What If: V: The Original Miniseries and V: The Final Battle

One of the great things about Science Fiction and Fantasy is that they are entertaining while offering a new social or political perspective or commentary. We love these books, movies, and TV shows because they get so much right, they tell a great story, they make us think, and of course they entertain us.

But sometimes, there’s a character or plot point or some other little thing that niggles at us. Maybe it’s a missed opportunity, or a contradiction that weakens the impact of the story.

What If is a column that takes a piece of Speculative Fiction and examines why it is so good, but also what could have made it better.

There will be spoilers.

First up, two of my absolute favorites:

V: The Original Miniseries and V: The Final Battle

The Premise (from IMDB.com):

V: The Original Miniseries: When aliens come to Earth to ask for our help, a few suspicious humans discover their horrific true intentions and prepare to resist.

V: The Final Battle: A small group of human resistance fighters fight a desperate guerrilla war against the genocidal extra-terrestrials who dominate Earth.

Those two summaries are a good start, but they really don’t do justice to the miniseries.

At first glance, it is your classic first contact story. Aliens come to Earth, we find out they’re not the benevolent beings originally believed them to be, and so we fight them to save our planet.

If we look a little closer, fill in a little more detail, it goes more like this:

Dozens of massive space ships arrive, hovering over the major cities around the world. They communicate with the people of the world, in every language. They come in peace. They need our help. Their planet is dying and Earth has what they need to make the chemicals they need to save their planet. In return, for our help, they will share their scientific knowledge with us, saving millions of lives. The Visitors look like us, and they speak our language. Their voices are a little funny, but otherwise, they are us.

Mike Donovan and Christine Walsh, journalists, get exclusive access to the Visitors and their ships. Juliet Parrish, a young medical student, is fascinated by the aliens and would love to have a look at their DNA.

People notice that animals and birds go into a terrified frenzy whenever the Visitors are around. People, scientists in particular, start to disappear. A conspiracy is unveiled, that the scientific community have had a cure for cancer for years but have never told any one because there is money to be made in research grants. How dare they! What else are they keeping from us?

Mike Donovan becomes suspicious of this conspiracy and gets aboard one of the ships to find out what’s really going on. He witnesses and videotapes the Visitors’ true faces. They are reptilian in nature. They wear a human-looking skin over their own. The Visitors don’t want that information made public, so they take over every television broadcast network. They claim it is due to the conspiracy by the scientists. That our world governments are giving them control and instituting martial law to protect the Visitors.

Meanwhile scientists of all branches are being disavowed. They’re losing their jobs, being forced into ghettos. Their kids are bullied at school and the teachers do nothing. Loved ones, though not scientists themselves, are losing their business clients.

Juliet Parrish and a few others who are tired of the Visitors meet in secret. They don’t believe in the conspiracy. Why are the Visitors targeting the science community? Because the Visitors are hiding something, and it is the science community that will find out what it is and stop them.

The resistance is formed, lead by Juliet Parrish. Mike Donovan joins the resistance and discovers that the Visitors aren’t after any chemicals. They are after all of the Earth’s water, and they are abducting thousands of humans to be food for the Visitors. The resistance is helped by a small group of Visitors who disagree with the mission their Great Leader has sent them on. They are the Fifth Column, fighting from within.

Juliet has a willing test subject, a low-ranking Visitor, much like a worker bee, Willie. He is there to do his job, knows nothing more. After multiple tests on Willie, extracting tissue samples and blood samples, Juliet comes up with a toxin that will kill the Visitors and save the planet.

The strength of these two mini-series:

In one of the first ever My Favorite Things for Speculative Chic, I listed the original V as one of my favorites. I watch it at least once a year. While some of the special effects and the hair styles may not exactly hold up as well as I’d like, the story itself is more relevant today than ever.

The story of V — which on a side note, stands for victory, not Visitors — is a cautionary tale of how fascism can happen anywhere, including the United States. It doesn’t try to hide this idea or be subtle about it. One of the characters is a Jewish grandfather, Abe, who survived the Holocaust. His wife did not. He repeatedly tells his son that they have to help. Abe tells his son that if someone had given them a place to hide back in Poland, maybe his wife would still be alive. Abe sees the fascism coming and warns us. He is the moral compass that people ignore. Everyone says the martial law will pass. It’s a phase. Abe reminds us that that was what was said in Germany in the 1930s. Abe sees the dangers of the Visitor Youth program that invites the youth of Earth to become part of the Visitor units, to inform on family and friends if they see any scientists, any dissension. Abe reminds us that the Hitler Youth did the same. The Visitor uniforms, including the symbols used, intentionally look enough like Nazi uniforms to get the point across. This is how propaganda works. If we are passive, if we don’t question what is around us, if we go along with injustices because they don’t directly affect us, this is how such horrors happen.

The Resistance is another great strength of V. The Resistance is lead by a medical student and a journalist, perhaps the two most inquisitive professions out there. Both ask questions, they don’t take situations at face value, they search for the truth. It is because of that persistence in the search for the truth that the Visitors fear them, and therefore isolate them from the rest of society. The Visitors don’t want people to question, to think for themselves, or to be educated.

What weakens the impact:

The Resistance needs to find a way to convince the rest of the population that the Visitors are dangerous, that they’re taking all of Earth’s water, and abducting thousands of humans to become either food or drone soldiers. They believe that by exposing the Visitor’s true faces, that they are reptilian, will turn humanity against them. They emphasize that it is because the Visitors are, in fact, different. They are not like us. Therefore, they must be evil.

On the surface, this makes sense. It is a debate my friends and I have had for years: how do you change people’s minds? How can you convince them that what they’ve believed is right is actually wrong, harmful to themselves and everyone around them? And in a tight plot situation of a book or miniseries, you don’t have a lot of time to show the slow process it can be. You need something instant and dramatic. A visual shock is a classic move. Think of the images of starving children that convinces the world to give to famine relief, or the images of beatings and murders of young Black people in the ’60s that showed the white population just how bad things actually were and massively grew the Civil Rights movement. It’s a proven technique. It’s why so much police violence is recorded and broadcast online.

So I understand the reasoning behind unmasking the Visitors. I think their unmasking was necessary. But I think the reasoning should have been different.

Had they gone with exposing the Visitors to prove that they lied about who they are, so what else are they lying about, would have been truer to the message of the show. The Resistance does a great unmasking during a televised event and it does seem to be what turns public opinion against the Visitors. But that change in opinion is due to the Visitors being different from us. Showing that they are different, and therefore they must be reviled, goes against everything else this show is trying to say. Fascism, racism, misogyny, are all about fearing the other, that which is different from us, not like us. If, then, the Resistance is saying the Visitors are evil because they are different from us, what makes us believe we are better than they are?

And let’s not forget, the Resistance has Visitors on their side. There is the Fifth Column, helping out, and yet they are vilified along with the others. Those Visitors are our friends, and yet because they are reptilian, they are like the others, therefore they are less-than, and isn’t that racism and fascism right there? Isn’t that just like saying “I’m not a racist because I have friends who are black”? Who cares if you have friends who are of a different skin color than you if you don’t believe, at the heart of it all, that they don’t deserve the same rights and freedoms as you?

Had they unmasked the Visitors to show that they have lied to us, and combined that with footage of them draining our oceans and the thousands of people being processed for food, I think it would have been far more powerful and convincing. Humanity would have had something tangible to fear, not just that which is different.

In conclusion: As it is, I still love the original V. The message is timeless and probably more relevant today than it was back when it was released in 1983. If we are passive, if we don’t question what is around us, if we go along with injustices because they don’t directly affect us, this is how such horrors like the Holocaust happen. I wish that had been exposed by the Resistance, rather than going for the easier option of fearing the Visitors because they are not like us.

Have you seen V? What did you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Let’s talk.