About the Science Fiction Series "V"

Alright, I just started watching the science fiction series "V" starting with the pilot, and I thought I'd give some impressions before I forget about them and get lost in the rest of whatever this series turns out to be.

I'm always into shows' first episodes, or pilots, since the writers tend to put their best feet forward, and though the execution is usually poor, it is where the raw idea shows through. "V", for now though, strikes me as somewhat unoriginal so far.

So it starts: We have a few opening shots of regular people going about their lives in Southern California, and suddenly there's an earthquake.

You can tell it's an earthquake because in every scene and location, there's a shot of a little thing rattling off a table, or a glass of water rippling like in that famous scene from Jurassic Park. What seems funny to me right away, is that no one just says "oh yeah, we're in California. It's an earthquake. I'd better do the earthquake thing and get under a table." Instead, they're all like "What's happening! I've never felt the earth shake before!"

Also, their emergency procedures seem chaotic and unorganized. We're led to perceive, from the opening shots, that this is a movie set in our world. Two historical events are referenced in the first scene: The assassination of US President John F. Kennedy in 1963

, and the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center twin towers in New York City in 2001. We are also shown the ID card of one of the presumably main characters, who works for Homeland Security. Regardless on this emphasis on American paranoia, the scenes that result are, as I pointed out, chaotic. In this show, people still don't know what to do if there's an earthquake or a terrorist attack. There's still panic and chaos.

Anyways, there's no reason for panic, because it very quickly turns out that it's an alien spaceship that's responsible for the earthquakes, which people realize as soon as they look outside and up. Hmm, where have I seen this before? The 1999 movie "Independence Day", to name just one, but I've seen it before. Aliens come to invade by parking spaceships above every major city in the world. Most recently, this trope was used as a powerful and satirical device when, in the 2009 film "District 9", an alien ship parks itself over the dysfunctional city of Johannesburg, South Africa.

In "V" though, there's apparently no mystery, as the first thing the aliens do is turn the bottoms of their spaceships into giant video screens and broadcast a friendly message of peace and trade to the people of earth.

And that's where the show completely loses me.

If they have video screen technology, as well as the capability of interstellar travel, then clearly they should have the ability to communicate directly with "earth's leaders" whomever they might consider them to be. I'd contend that this remains the heads of state of the G8 most powerful countries on earth, the most important of which is the USA. But an argument could be made for the aliens contacting the United Nations, or perhaps one of the numerous scientific organizations with the capability to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors, like maybe NASA, or SETI.

[Speaking of SETI, I feel bad for them. They kind of get kicked around in funding and political circles because they haven't found anything yet. At least, they haven't found ETI, which is what they're Searching for. But as soon as they do find ETI with the capability of communicating with earth, it won't be SETI's job to communicate anymore. Some other agency will take over, and SETI will pretty much remain how it is today. Yes, they'll win awards for having found something, and by awards I mean they will get trophies, one-time cash prizes, and scientific apparatuses named after them, maybe even a planet or two. But the rewards that SETI will never be able to cash in on is the actual opportunity to communicate and deal with alien intelligences. This will be granted to someone with earth-bound experience in diplomacy and negotiation. SETI will instead be set loose on the universe again, searching for the next ETI, while at the same time searching our own planet for sources of funding which no one will want to do, since we'll have already found ETI. In many folks' eyes, SETI will have served its purpose, and made itself irrelevant. But the truth of SETI is that it will always be relevant, because there will always be more ETIs to discover. And it will always be questioned as to its relevance, no matter how many ETIs it ultimately finds.]

So for some reason, the "V" aliens decide that they want to communicate "democratically" with the "people of earth" by parking above our big cities and broadcasting a picture of a human woman. Interestingly, the human woman is a white woman, speaking English. Fortunately, the aliens speak French too, and the spaceship parked over Paris is conveniently in French.

But I'm beginning to wonder about these aliens. Apparently they speak English and French, and they've somehow determined that their spokesperson should be a white human woman. Usually when people have a message to get out to the mass media, they conduct focus groups to determine how to affect the recipients of their message most favorably. It turns out, in many cases, that a woman's face will garner a more positive response than a male face, if the topic is diplomacy and peace and love. A male face, on the other hand, tends to work well with messages of threats of war, economic sanctions, deadlines, and ultimatums.

So anyways, pop psychology aside, the aliens somehow got extensive knowledge of humanity long before they arrived, managed to reproduce a convincing female face, and yet for some reason never communicated with the governments or scientific agencies of Earth? And for that matter, where was SETI? Where was NASA? Where were the amateur astronomers of Earth? These spaceships are as least as big as middling asteroids, so why was no one able to detect them? No, they somehow manage to fly in, under the radar, and announce that they just want to be friends.

Look, if the aliens really want to be friends, they should park themselves in orbit. Not around Earth, because that's where our satellites are, and we don't want them interfering with our satellites. Preferably somewhere comfortably distant. Like the moon. Let them park themselves in orbit around the moon. And rather than fly in with giant TV screens, all Big-Brother-esque (have they not read George Orwell's "1984"? Are these aliens completely oblivious to irony?) if they really want to communicate with earth, all they have to do is hack into the major TV networks. Or hey, get on Twitter.

Alternatively, just get in contact with a spokesperson on earth who can disseminate information to the rest of the planet on a want-to-know basis. Because believe me, at least at first, if there are aliens on TV, or aliens on the internet, that's where people are going to be clicking. You don't need to hack in, you don't need to broadcast on a huge screen above every major city. People are going to want this information, and they're going to go to our numerous and extensive media outlets to get it. There's absolutely no need for the aliens to beat us over the head with the fact that they're here and they "just want to trade and be friends".

If you just want to trade and be friends, then why did you disrupt our most economically active regions, cause minor earthquakes and widespread panic (never mind your soothing message; what about deaf people, or people who just happened to be indoors at the time)?

And then there's this business about a "mineral" on earth that is found nowhere else in the entire galaxy. I happen to know that this is utter bullshit too. Any element found on earth can be easily found elsewhere in the solar system, and it would be far easier to extract from pretty much any other planet.

Want water? Try the comets, the minor planet Pluto, or Jupiter's moon Europa.

Iron? The asteroid belt is full of it, and far more pure than what you find on earth.

Carbon? Try the atmosphere of Mars, or Saturn's moon Titan.

Silicon? Back to the asteroids, or hey, how about Earth's moon, since there aren't any people or ecosystems there to disrupt with interstellar scale mining operations?

Hey aliens, we appreciate the fact that you want to trade and all, but right now, the most valuable thing we have to offer is our knowledge. And likewise with you to us. Anything material, from matter to energy, you can pretty much take from the solar system and there really wouldn't be much we could do to stop you. We'd certainly appreciate getting something in return for "letting" you mine the asteroid belt, but we're just not in a place technologically to have a real voice in the matter.

So anyways, that's all from the first five minutes of the pilot episode of "V". My guess is that some of the things I brought up here will turn out to be questions that the human characters ask the aliens, and maybe there will be satisfactory answers, and maybe there won't.