V is for Reinforcements

Can it possibly be that nearly 4 weeks have already passed, sending V into a holidays and Olympics induced hiatus till March? Seems like just yesterday we were watching the Visitors hover ominously into focus for the first time and now that phase one of the ride is over, I can’t help but feel like this is a show whose roller coaster hasn’t even crested the first hill yet. This might bode well for V’s future, meaning that we’ve got loads of action and twists to come, or it might prove to be a crippling disaster if fans on the fence just weren’t quite wowed enough by the intro eps that placed more dominoes than they bothered knocking down. The final episode provided lots of teasing about stuff we had a very reasonable expectation of learning explicitly, “big reveals” about stuff we could see coming from lightyears away, and, I’ll readily admit, enough emotion, surprise, and sense of wonder to keep me poking around the mothership next spring.

Tyler & Erica share some painfully awkward and realistic mother/son moments in the wake of Erica finding out about Lisa, and it seems like the poor kid will actually reach out to his mom until a phone call from Ryan pulls Erica closer to the resistance, but drives Tyler closer to the Vs. He later shares these sentiments to his shrink who turns out to be, surprise surprise, Ryan’s fiancée Valerie! The show’s strongest characteristic continues to be a ready willingness to link disparate characters together for the sake of a focused story, but that story still needs some work.

Anna uses her monkey puppet Chad (who could really use some of those links I was talking about) to start spreading the good news of Healing Centers where the Vs will use their considerable technology resources to cure just about everything other than the common cold and offer an immune boosting “vitamin shot” that I’m sure is in no way an evil mind control virus or some such malevolence. Val leaps at the chance to cure a heart condition, so she visits behind Ryan’s back to get her ticker fixed as well as finding out why she’s been feeling sick. In the morning. Hint. Chad gets scanned as part of his story, and gets the news that without intervention from Visitor Medical Group,i he’s destined for a deadly aneurysm in a few months.  Anna’s consigliere Marcus offers Chad’s continued cooperation as his price of treatment. He hasn’t had much trouble pimping his journalistic integrity thus far, so I’d hardly expect any difference when his life’s on the line.

Ryan reacts to news of the healing centers with the recollection that his sinister kinfolk had been working on an injection that they plan to distribute in the guise of plain ol’ flu shots. So that’s why they can’t cure a cold! Well played, shifty lizards. The resistance foursome of Erica, Ryan, Father Jack, and Georgie try to break into a V lab to destroy the tainted vaccines and while their ultimate goal is successful, Georgie gets shot, Ryan force feeds an ex-comrade the spontaneous combustion suicide pill we now learn all Vs carry, and Erica puts 2 and 2 together about what’s under Ryan’s skin. Discovering that the ever mysterious and evasive Ryan is one of the Visitors hardly puts Erica in a good mood, and it doesn’t help that her all too brief interrogation provides no useful questions or answers, when Ryan could surely at least spill what planet they’re from or something.

Back on the mothership, Anna is just plain all over the place as she careens between roles as caring mother:  showing Tyler around to welcome him into the family since he’s dating her daughter, scary dictator: ordering the exposure and skinning of whoever killed Dale, and shiny happy sex goddess: getting naked in a pool of light to offer a universal feeling of bliss to all of Visitor kind at once. Yikes. A lower ranked 5^th Column spy takes the fall, forcing the well placed medical officer to flay his own brother in arms alive. This wouldn’t have been a problem for the rubber suited Vs of the ’80s, but the new breed are clearly more attached, literally and figuratively, to their new skin.

The cliffhangers we’re left to ponder till March are, in least to most order of how shocking they were and/or how much I care, Father Jack getting stabbed in the gut by a V: Really? He’s a series regular. He’s not going anywhere. If the Vs wanted him dead, they could have done it. Ryan finding out that Valerie’s having his baby: I’m eager for the conversation that’ll have to happen when Ryan tells Val his real species, but for now it’s just melodrama. The biggie? A slick zoom out from Tyler hanging out with his new family that goes beyond the solar system to a jaw droppingly huge fleet of hundreds of V ships, each at least as menacing as the current crop of mega-saucers. Earth is reamed.

For another take on this episode, check out V is for Reinforcements by Liz Cooper.

Season 1, Episode 4: It’s Only the Beginning (originally aired November 24, 2009)

For more on V, click here.

Tuesdays 8/7c on ABC

Photographs courtesy of ABC and Sergei Bachlakov