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.

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.

Smallville's Shortened Seventh Season Piles on the Fun With Kryptonian Kara

Back in 2006, my brother Nathan, then a senior in high school, got me hooked on Smallville on DVD. In the months leading up to his departure for college, we watched the first three seasons. Over the course of his freshman year we watched two more. But since then it's been slow going in getting caught up, so that we only just now finished season seven and are faced with the fact that we're probably never going to actually catch up with this show, since if past seasons are any indication, season eight will hit DVD about a week before season nine premieres. Well, maybe we'll try to cram it all into one week. Or maybe we'll just resign ourselves to watching Smallville exclusively on DVD. Frankly, I'm pretty surprised at the show's longevity, simply because it's a prequel, and Clark's seemed on the verge of donning those tights for about three seasons now. But I'm not complaining, and if I still have Smallville to look forward to after LOST concludes, so much the better.

Season seven of Smallville is, in some ways, lighter than the sixth, in which Clark must deal with the aftermath of a staggering personal loss and the impending nuptials of the girl of his dreams to his best-friend-turned-arch-nemesis, all while trying to round up a series of bloodthirsty intergalactic convicts who make the meteor freaks look like minor irritations. It isn't that the stakes aren't high in the seventh season, but the sense of peril is less pervasive, and there's even a fair amount of domestic tranquility for Clark, who really seems like an adult for the first time (though Tom Welling looks exactly the same as he did when Clark was supposed to be a freshman in high school). Though he's still a farm boy, he's now running the place, with his mom Martha (Annette O'Toole) out of the picture in Washington, D.C. Moreover, he's spending more and more time in Metropolis, where intrepid reporter Chloe Sullivan (Allison Mack) and dorky heart-of-gold photographer Jimmy Olsen (Aaron Ashmore) work for The Daily Planet, soon to be joined by budding journalist Lois Lane (Erica Durance). Can it be long before Clark joins their ranks? For the second season in a row, an alternate reality sequence has him donning the iconic thick-framed glasses and suit. Now if only phone booths weren't so hard to come by nowadays...

Though political advancement removes Martha from the equation, Lex's (Michael Rosenbaum) father Lionel (John Glover) still has a significant role to play in Clark's life. It's curious to see him playing the protective, paternal role, especially since Martha is no longer there to act as a link between these two powerful men. While Lionel often acts in ways that seem suspect, he claims to be on Clark's side, and despite years of experience with Lionel's villainy, Clark generally seems to believe that this tycoon has turned over a new leaf. Lionel has been one of the show's most compelling characters for me, in large part because of Glover's brilliant performance; his theatrical background and his masterful way of masking his character's motivations remind me very much of LOST's Michael Emerson. And like Ben, the bug-eyed baddie Emerson portrays, Lionel is a character I've been longing to see redeemed in the end. Since I don't see how that can happen with Lex, I've transferred my hopes onto Lionel. It takes a while for him to become a part of the season, but once he does, his participation is crucial.

We've also got Lana (Kristin Kreuk), who just won't go away no matter how many times it seems like she may be off the show for good. Since I never hopped aboard the Clark and Lana ship, and since I know he's going to end up with Lois anyway, I'm not sure I appreciated Clark and Lana's cohabitation in this season as much as I could have. I mean, poor Clark has wanted this for years, and now he finally has a shot at domestic bliss with his one true love, a woman who now knows most of his deep dark secrets. But her tenure as a Luthor girl did nothing to improve the toxic aspects of her personality; despite the sweet exterior, some of her actions this season are downright diabolical, and it isn't long before distrust and deceit starts to settle in at the Kent Farm.

Though he stoops to some very dark deeds this season, at times, Lex still manages to come across as a decent human being, particularly in his associations with the newest member of the principal cast, a blonde beauty named Kara (Laura Vandervoort) who happens to be Clark's biological cousin. Yes, it just so happens that Kal-El was not the only Kryptonian to escape to Earth, but Kara was stuck in suspended animation for a couple decades longer. Her first act upon awakening in this strange new world involves rescuing Lex from a watery death in a precise parallel of what Clark did in the show's very first episode. Lex sees her first as an angel of mercy, later as the key to solving the mystery that has plagued him for so many years. Kara carries herself with an air of innocence and youthful rebellion. Though she remembers the infant Kal-El, Clark is now older than her, and since she's on his home turf, he has to show her the ropes. Unlike Clark, she doesn't feel the desire to keep her powers secret; convincing her to lay low is one of his most trying tasks throughout the season. Meanwhile, he struggles with revelations about an old family feud that cast Kara in a questionable light and suffers the indignity of knowing this newcomer might be a novice in the ways of Earth but is fully equipped to take to the skies. On the whole, I found Kara a refreshing addition, injecting an extra dose of youthful fun into the season and allowing Clark a different sort of significant relationship in his life while opening a window to a deeper understanding of his biological mother.

Because I've always loved Jimmy Olsen and because Ashmore captures the character's sweetness and goofiness perfectly, Smallville has finally sold me on a Chloe romantic relationship with someone other than Clark that I can root for, particularly since Chloe's status as Clark's most cherished and indispensable friend is assured at this point. Chloe and Jimmy share some of the most tender moments of the season, as well as some of the funniest. Granted, their courtship has its ups and downs, particularly since Chloe is afraid to reveal to him that she has been endowed with a miraculous gift with potentially fatal side effects, and Kara's immediate (and rather inexplicable) infatuation with him complicates matters somewhat. But I'd much rather watch these two characters I genuinely love and can sympathize with equally work together through the trials that come their way than cringe over the twisted couplings that surround them. I'm starting to think theirs may turn out to be Smallville's grandest love story. It's fun to throw Lois into the mix too, especially when she and Jimmy end up working together, since their personalities contrast so magnificently. While romantic sparks never fly between them, it's sweet to watch them develop a deeper sense of respect and affection for one another. Meanwhile, Lois's luck in love seems to change this season when the hunky new boss Grant Gabriel (Michael Cassidy) takes a liking to her.

Some old faces resurface this season, including the silky artificial intelligence known as Milton Fine (James Marsters); filthy rich, gadget-heavy vigilante Oliver Queen (Justin Hartley), who secures a surprising assistant in his quest to rid the world of injustice; and, much to my excitement, the long-neglected Pete Ross (Sam Jones III), who vanished without a trace back in the third season. Don't get too excited; he's not in it for the long haul. But just getting a brief visit with this terrific character, the Ron Weasley of Smallville, is a true gift to long-time fans of the series. Other significant characters, such as Jonathan Kent and Dr. Virgil Swann, are referenced but not seen, while one sinister character maddeningly assumes Clark's identity, which naturally leads to complications, mostly with his relationship to Lana. Of course, every season includes at least one instance of Clark being "not himself," either because he's under the influence of some nefarious substance or because someone else has assumed his form, but this is one of the more effective uses of that device. On a related note, two otherwise ordinary people in Clark's life suddenly develop unusual abilities, which leads to comical situations but ultimately causes insecurity all around.

Most of the season's best episodes shine a light on past events. Lara and Blue both help Kal-El's mother to emerge from the shadows of memory as a vibrant, loving woman, while Fracture offers a fascinating peek into Lex's labyrinthian mind, giving us a compelling reason to consider him redeemable despite all evidence to the contrary. This little-seen side of Lex emerges again in the chilling Descent. I also enjoyed the It's a Wonderful Life-like Apocalypse, in which Clark has a chance to see what the world would be like if he'd never made it to Earth. Throughout the season, surprising connections among characters come to light, and the trustworthiness of various characters remains unclear. It's a season that keeps us guessing, and having a whole lot of fun along the way. It's a shame that, due to the writers' strike, there are fewer episodes than usual, but even so, season seven is top-notch.