The ABC V retread premiered this week to good ratings, political overtones, and both cheers and jeers.

Obviously, the network lost one of the biggest fascinators of the original mini-series: the mystery behind the aliens. Everyone now knows (even if they just caught up through the SyFy broadcasts of the 1980s shows this week) that the aliens, even though they are pretty and human-shaped, are not human at all: they're reptilian bad guys.

Okay, so we have reptilian bad guys who are also liars. No matter how many times the beautiful Anna (Morena Baccarin) insists "We are of peace," we all know better. Even when they bring truly "universal" health care to humans, we all know they've got a dark agenda. We know what humankind will do is fight.
 
In the last version, we took up the resistance fight like the world did against the Nazis, combatting aliens engaged in cruel experiments and rounding up people and sending them to camps--I mean, cooking schools. In this version, the focus of the resistance is not so obvious. The resistance is shown organizing within weeks after the Visitors' arrival, but at that point, the aliens haven't really done anything bad that we can see, other than suborn a gullible network news guy and send out lizard chicks trolling for Earth Boys are Easy.

The reaction of Earth governments to the Visitors is extremely low-key, which just doesn't seem to fit with the current world status. Jets approaching the ships lose power and crash; where is the military presence over-reacting to this threat? We just gladly suck up the vaccines and cures for cancer and other health initiatives without asking what's owed in return.

I mean, how is it in every other movie we can detect a small piece of rock flying toward the world at thousands of miles away, in time to train a bunch of bumpkins to use technologically advanced equipment and get them to the flying rock--but we didn't know these guys were coming till they showed up over the cities? Really?


Some writers are even calling this a flat-out attack on Obamamania. The earlier stories I'd read about this seemed pretty far-fetched, but listening to a couple of the near-rabid resistance fighters do their Glenn Beck impression, it made me think again. Are we really so desperate for something different--for change--that we'll accept it from anyone?

One place this version rings truer than the prior series, is the fact that the Visitors sent out frontrunners to lay the groundwork for their arrival. If you're going to travel some 50 billion miles to a new planet, it makes sense that you'd scout out the place first. Look at War of the Worlds, where the aliens had pre-planted their agents/equipment here--much easier to effect the takeover at that point.

Planting people in all walks of life would facilitate alien entry when the invasion comes--and also allows for a more sophisticated end goal for the aliens to accomplish. So what is it exactly, if it's not just an interplanetary snack? That we don't know quite yet.

Another theme this version will take up is the examination of alien existence by religious organizations. When Joel Gretsch's Catholic priest is troubled by aliens and how they impact the faith, he's told that the Vatican embraces the arrival. Indeed, the Catholic Church has long made a study of the existence of aliens, and it has been previously explored in movies like Contact. 

The cast is solid, the special effects fabulous--how long do you think it will be until the major networks have a bidding war to be able to broadcast major sports events off those cells on the bottom of the aliens' ships??  The real question is, will V be able to overcome the loss of mystery and take viewers to new territory, or will this be more like a remake of Psycho or The Sixth Sense? Once you know the truth, is it worth watching again?