V - Season 2 (1 Viewer)

[Tony J Case]

Originally Posted by NeilO

Quote:


They have some female he cares about "safe." She has been missing for 5 years. I can't recall whether she was a wife or girl friend or sister. They played her voice pleading to me over a phone. They gave him a device which would magically set off all the 5th column vest explosives.

Note to self, when building a explosive suicide vest, do not use Wi-Fi components in the bomb!


So here's my notes scribbled down as I watched:


* This is Anna's best hunter's MO? Jumping around on top of a wall like spiderman?


* And The 5th Column capture someone from the Visitors in their super secret base, and the terrorists first response is not instantly pulling up and moving? Hell, how about just bringing the unconscious guy inside instead of leaving him sprawled out on the sidewalk? It's like the stupidity of Our Heroic Basement Lurkers is infectious or something!


* Our hard as nails terrorist balks at hitting a woman when their survival is on the line? Right.


* So the terrorists have no problem with letting their "hostage" wander around in front of the window free and unguarded. Thank goodness the FBI didn't have anyone watching the exterior or anything.


* Um, how about escaping out the prohibition tunnel that the FBI doesn't know about?


* Yeah, daddy getting gunned down right after the happy family reunion? Saw that one coming. Remember kiddies, Redemption Equals Death!


* My god - Our Basement Lurking Heroes are actually going to do something? It's only taken, what 17, 18 hours to get to this point? Forgive me if I take a "Believe it when I see it" stance.

 

[Nelson Au]

Thanks for the clarity about Hobbes, Neil.


I too was wondering if the alien device would spot Erica freely walking around too!

 

[Greg_S_H]

That's what I like to see out there. Things are coming to a head now.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Yeah, I'm invested again. They've got a four episode race to the finish. Obviously not enough time to overcome the Visitors, but hopefully enough time to make a decisive turn in the direction of events.

 

[Tony J Case]

So just as a counterpoint to just how completely inept and incompetent the writing is in V, I picked up a copy of Kenneth Johnson's novelization of his V: The Second Generation script. I'm only 60 or so pages into it, but so far in the first five chapters we've had more gun battles and v fighter chases though the now-drained San Francisco bay and more character development than this remake has had in it's 20+ episodes.


Is it a great book? Naw, the prose is a bit clunky (as a author, Kenny makes a great screenwriter!) and I'm sad that it's ignoring the second mini-series (meaning no Micheal Ironside) but it's still light years ahead of what we've been subjected to thusfar.

 

[Jeffery_H]

ABC has all but "officially" canceled V and they are just running the remaining episodes. Many articles in EW and other entertainment sites has been very critical of how bad both the scripts and acting are for the show. In fact, it has become so bad there were reports for a while indicating ABC may pull the plug before all episodes this year were to end for better ratings against powerful lineups like Idol. However, things were reported to have the green light still to finish what they have and that's it.

 

[DaveF]

Pretty good episode. as these things go.


My one complaint was the death of the Evans' husband. It felt very, very forced, having him killed by stray fire on the ground on the escape. I couldn't figure how or why anyone was shooting in his direction.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by DaveF

My one complaint was the death of the Evans' husband. It felt very, very forced, having him killed by stray fire on the ground on the escape. I couldn't figure how or why anyone was shooting in his direction.

Ah, but was it really a stray bullet? We know Anna had plants inside the SWAT team.

 

[DaveF]

The shots came from the terrorist crew.

 

[Nelson Au]

Looks like Erica is turning into Sara Conner. Was Hobbes line to Erica about liking the new her new more agressive persona some kind of wink at the audience?

 

[Tony J Case]

Some random thoughts as I watched:


The Priest and the Terrorist? Sounds like a sitcom! "On November 13, Jack Landry was asked to remove himself from his parish; that request came from The Pope. Deep down, he knew he was right, but he also knew that some day he would return to the fold. With nowhere else to go, he appeared at the home of his friend, Kyle Hobbes. Several years earlier, Hobbes' terrorist cell had thrown HIM out, requesting that HE never return. Can two resistance members share an apartment without driving each other crazy?"


Boy what a raw deal - the actor who played Tyler shaved his head for a series that is about to be canceled out from under him. Poor guy.


Hey, here's a good idea. Lets talk about a super secret conspiracy right out in the open in the main hallway? Thank goodness this isn't a dictatorship where public spaces could be monitored or something.


30 seconds into the operation and so much for the "The cops will never know we were there"!


. . . .The least convincing Chinese guy ever



So what I don't understand is why the rush to get out of the building. Oh sure the cameras will reset in 15 minuets, but the apartments aren't monitored. The occupant was taken care of, nobody knows anything is wrong (except for the naked unconscious guard downstairs). Why don't they just hit the reset button now while everyone is away from the prying eyes, get themselves a fresh countdown and stroll out of the building?


Wait - Traitorous Black Alien is alive? How the hell did he get out of the room with the bomb. You know, tied up 30 feet away from the explosion that took out the top floor of the building?


Wait - so the Aliens are DNA borg? Man, they stole the premise straight out of the pilot to the Sarah Jane Adventures - harvest the best human traits and infuse them into a prototype life form.


Yippie! Slap fight!


Accelerated hybrid baby growth? Yippie! Starchild!


Wait - Traitorous Black alien doesn't even blink at the "hey, my child suddenly 3 years old now"? Not even "what did you do to her?" or "Where is my baby?" Nope - just instantly accepting that this is indeed his kid instead of a ringer.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

Originally Posted by Tony J Case

So what I don't understand is why the rush to get out of the building. Oh sure the cameras will reset in 15 minuets, but the apartments aren't monitored. The occupant was taken care of, nobody knows anything is wrong (except for the naked unconscious guard downstairs). Why don't they just hit the reset button now while everyone is away from the prying eyes, get themselves a fresh countdown and stroll out of the building?

Well, there's the crowd on the street who saw a woman plunge from the upper stories and incinerate into ash midair.


Most of your complaints this week are valid, but the sort of thing you just have to roll with at this point if you're still watching. The most egregious sloppy moment was the webcam teleconference, since we know that the Visitors are monitoring and filtering all internet and broadcast communications through the mother ships. But if you worry too much about that, you have to start worrying about them using cell phones without consequence. And things just keep spiraling from there. I enjoy the show for what it is, so I just accept that they don't get caught because they don't.

 

[Phil Kim]

Originally Posted by Adam Lenhardt

The most egregious sloppy moment was the webcam teleconference, since we know that the Visitors are monitoring and filtering all internet and broadcast communications through the mother ships.

I think bigger hole (or perhaps yet to be addressed reveal) is that V has administered a "monitoring pill" to father Jack Landry when he was impaled in season 1.

 

[Greg_S_H]

Before the weekly complaints begin, let me point out an undeniable fact: a half-naked Elizabeth Mitchell erases a whole multitude of sins. You know Jack is going to be jealous. Maybe the key to defeating Anna is for all of the cell to have a turn. Or maybe I'm confusing Anna with Pennywise.

 

[Nelson Au]

Jack Shepard? I was half paying attention to the episode, but I did notice in the last couple of episodes, as Erica has become more and more aggressive and violent in the fight against the V's, they started to show Hobbes noticing her more. Not sure what to make of this development. I guess as they've plotted it, Hobbes and Erica's loss of loved ones thrust these 2 together to comfort each other. It was interesting to see this development with Diana and the movement within the V's to defeat Anna. The hybrid thing seems to invalidate this whole plan Anna has to breed. I'm still watching Battlestar Galactica season 4 on blu ray for the first time. It feels like the same idea, humans and Cylons or V's can inter-breed.

 

[Tony J Case]

30 seconds into the show and again with the Special Effects failure. Seriously, how hard is it to do green screen effects in the modern era? My 5 year old computer can do better effects than that - and I don't mean the Puking Up Nasty Gore effect, I just mean the crappy matte of the Forbidden Palace in the background. At least on the spaceships we can hand wave it as Visitor technology somehow eliminated convincing shadows on the ground or something!


You know what's bugged me all along. The term 5th column doesn't mean "Anyone who is in La Resistance". It's a group of people who clandestinely undermine a larger group from within. Meaning a subset of Nazis working against Hitler, not an external force attempting to overthrow them. Oh sure there are aliens in La Resistance, but it's mostly humans fighting against the aliens.


Wait - the all-powerful and all-seeing aliens don't monitor facebook server traffic?


Wait - La Resistance plan to generate fake DNA and insert it into people so that the lizards get bad samples? Without killing the humans? DNA DOES NOT FUCKING WORK THIS WAY!!!! ARRGH!!!! (okay, it did have a side effect later in the show, but messing about with someone's DNA like that - putting aside that we don't have the technology to do that - would be 100% fatal).


I wonder how much Met Life is paying into production coffers to show up week after week to have their building show up under the Mothership during the Establishing Shots (or conversely, I guess they're not paying enough in blackmail to not be featured prominently in a really shitty show that besmirches their name week after week)


So the alarm to the front door is going off and the second guard just strolling down the hall like he's coming back from a doughnut break? Or the third just casually meandering into the Virus Storage Room. Is this like a game of Metal Gear, where the guards only notice something is wrong if you stand right in front of them?


Guns? What happened to the "Don't kill humans" policy? Only one tazer amongst the lot of them? Okay, this turns out to be a major point later on, but if they were even TRYING to not kill humans, why only the one tazer?


Hurray! More sexual tension between the Merc and the Agent! Geeze lady, your husband has been dead - what, 3 or 4 days now? The corpse isn't even cold yet!


Man, Angsty Priest needs to STFU. War is hell and sometimes you have to let the Nazis bomb Coventry so they don't know you have an Engma machine listening to their codes.


Hey! Another Heel/Face turn for the Angry Black Alien? This guy flip-flops more times than a politician.


"Bring me the leader of the Fifth Column!" Anna commands. Does Anna not realize that there are six billion people on the planet? Why is she talking like there is only one La Resistance? There will be hundreds and hundreds of cells all across the globe, ranging from two nutjobs with a shotgun to highly organized groups in the middle east.


Dead husband? Who's that! Lets bump uglies! (Although I do agree with Greg that half necked boobies is clearly the best thing about the show).


So I finished the Second Generation novel a couple of days ago. No, it was pretty clumsy in it's prose (I swear to god, if I read a description calling Willie a "Gentle Alien" one more time, I would have punched a baby!), but at least the story actually did something and went somewhere. There was gunfights with lasers and ships and dogfights and atomic bombs and flying motorcycles and plot development and interesting characters. It had problems but it was WAAAAAY better than this dreck.

 

[mattCR]

This show is so damn terrible. They come up with these elaborate, over the top schemes that are HORRIBLE in their execution. I mean HORRIBLE. "They sent up Suicide bombers".. uh, Suicide bombers would have been a lot more effective. You are in a fight for the future of all humanity. The priest wants to ring his hands "I thought we wouldn't kill anyone" WTF! I'm waiting for him to hoist the French flag and start screaming "we can peacefully negotiate with these aliens, maybe they are just misunderstood" Terrible. Just absolutely terrible. And if someone approaches me with a shot that looks like it's a caulking gun and tells me "It's not going to hurt" I don't know how brainwashed I'd have to be to believe that crap .. "wait, you're going to shoot a GALLON of some strange substance into me, and I won't feel it? "

In the "V" series we grew up with, very quickly they were willing to start taking the fight to them, the earliest scene of them unmasking the aliens and starting war in real. They know that they are lizard people, why aren't they skinning them and throwing them out to the TV cameras?

The Special effects are terrible, the science is terrible. Now, we are to believe the aliens have went around the galaxy stealing DNA from different plants to make themselves into a super race. Except if that is true, then how the hell did they survive their first encounter or how were they advanced enough that integrating these components would do anything to them but make them into frankenstein monsters, sickly defective whatevers..

I wrote off this show a few weeks ago, and thought "I should give it a chance". How is this not cancelled? The rebels are the biggest bunch of wussies on TV, and their plans are insane. The aliens are rudderless.. when the queen pointed out she had hid escape pods through the ship that no one could detect I thought that was interesting. When it was revealed they were the size of silos and extended up from the rooms, I about laughed myself silly. Yes, no one noticed giant silos with robotic arms that go up about 6 floors to the outside right above interrogation rooms with a ship in them? Even if you could "Cloak" them don't you think someone on every floor would notice the giant pylon they had to walk around?


Whoever writes this has a long road to redeem their career.

 

[Tony J Case]

Originally Posted by mattCR
When it was revealed they were the size of silos and extended up from the rooms, I about laughed myself silly. Yes, no one noticed giant silos with robotic arms that go up about 6 floors to the outside right above interrogation rooms with a ship in them? Even if you could "Cloak" them don't you think someone on every floor would notice the giant pylon they had to walk around?

Yeah, that through crossed my mind too "Wait - Anna has been hanging out in this room for how many years now and she never bothered to look up in all that time?" but I think by that point I was stunned into submission by the utterly shameless stupidity of the show thusfar.

 

[Mikel_Cooperman]

I started watching this season because I heard Diana would be back. She is great and a real scene stealer but why bring her back just to have a 3 minute scene every week?

At least it is only 10 episodes and will most likely be cancelled after that.

They should have continued from the original miniseries with some of the same characters intermixed. The ones they are writing for now are boring.

 

[NeilO]

Just one more episode after tonight. The one thing that really got me tonight was after the press conference/unveiling of Concordia, Anna is gloating right there about her plans. The blooper on this scene is the open microphone - "Ooops, did you hear that?"