MEMORY LANE: REMEMBERING "V" (PART TWO OF THREE)

When "V" debuted in 1983, I was not quite eleven years old, and found myself sleepless with anticipation. The 80s were the Golden Age of TV movies and mini-series, of course, but the vast majority of these were historical melodramas like "The Thorn Birds," "Shogun," "The Winds of War," "North & South," "Masada," etc. A sci-fi mini-series about a "soft" alien invasion of contemporary Earth was a big deviation from the norm. In fact, it was unique. And since every kid my age had been raised on "Star Wars," "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica," our thirst for fresh science-fiction adventures was pretty keen. "V" provided a lot of satisfaction for that thirst, but it ended on what might be called a cliffhanger, leaving me and my schoolmates keen for a resolution. "V: The Final Battle" certainly provided that. It's a slam-bang "finish" to one of the most interesting and innovative ideas ever put on television. But the emphasis is on the "slam bang" and not the "imaginative" or "innovative." In retrospect it is still enormously entertaining, but leaves the viewer -- this one anyway -- with a feeling that it might have been much more.

To position us in the right spot on Memory Lane, the place where "V: The Final Battle" resides -- 1984 -- it's necessary to walk backward a year, a perform a swift recap.

In the original "V," conceived and executed by writer-producer-director Kenneth Johnson, a huge alien fleet appears unexpectedly over the skies of Earth, disgorging aliens who look...just like us, and even use prosaic, comfortably familiar human names. The "Visitors," as they call themselves, pose as benefactors of humanity, offering their advanced technology in exchange for certain chemicals required for their dying homeworld. In reality, of course, the Visitors are humanoid lizards wearing prosthetic skins, whose real aim is to suck Earth dry of its natural resources and devour that of the population they aren't going to turn into slaves. Taking control of the media, government and military, exterminating the scientific community, and actively courting human collaborators, the Visitors soon established de facto control of the planet and go about their grisly scheme, only to be confronted with a home-grown resistance movement in Los Angeles led by handsy journalist Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and scrappy scientist Juliet Parrish (Faye Grant). At the end of "V," with the Visitors' secret exposed, the battle lines are clearly drawn: Visitors and their human collaborators versus the resistance and the "Fifth Column" -- sympathetic Visitors working with the humans to sabotage the evil aims of their fellow reptiles.

"V," as you will recall, was a heavy-handed but nevertheless brilliant analysis of how fascism comes to power -- not merely the methods it uses to destabilize and destroy democracy, but the nature of its appeal to the ordinary person on the street, the person who seemingly has nothing to gain by embracing it. The Visitors are not only dangerous because they have nefarious motives and employ violence to bring them about, but because they are so able at recruiting -- or rather seducing -- humans to do their dirty work for them. These collaborators run the range from cold-eyed opportunists to unstable weaklings thirsty for power, to merely the naive and credulous. Kenneth Johnson had a point to make, and he made it both grossly and subtly.

"V: The Final Battle" is cut from rather different cloth.

The second miniseries begins not long after the first left off. The Resistance, led by Mike and Juliet, is waging a brutal guerrilla war against the Visitor occupation, but floundering in the face of superior alien technology. Enter bloodthirsty mercenary Ham Tyler (Michael Ironside), a resistance fighter from Chicago, who brings special weapons and a demand: join the larger, nationwide resistance movement or be wiped out. Tyler's appearance exacerbates existing tensions within the Los Angeles resistance, as well as despair over how they are ultimately going to drive the Visitors from Earth, but things aren't much better on the Visitor side of things: Supreme Commander John (Richard Herd) has to juggle the ambitions of his sadistic chief scientist Diana (Jane Badler), and their equally cruel security chief Steven (Andrew Prine), while dealing with the arrival of a new fleet commander, Pamela (Sarah Douglas), who arrives determined to exterminate the resistance and suck the planet dry. He must also contend with the Fifth Column, led by the brave dissident Martin (Frank Ashmore), which is feeding the resistance information and aid. Meanwhile, Robin Maxwell (Blair Tefkin), who was impregnated with the first human-alien hybrid baby in the last series, finds herself the potential key to ridding the Earth of the Visitors once and for all...but first she has to give birth, and only God knows what she's going to give birth to.

"The Final Battle" is densely packed with characters and even more densely packed with sub-plots, some carried over from the original series. As I just said, that series was essentially an allegory about how fascism infiltrates, seduces, and finally throttles a democratic society into submission: the second, far more violent and brutal, is about the price that must be paid to resist such tyranny, and not only the blood price, but the moral one. Families, including Donovan's, are broken apart by the war -- his mother is an arch collaborator. The resistance performs horrible acts fighting for freedom: experimenting medically on prisoners, setting up collaborators to be horribly murdered, using seduction and betrayal to obtain information, etc., etc, and these acts, in turn, set up fresh conflicts between the resistance members themselves. If there was one thing 80s TV was good at, it was the soap-opera dynamic of "constant conflict, constantly occurring." Everyone fights as much with each other as the enemy. This may be melodramatic, but it's also realistic, and compelling.

There are some commendable performances here. Andy Packer as the traitor David Bernstein is at once horrifyingly degenerate and truly pathetic as the sniveling, deluded misift who only the Visitors would accept and empower. Andrew Prine as Steven manages to look remarkably like a reptile wearing a human face -- he has a sort of cold, pitiless hunger in his stare at all times. Robert Englund is remarkably sweet as as Willie, and Frank Ashmore brings a grave dignity to the Stauffenberg-esque character of Martin. Though the cast is largely unchanged -- most everybody who survived series one is back for series two, with a few exceptions -- one of the great additions to "The Final Battle" is Michael Ironside as Ham Tyler. Tyler is a walking weapon, as cruel as the Visitors, and just as bloodthirsty, the sole difference being that he is human and they reptilian. If Donovan is the heroic "do-gooder" with a smoothly functioning moral compass, Ham epitomizes the ruthless resistance fighter who has zero scruples and would just as soon shoot a reluctant or collaborationist human as one of the lizards. The chemistry he has with Singer is terrific, and he elevates every scene he is in, even the bad ones.

There is also plenty of action, much more than in the first series, and much of it enjoyable. The Visitors, of course, don't shoot much better than Imperial stormtroopers or Cylons, and with the exception of the opening battle, the humans are far too successful in firefights and dogfights, but what the hell. If bad guys could shoot, Hollywood would be out of a job.

On the debit side, "The Final Battle" lacks some of the elegance of the first series, probably due to the lack of involvement by Kenny Johnson, the series creator, who had little or nothing to do with this sequel and lamented the less visceral, less philosophical script that was ultimately put on screen. The 80s were, tonally, as addicted to melodrama as they were teased hair and pancake rouge: some of the brain of Johnson's concept was crudely cut out in favor of Dynasty drama and shoot 'em up action. What's more, the rather tenuous suspension of disbelief the plot required to work at full pressure was pierced by logical holes at many points. The Visitors are so predatory and treacherous it's hard to believe they could get through a single day without killing each other all off, the "star child" plot is silly and scientifically nonsensical, and the alien baby sequences come off as utterly ludicrous due to rubbish make up effects. The "conversion" scenes with Julie are also intolerably long and in the end, tedious -- how long can we watch Faye Grant in a body stocking, acting as if she's having a heart attack? I was also disappointed that a plotline from the first film -- the Resistance trying to contact another race of aliens who are enemies with the Visitors -- is abandoned here. Finally, the solution the humans come up with to rid themselves of the reptiles, while workable as an idea, is executed in a laughable way -- laughable even to me as a twelve year old boy. Although this series is actually more fun than the first, being replete with shootouts, escapes and fist-fights, it is not actually better: in fact it is not as good. But the difference is probably not worth bothering with. Each miniseries has its own distinct flavor, bitter and sweet.

Such was "V: The Final Battle." It was not Shakespeare, not even bad Shakespeare, but it had a lot to handle and it handled most everything, if not necessarily well, then at least decisively.

So where does that leave us now, as we stand at 1984 Memory Lane and peer through its ivy-covered windows into the dusty living room of TV history? Is "The Final Battle" worth remembering or celebrating? Does it withstand the test of time? And did it leave a legacy?

Having just rewatched the series, I can say that, despite all its hokum, its cumbersome plot armor, its logical contradictions and cheesy silliness, "The Final Battle" is largely a very satisfying watch even forty-odd years down the road. Stories of resistance against tyranny are almost always enjoyable despite their inevitable brutality -- and "TFB" is indeed quite brutal, sometimes even to the point of mild shock. Allegorical stories have a great strength to them, allowing us to make fanciful takes on real history, and "V" so clearly being the story of resistance to Nazism specifically and Fascism generally, it is nonetheless even more fun to see the allegory handled with laser rifles and green blood. From the standpoint of execution it may fail the time-test as all "old" television fails in the face of ever-advancing technology and changes in societal mores, but on the most critical point -- as a warning against fascism, and a reminder that democracy is fueled by the blood of ordinary people with moral and physical courage, not "influencers" or the punditry -- it is actually more relevant than ever. America, now, today as I write this with my cat staring at me, is in a surprisingly similar-looking boat to the fictive Los Angeles of 1984. Like the characters in the miniseries, we real flesh-and-blood Americans have a choice to make, between clunky, cumbersome, pain-in-the-ass democracy, or the sugar-coated poison pill that is fascism, that dark medicine that goes down so smoothly and leaves such a bitter aftertaste.

I close this second of the three chapters of this trip down Memory Lane by pointing out "The Final Battle" did indeed have a legacy: Following the huge rating success of this mini-series, a TV show was commissioned which continued the story and characters for another year...and we will soon be discussing this (mercifully?) forgotten chapter of television history: but but for today's purposes, this is the climax. And a fitting one. "The Final Battle" is not brain food as its predecessor was: it is greasy, overbuttered county fair popcorn, but damn tasty nonetheless. Entertaining as hell, it rides roughshod over its own flaws and delivers a brutal, satisfying, rather ridiculous finish to one of the more exciting moments in television history.