Review: V Episode #2.1 “Red Rain”

Cory Barker joins KSiteTV with a recap and review of this year’s V season premiere. Welcome to KSiteTV, Cory! And now, the review…

When I started to look back on my reviews of V’s first season and back on the series in general, I realized one obvious thing: V is not a very good television series. I say that I realize this because I honestly kind of forgot that V existed in the first place.

I like to think of myself as tuned in to what is happening in the television industry. I follow the right people on Twitter, I watch over 40 current series and regularly update my own television web site. And I still nearly forgot about V.

This is the primary battle V faces with its return. Viewers checked it out back in November 2009, but by the end of the season last spring, the numbers weren’t good, the reviews weren’t much better and amid a sea of behind-the-scenes changes, it seemed like ABC was bound to cancel it.

Thanks to FlashForward’s failure and ABC’s inherent desire to pretend that at least one of its post-Lost series is a success, V is now back.

EP Scott Rosenbaum gets a full season – well, ten episodes – to make his mark on Scott Peters’ creation. The concern is, of course, whether or not that mark will really change anything in the grand scheme of things.

After “Red Rain” I can make two suggestions about the series. First of all, Rosenbaum has done a nice job of making V “his” series. Second and more unfortunately of all, I’m still not sure that really changes the series’ status in the minds of viewers or critics.

Let’s separate those two points, shall we? If you take a look at this premiere episode versus the first four episodes of season one and you should be able to notice changes. Gone are the heavy-handed, but still kind of interesting parallels to President Obama or any sort of demagogue politician. In fact, it seems like all political leanings have been removed from the series. I think that’s probably a good thing, because it never seemed like Scott Peters and his writers were too interested in making the political elements, well, interesting. They were there, gave random people online something to talk about during the first two episodes, but after that, there wasn’t much to them.

Rosenbaum has instead decided to focus on the series’ female characters and what kind of things they have to deal with. Anna, Erica and to a growing larger extent, Lisa, are definitely the center of the V universe at this point. This framework is certainly less original, but it is also easier to execute. Morena Baccarin and Elizabeth Mitchell seem to enjoy – or at least do a nice job of pretending to enjoy – delivering the tepid and heavy handed dialogue with an admirable charm and energy. Baccarin in particularly seems to be the only actor on the cast that recognizes how goofy the series is, so her ridiculous intensity makes watching Anna kind of fun.

Speaking of the ridiculous, the goofy and the fun, Rosenbaum and his team have also apparently decided that the best way to tell a story about alien invasions is to fill it full of intense sight gags or generally gross moments. There was a lot of that in the second half of season one and it continues here in “Red Rain,” with Anna’s attack of the other Visitor and also with Ryan’s creepy hybrid baby. Those moments are memorable and at this point the series needs people to remember it.

However, there’s a problem with that shock value storytelling approach and it plays right into my second assumption that I mentioned up top. Including really great, shocking moments works, but those bits of V are always going to be undercut by the series’ inherent seriousness. This series is just SO SERIOUS about everything that it is borderline suffocating.
Adding to this tonal clash is a new character, Dr. Sidney Miller, played by Reaper’s Bret Harrison. I love Bret Harrison and I love Reaper but Harrison is just out of place on this series. In “Red Rain” he serves as both the comic relief and the exposition deliverer and unfortunately, his manic comic style doesn’t really work in the wooden, uptight world of V and perhaps just as unfortunately, he’s not particularly good at delivering exposition.

So if we add up the few shocking moments, Bret Harrison and the wooden, tight tenor of 95 percent of the series, V has a major crisis of tone. The crazy moments and Bret Harrison are great in a vacuum, but they don’t really fit into the series’ overall tone and so the series is being pulled in too many tonal directions. Of course, it would be nice if the series would stop taking itself so seriously, but I don’t think that is going to happen and thus, Harrison and the big, goofy moments are going to continue to feel out of place.

If there is one major improvement to the series after “Red Rain,” it’s the Rosenbaum and his team seem really interested in giving up all sorts of somewhat interesting answers to questions. This premiere episode gives us a look at a Visitor tail, face and skeleton and (unsurprisingly) shows us that the Visitors have been on this planet for a very long time. These aren’t necessarily “big” answers or developments that really help the narrative, but they’re useful in convincing the audience that they won’t be totally jerked around throughout these ten episodes.

Most importantly, the overarching plot looks like it will deal with Anna’s developing humanity. There is a good deal of intriguing dialogue and discussion in “Red Rain” about what the human skin may or may not do to the Visitors and although it’s slightly unbelievable that Anna would be so upset over the random solider eggs she developed, I can go with it if that means more of Anna struggling with feelings.

Unfortunately, these improvements can’t make up for the tonal issues and perhaps more importantly, the scope issues. The Fifth Column story didn’t really come together last season because it was too hard to believe that four or five people were really successful in putting together a resistance and the series goes right back to that well again in “Red Rain.” Erica, Ryan, Jack, Chad and Hobbes have a good chemistry and are various degrees of interesting in their own right, but their episodic adventures are misguided and here, boring.

I don’t expect V to be able to tell a story with a global scope on a weekly basis if only for budgetary reasons, but the series seems so set on tightening its view to such a small, directed group of people that it hurts the overall impact of anything the Fifth Column does. We know that Erica and company don’t really buy Anna’s hackneyed rationale for Red Sky and Red Rain, but what about the rest of the world?

The series is so inherently vague about Anna and the Visitor’s intentions, which is something that in itself is annoying but is only compounded when we don’t really see any reaction to those intentions. Sure, a few people held up signs during Red Sky and Red Rain, but the fact that the Fifth Column resistance has expanded by two members since the pilot episode if you include Chad and we still don’t really know what the Visitors want, even the small answers given in “Red Rain” become less satisfying.

I don’t mean to sound overly critical, but V is a series that has some potential. It’s never going to be a really “great” series, but it could be unbelievably fun and crazy and wild. There are elements here that I enjoy, but “Red Rain” is disconnected, sloppy and trying to do too much without really doing anything at all. It’s not the best start to a season for a series that is probably already on the bubble. But there’s hope. I think.

Rating: 2.5/5

Cory Barker is a graduate student at Bowling Green State University’s Department of Popular Culture focusing on television studies. He wrote television criticism for the Indiana University student newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student, for three years and started both a television-specific blog and podcast for the same publication. He now runs his own television criticism web site, TVSurveillance.com and is a contributor to TVOvermind, Target419, VisitorSite.net, and several other television websites. He can be found on Twitter @corybarker. You can read his Season 1 V reviews at VisitorSite.net.