LogFAQs > #928381978

V - "Pilot"
Nominated by: Karo

Let's start with the good: Elizabeth Mitchell. There are few actresses that come remotely close to being as absolutely intoxicating to watch as Elizabeth Mitchell. She straddles the line between angry and happy constantly. Her face fascinating to study, full of subtle nuances in emotion that make Mitchell such a compelling actress. Really, she's my TV Cate Blanchett. There's something timeless about her strange, elevated charisma. She is sadly beautiful.

Now for the bad: the show. Everything about this series feels like a mix between a 90s sci fi film and a CW teen drama. All of the bad, none of the good from both of these things. When a race of alien visitors arrives, it becomes all-too-quickly apparent that they are up to no good. Perhaps that's why this show was so doomed to failure from the start, honestly. V suffers from the clear and apparent truth that 99.9999% of humanity is too fucking stupid to recognize clearly malevolent alien visitors. Unlike District 9, where there is a messy mix of dumb humans and dumb aliens, making for a compelling quagmire of winless morality, V is presented as the worst version of Grant Morrison's Hyperclan.

Another strange issue I had with this episode is how... dull the arrival of aliens was. The show attempts to claim that this is a moment of historical significance, and yet V really does no favors to this moment. It's a quick, two-minute speech. Then, we're off to the races with boring people doing boring things. Cops are chasing terrorists! We should be allowed to linger in the majesty of this moment for at least a few minutes. The reason Close Encounters of the Third Kind is so memorable, the reason that first contact is burned into our collective psyche, is that it breathes. The viewer is given opportunity to let the gravity and scope of the film's events sink in.

Here, we get a pellet of first contact before the world just starts chugging along, adjusting marginally to the extremely important revelations as if the aliens have just debuted a popular hit single instead of revealing life in the universe.

Overall, I can't say I'd recommend this to anyone - at least based on the first episode alone. This is bland, rushed, and quite frankly, uninspired.

Writing: 3/10
Characterization: 2/10
Scarlet Factor: 4/10
Overall Rating: 9/30
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"It is too easy being monsters. Let us try to be human." ~Victor Frankenstein, Penny Dreadful