From: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Title: The "V" Miniseries
Article-I.D.: watmath.5002
Posted: Mon May  2 12:38:08 1983
Received: Tue May  3 04:59:36 1983

I thought at first this might have something to do with Pynchon, but found
out quickly it did not, being from the maker of "The Inrcredible Hulk" and
The $1E6 Man.  So I didn't go in expecting too much.

I got more than I expected, though.  I found it fairly entertaining.
The beginning, up to the "scientist conspiracy" part, was a reasonable,
though not outstanding first contact story.   I'll accept aliens who are
close to 100% human fairly easily - it just posits we came from the same
stock rather than evolving of different planets as we now think.  I was
pleased to see the scientists of the world amazed that they were human,
so things looked good.

The the anti-scientist sentiment.   I found this hard to take at first,
figuring the public, at least in educated countries, would never go for
this kind of thing.  Then I began to think about the amount of mistrust
a lot of the public has in us - the aid of mystery about our work and the
envy of our success in society.   Remembering Hitler, as this movie told
you rather blatantly, again and again, to do, you could see how it might
happen.

It was Marc Singer's espionage mission aboard the alien ship that really
broke the crediability of this film as SF.   Aside from the incredibly
campy "let's reveal our secrets again in case anybody is watching from
the wings" dialogue, the facts that the aliens spoke English on board their
ship and in fact were lizards dressed up as men were inexcusable.

I have long been of the opinion that an alien race would never bother to
invade our planet for military purposes.  If their technology is high enough
to allow them to cheaply flit from planet to planet in huge ships, then they
can hardly need us, even for raw materials.  If it is only high enough to
barely manage interstellar travel (especially non-FTL) then it would not
be economic to invade other planets.  Lately, though, I have seen how it
might be to the advantage of an alien race to enslave another race.

We'll see what happens tonight.  If the "Hitler" of these people turns out
to be a computer, I take back everything I said about the quality of the
show.