How V drags religion down

I want to like V; I really do. I have fond memories of the original series from the '80s, and when I heard that Kenneth Johnson-- also responsible for one of my favorite SF shows ever, Alien Nation-- was bringing it back, and that the update would feature not one but two Firefly actors, I was more than a little thrilled. Imagine my disappointment, then, to discover that the first episode of the show is a ham-handed smear of the American left in general and Barack Obama in particular. V ratchets up the worst reactionary conspiracies to SFnal absurdities: worried that our dark-skinned President wasn't born in the U.S.? These scaly-skinned usurpers are real aliens! Believe he's a secret Muslim? The aliens have been sponsoring terrorist sleeper cells for years! Paranoid about death panels? The Vs don't just want to kill grandma, they want to eat her, too!

Others have written about this already, so I won't belabor the point too much. I can only hope that future episodes bring in some of the nuance and complexity that we've see in the political allegories of recent shows like Battlestar Galactica-- and not-so-recent ones like Johnson's own Alien Nation. At the moment, though, the metaphors are as ugly as they are transparent, and I for one am not amused.

What I really ought to talk about, though, is how religion gets dragged down in the mess as well. One of the first characters we see in the opening scenes of the pilot is Father Jack Landry, a Catholic priest assigned to a sparsely-attended lower Manhattan church. After the arrival of the Visitors, his pews are packed, in large part because he preaches caution and suspicion. One of his congregants sees him as a candidate for a small but growing resistance movement, and by the end of the episode he's attending meetings about anti-alien strategy.

On the one hand, there's something good about the depiction of a priest as a member of the resistance. The early church was, in many ways, a resistance group to the oppressive Roman Empire, and there's a long history of religious anti-imperialism. But, if the new series follows anything like the trajectory of the original miniseries, the resistance group will soon become an active guerilla army-- and, at that point, the presence of a priest in a violent resistance movement will become problematic. V is already treading dangerous ground in advancing to the kind of conspiracy theory believed by nuts who bring guns to presidential appearances. But a religious leader giving his blessing to violence-- don't we have enough of that sort of thing in the real world?

Comments

[Erin]

Actually, my favorite parts were the laughably bad lines tying the aliens to liberals. The rest of the episode was boring, and bad is always preferable to boring.

[Andrey Arkhipov]

LOL. Again, I find it amusing that people without the context miss the parallels to the reality of that show. Actually it does nothing to drag the religion down. It simply exposes the "prostitute religion" that only cares about the "filled churches" in exchange for keeping the population calm by not asking the real questions about the order of things.

In V, the "aliens" destabilized the world in order to reveal themselves as saviors from the woes that they themselves created. Ironically, they are "wolves in sheep's clothing" that gain trust of people, only to use them and eventually destroy them... sounds familiar?

[David Ellis]

I was really looking forward to this series but have been less than overwhelmed. They don't appear to have done any significant reinventing the was BSG did. And, let's face it, the original V's basic story was pretty daft.

I would have liked it if they'd done a bit of playing with audience expectations. What if the visitors actually WERE benevolent in this version and the "resistance" were just misguided xenophobes? That might have been fun.