V Files, book 1: The Arrival

Introduction by Robert Strauss

So it doesn't have the hard science fiction edge of The Outer
Limits. So it doesn't come with characters as compelling
as Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock (yet!). V is by far
the best sf television series to be broadcast in a
decade. It is brave, it is audacious, it is shrewd, it is
funny and exciting; it is, in short, calculatedly
entertaining, and extremely successful at it. And while these
qualities are never going to place the show in the literary
league of either 2001 or Masterpiece Theatre, they
certainly put it way ahead of 95 percent of the other junk
that currently appears on network television, and all
but a handful of the space waste the small screen has
offered in place of imaginative fiction.
It may be the mutant offspring of an unholy liason between
space, soap and horse opera, but V is an eminently
watchable geek. It is, indeed, an entire electronic
sideshow, offering each week a cathode-cooked smorgasbord
of spectacle, sex, action, suspense, treachery,
triumph, tragedy and, for those with slightly more
eclectic tastes, cannibalism, ruminations on oppression
and inter-species miscegenation. I don't care how
sophisticated you are; such a spread is all but impossible to
resist.
The Early Visits
V began in the spring of 1983
as a NBC miniseries about a group of "friendly"
aliens who come to Earth, all-smiles, offering
miraculous scientific gifts and making just a few reasonable
requests for some abundant local elements in return.
Accepted at benign face value by the majority of humans,
the Visitors soon set up shop by establishing
pseudo-fascist dictatorships in major cities around the world.
Only a few earthlings, including tv cameraman Mike
Donovan (Marc Singer) and scientist Julie Parrish (Faye
Grant), discover the Visitors' hideous secret: the
aliens, beneath their flawlessly complexioned, humanoid
exteriors, are actually reptilian carnivores with powerful
penchants for ruthlessness and deceit. What's more, their
favorite food happens to be human flesh. The abundant
Earth element the Visitors have really been after is
us!
Donovan and Parrish organize an underground resistance
movement against the aliens and their human collaborators.
In the second NBC miniseries, V-The Final Battle,
the freedom fighters finally succeed in ridding the
planet of the superpowered, superintelligent Visitors.
With the aid of a miraculous red dust that proves
fatal to the off-worlders, the resistance captures the
enemy mothership and eliminates all of the aliens
except for Diana (Jane Badler), a cruel, beautiful and
relentlessly ambitious lizard commander. On the surface, once
again, all seems right with the world.
The Second Coming
But all is not. The new,
one-hour series, which began airing on October 26, 1984,
opens a year after the Visitors have been banished from
Earth. Celebrations commemorating the liberation are
underway, but there are still a few loose ends dangling
from the days of the occupation. Donovan's son, Sean
(Nick Katt), along with many other humans, is still
being held captive, somewhere out there, by the
Visitors. Diabolical Diana, who has been held in an
antiseptic environment to protect her from the effects of
the red dust, is about to be brought to trial for war
crimes and, oh yes, a few counts of cannibalism.
Scientist-industrialist Nathan Bates (Lane Smith), whose company created
the war-winning red bacteria and is now charged with
dissecting the alien mothership, is finding that his loyalty
to the human race is coming into conflict with his
profit ratio.
In order to expedite his firm's investigation of the mothership's technology, Bates helps Diana escape from the clutches of the authorities. Always one
to seize upon any opportunity presented to her,
Diana soon slips out of Bates' grasp as well, with the
red dust antidote in her pocket. She commandeers a
shuttle craft and is soon scot free. Behind our moon, she
rendezvous with a massive flotilla of Visitor warships. It
seems that their home planet has become uninhabitable,
and conquering Earth is now a matter of racial
survival.
Once again, the war begins in earnest. The Visitors
occupy parts of our planet and meet stiff resistance in
others. Los Angeles is declared an open city, and in it
Nathan Bates conducts his less-than-altruistic
negotiations with assorted alien representatives. But while
both fighting and discussions drag inconclusively on,
humans once again become the top item on the Visitors'
menu.
We've All Got Problems
The special effects in V are excellent by television standards. Models,
miniatures and controlled-motion shots (supplied by
Dreamquest and model designed Greg Jein) swoop onto the
screen with all of the believability and craftsmanship
of an Empire tiefighter.
But it is really the subplots that keep the viewer coming back for more.
Besides the overall progress of the war, veteran TV
writer Paul Monash (who is the show's creative
consultant) and executive story consultant Paul Edwards have
about a dozen ever-evolving personal stories to keep
track of each week. Indeed, V more closely resembles a
hybrid of Knot's Landing on Neptune than it does Lost in
Space or Twilight Zone.
To begin with, Donovan loves Parrish, but Parrish is now working for Bates,
who wastes no energy hiding his amorous interest in
her. In a good position, as the untrustworthy Bates'
head scientist, to keep tabs on his questionable
dealings with the Visitors, Parrish suppresses her
attraction to Donovan, which leaves Big Mike feeling less
than comfortable.
But poor Mike has enough other problems to keep him distracted from his
unrequited relationship with Julie. There is, of course, the
matter of his alien-appropriated son, who in a later
episode, he discovers has been brain-washed into becoming
a killer for the Visitors' cause. And then there is
Mike's mother, who didn't even need to be brainwashed to
fall right in step with the spacemen's line, to the
extent of even taking potshots at her own son when he
attemtps to interfere with the aliens' smooth takeover of
our world.
The Donovans' aren't the only family rent assunder by the pressures of the invasion.  Bates' own son, Kyle (Jeff Yagher), joins the resistance
partly as a protest against his father's corrupt ways.
His other reason for siding with the freedom fighters
is a little less idealistic: he has had an affair
with undergrounder Robin (Blair Tefkin) and would like
to have one with the teenaged woman's teenaged
daughter, Elizabeth (Jennifer Cooke).
Huh? Yes, you read that right. Teenaged Robin has a teenaged
daughter. How, you ask? Well, in the wonderful world of V,
there is one family that even the Addams clan would
consider a bit odd. Remember, when the Visitors first came
to Earth, everybody took them at face value. And
most of those false human faces (and accompanying
flesh-covered bodies) were undeniably attractive. Young Robin
fell in love with one of them, and before she became
aware of the scaly reality underneath his skin, she
discovered the hard way that humans and Visitors share the
capability of mating with one another.
In a few short months, the progeny of this liason appeared as little
Elizabeth. She wasn't exactly human, but she seemed okay for
a little while. But the problematic word here is
little. Elizabeth didn't stay little for long. In two
quick metamorphoses, complete with cocoons, she shot up
overnight to ages 8 and 18, respectively.
Naturally, mother Robin has a bit of a problem adjusting to her
unusual offspring. Not only is the kid taller than she
should be, she has all of these weird mutant powers. And
when the love triangle develops between Kyle and the
two women, even J.R. Ewing has never seen anything
like this.
Aliens Are People Too, Sort Of
The full-blooded aliens have their share of problems, too. Not
only do they have to worry about these uncooperative
humans shooting at them or blowing fatal bacteria in
their faces they have got to keep looking over their
shoulders to make certain that their own comrades aren't
about to stab them in the back. Except for an
occasional Visitor, such as friend Willie (Robert Englund),
who inexplicably possesses a kind heart and a set of
moral principles, the aliens are the most paranoid,
selfish and contentious bunch of individuals since the
Nazi SS. And like Hitler's henchmen, the Visitors move
up through the ranks on the backs of their
less-fortunate, and less-sinister, co-workers.
Of course, Jane Badler's Diana is the femme de la creme of these
ladder-climbing lizards. Already identified in every viewer's
mind simply as "the space bitch",Diana will screw anyone, both literally and
figuratively, to talon her way to the top. 
Until the series began, most of Diana's alien competitors
were of the male variety of the species. But with the
addition of Commander Lydia (June Chadwick), she now has
an equally ruthless reptile woman to contend with.
English actress Chadwick, most recently seen as the
girlfriend/manager in the rock&roll documentary spoof 'This Is
Spinal Tap,' brings the same kind of camp amorality to
the role of Lydia that Badler brings to Diana, and
the two of them hissing biliously at each other, as
each tries to find something with which to embarrass
the other in front of their superiors, has become a
highlight of every show. These women play it to the hilt;
you expect to see forked tongues snaking out from
their mouths at any minute.
Ain't Nothin' Like 'Em Nowhere
Which brings us to a fascinating and somewhat unusual (for
television anyway) aspect of the show: Whether heroines or
villianesses, the women of V are some of the strongest, most
intelligent and most capable females in American popular
culture today. In fact, except for Marc Singer and Lane
Smith, it is primarily the ladies who make things happen
on the show. Faye Grant's Julie Parrish, besides
being the scientific brains behind the human
resistance, also has a hand in not only planning attacks
against alien installations but in carrying the fight
right into the Visitors' laps, firing rayguns and
trading fisticuffs with the best of her male
counterparts.
The constantly scheming invader-women, Diana and
Lydia, perform much the same services for the other
side. Only being stronger and more impervious to
physical damage than earth people, they're even tougher.
Plus, they have sharper teeth. And with such hard-nosed
special guest aliens as Sarah Douglas (the evil Queen
Tamaris in Conan the Destroyer and one of the three
Kryptonian outlaws in Superman II) and Sybil Danning (whose
cinematic acts of derring-do have earned her the sobriquet
of The Female Clint Eastwood), scheduled to appear
throughout the show's run, one thing we won't have to worry
about is a shortage of strong-willed
spacewomen.
And then there is Elizabeth, the starchild, who seems
to hold the key to the resolution of the entire
situation. Sympathetic to the human cause but sought by both
sides in the conflict, Elizabeth has unique abilities
possessed by no other members of either of the warring
races. In both a physical and a dramatic sense,
Elizabeth is shaping up to be the most powerful member of
the V cast. For a medium that offers only Cagney and
Lacey and a few half-assed sitcom characters as
positive, strong female role models, V is more than just a
whiff of fresh air; it is more like a long-overdue
tornado, and unlike your average tornado, an extremely
welcome one. 
Some Funny Things
Another of V's major strong points is its humor. Rarely, if ever, has a 
science fiction show so fully integrated comic relief into an
essentially dramatic storyline. The creators of V have done
an exemplary job of poking fun at the more
outlandish aspects of their series without ever letting down
their poker faces.
Perhaps the most memorable instances of this are the irresistible spaceship/horse chases that occasionally crop up. As Donovan gallops
across a meadow on the back of an appaloosa, firing his
ray gun up at a pursuing Visitor shuttle craft, the
viewer is given just a second to appreciate the
unlikeliness of the whole situation. We all know that the
fastest automobile doesn't have a chance of escaping a
modern jet airplane or helicopter, let alone a horse
escaping a much more technologically advanced spacecraft.
Yet the image of a man on a white horse
outmaneuvering the best the enemy has to offer is so
fundamentally pleasing that we can't help but get excited about
it. In such cases, V gives us our cake and a fork to
eat it with. We can feel that the producers of V,
unlike those of such intelligence-insulting series as
Lost in Space and Battlestar Galactica, are sharing a
little joke with us viewers, not making us the butts of
one. Or themselves either, for that matter, much as
the perpetrators of such outlandishly humorless
schlock as Space: 1999 and One Step Beyond often
did.
The humor in V is also quite varied. Naturally, the
aliens and their appetites provide limitless fertile
fodder for slick black comedy. But perhaps most
interestingly, V does not shy away from trenchant social humor
when it fits the situation. Perhaps the most amazing
scene I've watched in any of the programs thus far was
one that had nothing to do with action or makeup or
special effects.
It was a scene in the second miniseries. The
freedom fighters were hiding underground, and Blair
Tefkin's Robin, who had long known that she was carrying
one of the aliens' children, had just learned of the
Visitors' true, serpentine nature. Determined not to give
birth to a salamander, Robin emotionally insists on
having the fetus aborted.
Although they later learn that the embryo Elizabeth has developed
a special protective shelf inside of Robin's womb that makes any
attempt to terminate her existence impossible, at the
time of the mother's initial request, an
executive-wide debate is engendered among the rebels, which
include Robin's father and a priest. In the process of
the debate, every point of view on the controversial
abortion issue is expressed openly, intellectually, and
with all of the emotional fervor that the topic is
argued over in real life.
To hear it all brought to attention on a network entertainment show was
unusual enough. To simultaneously understand that these
people are talking about something that is only going to
be part-human, even part-mammalian, lends the whole
scene an absurdist tickle that, one suddenly realizes,
makes one open up to listening to all sides of the
highly-polarized abortion question, regardless of one's, perhaps
strongly held, personal feelings about the subject. As
Stanley Kubrick proved with Dr. Strangelove, an absurd
spin on an unmentionable topic can not only make it
palatable; it can make some people actually hear what they
might have been unwilling to listen to presented any
other way.
TV SF For the ‘80s
So that’s why I like V.  It’s pulp, but it’s a little bit smarter than the run of the mill.  It’s pure commercial TV, but it has more of a heart than most other shows.  It shamelessly appeals to one’s most basic, undeveloped entertainment desires, yet it is rarely predictable and always, unexpectedly, surprising.
And I guess I have to admit it.  For all of its fine storycrafting, I often found myself bored by the Outer Limits.  I also grew impatient at times with Kirk’s mastery of difficult situations, Spock’s impeccable logic and McCoy’s flagrant emotions.  And for all of his fancy monologues, Rod Serling told more than his share of just plain dumb stories.
So give me those lizard women, give me those star children, give me those space nazis in their red nylon jumpsuits and wraparound sunglasses.  If V is going to represent the apex of TV SF for the ‘80s, it’s all right with me.  There is an active imagination behind the show, and isn’t that really the main thing good fantasy requires?  See for yourself.  The only show that’s any weirder is the evening news.