"V" The Freeper Remake

"V" The Freeper Remake

Being a child of the 80s, I was mildly excited to see the "V" remake.  "V" was a seminal television series when I was a kid, we talked about it all the time at school after it aired in 1983.  Plus I had pet hamsters, so after "V" aired, pretty much everyone who picked up one of my hamsters pretended to eat it.  (Yes, hilarious.  Just as funny the 10,000th time as the first.  Honest.)

I re-watched the original "V" a few years ago and… I did not feel that it had held up.  Some things play better to a ten year old audience than a thirty year old audience, you know?  In some ways, the original series was still as powerful, but in other ways (particularly the special effects and costumes) it just seemed campy.

Presumably the remake of "V" would have better special effects, but would it be less campy?  The answer is "No, but in a really weird way."

About 3/4ths of the way through the episode, the script makes its agenda clear.  The leader of the visitors (Morena Baccarin, better known as space whore Inara from "Firefly") has called a global press conference to talk about their plans.  In exchange for obtaining some necessary minerals from our planet, the visitors will cure all of our ills.

"Universal Health Care?" the stooge reporter asks.

"If you want to call it that," she says, with a sly smile.

The original "V" was intended as a political thriller, and a "Nazi allegory."  It used the "body snatcher" premise to play with the idea that your best friends, your neighbors, and your entire country could gradually give itself over to the Nazis.  

This premise has been updated, but please to be substituting "Obama" for "Nazi."  This immediately rubs me the wrong way, because it directly leverages the "Obama = Hitler" thing that the paranoid Right has been trotting out whenever they can (seemingly unaware that they are self-Godwinning).  How "making sure people don't lose their homes because they get sick" equates to "Hitler" is beyond me, frankly, despite the time I've spent trying to figure it out.

"V" further pushes the analogy by playing the indoctrination card.  I'm sure you have heard by now of the Freeper panic regarding school children being "indoctrinated" based on one or two YouTube clips of little kids singing songs that mention President Obama.  Once again, how this counts as "indoctrination" is beyond me.  But logic is not a Freeper's strong suit, and they have the unmitigated gall to trot out the Hitler Youth comparison whenever possible.

Just to make the whole thing worse, there's only one black man in the show, and he is literally a traitor to his race.  He's a Visitor who has escaped, and is working hard to "blend in" and "pass" as human.  He gets drawn back into the anti-Visitor fray at the end of the premiere, but I'm not willing to keep watching to see if he ends up lynched.