V – Episode 1 (Season 1): “Pilot”
Let me get this out of the way first: I never watched the original V TV series. It was before my time. I have heard good things about it, and wanted to check it out (and I still plan on it … someday), but for now I’ve started watching the remake.
It was a good watch, and the show is well worth the time, but falls back too much on formulaic storytelling. From the start of the Pilot to the end, there’s nothing at all that will catch anybody that’s seen, well, any TV show or movie, off guard. The method by which the different character’s storylines are tied together by the end of the episode is done beautifully, and I suppose that that was the entire point of the episode – to lay down the infrastructure for future episodes. At this the episode succeeds marvelously.
The episode opens with the mundane lives of normal people on their normal everyday routine when alien ships fly over 29 major cities in the world, causing mass panic. Then, a few moments later, the Visitors make an open declaration of peace, causing mass joy (and later, mass protests). The episode centers on individuals who aren’t entirely sure that the Visitors are evil, but don’t exactly trust their motives to be entirely benevolent either. At least one of the characters already knows they’re evil from the start, and the others find out by the end one way or another, and the episode ends just as they begin to plan a resistance. I can already say that I’m going to be annoyed by the character Logan Huffman is playing – kids with daddy/mommy issues are the most annoying kind of archetypes. The dialogue is clichéd, but any problems it had are made up by the actors themselves.
Anyway, it’s to early to be judging the series as a whole as some reviewers are saying (have we learned nothing from Heroes?), and it’s definitely not the best pilot episode I’ve ever seen (that honor would belong to House). But it’s still a great opening episode and I’m looking forward to seeing how the rest of the season will shape up.
