V: Season 1 Episode 1

Back in your childhood, or at least the childhood of your dad, there was a somewhat cheap sci-fi series that attempted to look not quite as cheap, with big ideas and annoying characters.

Consigned to the dustbin of history, it was recently resurrected against all the odds, given a sexy sheen and even bigger idea, and promptly became one of the most respected and successful genre programmes of recent times. This, inevitably, is not that show.

It’s easy to assume that the success of Battlestar Galactica gave the green light to the red V, which - old and new - is essentially a feature-length remake of that particularly decent episode of The Twilight Zone (the one where the visitors make a gift of a book called 'To Serve Man'). However, this isn’t an entirely pointless re-tread: the FBI agent spots connections between the alien invaders and terrorist splinter cells. The Visitors are referred to - and call themselves - ‘V’s, which seems to immediately alienate them, in more ways than one.

As a remake, this trades on the fact that we already know what the main course is going to be, so there’s less of the soap of the 1980s version, and so this V’s vendetta is more on the slow burn when’s-it-gonna-happen reveal of the Visitors showing their real faces. With that in mind, there doesn’t seem to be quite enough menace and doom hanging over proceedings: anti-V groups are referred to in passing, where it would seem a wise idea to have at least one plot thread following a character in one of those groups. But perhaps that would be too confusing in sorting the good from the bad guys. In the '80s, the militant Nazi undertones of an invading force seemed clear, turning all of Earth into a concentration camp. Those colours are still there, but now the unstoppable beast is a shiny, sexy iPod generation of power seducing a willing human population.

Let’s be honest here; the original V probably isn’t quite as good as it's remember to be - and let’s be even more honest: it's not remembered as being particularly good in the first place. Of course, in the 20 years since the original, it’s been hoisted - or rather heisted - by its own petard, what with last year's District 9 making similar salient points about segregation, and the iconic images of shadows dripping over the city skylines have found themselves used in major movies since most particularly for a certain Will Smith film. ‘Dude, it’s Independence Day’, one kid gleefully declares on spotting the UFOs. ‘Which was a rip-off of any number of alien invasion predecessors’, his friend dryly responds. Even V’s best weapon, the fact that it concentrated on the ‘real people’ away from the spaceships has very recently been revived by (who else?) Battlestar Galactica with spin-off Caprica.

V has taken twenty-odd years to mount a new invasion. In the meantime, however, it will find that we’re already occupied.



Airs at 10pm on Tuesday 13th April 2010 on SyFy.

Written by Andrew Allen.