I didn't catch it but I like what I've been hearing so I might watch if it repeats or goes on the ABC website.
V: 1x01 "Pilot" 11/3/2009 - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter jefferiestubes8
- Start date
It was faster paced Trekker but that is not neccessarily a bad thing. Why does everything today have to be at a snails pace like LOST, FLASHFORWARD etc.
This show revealed all the elements that 50% of viewers probably already knew from the original. Elements from the original that they decided to reuse. So Im happy about that. I didnt want to wait through 2 or 3 eps to find out they are reptilian and not so friendly. Im sure most of the fun in this show will be about the resistance fighting the aliens. This show will probably be more action oriented than slow moving story style.
Frankly its refreshing to get a faster paced show today. To many slow arc based shows today. I see this in the style of Angel or Buffy. Great story arcs but fast paced. Im getting tired of beat around the bush type of story telling. Look where it got nuBS, one of the worst finales of a show ever. Loose ends all over the place.
J
Jetfire
Guest
Is this good? i think the numbers will be half for the next episode.
I think what this series is missing the most is the concept of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in desperate circumstances. The original Resistance was made up of a free-lance newsman, an almost-mousy scientist, a family man, and a ne'er-do-well street dealer, among others. The wound up setting aside their differences -- and their natural fears -- to become something that would spark a real movement. It was a story worth telling.
And while the new V doesn't have to follow the same formula, it still needs be a story worth telling. And right now? It's a premise that has no real story to it ... yet. There are some hints (Erica's comment about devotion, the tension between personal advancement and sacrifice for the common good as represented by the pretty-boy reporter). But the two sides of these issues are very poorly represented, if at all. And without a clear focus about something, the series will, ultimately be an empty shell.
And while the new V doesn't have to follow the same formula, it still needs be a story worth telling. And right now? It's a premise that has no real story to it ... yet. There are some hints (Erica's comment about devotion, the tension between personal advancement and sacrifice for the common good as represented by the pretty-boy reporter). But the two sides of these issues are very poorly represented, if at all. And without a clear focus about something, the series will, ultimately be an empty shell.
Agreed. By the time the resistance in the original was doing it's thing, you already had an impression of the Visitors as this huge, overwhelming force. It really did feel like they were going up against the Nazis.
I don't expect the new version to be so black and white, but it still could have done a MUCH better job laying out all the various themes and issues. Right now it's just a complete mishmash.
Frankly its refreshing to get a faster paced show today. To many slow arc based shows today. I see this in the style of Angel or Buffy. Great story arcs but fast paced. Im getting tired of beat around the bush type of story telling. Look where it got nuBS, one of the worst finales of a show ever. Loose ends all over the place.
I'm fine with a faster pace-- I loved how the first season of Heroes kept throwing surprise after surprise at us-- but you still need at least SOME kind of natural plot development.
Even Heroes took the appropriate amount of time to reveal certain things about the characters, and kept things nicely strange and mysterious for a while.
If we had learned the full nature of their powers in the first 30 minutes, we wouldn't have been able to identify with or take those characters seriously at all. Yet that's pretty much what it felt like I was watching with V.
To be honest I am still hoping the Visitor troops brought more than knives, floaty flechette bombs and ninja weapons to try and fight us with.
I mean folks may call the 80's shocktroopers cheesey but they were fairly intimadating, the red and black uniforms and armor, high powered rifles that unlike Star Wars stormtroopers these guys seemed to actually hit people and kill them.
I'm just hoping that was Visitor intelligence troops being /way/ over confident. Occupation troops need to be somewhat a frightening presence once things open up somewhat. Like I said time will tell, it just surprised me all they had were melee weapons for that first strike.
Gonna keep watching though.
Vons
I mean folks may call the 80's shocktroopers cheesey but they were fairly intimadating, the red and black uniforms and armor, high powered rifles that unlike Star Wars stormtroopers these guys seemed to actually hit people and kill them.
I'm just hoping that was Visitor intelligence troops being /way/ over confident. Occupation troops need to be somewhat a frightening presence once things open up somewhat. Like I said time will tell, it just surprised me all they had were melee weapons for that first strike.
Gonna keep watching though.
Vons
That is the problem the only reason to form a resistance which has been shown is the secret treatment of the reporter. Going with sleeper cells instead of a Nazi takeover and the registration of undesierable people leaves us with conspiracy theory nuts asking a bunch of strangers to let someone cut into their head. Why would anyone do that? What FBI agent would sit still and let flaps of skin behind her ears to be cut?
This show is moving faster than the later 24 seasons. Hell, if this were 24, Jack Bauer will have defeated all the aliens by the end of the first four episodes to uncover that different aliens are behind it. But then the conspiracy will unfold to reveal that rich white guys are behind those aliens!
So I'm out with a friend eating a hamburger he says to me, "does your burger taste funny?"
And I think about it for a minute, and I go, "yeah, it kinda does. Maybe the mayo's gone bad."
So we ask the waitress, and she says, "oh we got a deal on the meat this week."
"Really?"
"Yeah," she says, "they killed the cows with a raygun. Butcher says it's faster than the usual method of whackin' their heads and cuttin' 'em open to drain the blood. I dunno, though, we've been gettin' lots of complaints."
My friend says, "wonder if it's the raygun?"
She answers, "Ya know, that's what I been thinkin'!"
And maybe that's why a race of reptiles that comes to Earth to use humans as food use knives, swords, and kickass blades to attack a resistance cell of humans instead of fancy Gene Roddenberry ray guns.
And I think about it for a minute, and I go, "yeah, it kinda does. Maybe the mayo's gone bad."
So we ask the waitress, and she says, "oh we got a deal on the meat this week."
"Really?"
"Yeah," she says, "they killed the cows with a raygun. Butcher says it's faster than the usual method of whackin' their heads and cuttin' 'em open to drain the blood. I dunno, though, we've been gettin' lots of complaints."
My friend says, "wonder if it's the raygun?"
She answers, "Ya know, that's what I been thinkin'!"
And maybe that's why a race of reptiles that comes to Earth to use humans as food use knives, swords, and kickass blades to attack a resistance cell of humans instead of fancy Gene Roddenberry ray guns.
^ Or maybe you should stop going to Mickey Ds. 
Well in their diffence I think this was just members of the Visitor sleeper cell and not their regular stormtrooper-type guys, so it would make sense not to give ray guys and heavy armor to guys who are supposed to blend in on Earth and save the their big guns for when they can find a way to move their troops around in public without people being suspicious about it.
Except that he's the ANTI-FOX-NEWS guy. Remember... Fox News is the only network that asked hostile questions of Obama. The rest just blithely went along with the list of questions that they were supposed to ask...
The fact that the head writer and lead producer of this show have been fired from their positions as a result of this is VERY, VERY interesting, isn't it?
There are these new-fangled things called semi-automatic pistols. Hugo Borchardt invented them in 1893. You may have heard of them.
This is America, everybody has guns. Especially in New York City. It isn't like the Visitors would have had much trouble obtaining firearms if they had been manipulating things for years.
Maybe that's the point. Maybe the Visitors aren't villains this time. Maybe the first season will end with the resistance winning public opinion and the government rounding up Visitors to put them in internment camps where the showers have a disturbing lack of water. Now that would be a kick in the pants, the writers leading us to cheer on the resistance as they fight the evil Visitors and then flipping things around when the resistence does win,showing that the visitors really were altruistic, but their social ineptitude made them easy scapegoats.
^That would be a cool and nicely subversive idea, but I don't think these writers have thought the concept through that well. I think they've just tried to update the premise by making it about topical fears rather than historical ones and in so doing have completely muddied the point of it.
This:
...and this:
Rushed and rather implausible. One of my favorite things about the old show was how all the separate elements grew and combined slowly, and they've pretty much scuttled that notion. The cards are all on the table already, and not nearly as elegantly.
This V's Earth deserves to be stomped on. No one seemed to question that the aliens didn't explain why they had Earth names, or didn't tell us ther race name, or why they looked like us.
Aaaand, did anyone else question why the ships had to enter the atmosphere, shake everything up, and crash an F-18, only to come on their giant stadium screen and go "Oops. We're sorry. Friends?" I mean, what was the real point of that?
...and this:
Rushed and rather implausible. One of my favorite things about the old show was how all the separate elements grew and combined slowly, and they've pretty much scuttled that notion. The cards are all on the table already, and not nearly as elegantly.
This V's Earth deserves to be stomped on. No one seemed to question that the aliens didn't explain why they had Earth names, or didn't tell us ther race name, or why they looked like us.
Aaaand, did anyone else question why the ships had to enter the atmosphere, shake everything up, and crash an F-18, only to come on their giant stadium screen and go "Oops. We're sorry. Friends?" I mean, what was the real point of that?
They were pretending to be incompetent and innocent and fresh on the scene. They were pretending that they hadn't been cloaked in orbit for the last 20 years destroying the economy and world in general for the last three decades, that we would be just creaming ourselves for the arrivial of a hero to save us in our darkest hour.
All part of the show.
All part of the show.
So, Glenn Beck is an alien. Knew it! 
Respectable premiere, pretty much along the lines of what I hoped for. It doesn't have a unique feel, like Lost did, but it's more than good enough to hold my attention.
Other than the crowd clapping right after Anna's initial speech - nah, they'd still be in shock - the sociological elements seemed frighteningly plausible. Yes, humans really are that easy to manipulate via hope, ambition, teenage horniness etc. Yes, people would start to adjust after a few weeks, and the V's would just be part of normal reality. Yes, universal health care really is a communist plot to enslave us to alien overlords.
If ABC plays their cards right, they could have found their decent replacement for Lost. Unlike FlashForward, which is already starting to become boring, V has a durable, extendable plot that could roll on very well for four or five seasons.
Respectable premiere, pretty much along the lines of what I hoped for. It doesn't have a unique feel, like Lost did, but it's more than good enough to hold my attention.
Other than the crowd clapping right after Anna's initial speech - nah, they'd still be in shock - the sociological elements seemed frighteningly plausible. Yes, humans really are that easy to manipulate via hope, ambition, teenage horniness etc. Yes, people would start to adjust after a few weeks, and the V's would just be part of normal reality. Yes, universal health care really is a communist plot to enslave us to alien overlords.
If ABC plays their cards right, they could have found their decent replacement for Lost. Unlike FlashForward, which is already starting to become boring, V has a durable, extendable plot that could roll on very well for four or five seasons.