Elizabeth Mitchell Plays Double-Agent With Extra-Terrestrial Others in V

Last year, ABC introduced two series meant to vie for the attention of the LOST-loving crowd. That wasn’t their only purpose, certainly, but the network marketed them in such a way as to make them as appealing to that demographic as possible. Along with large casts, sci-fi elements and overlapping themes, each boasted at least one actor who played a major role on LOST. Flashforward had the edge in that department with Sonya Walger and Dom Monaghan, best known to LOSTies as roving Scotsman Desmond’s lost love Penny Widmore and burnout rocker-turned-hero Charlie Pace, plus a brief appearance by Kim Dickens, who played Sawyer’s ex-flame Cassidy Phillips, but V boasted Elizabeth Mitchell, who portrayed fertility doctor Juliet Burke, defector from the Others.

Mitchell plays Agent Erica Evans, the show’s central character. A tough but compassionate woman, she finds herself in a prickly position as her job requires her to work with the extraterrestrial entities who have introduced themselves as “the Visitors,” but in secret, she is one of the key leaders in an underground movement to plot against them. She doesn’t trust these seemingly benevolent aliens, and she has good reasons for her stance. But while she works tirelessly to expose their nefarious nature, her teenage son Tyler (Logan Huffman) is falling head over heels for Lisa (Laura Vandervoort), the gorgeous daughter of the Visitors’ leader, Anna (Morena Baccarin), complicating matters considerably.

V began airing after Flashforward, and my first impression of it was that I much preferred the pilot, which drew me into the action immediately and gave me a pretty good sense of the key characters. I also thought that the pilot episode had more humanity and levity than Flashforward’s did. On the other hand, I found both series to be pretty dark, and V just kept getting darker as the season progressed. While Flashforward’s primary point of similarity with LOST is its emphasis on the question of whether people are guided by fate or free will, in V, it’s the whole notion of Otherness, of Us vs Them.

On LOST, I always had the sense that despite all of the ugly confrontations between various factions that were foreign to each other, they would ultimately find themselves on the same side of things. On V, this outcome seems a lot less likely. The conflict feels much more black and white: humans good, Visitors bad, even though most of the world, by the end of the first season, still sees the Visitors in a very positive light. However, I suppose it is possible that a majority of the Visitors could end up eventually sympathizing with the humans and defecting, so that there would still be a conflict but it would mostly be about taking down one mega-villain and her closest associates instead of an entire civilization. I never watched the original series, but I get the idea that there’s not a lot of similarity between the two, so I doubt that familiarizing myself with that will give me many clues as to how creator Kenneth Johnson will proceed.

Unlike Flashforward, V survived its first season, which I think is due in part to the fact that it’s much easier to tell what exactly is going on. There are no flashforwards, while flashbacks are rare and always clearly connected to the action at hand. There are a number of major characters, but they’re all pretty closely connected, so we don’t have half a dozen distinct stories going on at once. While Flashforward presents a very puzzling mystery and only begins to drop any real hints as to its true nature about halfway through the season, V lets us know right off the bat what the true nature of these Visitors is, so there’s not so much opportunity for viewers’ patience to get tested.

The relationship between Erica and Tyler is compelling, and the presence of him and Lisa makes the show more appealing to teenagers. And while Flashforward included only a couple of cursory nods to how the global blackout affected religious communities and people of faith, that question is central to V, thanks largely to a rugged priest named Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch). Deeply committed to his beliefs, he joins the revolutionaries but is always the first to raise an objection when they find themselves getting into murky ethical territory. Jack is my favorite of the characters, and I enjoy his rapport with Erica; I would be pleasantly surprised if the show allowed their friendship to deepen without getting into physical territory.

With most of the characters, we have a pretty decent idea of where they’re coming from. The two biggest wild cards throughout the first season are Lisa, who is seducing Tyler on her mother’s orders but who seems as though she could be genuinely falling in love with him, and Chad Decker (Scott Wolf), a self-serving journalist who becomes the Visitors’ primary liaison in the media. Just as we aren’t sure where these characters stand, it seems likely that they don’t know themselves, so they are especially fascinating to watch. I was particularly drawn to Lisa because Vandervoort plays Clark’s cousin Kara on Smallville, which is a role that similarly calls for both sweetness and duplicity.

Meanwhile, the standout role is Anna, to whom Baccarin brings a soothing but unsettling aura. Under all that attractive human skin, the Vs actually resemble lizards, and Anna has this eerie manner of reflecting that make-up, particularly in the way that she blinks. She comes across as incredibly empathetic and maternal, but behind closed doors, we see the atrocities of which she is capable. Most of the truly horrific scenes in the series involve her in some way, and at times, they are quite graphic. While I’m looking forward to its return in a couple of months, I confess that V does sometimes make me feel a bit squeamish, and if the second season takes the violence up a notch, I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to stick with it. In its first twelve episodes, the series spreads the more gruesome stuff around enough that it’s not pervasive, but the season ends on an ominous note that suggests the worst is yet to come.

Like Flashforward, V is hardly a show that has captured my imagination as thoroughly as LOST, but it’s fairly well-crafted, with interesting characters, a great cast and some pretty convincing special effects. When the Visitors return to screens across America in January, I’ll be watching.