How well does childhood memory of favorite teevee shows hold up? Judging by the maddening 80’s nostalgia currently in vogue, I would wager not well. I mean, “He Man” and “Jem” were pretty stupid as far as kids shows go. They’re simply painful to sit through as an adult. As a kid, my favorite “adult” show was “V,” an occasional miniseries turned shortly-lived regular series about the human resistance against an extraterrestrial invasion of Earth. What my five-year-old self enjoyed about the show was the rough-and-tumble adventuring antics of the resistance fighters, the “vshboo, vshboo” sound of the aliens’ laser guns and the frequent reveal that under the aliens’ human masks were lizard skins. An exciting action-adventure serial with no redeeming qualities, or so I recalled.
Revisiting the series on DVD, I was surprised to find that the original 1983 miniseries was a taut, sophisticated Nazi allegory. In a montage that was ripped off by “Independence Day” years later, 50 alien saucers appear over the major cities of the world, and people gather excitedly around their televisions and below the motherships to await first contact. Unlike the aliens of “Independence Day,” these “Visitors” have a more ambitious agenda that simply blowing stuff up. Their envoys send greetings of peace in a ceremony on the roof of the United Nations. Their planet is dying, they claim, and Earth has certain chemical resources that they need to save their planet. The Visitors have assumed human first names like “John” and “Diana,” and seem just like us except that they wear dark visors to protect their eyes from our sun, have weirdly modulated gravelly voices and dress in militaristic jumpsuits adorned by a symbol that looks like a connect-the-dots swastika, if you were being cynical. But why be cynical? The Visitors promise to share their vast scientific knowledge with us in exchange for our help. Intergalactic travel, a cure for cancer and more!
And many people fall all over themselves in the series’ first hour to collaborate with the Visitors: The journalist who trades her objectivity for exclusive access as their official mouthpiece, the industrialist who contracts her factory to engineer the Visitors’ mysterious chemical and the teenage loser who seeks power, respect and a laser gun in the Visitors youth auxiliary. At the same time, others begin to question the Visitors’ true motivation. But after an outlandish plot by Earth’s scientists to murder and drive away the Visitors is foiled and some of the brightest scientists in the world “confess” not only to the plot but to withholding cures for common diseases from the public, the handful of remaining skeptics are driven underground, hated by the vast public who welcome the protection of the Visitors’ clampdown, even as entire towns are “disappeared.”
Our skeptics, who slowly form a “Resistance” against the fascist aliens, eventually discover that the Visitors are actually giant lizards under their fake human skin, and that the chemical they are creating on Earth is flushed down the drain as soon as it’s brought on board the motherships. The captured humans, however, are stored in gooey pods to be brought back to the Visitors’ home planet. Some will be brainwashed and used as laser cannon fodder in the Visitor Leader’s many wars with his enemies. The rest, in classic science fiction tradition, will be eaten.
The first “V” miniseries was a big deal back in its day, with fairly sophisticated special effects and a very large cast. The storyline rapidly progresses from the initial excitement of the first contact to the dreadful realization that the humans are no longer in control of their destinies. Writer-producer Kenneth Johnson’s breathtaking audacity to deal with a subject as serious as Nazis and the Holocaust in a medium that could have easily been a trivial shoot ’em up adventure is enhanced by his stubborn refusal to give the miniseries a Hollywood happy ending. Which is not to say that the ending isn’t optimistic, as an official “Resistance” is formed, makes contact with an anti-fascist “Fifth Column” within the Visitors’ ranks and sends a distress signal out across the cosmos (for help, or worse), but it does imply a long struggle.
But not too long, it turns out. The original “V” miniseries was too big a hit in the ratings to stand alone, so NBC’s Brandon Tartikoff revived it one year later in “V: The Final Battle.” Kenneth Johnson is long gone by this point, and some of the ridiculous action-adventure tropes I recall as a kid first start to appear. For instance, it appears to be ridiculously easy for our Resistance heroes to steal a Visitor shuttle and steal away aboard any of the motherships, and the Visitors, apparently, couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with those laser guns of theirs.
Still, the cast of Resistance fighters displays some charming chemistry, and the (not-so) friendly rivalry between Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside) is probably what I liked most about the series, as a kid and now. And the second miniseries closed out each episode with a great “shock” cliffhanger ending: the Resistance fighters ripping the skin off of Visitor envoy John on live teevee and the birth of the snake-tongued alien-human hybrid Elizabeth and her afterbirth. As promised by the title, the Resistance does drives the Visitors off of the planet by cooking up a virus that supposedly turns everything on the planet into poison for them. Despite some hokiness, “The Final Battle” would have been a satisfying conclusion to “V,” but, alas, NBC went to the well one time too many.
The following season, “V” returned as a regular weekly series. The virus, it turns out, only works in colder climates, so the Visitors return to fight the humans in Los Angeles. The writing for the regular series was frequently insulting to human intelligence. For instance, the Visitor motherships were hiding behind the moon, where no Toys-R-Us telescope could possibly see them. The female Visitor leaders have sewn shoulder pads into their military uniforms and frequently engage in “Dynasty” style catfights. Our heroes in the Resistance spend most episodes traveling to small towns in peril and helping people rise up against the Visitors and/or their collaborators. It’s kinda like the A-Team, except the bad guys don’t stand up and dust themselves off after getting blown out of their jeeps, and, instead of Mr. T, we have the hybrid “Starchild,” Elizabeth, who sheds her skin and becomes an 18-year-old hottie and frequent deus ex machina.
This, finally, was a show that a five year old could love. It’s lots of derring do, and ripping skin off scaly lizard people, laser gun and space shuttle dogfights, and the aliens constantly eat disgusting things like worms, rats and tarantulas. Apparently, five-year-olds weren’t a big enough audience to keep the show on the air. As a cost-saving measure, “V” vaporized half of its cast in the middle of its first and only season and was eventually cancelled after 19 episodes. Apparently, there is still a cult of fans for the program and rumors of a revival on the Sci Fi network. “V” does deserve a proper revival, now that television science fiction is finally displaying more brains and sophistication. Perhaps the next writers can delve deeper into the issues of fascist collaboration and resistance that were hinted at in the terrific original miniseries.
