Shaun Richman

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.

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.

Daniel Day-Lewis is pure, foreboding menace in “There Will Be Blood.” Although, when he finally unleashes the full force of his menace, it is not entirely what is expected. Nor, likewise, is the blood alluded to in the title precisely what one would expect from the cleverly edited promotional trailers, although plenty of the red stuff flows.

Based upon the Upton Sinclair novel, “Oil!,” the film could easily have been mere anti-capitalist propaganda, but director Paul Thomas Anderson focuses more on themes of family, ambition and envy. Anderson doesn’t make short films and “Blood” is no exception, clocking in at nearly three hours. But whereas previous movies featured a large, Altman-esque cast of characters, Day-Lewis is the sole, scene-chewing focus of nearly every frame of “There Will Be Blood.” It’s one of those performances that shouts, give me my fucking Oscar or I’ll cut your fucking throat. Or bash your head in with a bowling pin 17 years from now. It’s a mesmerizing performance, and easily worth a six and a half dollars matinee ticket.