V: Chubby Rain

So it’s the ABC alien invasion show.  The one where the aliens are reptilian but look exactly like humans, and they want to kill us for some reason.  This is season two.

Welcome!  I’m Saint Clare of Assisi.  I’ll be taking over the helm for the estimable WaffleBoy this season.

I also have a treat for you.  One of my favorite aspects of this show is the way the V’s keep unveiling increasingly ridiculous technology.  You can find a guide to all of it in my V-cyclopedia.

Now then, in case you’re just joining us, here’s a quick run-down of what’s already happened on the show…

The V, or “Visitors,” visited Earth.

And now they hover over 29 of the biggest cities in the world, in their Challah-shaped space ships.  But this isn’t actually their first contact with Earth.  The V’s look exactly like we do, because they can clone human skin and mold it onto their bodies.  They’ve had undercover operatives on Earth for decades.  These operatives have infiltrated the upper echelon of our society.

Anna is evil but pretends not to be

Anna is the super-hot alien queen and leader of the Visitors.  She says she comes in peace, but like most aliens, she wants to kill and/or eat us.  While she gets that ball rolling, she has to make it look like her people are benevolent.  She uses a human reporter named Chad, (Scott Wolf), as her mouthpiece, but lately Chad’s been having second thoughts.

Lately, after our hero Erica Evans blew up all her soldier-eggs, Anna flipped out and dumped something called Red Sky into the atmosphere, turning it completely red.

FBI agent Erica Evans: playing for both teams

At the center of the show is Erica Evans, FBI agent and single mother of a teenage son.  Since the beginning, she’s been leading a double life.  The FBI has pledged its support to the V’s, so Erica has carried out various missions that serve the V’s interests.

But not all V’s are evil.  Many, in fact, have developed human emotions and are sympathetic to us.  Those that have decided to rebel against their queen have formed an organization called The Fifth Column.  Erica has been part of this since the beginning, because she knows most of the V’s have ill intentions.

She does not pull any punches.  Ever.

The first-ever human-V hybrid baby was born
Turns out the V’s and humans can breed.  Anna has just captured the first ever human-V hybrid baby.

The mixed-breed’s father is played by Morris “I can say ANYTHING with a straight face” Chestnut.

Tyler joins the Live Aboard movement
Tyler is Erica’s son.  He is a teenager who’s written pretty realistically, because he rarely thinks things through and thus makes terrible decisions.  One is to blindly trust the Visitors as a way to rebel against his Mom.  He’s been considering moving out of Mom’s house and onto the alien mothership for quite a while now.  He’s dating Anna’s daughter, Lisa, who herself is beginning to develop feelings for him.

He is a dipshit.  He reminds me of James from Twin Peaks in his ability to drag down a show. 

The aliens are Obama

It’s a show about a mysterious stranger showing up out of nowhere and promising to make everything better.  At one point last season, they literally said they would offer “universal healthcare.”  Sound like a certain President of the United States we know?  Or maybe they’re just ripping off The Music Man.

I think that’s everything we need to start.  Here we go…

SEASON TWO BEGINS: THE INTRO

Well, it looks like the Red Sky is deadly, as scores of people lie dead on the streets of New York City.

One of the bodies comes alive, and it’s none other than our hero Erica.

Soon she finds Tyler, but the second she makes contact with him his face starts melting.

WAIT, IS THIS A CLEARASIL COMMERCIAL? Wha-bam.

Anna comes walking up now.  “You killed my children.  Now I kill yours.” BUM-BUM-BUMMMMM.

Wait, no.  Dream.  In reality, things are just as we left them at the end of Season One.  It’s four days after the launch of Red Sky.  Anna and the Visitors have gone into radio silence.  People don’t know what the eff to do.  Remember how throughout Season One pretty much all of humanity loved the V’s unconditionally?  This turn of events sort of contradicts their mental image of the V’s.

Then we head up to the mothership.  They V’s have been ignoring humanity’s calls for answers for some time, but Anna doesn’t worry because she figures we humans aren’t smart enough to figure out what Red Sky is on our own.  However, her second-in-command Marcus has learned that one scientist on Earth is getting close to the answer, so Anna orders him or her killed.

Meanwhile, Anna’s twenty-nine hover-ship captains have started to doubt her effectiveness.  They are worried the premature launch of the Red Sky, in response to losing her eggs, means she’s beginning to develop human emotions.  That’s bad for any  cold, calculating V.

Then we check in with Ryan.  He’s still on the V mother ship.  Anna intends to figure out just exactly how Ryan was able to mate with a human.  But here she decides she’s performed all the tests on Ryan she needs to, so she sends him back to Earth, because, she says, he loooooves being with the humans so much, and maybe he should marry them.

Let’s head back to Earth.  Chad steps in for some long-ass exposition: Red Sky has changed people’s opinions about the V’s now.  They are rioting, stockpiling goods, arming themselves, and so on.  One big riot is taking place at the Peace Ambassador’s center.  The FBI, who, apparently are the only human agency in charge of dealing with the V’s now, are paralyzed because of Anna’s refusal to communicate.  Erica soon gets fed up with the inaction and sets out to figure this out with her friends at the Fifth Column.

Then we get a scene where Anna and Marcus discuss her reasons for releasing Ryan instead of just killing him.  Anna figures that since they’ve kept his baby, they can leverage Ryan into destroying the fifth column.

“I think for this scene, I’ll say something cold and calculating, turns away from whoever I’m talking to, and stare coldly and calculatingy into the middle distance. Sound good?”

Back at Fifth Column headquarters, Erica, Hobbes, and Father Jack are also trying to figure out what to do about Red Sky, when they are surprised by a visitor: Ryan.  He’s back!  He’s been gone the past four days, so he has to explain that he’s been on the mothership  just got released without knowing why.  Hobbes isn’t buying a word of it.

A phone call interrupts the tension.  It’s Tyler.  He’s been hanging out at the Peace Ambassadors Center and got caught up in the riots.  He needs help.  Erica will be right there!

But first it’s time for Anna to deal with the murmurs among her ship captains.  She has gathered them all to the main mothership to address their concerns.  First, she tells them that nobody in the galaxy, human or V, is as smart as she is, so they should all just shut up.  Then, she brings up the elephant in the room, her recent outburst of emotion.  Her tone softens, and she reassures everybody, while she secretly engages her kill tentacle…

When they roast Anna, the joke they always use is: “You know when you see Anna’s kill tentacle, you’re gonna have a BAD day!”

Anna picks one of the captains at random and starts bitch-slapping him to show everyone she’s not to be fucked with.  Marcus gets seriously turned on.  Then to emphasize the point, she peels the poor bastard’s skin off and finally stabs him with her tail.

Step up to the WU!

ACT ONE

Over at the Peace Ambassador’s center, Erica finds Tyler amid the mob.  She tries to escort him out, but they get separated, and he winds up being shoved into a line of riot guards, who smack him around with their billy clubs.  It’s awesome.  But he’s fine.   Erica sees an opportunity: she can claim Tyler is seriously hurt and use her status as head of the Visitor-FBI taskforce to take him up to the mothership for medical care—and to pester Anna about what she’s up to.

The plan works.  Erica and Tyler start to head for a shuttle up to the mothership, but then, peals of lighting are heard overhead.  Everyone looks up at the sky, and it begins to rain.  It’s red.  It looks pretty much exactly like blood.

“What’s wrong?  It’s a gift!  Wait, you’re saying you DON’T enjoy having blood rained on you?  Then what is Bloodrayne all about? Oh.  Oops.  You humans are complicated.”

Then it’s over to Saint Josephine’s church, where Father Jack, having returned to duty after delivering his incendiary anti-V speech last episode, is helping his parishioners get through the crisis.  Chad Decker comes stumbling in now.  Jack is not pleased to see him, because Chad’s been betraying the Fifth Column to the V’s.  But Chad has something to say.

In the last episode, when Chad was still pro-V, he was hanging around the mothership.  There he met Joshua, the chief medical officer who sympathizes with the humans.  Joshua told Chad to visit an out-of-the-way section of the ship that would change Chad’s mind completely.  It was that dimly lit torture chamber-type place with the big levitating needle machine. (Which you can read more about in the V-cyclopedia!)

Anyway, the real scene without all that backstory takes about thirty seconds, so here goes: Chad feels guilty for having let Anna use him, and he wants to switch sides to the Fifth Column.  Father Jack is feeling pissy, so he tells Chad he has to earn their trust.

Then Erica and Tyler board the mothership, where Erica shoves Tyler off onto some doctors and starts snooping around.  Conveniently, Lisa is just standing there, so Erica asks her to dig up some dirt on Red Sky.  Lisa leaves to check with Marcus.

Immediately following that, Lisa finds a computer terminal and pulls up a file on some middle-aged human guy, who will be the focus of the rest of the episode.  He’s the one human scientist coming close to a cure for Red Sky:

So wait…in order to figure out what Red Sky is, the humans have to get onboard the ship so they can…find other humans who know what it is?  WHAT’S HAPPENING???

Erica checks back to see that Tyler is OK, and he is…

Yes, it’s a magic wand that heals wounds.  But as you can see it’s a BLUE magic wand, is how it’s sci-fi.

And then Anna shows up.  Here’s how this scene goes: Erica point-blank asks her what Red Sky is.  Anna refuses to be questioned, so she turns to leave.  Erica stops her and tells her, no really, she needs to know what Red Sky is.  So Anna takes her away for a demonstration.

Anna opens up her Planet Earth public address system thingey and explains to all of humanity what Red Sky is all about: basically, it cures pollution.  And it reverses global warming.  That’s literally all there is to it.  Aren’t the V’s great?

In her address, Anna also seems put-off that the humans don’t trust her.  Here’s what I would have liked her to have said…

“You know what, humanity?  You blew it.  We’re only dealing with the dolphins from now on.”

ACT TWO

Having delivered her Earthwide public address, Anna and now Lisa escort Erica and Tyler off the ship.  Anna and Erica exchange some ominous-sounding pleasantries, about how Anna forgives Erica’s accusations because Erica was just being protective, and Anna would have done the same thing—i.e. go to drastic lengths to serve her people.  Or whatever.

Tyler decides to stay on the ship so he can (bone) hang out with Lisa a bit.  Erica’s reluctant to leave him alone, but Anna reassures her that she’ll “take good care of him.”  As Erica hugs everyone goodbye, Lisa whispers the name of that human scientist she found on Marcus’s computer—Dr. Ellis Watts of the fake New York State University.

After Erica has left, Anna takes Lisa aside and informs her she will now be “performing her duties” with Tyler.  Whatever that means.  I hope she eats him.

Then it’s back to Earth, where Erica joins up with Ryan and Hobbes to pay a visit to Dr. Watts.  Outside they exchange some awkward dialogue…more awkward than usual, I mean:

HOBBES: HEY DID YOU SEE ANNA’S PLANETARY MESSAGE?

ERICA: I DON’T BUY IT.  SHE’S PLANNING SOMETHING

HOBBES: I BET THIS SCIENTIST KNOWS WHAT THAT IS

RYAN: WELL WE SHOULD BE CAREFUL, BECAUSE THE V’S MIGHT BE IN THE AREA

Hobbes stays behind to make sure the coast is clear, and Erica and Ryan make their way inside the university.  When they arrive at the professor’s office, they discover he’s gone off somewhere, but they do run into his associate, Dr. Sidney Miller…

But then Ryan notices a shady-looking dude in a hoodie has been following them.  It’s a V Tracker.  Ryan knows that if the Tracker reports back to Anna, they are all screwed,  So Erica and Ryan give chase.   V Trackers are pretty agile, so a parkour sequence ensues.

By “parkour” I mean Ryan and the Tracker jumping down things people otherwise walk down

They chase the guy out onto the street, and it looks like the Tracker’s getting away until Hobbes doors him.  Ryan takes the Tracker by the collar and starts beating on him, clearly working out his baby-related frustrations, and even the normally merciless Hobbes has to pull him off.   So instead, Ryan pulls out the Tracker’s suicide pill and force-feeds it to him.

They do this a lot.  I’m getting kinda disturbed by it…

Sidney Miller comes running up behind them and is blown away at what he’s just seen.  Not just that he’s just seen someone disintegrate; he too believed the V’s were peaceful, so these events have shaken his perceptions.  When the gang tells Miller the V’s might have been after his boss, Miller thinks the V’s were actually coming after him.  And because apparently nobody on a New York City street at midday noticed, the gang all walks back inside the school.

Why are the V interested in Miller?  Inside the lab, he takes them to a storage room.  He was on a research dig a while ago in New Mexico and uncovered a mass grave at least fifty years old.  Full of human skeletons.  And, one V skeleton, which he named Alpha…

“I would have alerted the world to the existence of aliens, but dude…the girl-guy ratio at NYSU is awesome.  I’m up to my knees in it.”

ACT THREE

So, what does Sidney Miller know about Alpha?  Pretty much nothing.  None of his human-science could tell him what it was, so he just kept it filed away until now.  Erica and the others decide to induct him into Fifth Column at this point, even though he wants no part of it.  He’s in.

Then it’s over to Jack’s church.  Chad has found a way to prove his loyalty to the Fifth Column—he did a bunch of interviews with Live Aboard members, and they all experienced the same horrors with the needle machine.  Chad will broadcast this tape, damn the consequences.

Up on the mothership, Tyler and Lisa take some alone time together.  He tells her how worried he was, not being in touch the last four days during the Red Sky situation.  And…he chalked up the lack of contact to her not being interested in him any more, NOT to, um, the Red Sky situation.  But she apologizes, and they proceed to have some awkward, mannered sex.

Anna and Marcus have been watching the whole thing via the Fiber Camera on Anna’s jacket…this is apparently Lisa’s duty, mentioned earlier: to have sex with an idiot. All is going smoothly.  Since Anna is currently trying to figure out how to mate a human with a V, I’m guessing this is part of the research progress.

“Remember what I told you, daughter.  He doesn’t have to pull out.”

Marcus brings up the next item on the agenda—something’s up with the twelve soldier eggs who survived the bombing.

Meanwhile, Erica and the guys press Miller for more information on why the V’s are after Watts.  He remembers why now—he found a weird chemical compound in Alpha, one that later showed up in Red Sky.  Dr. Watts was studying Red Sky, so, to complete the analysis, Miller logged onto Watts’s account and compared the two chemicals to make sure.

Miller logs onto his computer to show them, and Ryan immediately recognizes the compound as a concentrated form of phosphorous normally found on the V’s home planet.  The V’s need it for reproduction, because it forms a protective layer on their eggs.

So, why do the V’s want to saturate all of us with phosphorous?  Erica takes a long Meaningful Look at Alpha and nails it: for reproduction.

By the way, don’t you love how gullible most of humanity is?  “Hey Anna, whydja dump all this phosphorous on us?”  “It’s a gift.” “But isn’t phosphorous the basis for a type of grenade?” “It’s for global warming.”  “OK THANKS!”

ACT FOUR

WAIT THERE’S MORE!

Erica remembers a startling fact—when she was pregnant with Tyler, the doctors discovered that SHE has elevated levels of phosphorous in her blood.  MAYBE IT’S ALL CONNECTED!

Also, remember that sequence last season when they introduced doubt about who Tyler’s biological father is?  It ended up going nowhere, but maybe that’ll come back now.

So, did the V’s experiment on Erica during her pregnancy?  Only one way to find out.  Miller needs a blood sample.  Erica, being a Woman of Action, doesn’t bother rolling up her sleeve; she grabs a scalpel and slices her palm right open,

“I don’t have time to do things the non-ballsy way!”

Time to wrap things up…

Anna congratulates Lisa for a great performance, then reminds her that nothing must stand in their way, including V’s who have gone rogue.  The medics have just revived Joshua and intend to find out who the rest of the traitors are, so Lisa could be headed up Shit Creek.

Father Jack has showed up at the lab now for some reason, and he shows the others the Chad Decker torture interviews.  They debate how to use them.  Erica thinks he should maintain his access to Anna.  Ryan’s too preoccupied about his daughter to be helpful in the discussion.

Lisa visits the recently revived Joshua, but discovers his memory is completely erased.

Father Jack refuses to let Chad air the report, and instead asks him to conduct some spy work on the mothership for them.  Chad’s reluctant, but agrees.

Anna visits her last surviving soldier-babies.  Only six have lived, and all are permanently flawed.  She regrets her previous emotional outburst.  And lastly, she decides to pay a visit to a strange subterranean lair I think is aboard the mothership.  This is where her mother lives.

Hey, it’s Jan Badler!  She played the V queen on the original series. And The Predator, apparently

That’s all for me this week.  Thanks for reading!