Where were you the day the aliens arrived? If you watch the TV series V, which starts this Monday night on Pro7, you’ll have the answer.
The aliens in the series cordially call themselves the Visitors. They cure disease and give teenagers rides in their space shuttle. They ask only for some water and minerals to take home with them. They appear to look like us — but that’s just one of many ways in which they’re deceiving humankind.
The ones really being deceived, though, are the viewers. This series is a remake of another (also called V) that aired from 1983 to 1985.
The new series is certainly enjoyable, but the changes are almost entirely cosmetic. The heroes, once a TV journalist and a doctor, are now an FBI agent and a priest. The action has moved from Los Angeles to Vancouver (though the characters think they’re in New York). Most of the gender roles are reversed; instead of a father-daughter drama, we now get a mother-son drama. Ho-hum.
The new series is, in fact, so similar to the old one that the original author, Kenneth Johnson, had to file a legal complaint against Warner Bros. in order to be credited as its creator.
As someone who writes 100 percent original stuff all day long, I have to ask: What is the point of this? Is it so hard to invent a new scenario? Are all writers as lazy and fake as Undoctor zu Guttenberg? If so, maybe I should get a raise.
We’re told that originality has always been a rare thing. Nobody (except me) complained when Roland Emmerich stole his Independence Day spaceships-over-cities motif from V. Every Woody Allen movie is a remake of another Woody Allen movie. William Shakespeare adapted Francis Bacon, who’d “re-imagined” what Euripides and Sophocles had borrowed from oral tradition. George Lucas remade, in Star Wars, every story that’s ever been told.
So why do we continue to tell stories? Because they contain messages and moral lessons that we as a society want to pass on. This is my main gripe with the new V.
Lessons from history
You see, the old V was an allegory from start to finish. Everything about the Visitors — their emblem, their uniforms, their control of the media, their youth movement, their persecution of individual groups — was an exact parallel to the Third Reich. The Visitors rationalized their behavior by seeing humans as animals, the same way the Nazis saw Jews. The Resistance used the same techniques of theft, sabotage and clandestine communication as the real resistance did. We saw how collaborators could turn a blind eye, but also learned that some Nazis tried to fight the system from within — something Hollywood had never before admitted.
Because the new series has copied so much of the original, most of these elements are still included, but they’re harder to see. What’s missing are two prominent protagonists of the original V, an old Jewish couple who hid their neighbors in the attic, the same way their neighbors had hidden them from the Nazis. They told local kids about the 1930s and taught them how to stay alive — until their own grandson, a member of the Visitor Youth, had them taken away.
The producers of the new series decided they didn’t need historical allegory. It’s just “a show about spaceships”, one of them said at a press conference.
The Visitors would love our uncontroversial entertainment. Today’s movies and popular music demand to be marketed around the world, including to societies that don’t share our values. So they rarely raise the kind of uncomfortable questions they used to, nor do they teach us the moral lessons of history. Without the medium of entertainment to convey them, these lessons have the potential to become academic and trivial.
If we don’t learn from the past, we’ll be condemned to repeat it — in the form of further meaningless remakes.
