as street-thug is for African Americans (Angel had Gunn, proving it did not go out of vogue). There’s a lack of imagination there, my friends. However, they do have the diverse cast, so the intent existed to produce a show that wasn’t populated entirely by young, white middle-class people as though it were an episode of Village of the Damned.

Now, let’s talk about the key differences in the characters as presented by the original and the re-vamped version.

Michael: Michael’s role has been given to Chad, but part of his personality has been grafted on to Father Jack. You could say Michael has been split into two and merged with his love interest, who was a reporter hired as the official spokesperson for the aliens. Chad’s a lot more unspectacular than Michael. Chad is a news anchor who hasn’t done anything big and gets lucky when he lands an interview with the aliens. He’s also headed the alien-spokesperson way. Michael, on the other hand, is an award-winning journalist who was in El Salvador before returning to the United States to cover the V story. He knows how to deal with tough situations and behaves like an Indiana Jones of journalism. He’s the one who finds out most of the secret information about the Vs. Father Jack represents the “action” side of Michael. He even looks a bit like Marc Singer. Unfortunately, for all his cockiness, I prefer Michael over Jack.

Juliet: Juliet’s character becomes Erica in the new series, a huge departure. Juliet was young, a scientist and not very experienced with handling weapons. Erica is an FBI agent and she has a teenage son. On one hand, it’s a welcome change. I never got why Juliet was the leader. A character tells her some people are “born” leaders, which sounds like baloney to me. Juliet’s character was probably inspired by Che Guevara, who started off as a medical student and ended up as a guerilla leader. Unfortunately, Juliet does not make a credible Che. Erica is better suited, due to her FBI training, to handle the resistance movement. She’s also made of sturdier stuff. On the other hand, I resent the loss of a doctor on the show. It would have been useful to have a scientist. Father Jack might have been better-utilized if he had been given a medical background instead of a military history. Or, the other useless human character of the very-unimpressive Resistance in the new series could have been a scientist. Warning: Juliet and Michael had a romantic thing going in the follow-up to the miniseries, which may lead to migraine-inducing scenes between Father Jack and Erica.

Diana: Diana has been changed to Anna. Instead of being the second-in-command, she has been promoted to commander. In the original miniseries, we barely spot her “superior” John, so she is effectively top dog and it makes sense to have her as such in the remake. Plus, Diana was probably the most famous character on V, one more reason to obtain top billing. As far as looks go, Diana and Anna are very similar: dark-haired, beautiful, cold. Anna goes for a “kind and elegant” type, while Diana has a “bitch queen” aura, but they’re both hard cookies and cruel: they like to torture people, perform experiments and grin at the camera. Diana doesn’t have a daughter, while Anna has Lisa.

Robin: Robin is the annoying teenage character of V. Tyler, Anna’s son, is the new Robin, but with a bit of Daniel on the side. Robin is an idiot of a character, perpetually pouting, getting in trouble and lusting for an alien, and so is Tyler. Tyler also has the Daniel characteristics: disengaged youth who joins the enemy. It’s a double-whammy of badness. Daniel was bearable as a psychopath traitor and Robin could be stomached because she had a kid sister who inherited all the smarts and toughness Robin missed out on. Tyler doesn’t have either of those things. Either character is eye-gouging-worthy, but if you force me to pick one, I’d have to go with Robin. Tyler is just the worst combo of two old characters.

Brian: Brian is the original Lisa. He is the good-looking alien who befriends Robin and later impregnates her under the orders of Diana, as part of an experiment. A role-reversal which may prove more frustrating than anything if they try and make it like Lisa wuvs Tyler.

The original V also featured alien traitors but it would take too long to enumerate all of them. Suffice it to say they were there in the original. What was in the original and didn’t make it to the remake? The Vs use contact lenses to hide their snake-eyes, have a weird-voice thing going on, explain that they picked common Earth names so people could pronounce them easily (no similar explanation on why Anna is Anna instead of Xsyshsga, or something like that), and they don’t go around giving free health care. In fact, the Vs give a surprising amount of nothing to Earth people. Sure, they promise they will share technological information, but don’t reveal squat and quickly send their workers to go labour in human facilities to produce a chemical they need. It’s thus predictable that people will wonder what the deal is with the lousy trade agreement. I don’t understand the animosity displayed in the new V for the aliens when they are all about giving. Father Jack essentially acts as a jerk towards the mere idea of another lifeform, even before he has any evidence they are evil. Way to be xenophobic, Jack.

The whole scientists-as-scapegoats angle was also eliminated. I never thought that made much sense, so I’m not mourning it.

Things I really miss? The gigantic V sunglasses. They’re too big for today’s fashion, but not seeing the eyes of the aliens made them more menacing.

You can purchase V: The Original TV Miniseries (1983) through Amazon.com

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