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?
