I Love the 80s...Miniseries!

I don't think that there's one person who grew up in the eighties who doesn't remember when the slimy green alien lizard baby crawled out of Robin Maxwell during that pivotal scene in the V miniseries.

EVERYONE talked about it the next day at school.

It was one of my favorite miniseries growing up and for some odd reason, my mother let me watch it. She didn't allow me to watch Lace, the only thing I knew about it was from the commercials with Phobe Cates saying, "Which one of you BITCHES is MY MOTHER!"

She also didn't allow me to watch SHOGUN--I don't remember, why was that inappropriate? Oh wait, it's not that I don't remember, it's that I don't know. I NEVER GOT TO SEE IT.

My mother let me watch the remake of Splendor in the Grass until the scene where Bud Stamper squeezes Deanie Loomis's hands and she falls to her knees. That's when my mother told me to go to my room because she had seen this movie before and it was INAPPROPRIATE. Of course it's inappropriate, it's all about sexual desire. Who were the geniuses who decided that it would be great to cast Melissa Gilbert of the Little House on the Prairie for that film, knowing that diehard eight-year-old Little House fans (such as myself) DESPERATELY wanted to see her in this movie?

The one saving grace was that she told me that she would personally watch the movie AS A FAVOR to me and tell me the appropriate parts of the story the next morning before school.

When I asked her what happened, my mother said, "Oh, that girl and boy never ended up together...she was better off because he ended up being poor and married to some poor slob and SHE married A DOCTOR!"

Can you blame me that for years I didn't believe her version of the story because it's so Chinese to tell your daughter that you're better off not falling in love with that handsome boy in high school because what you really want to do is save yourself for A DOCTOR!

Anyway, back to V.

For some inexplicable reason, she let me watch this one...although how is alien sex and lizard babies appropriate television for children? And I LOVED it. It's partly the reason why I love sci-fi and why I spent my high school years trolling the science fiction sections of bookstores and having total nerds suggest Orson Scott Card novels to me. Although once in high school, the cutest boy in school admitted to me during one of our 8-hour-long conversations (if I knew then what I know now, we would have SO DATED because now I know that boys NEVER talk with a girl that long unless he liked her...DUH! Why was I so stupid in high school?) that he loved Lloyd Alexander and I had never felt closer to any other human being. And then a few days later he told me to start listening to Steve Winwood.

So how excited was I that a NEW V SERIES was being produced!?!?!?!?

Let's just say I was s'excited and literally COUNTING DOWN THE DAYS until the pilot aired.

Unfortunately, now I know that V stands for V'terrible.

They obviously spent a lot of money on great actors (except for that terrible Scott Wolf--which should have been a sign) and awesome production stuff like special effects and I guess by the time they were all done, there wasn't any money left for writers.

I felt that the show was SO unrealistic and Peter said, "Uhm...the show is about lizard aliens who come and harvest people. How is that show going to be realistic?"

The thing is, when you have a show that is Cuh-RAZY, you still need to center it around the reality of that universe. I mean, those human characters are WAAAAY too calm about aliens announcing their arrival on their huge plasma screen on their spaceship. Cheering? Really? Like, THAT'S the way these writers think that human beings will react to the news that we're not alone on this planet?

Hmmm. Have those writers ever MET A HUMAN BEING? Because we all would be going SO APESHIT.

Instead, these people are all, "Lahdidah...let's all go up to the alien spaceship and check it out!"

Also, I felt that the whole lizard-reveal happened WAY too early. Peter felt that the producers might have been forced to make the reveal early because EVERYBODY ALREADY KNOWS that they are lizards.

I disagree. The most tragic of the Greek tragedies are more so BECAUSE the audience already knows what's going to happen. There's an incredible relationship you can build with an audience when they are in on the secret. I felt that the show should have waited to make the reveal--but instead, they blew their load and now when we watch the show, it's just me screaming at the television, "REALLY? You have this AWESOME story and THIS is how you're going to execute it?"

And Peter's mumbling, "That poor Elizabeth Mitchell. Things were going so well for her..."