V: Serpent’s Tooth

By Nina Sordi

Well, there might have been a whole lot of talking this week, but V certainly got the ball rolling on many of the show’s most intriguing plot points. The question is, did they try to address too much in too little time or was the frantic pace just the thing to get the show in motion?

The episode starts out with Anna confronting her mother, Diana, about how to defeat that pesky human emotion. Considering that Diana has been her prisoner for fifteen years, presumed dead by the rest of her people, they certainly had a lot of catching up to do. Throughout the episode they discussed normal mother/daughter things: the futility of cross-breeding with humans, the science behind emotion, the essence of a soul, you get the idea. It was a thrill to see more of Jane Badler, especially as the mother planting seeds of doubt into Anna’s increasingly frazzled mind. Still, though, there was a great deal of time, once again, dedicated to discussing the source of human emotion, leading to the introduction of a new enemy for the Visitors: the soul.

I am really starting to wonder where they are going with this. The idea that Anna is so perplexed by feelings and concepts that are not visible or concrete (to the point where she insists on using the Visitors’ advanced technology to find and destroy the human soul) provides important insight to the Visitors and how they function. But between Anna’s emotional troubles and Ryan wrestling between humanity and Anna’s bliss, these themes are taking up a great deal of focus throughout the show. Unless they are going somewhere with all of this, they seriously run the risk of just talking in circles.

As I had said before, Ryan’s daughter has proven to be a serious conflict for him and the Fifth Column (although they aren’t fully aware of that yet). The constant taunting Anna subjected Ryan to in this episode was just bordering on tedious, but Anna calling his bluff and making the child sick raised the stakes in a believable way. Instead of just talking endlessly about how he misses his daughter, Anna pushed Ryan to the edge, so much so that he eventually agreed to do her bidding. Right? I love that we don’t know exactly what he is thinking or if he has a plan.

In other news, Anna FINALLY ate a rat! Well, technically she chewed it up and fed it to Ryan’s baby. The scene acted as a perfect homage to the iconic rat-eating scene in the original V, by passing the torch to the new series. The torch, of course, being the chewed-up rat carcass. Yum.

The Fifth Column and their fellow Earthlings had their share of problems as well, starting with the emergence of an even more radical branch of the resistance. When they aren’t making suicide bombers out of librarians and secretaries, these guys appear to be operating on a global scale, something that might work to our heroes’ advantage. The show did a good job of solidifying the moral code of the main characters, where they will and will not compromise, so encountering this very different kind of resistance will likely prove to be a challenge. It is another situation, however, where our heroes could end up debating right and wrong for five straight scenes. As long as this friction is played out through major strikes leveled against either the Visitors or the potentially rivaling branches of the Fifth Column, it should be an incredibly fun ride.

By far, though, my FAVORITE development of this episode was the unraveling partnership of Erica and Agent Malik. This appeared to be brewing for some time, but things sped up when Malik started to show a more active role as a Visitor in hiding. After too many close calls for either of them, Erica and Malik finally dropped all pretenses of ignorance and reached for their weapons. For Malik, that meant her gun. For Erica, that meant a moving vehicle, which she proceeded to run off the road and flip over into some wooded area, leaving both women wounded and stuck. Now, we all know Erica will make it out of there somehow, but considering her past experience with her partners being Visitors (Dale in season 1), she is going to have a hard time covering up another disappearing coworker. Let’s just hope Malik goes down swinging because I sense an epic fist fight after that car wreck. Pretty please?

But wait, there’s MORE! This episode also touched on Lisa growing closer to the Fifth Column, the potential risk of Joshua’s memories resurfacing, and Erica giving Tyler’s blood sample to Sam in hopes for answers about her peculiar pregnancy. V is determined to cover a lot of material in each episode this season, but following the multiple storylines has not proven to be a chore so far. Do you agree? Or is V attempting to perform an impossible balancing act?

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