Violent V Meets With an Abrupt End in Season Two

In 2009, the sci-fi drama V debuted on ABC, and even though I soon realized it wouldn’t be the LOST replacement many fans were hoping for, I still tuned in, getting caught up in the battle between a small group of intrepid humans and the deceptive aliens who claim to have come in peace. It was a long wait between seasons, and when it finally came back in early 2011, I was excited to see it.

Late last summer, my parents and I decided to try foregoing cable, figuring it was getting to the point where we could just watch pretty much everything we were interested in online anyway. It seemed like it might save us money and also make us more intentional about our television viewing so we would be less likely to waste our time with pointless programming just because it happened to be on. But ABC pulled a fast one on us with V. While it offered season one episodes online when they aired, we discovered to our frustration that we would not have that option with season two. We had to wait another several months to get caught up online. So was it worth the wait? Sort of.

Season two begins with Anna (Morena Baccarin), the seductive leader of the aliens who call themselves the Visitors, having just unleashed Red Rain upon the world. The precise purpose of this bizarre weather phenomenon will soon become clear. In the meantime, people are panicking. Suddenly, the Visitors don’t seem so benevolent. As special agent Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell) and her team of Fifth Column freedom fighters try to figure out what Anna is planning, the action (and the ick factor) gets ramped up in this intense saga whose sophomore season contains only ten episodes.

Anna and Erica are the show’s central characters, both tough, duplicitous women driven largely by their motherhood. While Anna appears to be a concerned parent to her teenage daughter Lisa (Laura Van Dervoort) , all she really cares about is grooming the next queen and using her to advance the cause of her species. Erica truly is devoted to her teenage son Tyler (Logan Huffman), but since he is utterly enamored with the Vs – especially Lisa – and she is secretly trying to bring them down, their relationship becomes increasingly tense.

That isn’t to say Erica has a problem with Lisa, however. Indeed, this naïve alien princess has become a powerful ally to the Fifth Column since she found herself developing true feelings toward Tyler. The more Lisa embraces her humanity, the closer she draws to Erica, while Tyler, repelled by reactionary anti-V violence and unaware of Anna’s true intentions, begins to feel more at home aboard the vessels hovering low in Earth’s atmosphere.

One of the central questions of the first season was whether Lisa would ultimately side with her mother or humanity. With that question seemingly answered as the second season begins, the new debate becomes whether Lisa might be able to overthrow her mother and lead the remaining Vs into a true partnership with the inhabitants of Earth. Adding fuel to this possibility is Anna’s mother Diana (Jane Badler), who may have dark purposes of her own but at least understands human emotion.

Season one’s other major wild card was smarmy news reporter Chad Decker (Scott Wolf), whose primary concern always seemed to be self-advancement. In the second season, it seems clearer whose side this free agent prefers, but he remains one of the most ambiguous characters in the series. Joining him in the shadowy area in this season is Ryan (Morris Chestnut), a V whose staunch alliance with Erica may be compromised by desperation to reclaim the daughter Anna has stolen from him, and Joshua (Mark Hildreth), a Fifth Column V in close association with Anna who now seems to have reverted to her side.

Unlike Flashforward, the sci-fi series that began airing on ABC around the same time, V has always delved deeply into matters of spirituality and faith. If anything, that focus becomes more acute in the second season. Once again, rugged Catholic priest Jack Landry (Joel Gretsch) publicly expresses his distrust of the Vs but also is the first to call Erica on the brutality to which she is willing to resort. Always the voice of ethics in the midst of desperate deeds, he remains my favorite character, though Lisa becomes a close second for me in this season.

Anna’s frenzied obsession with the nature of the human soul takes the show in an interesting direction. What exactly is it that distinguishes the people of Earth from the Vs? Is it something to which the Vs may have access? How would extraterrestrials react to human evangelists, and would the presence of aliens boasting miraculous powers threaten to topple ancient religious institutions? In her own thirst for answers, Anna displays the full extent of her power and the sadistic depths to which she is willing to sink. Whether she’s devouring her own insubordinate underlings or torturing innocent people who have volunteered to live aboard her ships, she is one nasty piece of work, and many of her scenes had me averting my eyes. Then again, Erica can get pretty grotesque as well. If the season weren’t so short, I don’t think I could have handled the violence. As it was, I often felt sickened.

Despite this overwhelming darkness, I enjoyed the complexities of the second season, and I was curious about the direction in which it was headed. From the first episode on, the general consensus I heard was that V would not be picked up for a third season. Unfortunately, the show runners would not know this for sure until after the season finale. If they attempted to craft a finale that granted a real sense of closure, it would be admitting defeat and would leave them with little wiggle room if the network did decide to continue the series. However, if they went with a big cliff-hanger, fans would be left dangling indefinitely if the show got the axe. Which direction would they choose?

Not the one I wanted. The finale offers a tantalizing glimpse of victory before plunging into one of the most despairing conclusions I have ever seen. Yes, there’s enough of a faint glimmer of hope that a third season would have had someplace to go. However, it is dim indeed, and as it’s all the ending we’re ever going to get, it goes from being a calamitous cliffhanger to an absolute downer that sort of makes you wonder why you invested so much in these characters only to have everything turn out so badly for them. I suppose that writing the finale as they did was an act of optimism, but the end result is enough to make me hesitate to recommend the series to anyone who has yet to see it. In its second season, V stands for Violence and Vanity, and neither is a noun in which I want to immerse myself.