V

[marcmagus]

[Again, I started to write a comment to somebody else and decided it was better as its own journal entry.]

So I watched the V premiere the other night, and . . . it had some mild ups and some pretty severe downs. I don't know if this one's going to be a keeper, though I might watch a few more episodes. Some random thoughts:

• I can't stop giggling about Jesus dive-bombing Roy. There was just something wonderfully silly about that in my mind.

• When the ships first arrive over the major cities, we have a lot of shots of our cast reacting in various ways. In it, we get a couple of shots from the POV of one of those characters looking up in the sky at the ridiculously fucking big ship over the city [those things are huge, guys]. This shot is a staple of the genre because it works . . . it gives us, the audience, a share of that feeling of awe and terror that something huge showing up in the sky should give us. Mixed into the middle of it is a view-from-above of the ship not quite filling the screen with the city's buildings all visible below it. That whooshing sound you're hearing? That's all the awe and wonder getting sucked out of the viewer's experience because the amazing, majestic, possibly godlike mysterious ships suddenly don't look so amazing. WTF were you thinking, guys?

• Really? "The Vs"? That's what we all call them? Even though they call themselves "The Visitors"? Right from the beginning, when we all think they're the most awesome thing since sliced bread, we can't use the name they've given us for themselves that's conveniently in our language? How . . . American. No, actually, it just sounds weird, even if we do seem to have a fetish for initialisms these days.

• Good job on everybody suddenly and mysteriously showing up in church right after the whole world changes. Is anybody else feeling that the creative teams for Flash Forward and V read slacktivist on Left Behind and decided to split between them all the suggestions for what should have happened in the response to a major, possibly apocalyptic, event?

• The V's have gravity manipulation of some sort sufficient to keep those huge fucking ships in a low geostationary orbit over arbitrary cities without any apparent effort and cheap enough that they use it for art displays. Yet their shuttlecraft appear to use some sort of combustion-based impulse power to launch? Does this strike anybody else as weird? Did I misread that visual? [Refrigerator moment here]

• The secret society that the FBI is tracking as a terrorist cell but turns out to be the only people who know what's going on thing was kind of cool, although it resolved really quickly. Ditto the mole bit. Although there's still something slightly weird going on there [why did he tip them off, or is there another mole?]. I'm hoping the leader of the cell turns out to be a V [he didn't offer proof like he demanded that I saw] and the whole thing is part of the plot, to round up potential resistance and eliminate them. Otherwise, something about this feels slightly off.

• Journalist fails basic test of integrity. Nice.

• "Universal Health Care". Ok, I'm worried about this one. Are we intended to read this as "Look, the V's are so amazingly good and godlike they're offering to heal everybody." or "'Universal Health Care', see, they're evil!"? I really can't tell . . . it was during the ominous "We, the audience, already know they're evil and out to get us" phase. If this is going to be a really unsubtle political message I highly disapprove of, I'm going to get mighty cranky. Because, really, you're against being taxed for universal health care, ok, I can see where that comes from. You think universal health care is inherently evil such that it would be bad even if it actually didn't cost anybody anything, we have a problem.

• Also, what's with that? Given the whole V front of "we come in peace" "we offer technology in exchange for water and a suspiciously unspecified compound" "we'll heal the world's sick" amazing goodness, we could have easily let the audience play along with "Wow, this is great! But something feels slightly off..." that the world is experiencing for months. The FBI person could have taken longer to track down the cell, giving us an increasing "terrorists or freedom fighters" ambiguity before it resolved. Instead, a lot of potentially interesting stuff is resolved in the first episode to put all the pieces in place, and I suspect the show will suffer for it.

  IOW, I kind of wish this show had been done by a JMS or even a Joss [I still love the Jasmine arc]. I caught the first bit of the original when Syfy [gak] was showing it Sunday night, and it seems to have handled a lot of this stuff much better, with both a good sense of amazement and wonder, and keeping us going with an uncertainty as to exactly what was going on. Maybe I'll obtain and watch that in its entirety instead.

• "Compromising one's principles for the greater good is not a shameful act, it's a noble one." That line, OTOH, was awesome. The show needs a lot more of that.

• Did I just miss it, or was there disappointingly little evidence that the rest of the world was reacting to this in any way, or in any way really affected? I feel like I missed the "talking in all languages" from the beginning of the original. Plenty of shots of random Americans, at least, so it wasn't all about the protagonists--that I appreciated. But where's everybody else; were they even in the news clips?

If you didn't watch it, I probably wouldn't bother unless you're looking for something to do. It might get better, and I'll probably give it a bit longer to see [and, knowing myself, get sucked into even the lousy story and keep with it to see where it goes], but after one episode I can't say I really recommend it. As serious SF, it's not quite getting it. As fluff, the density of fun/great moments just isn't high enough, at least not yet; there's better ridiculous crack out there [Eastwick]. Meh.