TV is the New Reading

Looking at ‘V,’ past and present

This week’s sidecast I wanted to talk a little more about the ABC premiere of “V,” contrasting it a bit more with the original series from 1983, which Syfy aired as a marathon this past Tuesday, along with a show-so-far on hospital dramas “Mercy” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The shows so far

But first, it was good to see the return of “Bones” and “Fringe” this week. I wasn’t especially impressed that Angela broke her celibacy fast with the first lab assistant happened by, but since Hodgins clearly isn’t feeling it anymore, more power to her. Anyway, the most impressive aspect of the series resume was the group of Woodchucks, which are like science-oriented Girl Scouts. The Woodchucks recovered a body from a river and also brought in digital photographs, plants, insects, water samples and soil samples marked by GPS coordinates. Essentially these third- and fourth-grade girls had conducted the crime scene investigation on a really gross dead body. That’s pretty impressive, and could probably even stand up in court once they outlined their methodology. If nothing else, it was fun to watch their hero-worship of forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan turn to outrage as she scolded them for disrupting the crime scene.

And “Fringe” was a wonderful reminder of how cool the “X Files” got occasionally. A cosmonaut had apparently picked up a high-radiation passenger while on a spacewalk, fell into a coma on his return and since then, this shadow entity had been passing through persons and feeding on the low-grade background radiation, sucking it all from their bodies and leaving them a pile of ash, mostly in hospitals. The “X Files” aspect was the Russian-made equipment cobbled together by the cosmonaut’s brother to try to control the shadow entity. Mad scientist Walter had to decode a chemical that would neutralize the entity, but in the end it was too late. The brother died and the cosmonaut was killed in order to destroy the radiation-sucking shadow. It was really well done and itself part of the Pattern Walter, his son, Peter, and FBI agent Olivia Dunning will continue to investigate.

On the ward, “Grey’s Anatomy” dipped a bit into pander mode when a really, really preemie was birthed with some sort of problem that was solved and then her mom had a seizure and passed out. Alex was informed he owed the hospital $200,000 for Izzy’s cancer treatment since she’d vanished and he was next of kin. And in that Izzy had vanished, he was feeling a complete lack of control, but one thing he could do was hold this baby. So he held the baby. Justin Chambers spent four or five scenes shirtless promoting skin-to-skin contract which stabilized the infant and, oh yeah, featured Justin Chambers with his shirt off holding a tiny baby. Looks like Izzy will be coming back next week so the little redhead from Mercy West better watch herself.

Other end of the country and socioeconomic spectrum in Newark, New Jersey, “Mercy” continues to amaze with pitch-perfect guest appearances by comedy legends Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara who have to share their anniversary celebration in Mercy Hospital after she gets a hip replacement. Another shining guest appearance was Elisabeth Moss of “The West Wing” and “Mad Men,” who played a cancer patient who couldn’t take the pain her illness was causing her family and wanted to end it all.

Nurse Veronica requested to work the cancer ward to avoid seeing hottie Dr. Sands, who she had an affair with while serving in Iraq. To be fair, her husband, Mike, had affairs while she was away as well – she might not have cheated if she hadn’t found out that he’d cheated – but then Mike completely spaced that when he found out about her affair, flew into a rage and stormed off.

What I’m liking about “Mercy” isn’t the soap opera stuff exclusively (which has been the “Grey’s” go-to for years). And it’s not that I just LOVE Kate Mulgrew as Veronica’s mom, popping up out of nowhere all the time to be friggin’ hilarious. The characters are really well drawn. The patients have support systems and back stories that you get into really quickly, and all of the doctors and nurses are deeply flawed people who are all doing the best they can -- even if sometimes it feels like they’re just doing the best they can to irritate one another. Whereas “Grey’s” seems to be about hotshot superhuman surgeons sometimes, these people aren’t prepared to get all bent out of shape for their inability to perform miracles. They’re all just getting by best they can and that’s sometimes an excellent story in and of itself.

Classic 'V'

In the run-up to ABC’s reimagination of the 1980s version of “V,” which I touched on in my column, blog and other podcast this week, Syfy aired a marathon of the original series back to back, culminating in the miniseries that got the whole thing started.

The miniseries was really good for its time. It was able to spend a lot more time on the Visitors and their backstory. The aliens came from Sirius, some 30-plus lightyears away, and came to Earth to meet other intelligent life, which in the ABC reboot Morena Baccarin as Ana simply gushes over us and makes us feel adorable.

The miniseries had Jon who served as high commander for the Vs. Diana was science officer and second in command, but Ana reminds me more of Diana in the series – basically in charge, brimming with personal charisma, and a force to be reckoned with.

In the miniseries, the aliens are essentially after our water, which they’re saying is rare in the universe even though it occurs naturally on five bodies I’m aware of offhand in our own solar system along with countless comets and probably in more places as well. If that turns out to be their goal, I’m OK with them latching on to Jupiter’s moon Europa and towing it away if they want (I mean, we're not using it). They also want to freeze-dry humans as a food source and this seems silly as well. Mice breed like mad and again, I’m pretty sure we’d be OK with them taking as many of them as they want. Also, as soon as they got all the water they needed I’m guessing they’d be fine on food as well.

But failing all of that -- say they like it here and don’t want to go back -- the miniseries shows a Visitor diving into liquid nitrogen to save a human coworker. It seems like they’re at least better suited to life on Mars than they are on Earth. Again, if they spend a few years terraforming Mars to a suitable atmosphere -- I mean really, they’ve crossed interstellar space, what’s another couple of years? -- again, they can have it, and hop across to Earth for anything they need, and they can probably make a perfectly good life for themselves and we could all get along just fine.

I’m guessing it won’t be as simple as that this time around. The scifi audience is a little more sophisticated than it was in the ’80s (and for all of its diehard fans, there’s a reason “Defying Gravity” is off the air) and this series is already drawing in social and cultural depths and realities not present in the original. And it’s raising different questions, as scifi tends to do.

For instance, whereas it seems pretty clear what’s going on in the new version -- a slick, charismatic savior descends from on high, purportedly to save health care, our environment, agriculture, social unrest -- but has a destructive hidden agenda we can only guess at. Meanwhile the only ones who haven’t been completely taken in and duped are kooky conspiracy theorists and religious types (and the supporters of the Visitors are hoodlums and ne’er-do-wells who graffiti everything and forge their mother’s name to things.)

In the original, the Visitors were anti-intellectual bullies who hunted down scientists and took their lunch money. The investigative journalist who uncovered their dirty little secret stumbled upon their taste for live animals and the fact that they were reptiles in a completely random manner. There were more analogies to the Gestapo and death camps from World War II than anything else.

Ultimately, the message of both is that aliens are scary and bad and we need to form a ~~tea party~~, a Resistance to fight them. In fact, from the miniseries, we’re called upon to undermine all Visitor activity, impede their progress any way we can, uncover their hidden agenda, counteract all that brainwashing they’ve done, ferret out their weaknesses and expose them as reptiles. “The more people know about how alien they are, the more they’ll want to fight against them.” And most important, reach out to other ~~disaffected conservatives~~, ~~science fiction geeks~~, Resistance Fighters around the world.

They were unable to do all this in the miniseries because the Vs shut down the broadcasting and phone systems. I would hope their approach in the remake is more sinister and less heavy handed, because uploading one cell-phone video of that V who’d infiltrated the FBI with his face off should be able to at least get a few hits on YouTube before the Vs even know what’s going on, and the spread of information is pretty well democratized.

However, even in the remake we’ve been introduced to at least one infiltrator who is opposed to what the Vs are up to (whatever it turns out that they are up to) and that’s part of what made the original so thrilling -- figuring out everyone’s motivations, why people are conspiring and collaborating and doing whatever it is that they’re doing.

For some reason, they’ve decided to stick with lizards in human suits, but I’m guessing the makeup effects, at least, are up to the challenge. The lizards in the original had nowhere near the subtle complexity of feature and control that they did once they suited up.

The series they based on the miniseries, by the way, was largely disappointing in retrospect. I enjoyed it at the time because I was a science fiction geek who and it seemed to be written specifically for me. Heck, there’s this one episode where a woman’s having a baby, and there’s this bespectacled little kid who might actually have been me. I’m guessing it probably wasn’t me, but it was a little weird watching it.

Anyway, yeah, I’m thinking it was written for children, the way the the stories had zero complexity and the recurring abandonment theme and how the V who was among the resistance fighters -- Robert Englund as Willy -- was this extraordinarily wet negative space of a character whose vague klutziness and weak grasp of English made him a perfect companion piece to the Star Child, a girl with random superpowers -- she had telekinesis to the extent the script called for it and could mimic voices and sense things. They kept the adults in the group -- specifically Mark Singer and Faye Grant as journalist Michael Donovan and doctor Juliet Parrish – from getting especially “adult,” if you hear what I’m saying.

Meanwhile, although the aliens have exhibited mastery over our transportation and communications, again, that’s only to the extent the script calls for it. They don’t block resistance radio signals, stop airplanes or give especially convincing chase. On board the ship, nearly everyone is always in their human suits and the simple investigation of the leader’s assassination is so terrifically botched it’s astonishing these are the same beings who, despite extraordinarily scarce resources, could cobble something together that brought them safely across interstellar space.

That being said, it’s true I could watch Jane Badler and June Chadwick a V leaders Diana and Lydia snipe at each other for hours, but yeah, the palace intrigue moved so slowly and it’s really hard to ignore the cheese factor of the hair, makeup, overwrought acting and stilted dialogue.

So indeed, all manifestations of “V” have their challenges, and I’m looking forward to seeing where ABC’s taking this thing. Despite my quibbles with the politics it seemed on reflection like it would be piling on for Visitor infiltrators to also have caused the economic collapse that’s part of their being hailed as saviors. Probably the social commentary will move off the front burner soon enough and we’ll be able to enjoy the story on its own merits, which would be pleasant.

“Mercy” airs Wednesdays at 8/7c on NBC, “Grey’s Anatomy” airs at 9/8c Thursdays on ABC, while “Bones” and “Fringe” air Thursdays beginning at 8/7c on FOX.

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