Customer Reviews

Pilot

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I thought this got off to a good start. The hook here is that the public is for the most part completely deluded by these beautiful aliens carrying gifts (think of the Trojan Horse updated) while only a few suspect that they are covering up their real looks and intended deeds. The beauty factor, the free medical care and cures, the free gadgets and gifts, this all opens up some interesting story lines about people's weaknesses. I think this series will either get really, really good from this point forward or it will get terribly cliched and go straight down the tubes.

how could people like 13 years of start gate and not like this. Its great to bad it was trashed

I grew up on Sci-fi (before it was SyFy), and love how the old shows are being recreated for a new generation. This was one I fondly remember from childhood and I am so happy to see it back on the TV. The first season has set up the story for us and given us a glimpse into the true nature of the characters. I am excited to see how they develop as the show progresses.

This show has been filled with action, suspense, drama & mystery since the beginning. I'm glad Fox didn't cancel it because it has only gotten better this season. I really enjoy where they are going with the storyline. I hope it comes back for another season.

Classic beginning, very nicely shot. Skillful, almost virtuoso, editing seamlessly ties multiple parallel stories using careful match cuts. Excellent camerawork, very good acting. The pacing was steady but unrelenting.

I enjoyed the pilot quite a bit in fact, saw it twice.

This show had so much promise. Sure some of the characters were dreadful in dialogue. Yes, you could tell things were off to a slow start. But when the V first hit Earth it's all very exciting. Then the show was thrown into a pile of trash, and is generally not worth watching. I recommend watching the series until the V introduce themselves on the giant undership screens, then hit your foot with a hammer, and save yourself the time of watching anything further.

(Spoiler warning.)

So, we have these reptilian-looking aliens, the 'V', wrapped in human-looking skin. The reptiles find the humans very attractive for love and sex, if we are to believe what the aliens say. Humans mate with the V only because they don't know that there is a reptile-looking alien inside the human skin. Humans are repulsed otherwise. That stikes me as a very odd asymemtry, but I guess there is no accounting for how bent an alien might be.

What is even odder is that these alien creatures can mate with humans and create a baby of sorts. A very weird baby, to be sure, but some kind of mixed-breed infant nonetheless. So, even though the V don't look like anything remotely human, they must be very closely related to humans. I have nothing to call that except incredible... i.e. totally unbelievable. Tip for the show's producers: If you are working in the science fiction genre, try not to stray too far from basic scientific facts.

The show goes on and on about how humans are weak because of their emotions (especially love) and how the V manage to remain emotionless. Then five minutes later we witness a scene among aliens displaying hate, anger and fear. The V Queen's daugher seems to be infatuated, if not in love, with the FBI agent's teenage son. Where did all that emotionless superiority go? Maybe that is the point.. the V are kidding themselves about being emotionless? Well, fine. The old StarTrek series would have dealt with that theme in an hour-long show. With V, it goes on and on, week after week.

Oh, to be fair, I have found some redeeming moments. For example, the Queen V eats her mate after consumating the business. Cool. However, most of the show is a dreary mess. I doubt Kilgore Trout ever wrote anything this pretentious and vapid.

The show survived to a second year. That is perhaps the most incredible aspect of this whole story.

The story of V does not adapt well. The dialogue is at parts very boring. The teenage love interest is very, well dry and stereotypical of a teenage drama. The teenage drama often detracts from the main story line. It tries to create a 24 sense of urgency at times, but fails. I could explain more, but bottom line there are far better choices out there. Season two barely made it from being canceled. Do not expect a third season.

"V" is the greatest missed opportunity in television remakes/reimaginings in recent years.

SF trappings aside, Kenneth Johnson's brilliant "through a glass darkly" original offered eighties audiences a deeply alarming insight into just how a modern liberal, democratic society could be coerced and misled into fascism and totalitarianism.

With this in mind, the creators of the new "V", given the last turbulent decade of contemporary American history, had a wealth of avenues, themes, subtexts and philosophical questions that they could have explored; it could, potentially, have been the most devastatingly relevant piece of television fantasy to grace our screens since the demise of Ron Moore's brilliant re-imagining of "Battlestar Galactica".

Depressingly, the creators and producers of the new show chose not to engage with anything so contentious and instead have seen fit to reach into the compost heap of turgid network television clichés and serve us a festering plate of tedious pap and soap opera banality. If you can find one character in this who is a) not a cipher and b) remotely worth caring about, then you're a better human being than I am.

If this is what passes for edgy, thought-provoking TV in the 21st century, then I'm not so sure that the original visitors from the nineteen eighties haven't been here secretly, sucking our minds out, after all.

Avoid at all costs. It's TV so bad that it could turn your television Beige.

Pretty much along the lines of most SciFi shows. You can see that this will generate a new cadre of fans. The same fans that watch Battlestar Galactica, Lost and Star Trek. It's going to be good for awhile and then the episodes will become pablum for the masses. Gotta say, Michelle Baccrain is HOT. That's about all that is hot. Three seasons from now it will move to another cable network and be all but forgotten, except for those SciFi fans.