V Is For Vacuous

Sorry, I just don't see what all the fuss is about. It's not that V is a terrible show. In the great scheme of television programming, it's just ordinary, and all the references to the Obama Administration in what has to be seen as an obvious attempt to appear topical and relevant, is not going to change that.

So buying into the advertising hype and the concomitant critical appraisals, I watched the opening premiere episode. It started off with a series of ever more ominous, threatening, and intensifying earth tremors, all leading to the revelation of an approaching group of interplanetary vessels, of huge size and of obviously advanced design, all eventually hovering over the major cities of the earth.

The leaders of the Visitors, played by Morena Bacarrin, pictured above, formerly of Firefly (as well as the spin-off feature film Serenity) somehow managed to address the entirety of the earth's population at once, in each of earth's major languages, simultaneously, assuring a worldwide captive audience of their peaceful intent and promises of sharing their advanced technology.

Now, if you're stupid enough to buy this premise, I have no doubt that you were probably inclined to go out and mindlessly purchase every item presented to you in the first round of advertisements. As it happens, by the time that first set of commercials was over and the next segment of this premiere episode aired, most of earth's population seemed ready to embrace the visitors and their line of smooth talking bullshit-just like that.

If you hadn't been paying attention up to this point, you might well have assumed the "aliens" were little more than a group of Mexican smugglers who just raced their marijuana or cocaine-laden van past a border checkpoint.

Actually, most of the earth's inhabitants as portrayed in this series don't even seem to display as much concern over the more fantastic scenario actually portrayed as most folks would betray over such a group of illegal earth style aliens. By the time the episode was half over, the Vatican has even issued a statement to the effect that the Visitors, as everyone calls them, are also God's creatures and should be treated with trust and understanding. Seeing as how everybody already seems collectively enthralled by the aliens by now, the Vatican's position seems to be somewhat unnecessary-even pointless.

But of course, there are a few characters who distrust the visitors. One of them is a Priest who tells his superior that "rattlesnakes are God's creatures too". There are others as well who are determined to resist the Visitors and the snake oil they are selling. In fact, few people seem to be aware that the Visitors are, in fact, snakes, come to earth for the sole purpose of first enslaving man, and then devouring him (assuming this pointless remake adheres to the plot of the original nineteen eighties series).

Even the FBI seems more determined to hunt down a terrorist cell than to concern itself with the fact that an interplanetary race of highly advanced beings of humanoid appearance has just appeared over all the major cities of earth and promised the inhabitants, in effect, the moon and the stars, in exchange for seemingly nothing but the right to grace us with their presence.

But of course, as fate would have it, this terrorist cell is actually a small group of people who are determined to resist the alien incursion. Some of these people include: a female FBI agent who is worried about her son's infatuation with the Visitors, which he has entertained to such an extent that he has, along with his best friend, signed up as a youth ambassador at the behest of an attractive blond visitor; a television news anchor, played by Scott Wolf (who bears a striking resemblance to Michael J. Fox), who is concerned about the Visitor's insistence that any interviews granted him must not ever portray the Visitors in a negative light; the priest; and finally, a black man, who in reality happens to be one of the "good Visitors", and, having fallen in love with an earth woman, is determined to save mankind from itself and it's fatal infatuation.

What do all these seemingly disparate characters have in common, other than the urge to fight to save humanity? Unfortunately, that would be the fact that they are all precisely the cliche' ridden, cardboard characters they sound like they are. The dialogue of this show is also standard hackneyed claptrap. Frankly, I could toss a bunch of Scrabble letters around and probably end up with better dialogue than was written for this episode.

What is worse, there was absolutely nothing that happened that made me care about what I just saw, or inspire me to wonder what was going to happen next. In a series where the laws of human nature are ignored, and where the accepted standards of natural reaction and common sense behavior seem to have eloped off together to parts unknown, it becomes obvious that as time goes on, no one else is much going to care. The truth is just too far out there, and not in a good way.

The series will air for four episodes during November sweeps, after which it will return for the remainder of its run in March of next year under new management. If it doesn't change drastically by that time, I have an idea most viewers will have lost their ill-founded infatuation with this series long before the fictional earthlings of this vapid program have recovered from their delusions about the Visitors.