It seems I chose a bizarre time to rediscover “V,” my favorite TV show from childhood about an alien invasion of Earth that served as a Holocaust parable. In a Penn Station book store on Friday, I noticed that familiar spray-painted “V” on the cover of a book called “V: The Second Generation.” Date of first publication: February 2008. The salesman who rang me up was as surprised as me to see it. “This used to be a TV show, didn’t it?”
The book is written by Kenneth Johnson, who created the initial 1983 miniseries but left before NBC made a mockery out of its sequels. Johnson writes the book as a straight up sequel to the original miniseries, taking place 25 years after the events in the original. In Johnson’s timeline, the Visitors have made good on their promise of sharing their scientific advances with mankind. Cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s and numerous other diseases have been cured, new fuel and information technology introduced. All national wars have been put to an end. The Visitors brought order and control to the world, and, naturally, most people go along while those who closely collaborate are greatly rewarded. The tiny Resistance that does exist is branded as “terrorists” and “scientific plotters” by the Visitor-controlled media. The Visitors have captured millions of humans for food and slavery and convinced most people that they were killed by “Resistance terrorists,” and they’ve taken half of the Earth’s water under the ridiculous guise of “cleaning” it before its promised return to Earth.
In marked contrast to the “Starchild” of NBC’s sequels, the half-breed hybrids are rejected by both species as deformed “dregs,” relegated to the lowliest manual labor. The human scientists and doctors are rounded up into ghettoes and strictly controlled. The historic parallels are obvious, but Johnson has a frustrating tendency to make them explicit, as his narration goes off into tangents about the Vichy French, the Warsaw Ghetto, Captain Cook and the native Hawaiians, African slaveships and more, assuming a certain lack of historical knowledge in his readers. Of course, I think his primary audience is television executives that might option the book for a new “V” television series. One historical parallel that Johnson thankfully does not footnote is a call to war by the Visitor Leader in which she declares that the far-away mutual enemy of the Visitors and humans have created a dangerous new chemical weapon that they intend to use against us, and that preemptive action is necessary.
Towards the end of the original miniseries, the nascent Resistance launched an SOS message into space, which was a potentially interesting plot thread that the NBC sequels dropped. Is the enemy of my enemy truly my friend? What if another alien race comes, not to save Earth but to vie with the Visitors for control over it? Johnson picks this plotline back up, but leaves it unresolved. Just like NBC’s sequel, which was followed by a regular series after Earth’s liberation, Johnson is hedging his bets in order to keep a franchise going, this time with more brains.