V 2x10 - "Mother's Day"

"Mother's Day" was the best episode of V ever - because it was utterly, shamelessly hilarious. I mean, if any part of the episode involved kids on a school bus, V would deserve the moniker of "The Funniest Field Trip of the Year!" by Michael Cole.

Remember the episode of WWE Monday Night RAW 10 years ago when ECW and WCW joined forces as the Alliance, laid waste to the WWF, and introduced Stephanie McMahon as the new owner of ECW, blowing off several weeks worth of angles in one episode? "Mother's Day" was kind of like that. Because their initial 13 episode season 2 order was cut down to 10 episodes by ABC, V's producers decided to cram a bunch of stuff they hadn't done in the previous 9 episodes of dicking around story-wise into the final 42 minutes. As a result, the laughs kept on coming.

Here are the highlights:

1) The Fifth Column was contacted by Diana, still hanging out in the bowels of the New York Mothership. Diana and Lisa are in cahoots plotting to overthrow Anna and restore Diana as Queen. So here's the brilliant plan the Fifth Column came up with to take out Anna:

A phony kidnapping.

That's right, they cribbed right out of the Homer Simpson and Rodney Dangerfield playbook with Anna as Mr. Burns. The Fifth Column pretended to kidnap Lisa, whom they smuggled out of the V ship in a coffin like she was the Undertaker from 1991. The plan was to lure Anna into an empty warehouse where Lisa would then kill her mother. How? By shooting her with a gun of course!

So Anna plays the worried mother to the public and actually goes to the warehouse and frees Lisa. Lisa then sneakily pulls a gun on her while her back is turned. Anna sees this in the reflection of a mirror in front of her - which Lisa does not see - and knows her daughter has betrayed her. Anna, being the smartest character on the show, decides to act all emotional and gives an impassioned speech to Lisa about how she's learned the value of human emotions and the human soul - which she has spent all season trying to eliminate - and hugs Lisa. Lisa falls for it, hides the gun, and hugs her loving mother back, unaware of the sneaky smile on Anna's face.

Lisa is too stupid to be queen.

What failed to happen after Anna and Lisa emerged together unharmed was the FBI and the Visitors drinking and partying while "Any Way You Want It" played. "It's a party! It doesn't have to make sense!" Instead Erica yells at Lisa for not killing her mother in full view of everyone but no one apparently hears her.

2) Back on the mothership, Ryan and Joshua free Diana from her basement prison. Instead of leaving the ship, Diana commands, "Assemble my people!" Then lickety split, she's on a stage surrounded on all sides by adoring Vs who aren't the least bit surprised their Queen they thought dead for 15 years is now giving a speech in front of them. While she's speechifying, apparently Anna, Marcus and Lisa were able to enter the chamber and sneak up behind her without anyone noticing. Anna unleashes her Prehensile Tail of Doom and IMPALES DIANA, holding her body up in the air and then tossing her corpse down! Diana is dead! Nine episodes of standing in the basement then she's dead! Thanks for coming, Jane Badler!

Then Anna turns to Lisa and rasps: "THAT'S HOW YOU KILL YOUR MOTHER!" Hilarious. I could have died laughing myself. Best moment in the history of the new V.

Regicide and matricide all at once!

But they weren't done yet.

3) Ryan sees the murder of Diana and says, "I gotta gets out of here. Feets, don't fail me now!" But first, he's got to find Amy, his hybrid daughter, who's now rapidly aged to about 7 or 8. Amy thinks Anna is her mother and Ryan, her father, is just some dude who leaves all the time. So she doesn't want to go anywhere with him. When he insists, Amy unleashes her Prehensile Tail of Doom, wraps it around her daddy's neck and squeezes until he's dead!

Patricide! All in the span of 10 minutes!

4) Anna has one last Queen egg that can hatch a new daughter to replace the one who's betrayed her. It hatches and we see a V in it's full reptilian form for the very first time. It looks a'it. Anna orders: "Give her human skin! Make her look just like Lisa!"

Oh ho. Ho ho ho. And I mean ho.

Lisa 2 now appears (Homer would call her Lisa Jr. and so will I) and Anna gives her new daughter her marching orders: "Go have sex with Tyler!"

Tyler had been told by Erica that the Vs were really reptiles, but he works for them as a shuttle pilot with a bad haircut now, so he doesn't know what to believe. He goes to find Lisa, finds Lisa Jr. waiting for him in a silk robe on her bed all sexy-like, and he loses interest in questions when all she wants is sexy sexin'.

Meanwhile, the original dumb as nails Lisa is being held in the bowels of the ship Diana used to live in. Anna comes down and lays down her punishment for betrayal: YOU MUST NOW WATCH MY NEW DAUGHTER WHO LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE YOU FUCK YOUR DUMB AS FUCK HUMAN BOYFRIEND!

And she does. She watches the whole thing as Lisa Jr. rides Tyler cowgirl. And then, instead of a cigarette post-doin' it, Lisa Jr. opens up her reptile mouth AND RIPS TYLER'S THROAT OUT WITH HER TEETH! YES! TYLER'S DEAD!

What's the 'cide' word for killing your reptile clone sister's human boyfriend? There isn't one? Someone invent it, stat.

Three fantastically funny major character deaths in the space of 20 minutes!

4) Erica has been secretly watched by her bosses in the FBI and they're now sure she's part of the Fifth Column. So they kidnap her in her house and bring her to a Super Secret Headquarters Miles Underneath New York City. This is the base of Project Ares, and their boss is MARC SINGER! Erica learns that Project Ares has been working against the Vs for years - yet they did nothing to help the endless bungling of the Fifth Column.

5) Anna decides now that she actually likes human emotion, she should use her Bliss to control not just the Vs but every person on Earth. Except doing so literally makes her eyes bleed. Still, an evil Queen's gotta try. So she gets in her sexy Blissin' robe and tries to Bliss the whole planet. But she can't, her eyes are bleeding, and she's gonna die. Then Amy comes in and she has Bliss too! And Amy Blisses the entire planet. Every person is now under V control, including Father Jack (but apparently not anyone in Project Ares in a Super Secret Headquarters Miles Underneath New York City.) So get this: Amy and Anna, who each just murdered a parent, just Blissed humanity. (I'm all for being Blissed by Anna, but if you ask me, I don't wanna be Blissed by a pre-teen. Am I right, fellas?)

6) The season (series?) ends the same way season one ended, with a bunch of Visitor ships hanging out above Earth waiting for... SEASON 3! Will the Vs wait forever?

V 2x7 - "Birth Pangs"

As a public service, I thought I'd get everyone caught up a bit on V. This is an admittance that I am still watching V.

No one's more surprised than me that I was generally pleased with the last couple of episodes. Oh, the show is still dumber than a pair of snakeskin boots, but seven episodes into their second (and final?) season, business has picked up. Might be too little too late; I mean, these major events should have actually started unraveling in season one, but better late than never.

Okay, so, here's where we are in V:

1) The Fifth Column is now an army, and Erica Evans is the leader. The V miniseries took about an hour for Julie, their blonde heroine, to become leader of the Resistance. In the 11th hour (literally) of the new V, Erica has finally become the leader of the global army fighting the Vs. The former leader was a man named Eli Cohn (Oded Fehr), who handpicked Erica to succeed him and was killed in a siege last week (titled "Siege").

In that very same seige, Erica's ex-husband and Tyler's father was killed. Erica is currently on bereavement leave from the FBI, which conveniently allows her time to travel the world and assert control over the Fifth Column. The good news is loss and command have turned Erica into a snarling, violent bad ass all eager to skin lizards and blow motherships out of the sky. It's sexay.

Father Jack was defrocked and is no longer a priest.

Chad is now working for The Fifth Column and is routinely surprised by things the audience has known for months, like Lisa working against her mother Anna.

2) Betrayals. Ryan betrayed the Fifth Column to Anna to protect his baby in Anna's thrall, but for some reason he's still trying to make nice with his former Fifth Column buddies, and for some, even harder to explain reason, Erica and friends haven't skinned him yet for betraying them.

Meanwhile, Hobbes has also secretly betrayed the Fifth Column because of a sudden backstory involving his wife-he-believed-dead-but-isn't. The Vs know where she is. Unlike Ryan, no one yet suspects Hobbes has been compromised even as he saddles up next to Erica as her second in command.

Speaking of betrayals, Anna is onto Lisa's wavering loyalty and ties to the Fifth Column.

3) Diana. So far, Diana has done nothing, just flitting about the bowels of the New York mothership. Anna goes down there to taunt her. Lisa also now visits for advice on how to betray Anna. But otherwise, there's been no point to Jane Badler being on the show. If neither Anna nor Lisa ever visited Diana to tell her what they're up to, Diana would have no impact on anything. In fact, it makes no sense Anna visits her at all; each time she does, she only shoots herself in the foot.

4) Red Sky, Phosphorous, Concordia, and The Soul. This is why the Vs are on Earth - try to follow along: Okay, so the Vs are a race that travels the universe with the primary purpose of leapfrogging their own genetic evolution. Decades ago, Vs were sent to Earth to infiltrate humanity and begin the process of getting humans ready for "cross breeding", so that the Vs can absorb humanity's best traits (like our hotness because we're not lizards) for the Vs evolutionary benefit. This involved selectively injecting pregnant women with high levels of phosphorous so that their children will have the capacity to breed with Vs. Erica Evans was one of those pregnant women and Tyler is one of those children.

There are 28 other children, however. We've been told by Anna in every episode that Tyler is "special" and thus was hand picked to mate with her daughter Lisa, but no, he isn't. There's a Tyler in 28 other cities, and the reason there are 29 V ships on Earth is each ship is docked over a city with one of the special children like Tyler. Does that make any sense?

When Anna unleashed Red Sky and Red Rain, the purpose of that was to condition humanity around the world to the higher phosphorous levels. We are to believe everyone in the world was red rained on. Plus, if you recall (or maybe you don't), when Anna unleashed Red Sky, she did it ahead of schedule. But that plot point doesn't matter one bit. In fact, nothing involving Red Sky-Red Rain makes any sense. But hey if you want not making sense, look no further than...

The Vs hate the human soul. Actually, not all Vs do; many, like Lisa, appreciate having human emotions. Anna hates it because the soul and human emotions counter acts her Bliss and ability to control the Vs. (Although Anna also secretly feels human emotions and hides it.) So Anna wants to destroy the soul and she thinks V science can isolate it and destroy it. In this belief and plot point, Anna - the smartest character on the show - is retarded. None of that makes any sense whatsoever.

But there's also Concordia. Concordia is the first of the V Cities Anna wants to build on Earth where humans and Vs can live together in perfect harmony. Except Concordia's real purpose is to be a docking station for the cloaked V ships in our solar system. I shit you not, Anna basically explained that the V Master Plan is for humans to populate Concordia while V ships secretly dock, then the Vs will come up, grab humans, and make with the sweet, sweet lizard on human sex.

This is the slapdash hodgepodge of inanity of V in a nutshell. Though again, the last couple of episodes actually stepped up the action and moved these ridiculous plot points forward, as opposed to the previous episodes involving Anna twirling her supervillain mustache plotting on her ship while the Fifth Column hem and haw in a basement.

Now that I've attempted to summarize V's story, I'm not sure what the V writers have been on since the series began, but I suspect it ain't phosphorous.

V 2x2 - "Serpent's Tooth"

Last week, I made myself sad by watching the season 2 premiere of V despite my intentions to do the opposite. More sadness this week as I watched episode 2. 

THE Vs ARE AT WAR WITH THE HUMAN SOUL. That's right, the soul. The soul is the enemy of the V. It is "well spring of human emotion." Vs talk about the soul retardedly. Anna thinks she can study it in a lab. Why don't the Vs just give Bart Simpson $5 for his soul, take off in their ships, and never come back, i.e. get off my television?

What a coincidence that at the very same time Anna is declaring space war on the souls of human beings, Morris Chestnut is having conversations with father Jack about whether or not he has a soul. This comes complete with retarded dialogue: Jack: "The soul is a blessing." Morris: "No, it's a curse!" Who can possibly take either this technologically advanced alien race or this ragtag band of human rebels seriously if they talk and think in hackneyed cliches like this?

Last week, we found out for realsies that the Vs are on Earth to mate with humans. That's the truth. They're not here for our water, or to eat humans, but they want our sweet sweet bodies for sweet sweet sexin'. They wanna sex us up, to the hip hop, you don't stop. Except there's a catch; not just that they're lizards, but they have high degrees of phosphorus in their bodies. They need humans to have phosphorus in their bodies too so they can mate.

Erica Evans has lots of phosphorus in her body, so said her doctor 20 years ago when she was pregnant with Tyler. See where this is going? And Lisa's near her fertility peak. This was a match made in Heaven, or the heavens, set long ago. Lisa has to do Tyler and have a hybrid baby.

Except there's already a hybrid baby. Morris Chestnut and black lady who's dead had a love starchild, which Anna now possesses. We saw it in lizard form last week but Anna gave it human skin. And then she fed it in disgusting fashion, eating a whole rat and then regurgitating it into the V-baby. Then Anna manipulated Morris into rejoining the Vs only one week removed from banishing him forever. Is this chick wishy-washy or what?

Incidentally, the events of this episode took place over a couple of days, but no one in wardrobe informed Anna, who wore the same grey business dress the entire episode. Maybe the V dry cleaners are on strike or something.

I haven't even mentioned how Red Sky was sold as a "gift to humanity" but is really linked to that phosphorus plan and lasted one whole episode before it was dropped, or the Fifth Column suicide bombers, or Tory from Battlestar Galactica revealing that she's a V to Erica, or the geeky human scientist hanging out with the Fifth Column and who possesses a complete V reptile skeleton in his lab, or how Joshua doesn't remember he's Fifth Column and Lisa's constantly about to pee her pants that he will remember any second now she's his co-conspirator and has betrayed her mother.

Speaking of mothers, how could I almost forget Diana! Diana, Jane Badler is on the show (and so are her boobs), playing Diana but not the Diana from the original V. Diana is the former Queen and mother to Anna, whom Anna deposed and imprisoned in the bowels of her ship for 15 years, but is also named Diana. The thing I couldn't quite put my finger on that was weird at first was that Diana's voice doesn't have that metallic echo it did in the original V, because today's Vs don't talk like that. Anyway, Anna imprisoned her mother in secret for 15 years and never visited her once, but now bothers her before every other act break. You see, Diana came to Earth once and Anna thinks she's like, the V expert on the human soul or something, just because she likes to listen to piano music*. Diana must have spent her incarceration watching V season one because she predicted Anna's daughter will betray Anna the way Diana was betrayed by her daughter.

"Tick tock," Diana says. She must be counting down to V's cancellation in 8 weeks. 

*Mendelssohn. May I add, aliens without emotion who start flipping out over humans having music is straight out of Robotech and the Zentraedi going batshit over Lynn Minmei's 80's pop songs. The Fifth Column should start listening to "We Will Win!"

V 1x12 - "Red Sky"

I'm pretty sure when V returns for season 2 I won't be there. That finale sucked. Sucked the big one.

Among my many, many complaints, the most important one is that when that episode was produced, they did not yet have a renewal from ABC. Therefore, as far as the V producers knew, it was the series finale. And that's what they gave us? Not a single concrete answer of why the Visitors are on Earth.  

Instead Anna turns the sky red. Everyone behind Anna, as she has her "first human emotion", smirks, reflecting their trademark changes of heart. Apparently, everyone on the V ship with a speaking role is betraying Anna, has been for some time, or just figured out how to.

Father Jack's Big Purpose this whole season was to finally give a Poorly Written Homily that the old priest kept warning him not to give.

Erica, Tyler, Lisa and Anna had the most boring, contrived dinner party ever with almost everyone leaving the table in turn to conduct their Secret Clandestine Affairs. (What about who was left at the table while people were missing? How awkward was that small talk?)

And then the Lamest Ray Gun Battle in TV History. Ptew! Ptew! Until Erica shots Joshua dead, but no, he isn't.

Don't even get me started on Ryan's Baby with the Lizard Tail. 

I don't care about a single one of those characters. Not a one.

Now, I actually liked the episode two weeks ago when the Fifth Column blew up the V shuttlecraft, mainly because for once Anna wasn't just smugly planning something ineffable and making faces. She was actually taking action that saw her one step ahead of her enemies. In other words, someone on the show was behaving intelligently for once.

Because Erica Evans is a nothing-collection of simplistic motivations, Elizabeth Mitchell is, in a word, lost. She has nothing in terms of a character to play and has to wring what little she can from those dumb ass scripts. The four characters who make up the Fifth Column we see every week basically all share a single brain, and it's not much of a brain to speak of.

Since Mitchell's talent is basically hogtied, Morena Baccarin ends up head and shoulders above everyone else on the cast. She's like Terry Silver, the villain from Karate Kid III - she'll give you a serious look, then turn around and immediately smile and snicker to herself. I enjoy it. It's comical. She's the only actor who seems like she's enjoying herself. Everyone else is so grim, or glum, or sleeping while standing upright. 

Baccarin's emotional control as an actor, like when she announced the Vs were leaving because Lisa was "assaulted" last week, is really good (and she immediately turned around, smiled and snickered to herself.) Same this week when she freaked out after her soldiers were all killed.

But please, the writing is the first thing that has to be fixed in season 2. Those scripts are just terrible, beyond dumbed down for "the masses" that aren't watching V.

The Fifth Column (they're no longer the Resistance nor have they been for many episodes) somehow killed off all the Soldier newborns. The Soldiers, we are supposed to be shocked to learn, "are bred to kill humans". You know who else can kill humans? Any normal V. Why breed soliders? They didn't bring an army of Vs with them on all their ships? Well, I guess that explains why those ships are so empty all the time. All that wasted space.

That's what V is. A waste of space.

V 1x5 - "Welcome to the War"

After staring at that big red V during Lost, like millions of others, the last thing I wanted to do afterward was actually watch V. But eventually, I did. And... eh.

Four months off and I didn't miss these people and lizards pretending to be people one bit. It would have been nice if V returned with some slam bang momentum.

Admittedly, a lot of plot development occurred and seeds planted for major events to take place. But I wonder, when and if this show ever picks up the pace and ramps up the action, will people still care? Do they care now?

Erica Evans, a trained FBI counter terrorism agent, was the first person to decide that she can't train anyone to fight as part of a Resistance. Instead, she insists they turn to some mercenary terrorist to be the guy who teaches the fledgling Resistance how to resist. I mean, in the original miniseries, a bunch of ordinary people just banded together and they Resisted. There wasn't all this hemming and hawing about it.

I didn't get the Master Plan Anna had for Erica's stupid son, leaving him on that table reliving all his memories and emotions, so he'd go back home and tell his mom he's outta there and moving in with the Vs. They already had him; Erica couldn't get him off that ship if she tried. And if she tries, the Vs can kill her. Why go through all the trouble?

Anna did say something about Lisa Fulfilling Her Destiny. If its to have the first V/Human hybrid, won't she be pissed off Ryan and his girlfriend have beaten her too it.

I liked the scene where she was tempted to eat the dead mouse caught in the trap. Nice callback to the Famous Gross-out Moment from the original V when the Visitor ate the mouse.

What else? Father Jack got healed from his gunshot wound at the V Healing Center and had a pretty neat dream about turning into a V.

Chad has dinner with the increasingly creepy Anna. He tells her he doesn't want to be healed from his brain aneurysm that he doesn't even have yet by the Vs. Anna feeds him some fugu. Later, Chad announces on television he'll take the Vs up on the offer of preemptive healing. Anna is pleased; continues to be creepy.

Anna, who spent half the episode in a sexy robe like an alien lizard Hugh Hefner, also wants to grow an army to fight the growing Resistance and the Fifth Column, and her method is to literally grow an army. She picked some V who was real buff and then had the least sexy sex scene ever where she just mounted him in the middle of a cloud of smoke for a few seconds and that was it. V sex is not much to speak of.

Then the newly impregnated Anna bared her CGI Lizard mouth and killed the father of her V eggs. And there went any lingering fantasy of getting it on with Anna. Won't Tyler be in for a treat when he finally hooks up with Lisa.

V 1x4 - "It's Only The Beginning"

I want some of that Bliss.  That was a pretty cool sequence.  Anna can make Vs feel real, real good.

So that's their plan!  They're pretending they have a miracle cure but really, they're fucking with our flu shots. It's so simple!  No, it isn't - it's needlessly complicated.  And it's also the very same plan Homer Simpson uncovered when he was Mr. X that got him banished to the Island in their parody of The Prisoner.

If I understand Visitor math correctly, Ryan and Valerie's baby will be half black, half Hispanic, and half lizard.

The new Resistance kind of blunders around and yet manages to get stuff accomplished.  I thought Georgie was a skilled rebel survivor who's been fighting Vs for a long time or something but no, he's just a greasy dude who doesn't know what he's doing and got himself shot. Where was Georgie after Erica, Jack and Ryan blew up the warehouse?  Did they just leave him in the car and forget about him?

I'm disappointed we didn't get to see the skinning.  Four episodes in and we still haven't seen the lizard within except for the brief shot of Dale's eye.  It's kind of weird how Visitors have all this super medical science but they use scalpels to skin each other.  Or maybe that's just Visitor punishment, going medieval on each other's asses.

I wish they went the extra mile and developed a Visitor spoken language so that when Vs are speaking to each other on their ships with no humans around, they're not speaking English.

I like the Visitor suicide method.  Vs about to kill themselves should yell out, "Kiss my ash, human!"

Tyler doesn't seem like he ever plans on going back home.  He's on a motherfuckin' spaceship with his hot blonde alien girlfriend and her hot mother.  He's in teenage boy paradise.

The ending was very encouraging.  Father Jack taking a shiv in the gut was a nice surprise.  The final shot of the Visitor fleet heading for Earth was pretty bad ass.

In the original V, the Visitors were from Sirius.  I hope in March, 2010 we learn what galaxy they're from and what the Visitors' name for their race is.  They can't possibly refer to themselves as "the Visitors" to each other.

V 1x3 - "A Bright New Day"

Erica Evans, Hero of the Visitors.  There should be an Erica Evans Day on the V motherships.

Big step up in story and character from last week.  The Resistance leadership is finally being formed, but the Fifth Column within the Visitors is an even cooler major development.  The references to "reconnecting" and "bliss" are interesting. The Vs' monitor screens linked to their swanky blue jacket cameras are cool. The more we find out about those damned dirty lizards, the better.

I also liked Ryan's threat that the Visitors would skin Cyrus alive.  The Vs skin each other?  Into what, suitcases and belts?  "See these sweet boots I'm wearing?  I used to know this guy.  He was a dick."

We spent a lot more time with the Visitors and this week, it didn't seem like scenes ended prematurely right when Anna was about to say something interesting.  I liked Anna's rehearsal of her speech to Mary Faulkner, right down to fake (crocodile) tears.  Anna must have studied Method acting on the Visitor homeworld.

Thumbs way up to Lisa's quick thinking of getting into her underpants rather than Erica seeing her in her uniform.  Lisa's mother (Anna!) didn't hatch no dummy.

Now that the Visitors have visas, do they have the same "diplomatic immunity" the South Africans in Lethal Weapon 2 had?

V 1x2 - "There Is No Normal Anymore"

Not quite the episode 2 I was hoping for. I read a review of the pilot last week that said something to the effect that V was like a cop procedural with aliens in the background. "There Is No Normal Anymore" really felt like that.

I can't help but compare to the original miniseries where by the end of hour 2 the Resistance was set up, all the main characters knew each other, and we knew the Visitors were evil and what they were generally up to. By the end of hour 2 now, we know... not too much new from what we knew by the end of hour one. We know not to trust anyone.

Don't trust anyone.  How fitting that the motto of V is the same as a certain Texas Rattlesnake.

I did like Lisa turning her back on Tyler because he punched out the protester. Tyler was trying to be all macho and impress the hot alien girl whose people's motto is "We are of peace. Always."

I feel like the Visitors' dialogue is ending up on the cutting room floor. Scenes end right before Anna starts saying something really interesting. The Visitors need personalities, stat.

V 1x1 - "Pilot"

V felt a little sparse. I wish the pilot were two hours. I wonder how it played to people who'd never seen the original miniseries when it aired in the 80's, on DVD, or on Syfy over the last few days?

Having refreshed my memories of V thanks to Syfy, it was interesting how the new V zigged where the original zagged:

• The Nazi/Jew parable is out in favor of a religious parable ("the Saviors of humanity") mixed with the hot button issue of "universal health care". Literally, in V's case.
• The Visitors looking more corporate and refined as opposed to military. I sort of missed the red uniforms, red sunglasses, and especially the amplified voices. Also the Visitors' modified Swastika logo.
• Elizabeth Mitchell's son, which eliminated the sociopath kid in the miniseries who joined the Visitors and sold his family out to them and merged that character instead with the girl who had the hots for a Visitor and ended up giving birth to the Starchild.
• The Visitors announcing right away via Anna's introductory video that they wanted Earth's water, which was a big secret in the original V, along with their being lizards, their plot to discredit and eliminate scientists,  and their intention to kidnap humans for food.
• The reveal that the Visitors are reptilian was kind of just tossed out there in dialogue. I suppose at this point the first thing anyone who knows anything about V knows is that the Visitors are lizards so they didn't bother to act like it was a big shock. Alan Tudyk's sudden appearance as part of the Visitors' raid on the Resistance meeting was pretty surprising though. And I was wondering what the point of Morris Chestnut's character was. I never saw him being a Visitor coming, so that was a cool spin on how some Visitors are part of the Resistance in the original V.
• The red V tag now being in support of the Visitors instead of as an act of support of the human Resistance = awesome.

Although I cringed at the implications that Visitors positioned on Earth for decades are responsible for all our problems (the "unjust wars" line was a bit of an eyeroller), I was wondering what the fuck all this plot about the FBI investigating terrorist cells was about when there are ALIENS in this story. I really liked the reveal at the end that the Visitors are the cell.

Elizabeth Mitchell said the Visitors were arming themselves with the most powerful weapon out there: devotion. Really? Because the word that came to my mind was "sex." Morena Baccarin and Laura Vandervoort? I'd walk a mile to kiss those reptiles.