Of all shows to remake, V?!?
February 16, 2009 by Jin
Filed under Recent, Science Fiction
It’s really going to happen. I’ve been following the development of this series for a little while now but have hesitated to write about it since it seemed more like a hoax than something plausible. I was pretty surprised when they got Scott Peters, executive producer of 4400, to take on this project. And as it’s been reported in a number of places, ABC has given Scott the green light to do a pilot.
If you’re unfamiliar with V, it’s a science fiction series that aired as a mini series and television series in the 1980s. V stood for Visitors, seemingly benevolent aliens who come to earth on a goodwill mission to trade water for some of their advance technology. We soon learn that these aliens who look just like us are actually repitilian like carnivores who not only want to plunder all of earth’s natural resources but also its people for foodstock.
The mini series and television show had lots of references to Facism and Nazis. The look of the uniforms, the formation of a Visitor youth league, the swatiska-like symbol used by the Visitors and the persecution of scientists. Further, you can’t have an occupation drama without resistance cells and human collaborators who sell out their own kind.
It was an amusing show, but a great show? Not hardly. Even watching it as a kid, I had some definite eye roll moments. The part when the Visitors were exposed as reptiles just didn’t come off as scary, probably because that was the limit of what you could do with special effects and make up back then. And there’s sort of a gross moment on the show when you realize that the Visitors and human beings can actually crossbreed. Ewww. The human mother births two children, one which looks like a pale humanoid lizard and another that looks like a perfectly formed human being. Of course, kids are boring after awhile and the TV show had the human one grow into a full adult in a few episodes. Her lizard sibling, if I remember, correctly got mashed up and made into this red power which was lethal to Visitors.
The direction of the new show is actually somewhat interesting. According to Variety, the pilot will focus Erica Evans, an FBI who has a wayward son. This son of course gets embroiled with the new Visitors which leads to family tension. Other cast members include a Catholic priest who is told by his superiors to stop his anti-alien sermons, but continues them anyway leading to the formation of anti-alien resistance; and Ryan, a Visitor disguised as a human, who falls in love with a human woman (ewww, here comes the alien-human babies; hopefully, the lizard looking one will fare better this time).
The leader of the Visitors is Anna (not Diana like in the 1980s version) and is a charismatic leader who explains that the Visitors thought they were the only intelligent life in the universe. Overjoyed to find out they were not alone, Anna offers to trade their advance technology for some earth natural resources.
It may not be all bad. I for one didn’t think Battlestar Galactica would be any good as a reboot. I was wrong. The new Battlestar Galactica is better, by far, than the original. So there’s hope that Scott Peters (who did a wonderful job with 4400) can take some awfully thin material and turn it into TV gold. Good or bad, I’ll watch the pilot for sure. The show could be wonderful or a huge train wreck. However, the show had better be good. My TV viewing nights are already getting crowded with good sci-fi shows: Battlestar, Terminator, Dollhouse.
And just for the record, if I were to remake a 1980s sci-fi show, I’d have picked Alien Nation.
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