Twenty years ago, they arrived in 50 gigantic motherships offering their peace and universal friendship to Earth. They said they had come because their world was dying and desperately needed our help to manufacture chemicals found on our world in return for sharing their technology, cures for diseases and all the fruits of their knowledge. Skeptical of the Visitors intentions, a collective coalition of scientists became the unwitting scapegoats of a conspiracy against the Visitors and soon a state of martial law was imposed. A small but growing band of underground freedom fighters had organized into the Resistance led in Los Angeles by Dr. Juliette Parrish. News cameraman Mike Donovan had infiltrated the motherships to discover their clandestine truth and with the help of Visitor Fifth Columnist Martin who revealed the Visitors' true horrific intentions that they had come to rape our planet of its most precious resource - water - and to harvest human beings for food. The Resistance struck back and won a small but decisive victory against the Visitors and sent out a distress signal deep into space directed towards their homeworld near Sirius in hopes of it reaching one of the Visitors' adversaries who might answer the beacon and come to help them stave off the invasion.
Twenty years later, that call has been answered. The world under Visitor control is at its most critical point. Fifty percent of the water in the Earth's oceans have been depleted leaving behind a vast barren salt bed along the floor of the Pacific basin. The Golden Gate bridge now suspends atop two large peaks above the once aqueous San Francisco Bay. An entire generation has grown up under Visitor occupation and has bought into the lies and propaganda with unquestioning obedience to The Visitor Way and the apathetic human race have become complacent and submissive through the coercion of the Teammates - those humans that serve the Visitor Youth Corps and the Players - the corrupt collaborators who have betrayed their own kind to satisfy their own personal ambitions. The operation that Martin had said would take nearly a generation to complete was accelerating rapidly now with little opposition after the Resistance had been decimated by Commandant Diana's Great Purge in 1999 and with only a few years left until the Earth would become a barren, desolate planet devoid of all life.
Enter the Zedti - a humanoid race evolved from an insectoidial alien species who respond to the signal at our most desperate hour by sending three advance "emissaries" to make contact with the Resistance in the form of a pair of strangely humanoid females named Kayta and Bryke and a humanoid male named Ayden who are prepared to launch a counter-invasion force waiting in the wings to strike against their old enemies the Visitors whom they had defeated once before and rescue us from their oppression. But are their intentions benevolent, or do they have their own more diabolical plans for us and are we simply trading one dictatorship for an equal or even greater oppressor?
Kenneth Johnson's narrative is engaging and entertaining and manages to deftly interleave socio-political themes relevant to present day issues of counter-terrorism and political apathy as relevant as his brilliant allegory of neo-fascist takeover akin to the Nazi Holocaust that he employed in creating his
V - The Original TV Miniseries. However, as a lifelong V fan, the biggest challenges I had to come to terms with while reading Kenny's book, is ignoring the problem of conflicting continuity between his original mini-series and the events of
V - The Final Battle and
V - The Complete Series of which he had no involvement with, and the fans are asked to simply accept the fact that those events had never even existed. Even more, the fates of several key characters established in Kenny's original story like Elias, who was killed off in the Series, and Robin Maxwell, who was impregnated by the Visitor Youth Leader Brian and gave birth to the half-breed Elizabeth, are overlooked or simply disregarded. In Kenny's mind, all of that never happened and many may welcome the idea that Elizabeth, the Star Child, doesn't save the human race with her hokey magical alien superpowers, the Visitors weren't defeated by the Red Dust, Robert Maxwell wasn't killed trying to help the Resistance commandeer the mothership, and Martin didn't die and come back as his zygote twin brother Philip who just happened to wear an identical human-looking mask. On the other hand we unfortunately never meet the stone-cold mercenary Ham Tyler nor his associate Chris Farber who joined up with the Resistance or other memorable characters indigenous to the series like Kyle Bates.
By disregarding the continuity of V: The Final Battle and V: The Series, there is, for better (*cough* Star Child) and for worse (*cough* Ham Tyler) gaps of unexplained and contradictory continuity between the Original and The Second Generation. Willy's true reptilian nature wasn't revealed to Harmony until V: The Final Battle when the Resistance captured and exposed him in front of a disbelieving Harmy and forced him to confess the truth to her. Complicating things even more, Harmony was killed during the Final Battle. Disregarding those events, the reader must make the supposition that Willy inevitably revealed the truth to her somehow and irregardless of which maintained her indiscriminate feelings toward him and they married and had a half-breed son named Ted and the reader is forced to accept the circumstances of altered continuity twenty years later as-is. With the introduction of the half-breed culture of Dregs at times it felt more like I was reading a page from Kenny's other series
Alien Nation, not V.
As much as I would love to see a Second Generation of V revived, I don't think, with all due respect to Kenny, that this story, in its current form, should be used as the basis of a new mini-series because of the problems inherent with ignoring the continuity which old-school V fans might find jarring and confusing. Perhaps this is why initial plans for a new mini-series announced a few years ago by NBC have remained on indefinite hold and Warner Bros. felt like they could still profit from publishing Kenny's book while surreptitiously gauging fan interest in a possible revival or perhaps have their own agenda for a "re-imagining" of V ala "Battlestar Galactica" which I think would be a huge mistake because it would be a betrayal to a generation of loyal fans who, like myself, grew up in the 80's and grew attached to those characters and the actors who portrayed them. Still, I'll take Kenny's version of V the Second Generation over an outright remake or "re-imagining" any day and I'm all for getting behind a revival of V that would reunite original cast members Mark Singer, Faye Grant, Jane Badler, Michael Ironside, Robert Englund, Blair Tefkin, et al, but if and only if it's my generation of V.
