The V Reboot May Have Been Way Ahead Of Its Time
V ended on a strange note. Did it work?
Some reboots of sci-fi TV shows become legendary and eventually eclipse the original series upon which the reboot is based. The best example of this is Battlestar Galactica, which in 2003 rapidly became a reboot that made the 1978 series more of a curiosity by comparison. The flip side of this is a series like the 2007 version of Flash Gordon, which is not even close to being as good as the 1930s and 1940s serials, and is basically forgotten today. Somewhere in the middle exists the 2009-2011 remake of V, based on the 1983 miniseries and subsequent series of the same name.
Ten years ago, on March 15, 2011, the new V — led by sci-fi fan-favorite Morena Baccarin — came to an abrupt end. The Season 2 finale, “Mother’s Day,” also became the end of the series in general. Was it all worth it? Was the V reboot great? Terrible? Or, perhaps it was none of those things, and instead, something a bit more interesting: a bridge between one era of sci-fi TV and another.
Mild spoilers ahead.
Like the 1980s franchise of the same name, the reboot of V began with the same premise: aliens appear in the skies all over Earth, and appear, in human form, as the “Visitors” offering a new era of hope and prosperity. In reality, the Visitors are reptiles who, for the most part, want to subjugate the human race. Baccarin steals the show in every single episode as Anna, the queen and leader of the Visitors. At the time, in sci-fi circles, Baccarin was best known for Firefly and Stargate SG-1, but this was before her roles in Deadpool, Gotham, and Homeland. But V was very much a showcase for Baccarin’s talents on an entirely different level, and in some ways, she’s never done anything that demonstrated her abilities quite like this.
For sci-fi buffs, Baccarin had a tough act to follow, as she was, essentially, playing a new and reimagined version of Badler’s character, Diana, from the original series. (Badler herself played a different version of Diana in the V reboot, but this version wanted peace with the humans.)
The two-season run of the reboot V followed a predictable, if fairly satisfying, set of story arcs. We slowly learned the Visitors were bad, though many of them were sympathetic to humans, resulting in a resistance movement called the “Fifth Column.” And by Season 2, everything was ready to blow up as the resistance made one final move against Anna in an attempt to wrest power from the Visitors.
The thing is, although the resistance has sympathetic characters in the form of Erica (Elizabeth Mitchell) and Ryan (a pre-Watson Morris Chestnut), the icy Anna is the person we’re rooting for the entire time. V, then, is a strange show about human resistance in which you essentially are already sure that the humans will lose and, on some level, you’re fine with that.
Morena Baccarin in the 2009 debut of V.
V was canceled in May 2011, a few months after the finale episode of Season 2 aired. In the events of “Mother’s Day,” the Fifth Column makes one last big play against the Visitors, which eventually results in Anna trying to use her telepathic “Bliss” powers on all of the human race. However, she needs an assist from Amy (Tanessa Holomon), and the episode basically ends with all of humanity brainwashed, and several more Visitor ships arriving.
Could a hypothetical Season 3 have done much else with the basic concept? While hardcore fans of the show tried to revive V, one has to wonder if this wasn’t the perfect ending of this concept all along. The bad guys (I.E. the most interesting characters win), and we’re left with an image that has populated countless sci-fi stories since the time of H.G. Wells: aliens everywhere, and there’s nothing we can do about it.
Today, with Pluribus and the forthcoming Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day, mainstream TV and film sci-fi seem to be following, in a sense, the footsteps of all versions of V. This isn’t to say that Pluribus Season 2 will contain scenes of people growing lizard tails, or Disclosure Day will focus on people eating rats. But, a decade after this reboot, and over 40 years after the original show, there is something compelling about an alien invasion hiding in plain sight. And maybe, we have V to thank for some of that.
