Review: V, “Unholy Alliance”

Despite its consistent issues that will probably ever go away, V has improved incrementally in every episode this season. “Unholy Alliance” is most certainly the most put-together effort, one that suggests there is more to the series’ writing staff than half-baked ideas that can never actually be executed in any proper fashion.

Although this episode still has that procedural feel to it, those elements are less pronounced in such a way that “Alliance” feels like a minor culmination of a number of the threads introduced and discussed over the first three episodes: Jack’s anti-V tirades, Anna’s search for the soul, her manipulation of Ryan and the search for the rest of the Fifth Column members. Each of these stories gets good coverage here, particularly Anna’s search for the soul.

I’ve talked a lot about how I thought Anna’s search for the soul seemed totally ludicrous and naive and while I still believe in those statements, the exploration of that thread took an interesting turn in this episode. V has been moderately interested — especially early on in the first season — in tackling what happens to society when these alien creatures show up to our society. Are they our political saviors? Will that share their cultures with us? These are questions that Anna seemed interested in manipulating the answers to in the first half-dozen efforts, but the political ideologies have been dropped as the series has turned into, well, whatever the hell it is now.

But in “Unholy Alliance” those questions make their way closer to the table, as Anna takes Chad on her little pilgrimage to the Vatican. Yeah, the Vatican. While I think the structure of her visit is way too similar to the one she took last season to the U.N. summit, pulling religion more deeply into the narrative seems like a compelling avenue to pursue. Father Jack’s sermons have always been moderately interesting in their ability to discuss how the Visitors’ presence and abilities feel like religious experiences, but Anna pushing her way into the Vatican takes those ideas further. When flexes her muscles and gives the TPTB in the church a blue energy light show, it’s seems to serve as something of a religious experience. And that’s really intriguing way to take things.

Most of the world’s people are religious, believing in things from ancient books and weekly sermons, but here we have physical beings, coming down from the heavens and presenting their real power. To many people, the Visitors are gods and their abilities are miracles. This is an angle the series should pursue further, particularly because it allows the story to expand in scope without stretching itself too thin. The series’ biggest problem is that we don’t really feel the Visitors’ presence on Earth because the plot sticks so tightly to Erica, Jack, Ryan, Hobbes, etc. and apart from Chad’s random (and horrible) reports, there’s no concrete indication of how the presence of these mo-fos is actually changing daily lives.

Of course, from her perspective getting the Catholic religion on her side means a billion or more people who feel a bit better about the Visitors’ placement on Earth AND helps them take out Father Jack in the process. This undercuts the thematic thread a bit, but ties back into Anna’s constant ability to use major societal institutions to shape her message to the people (even if we don’t see their response often enough). She’s used Chad to take control of the media, figured out how to make the Visitors crucial in the new advancements in medicine and played some role in the political landscape. Now that they’ve added religion and the Visitors have an obvious hand in most of society’s pillars (and probably have a hidden one in the rest).

The religion aspect also presents an interesting new wrinkle to the soul search. The Visitors had placed one of their own inside the Vatican years and years ago and by now, he’s fully sworn to God’s word. He preaches to Anna and Diana that the soul is the one thing that will save the Visitors from extinction, which is of course not what Anna wants to hear. In this respect it looks like Anna is going to be both fighting against and supporting religion. She’ll want to use it to manipulate humans, but certainly preach to her people to avoid it.

In other V plotting, there’s some actual movement on the worldwide resistance front. After continuously hinting at it in the first three episodes, Erica and company finally figure out who might be on their side in this important war. The resistance fighters hang up some ambassadors in front of the ships and opens up a trail for everyone to find them. Eli Cohn (Oded Fehr) is apparently the leader of this group and despite their differences on how to handle the Visitors, everyone agrees that the first step in working together will be framing a few of Cohn’s men for the murder of Malik in hopes of getting the FBI off the trail. It’s a step, not a big one, but a step nonetheless. In fact, I’m just happy that we’ve finally seen this mysterious faction, even though we still know so little about them.

Nevertheless, “Unholy Alliance” does a really good job of crystallizing the main threads and bringing the two opposing factions closer to actually doing something. We’re still in the dark as to what Anna or Erica’s respective groups are going to do, but at least we know something.

Other thoughts:

• Oh Tyler and your angst. No thanks.
• Similarly, not enough Vandervoort in this episode. You can never, ever have enough Vandervoort.
• Erica gets a new partner in this episode (played by Burn Notice, The Shield and Sons of Anarchy alum Jay Karnes) and it’s kind of refreshing to have her work with someone that is more suspicious of her than having it be the other way around. In this case (thus far), Erica is the probable criminal.
• Good CGI work in this episode, the budget must be higher this season.