Review: V Episode #2.3 “Laid Bare”

Another week of V, another slight improvement in quality. Last week’s episode presented some more concrete details about the Visitors’ plans and that continued through last night’s episode “Laid Bare” as well. But as with all developments in V, I have to ask this question: Why should I care?

I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way (well, maybe just a little bit), but instead I honestly want to know why I should really give a damn about Anna’s search and destroy mission for the soul? I talked about this last week as well, but this series has yet to show me that it can present a well-planned concept and then execute it with any sort of relevance, emotional heft or stakes.

Watching this episode lead to a moment that’s supposed to be a reveal about the kidnapping of missing persons being part of Anna’s journey to the center of the human soul isn’t dreadfully awful, but it’s just sort of…there. My presumption is that Anna and the rest of the Visitors are highly intelligent beings, much smarter than us earthlings. And yet, here they are, wasting a whole lot of time and V-power on trying to find a physical part of the humans that equates to the soul. It’s completely aimless and kind of insulting.

We as viewers know that there isn’t a quantifiable “part” that is “the soul” and so to watch a superior race bounce around trying to find that answer for themselves is just stupid. I presume that the writers are trying to enter into some kind of conversation about what the soul really could be — just as they did last week to moderate degrees of success — but this feels like a haphazard way to accomplish this goals.

“Laid Bare” also presents us with a connective thread to the search for the soul (I think): more mating! Lisa’s body is transforming and Anna’s ready to show her the ropes of how to both mate and presumably save the Visitor race for whatever reason. Meanwhile, Sidney shows Erica Tyler’s DNA strand, which is missing half of the normal pieces. DUN DUN DUN.

This is a development I can get behind because it legitimately ties Anna/Lisa to Erica/Tyler in the ways that the series was trying to do in a more abstract, thematic way last season. Now we know that Tyler was chosen for some reason to be part of this cross-species mating and so the relationship between the four of them is going to gunk up. My only complaint with this thread is that it’s just still so vague. We know the Visitors need to use Lisa to mate with a human, preferably Tyler, but we don’t know why and we don’t really know what that has to do with the soul. I’m not saying the writers have to show all their cards at once and they should have never written with cancellation in mind, but as a viewer, it’s a little disheartening to know that there are probably only seven more episodes of this story and it is still moving at a glacier-like pace.

Moreover, this episode continued down the typical V formula: New piece of information that makes Erica and the rest of the team feel like they are thisclose to taking down the Visitors and of course, they get that information and realize that they aren’t actually as close as originally thought. Oh well, there’s always next week! Here, the crew ties up Erica’s Visitor partner and the debates about torture from last season rise to the surface yet again. Sidney obviously doesn’t want any part of the skinning because he needs the information about the Visitors’ physiology, but the rest of the group feels a bit more bloody thirsty this go-around.

Apart from looking kind of cool and possibly raising some ethical issues in the future — because they’re sure as hell not discussed here really — the skinning only serves to present a false sense of progression. The torture leads Ryan and Erica to search for a missing girl and some Visitor trackers, but it doesn’t really amount to anything. We at home know that the missing girl was part of Anna’s experiments, but Erica and company do not, so they’re more or less back to where they started. The possible lead last week literally went nowhere and this one doesn’t get them much further. I noted this on Twitter but it feels like V wants to be this sprawling mythological series, but oftentimes it feels like a misguided and messy procedural with aliens. Unfortunately, the series isn’t really good at what it wants to be or what it sort of ends up being. It’s an odd combination of both that doesn’t work as well as it should.