V: "Laid Bare" - Jan. 18 on ABC - Grading & Discussion

[O'Dib]

Well, I also enjoyed how coldblooded they were about torturing the Cylon. And there really should be a Jack Bauer sensibility to the characters, especially the FBI chick. By that I mean, let's torture some humans too! Week in week out I'm baffled by what passes for Earth's resistance force. These people won't compromise their humanity in the name of the survival of the entire race?! I wish we had gotten this show instead:

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yOfBJcob7c&feature=player_embedded[/yt]

Now imagine mixing the elements: a supposedly friendly humanoid race arrives, saying they're pursued by a reptilian enemy that will surely want to conquer Earth. They offer technology and advice for the coming conflict in exchange for shelter. Of course, the races are one and the same, and the ruse is to infiltrate all human defense installations and shut them down from the inside. Our heroes would be perceived as terrorists for targeting the "good" aliens and some of their human collaborators. The military invasion plot would run parallel to this, as the reptilian vanguard would arrive shortly after the Vs (in vessels of different design, obviously). To begin with, the several devastating attacks on population centers would make the governments of Earth more likely to accept the terms for the help being offered (full integration with the population, in essence providing a new homeworld for the Vs). The final goal, obviously, is to take over with minimal human losses, for the purposes of interbreeding..

 

[DarKush]

DarKush, you're not honestly implying President Obama is an attractive man are you?

Not the way I swing but I've read/seen some swooning.

O'Dib that would've been an awesome idea for the V reboot.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Might an attractive, highly intelligent, sucessful black man stoke as much envy or unease as it might support? (President Obama anyone?) So, that could be a double edged sword.

Any strategy they use carries risk. Is it smart for the queens to insist on beautiful female skins? Just because they are female in gender doesn't mean they can't have male skins. Maybe good looking females would be taken less seriously and they should opt to look like Bill Gates or Donald Trump.

I'm not so certain about the Vs understanding human biases, etc. to the extent you are giving them credit for.

I have a habit of giving writers more credit for thinking things through than they actually do, which I should really stop because then I get all the more dissappointed when they do something stupid that proves that whatever intelligence I was discerning in their writing was always a mirage.

Anna and Lisa are beautiful so the actresses can be used to sell the show. Ryan is black because they need a token black guy. Everything can be easily explained by the usual shallow bullshit logic of mainstream TV. I'm just in another of my self-deluded moods.

I do find it interesting that the part that the black guy got cast for was an alien. An infiltrator; a potential enemy. I still think it speaks to the sense that blacks (and by extension other non-whites) are still seen as the Other.

I honestly think the writers should be given credit for that one. Hollywood is suffused in white liberal guilt, and I've noticed in sci fi there's a tendency to avoid casting non-whites in villanous or shades of grey, Garak-type roles, which works against minorities because those are the good roles, aren't they? Much better to play Ryan than boring-ass Father Jack. The usual drill would be to cast the token black guy as the noble priest, nice and safe, and give the juicy angst-ridden alien role to a white actor.

Ryan is a particularly juicy role because he's not a villain but rather a sympathetic alien who is caught between cultures. He's a good guy trying to do the right thing. So the actor gets the fun of playing a hero, but also a hero who is complicated and full of dramatic conflict. Those are the characters that steal shows.

The irony is that Morris Chestnut in particular is not up to the role. He brings nothing to the part! Were they really not able to find any black actor in Hollywood who could have taken that role and run with it? Just think of Denzel Washington in that same role. There's a young Denzel Washington in Hollwyood, or a dozen, they should have looked harder to find him.

Then again, at least that dude was black. Ryan's not "black" (though portrayed by a black actor).

Do you mean that he's actually not human, and as an alien, all bets are off how he should act? If so, then why complain about how he's being portrayed?

My main complaint about Ryan is that he's being depicted (and acted) as too human. He should be a decent, sympathetic person, but there should be more effort at depicting him having an alien mentality, an alien way of being "in love," of showing concern for his daughter, etc. I just don't believe at a gut level that Ryan is a V at all.

I'm still not sold on the white guilt thing. I don't think its widespread, if exists at all. Could you provide some examples?

Hollywood. Have you seriously not noticed how skittish they are about depicting blacks (or other non-whites) as villains they way they gleefully depict whites in (often scene stealingly) villainous roles?

Examples:

DS9 - Sisko, Bashir and Worf are heroic vs a passel of villanous and semi-villanous characters played by whites: Dukat, Damar, Weyoun, Winn, the Female Changeling, Eddington, Sloan, Garak, Gowron.

B5 - Had one black actor, I forget his name, but he was a nice, heroic doctor. Plenty of white actors stealing scenes with juicy villain roles - Londo, Mr. Morden, that crazy emperor guy...

Heroes - one black actor in the main cast, played an upstanding family man. For the juicy, scene stealing part of Sylar, they got a white guy.

Avatar - evil white mercenaries and capitalists vs. the noble Na'vi, played by black, Hispanic and native American actors.

BSG - heroic, Hispanic Bill Adama vs. sleazy whitey Baltar and a bunch of Cylons played by white actors, except for one token black Cylon who barely even appears as a character.

Caprica - Joseph Adama, also played by a Hispanic actor, is written more sympathetically than Daniel Greystone, played by a white actor, who is a greedy and deluded capitalist who wreaks havoc with his insensitivity and selfishness.

 

[DarKush]

Regarding my comment about Ryan not being 'black' I wasn't talking about behavior, I was talking about the character not being human. There is no one way to 'be black', and when people often think there is they dredge up demeaning stereotypes.

I think Ryan is all too human isn't necessarily a bad thing in the sense that it represents one way the Vs can be absorbed, 'defeated' by humanity. I think they are playing it that way to show the commonality, or potential commonality between humans and Vs. Ryan could play an ambassador-type in time, someone who bridges the gap. On one level I can agree that it is a juicy role and these type of roles don't go often to black actors, however, it still bothers me that Hollywood seems reluctant to find ordinary black people's lives interesting or juicy enough without comedy or without making them extraterrestrial.

I'm not so certain about white guilt as it pertains to Hollywood. There are a lot of white villains, but there as also a lot of white heroes. One near constant for me is that no matter what role the minority inhabits it is generally not as developed. So with whites you get a range of humanity, human experiences, but with blacks and non-whites, you don't get that. I disagree that blacks aren't portrayed as villains. It's just they aren't the arch villains, often, the intelligent villains. How many whites are cast as pimps as opposed to blacks? Or gang bangers or prostitutes? Same with Latinos as gang bangers. And how many Arabs are still cast as terrorists?

So I'm not so certain its a noble impulse or white guilt that necessarily driving these casting decisions. To be fair, some of that might be present in the more willing desire or lip service to diversity that many Hollywood folks make, but at the end of the day you still have a problem with the depiction of blacks or non-whites as fully developed, human characters far too often. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen sometimes, it just means that it doesn't happen enough.

I think after decades of casting blacks in stereotypical and sometimes subhuman roles, Hollywood in the 60s reversed course by portraying blacks, sometimes, as near saints. Today I see far too much of the kind of characters without internal lives, no matter if they are crooks or heroes, the kind of characters that pretty much exist to serve the white main characters. Sometimes they are there to be the butt of jokes, to provide comedy, 'urban, street, hip hop swagger', or the sacrificial lamb. But the end result of these characters, whether the most vile stereotypes or the saints created with the best of intentions, are black characters that the audience might laugh at or cheer for, but far too often can't relate to.

Whites are still seen as the default humans. And blacks and other non-whites are seen as being not universal, as different, and too often inscrutable.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I disagree that blacks aren't portrayed as villains. It's just they aren't the arch villains, often, the intelligent villains.

That's true, but it's easier to make them disposable walk-on "gansta" types than to really use them to explore the depths of human villainy the way Dexter Morgan, Walter White or Tony Soprano are. It would take guts to cast a black character in a role like that, like Denzel Washington in American Gangster or Training Day.

The lead characters I can think of who were played by blacks are all comedy, not drama and certainly not the type of drama where the lead character is an antihero. TV lacks the guts and imagination for that.

So I'm not so certain its a noble impulse or white guilt that necessarily driving these casting decisions.

Just to clarify, white guilt is not a noble impulse, if that's what you mean. It's cowardice and really racism as well.

 

[DarKush]

Funny that you mention American Gangster because I thought it was one of Denzel's worst roles in terms of characterization. The juice went with Russell Crowe's character. He had a pulse. Denzel was a cold, passionless machine. I never really got a sense of who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. Its not an issue where I wanted him to be noble or good, just I wanted to get inside his head.

I recently read the autobiography of Frank Lucas, the guy Denzel played, and he was a much different person. To be fair, much was made of Lucas's intelligence, his organizational skills, and his guts as he built a drug empire in the film, but I wish we had gotten a better sense of the man and the times in which he lived.

In most of the crime films I've watched, I've gotten a better sense of what compelled the gangster, from the Godfathers, Goodfellas, Untouchables, Scarface, Menace II Society, New Jack City, to The Departed and even Boardwalk Empire. I think Denzel fared better in Training Day. At least his Alonzo had passion. At least it was implied that he had sex, which is another gripe I have about the portrayal of blacks in Hollywood. Generally unless its deviant or comical sex, black sexuality is something not explored all that often in mainstream films, especially when its intraracial sex.

 

[Ruaidhri]

Based on everything we've seen so far in this incarnation of V, I seriously think this thread is giving the writers far too much credit for thinking about the racial mix of the V's. I'm in the camp that it was more about the racial mix of the cast than the racial mix of the characters.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Demolishing people that achieved something is fun.

Outting people that are peddling shit believing they're geniuses, or worse yet expecting to be regaled as geniuses when they're phoning it in, they KNOW they're phoning it in or with the case of the Voyager writing room they were ordered to write stupid for stupid people because there's more money in stupid...

These assholes have to be punished.