year after the battle against the alien Visitors (chronicled in two miniseries, V and V: The Final Battle), life on Earth appears to have returned to normal. The human race is protected by the "red dust," a bacterial weapon that renders the atmosphere poisonous to the reptilian aliens. Mike Donovan (Singer) has resumed his TV news job. Dr. Juliet Parish (Grant) is working for millionaire industrialist Nathan Bates (Lane Smith). Bates' company, Science Frontiers, produces the red dust and is also working to unlock the secrets of the captured alien mothership. Alien commander and evil scientist Diana (Badler) is in prison awaiting trial for crimes against humanity.
However, on the first anniversary of Liberation Day, it all comes apart. A scheme by Bates and former resistance fighter Ham Tyler (Ironside) to kidnap Diana goes awry, and Diana escapes. When she doesn't die, it's discovered that the red dust has stopped working in warmer climates. Diana is rescued by the remnants of the alien fleet, which have been parked behind the moon, just waiting for a rematch. Before long, the world is again awash in red-jumpsuited alien thugs, people are being rounded up, and no mouse is safe.
Where the original miniseries chronicled a pitched battle for survival, this time the Visitors are confined to a warm strip around the middle of the planet, and the result is a more drawn-out struggle. In Los Angeles, Bates manages to cut a deal with Diana, making L.A. an "open city" in which humans and Visitors maintain an uneasy truce. Donovan, Parish, Tyler and some companions from the earlier resistance regroup and resume resisting.
Several ongoing storylines weave their way through the series. These include Donovan's effort to find and rescue his son from the Visitors, and the dangerous game of political chess between Diana and Nathan Bates over the L.A. truce—despite the disruptive effects of resistance action. Another important thread is the ongoing power struggle aboard the Visitor mothership as Diana spars with another officer, Lydia (June Chadwick), and later any number of superiors sent from the home world to find out why the humans haven't been crushed yet.
The most important plotline, though, involves the half-human, half-alien "starchild" Elizabeth (Cooke). A result of Diana's earlier breeding experiments, Elizabeth has grown up with unnatural speed and begun displaying remarkable abilities. Her immunity to the red dust alone is enough to make capturing and studying her one of Diana's top priorities.
This DVD box set includes all 19 produced episodes (including Episode 3, "Breakout," which wasn't aired during the show's original run) on three double-sided discs. Apart from English, French and Spanish subtitles, the set includes no extras.
The way sci-fi TV used to be
The V franchise probably seemed like a natural for series TV. The two miniseries had been wildly successful and had left behind a wealth of sets, props, costumes and models ready to be reused. Since V was basically a parable about the rise of the Nazis, the series would become a science-fiction gloss on World War II movies of dogged resistance fighters taking on the Germans with only their courage and resourcefulness. The open-city idea, for example, was clearly taken from Casblanca. One episode even rips off Casablanca's famous "Le Marseillaise" scene.
The series isn't exactly high art, but at first it doesn't embarrass itself. As the effective leader of the resistance, Singer is more or less the star of the ensemble cast. His guiding principles here are 1) never just walk across the set with a gun when you can dance around it on the balls of your feet, and 2) do a dive-and-roll over any obstacle bigger than a garden hose. As usual, he's over the top but fun to watch. The rest of the cast ranges from adequate to good, and the show manages to maintain tension for several episodes, if only by keeping enough plates spinning at once that viewers worry more about which ones will be smashed than about spotting plot holes.
Around the middle of the run, however, things start to fall apart. Over the space of a couple episodes, nearly half the cast is either killed off or inexplicably sent away—including the show's only semi-dimensional characters, Ham Tyler and Nathan Bates. Bates' loss is a huge blow, as he's the only one tying together the visitors and the resistance. Without him, the truce collapses, the open city is no more, and the show devolves into "mission of the week" stories on the ground and an increasingly ridiculous prime-time soap aboard the mothership.
The problem may have been budgetary. After the shift, even the crude backlot L.A. of the early episodes is mostly ditched in favor of dirt-cheap rural settings with few people around. Not just effects shots but whole scenes are reused. In general, the show looks cheap and shabby compared to the early episodes, and it isn't nearly as compelling.
Still, V's lizards in human suits scared the hell out of a generation of kids, who have very rosy memories of how great it all was. They'll buy this set for that reason alone, and they won't care that there aren't any extras. But if you're not in that group, there's nothing here for you. V is best remembered as an example of what science-fiction fans had to put up with on TV before home video, CGI effects and the explosion of cable channels changed everything.
