Memories Of V

Marc Singer as Donovan, the reporter-warrior of the original V.

Tonight is the premiere of the ABC science fiction series V, which is a reboot of the NBC franchise that ran, in some form or another, from 1983 to 1985.

The 12-to-14 year-old me loved the original show, which I now recognize as, most likely, being pretty horrible, even without having to go back and re-watch it, which I admit I haven’t done. I also read the novel by A.C. Crispin, which was, I guess, was written for people who didn’t have a TV, or perhaps just those who wanted the alien-human sex scenes laid out a bit more explicitly. (Somehow, this was done in such a way that it remained unclear as to exactly how it worked.)

V was perhaps the first contemporary science fiction show I watched that was really aimed at my demographic. And, as such, it represents the first time that I felt personally betrayed by a work of fiction that turned out to be so cynically constructed that after a short time, I couldn’t take it seriously anymore. And that hurt, because when it started, I loved it.

In my memory, the show went on for season after season, starting out fantastic, but gradually declining in quality, the seams increasingly showing. But in reality, the whole thing, including the two mini-series, lasted only two years. Reading about it now, I see that Kenneth Johnson, who ran the show on the mini-series, wasn’t involved in the one regular season, so maybe the orginal wasn’t bad after all. But I’m not sure I can bear to find out.

What I remember is this:

• Recycled chase scenes. One in alien shuttles, another on horseback in the woods.
• Alien shuttle crashes that cut away before the actual crash.
• A surprisingly easy method of dispatching alien soldiers. What you do is, you reach inside their masks, and rip off their fake faces. This makes it hard for them to breathe, or something.
• A surprisingly easy method of sneaking aboard alien spacecraft. When a shuttle is about to take off, you wait until the last guard has marched inside, and then you do a somersault in behind him, just as the door closes. Then, you somehow hide from them during the flight, and get off before they do, hiding in the alien ship, but that’s always off-camera.
• One of those glass spheres, where an arc of colored static electricity jumps from the center to the edge, depending on where the edge is touched by a person from the outside. You could buy them at the mall for like a hundred bucks. Diana, the evil alien leader, had one of those things on the show, and she was trying to pass it off as a cool alien device.
• An alien-human baby, who looked like a little girl, but wasn’t dramatically useful, so she went through an accelerated aging process in order to become a hot 20 year-old.

The question that I’m asking myself today is: Are the creators of the new series aware of how ridiculous the first one became? Do they care? Are they making “what should have been,” or merely “what was,” but with better haircuts?

Image from FusedFilm.