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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 8 |
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Ron reviews writer-producer Kenneth Johnson's long-awaited literary sequel to the epic space invasion TV miniseries and weekly TV show of the 1980s...
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Johnson's finale to rousing
sci-fi tale is a big winner
of TheColumnists.com
One of the most exciting and memorable TV events of the 1980s was "V," a two-part miniseries that retold the story of the rise of Naziism in the 1930s as a science fiction action adventure taking place in the near future.
The "V" stood for "The Visitors," an alien race from a distant star system whose enormous armada of flying saucer spacecraft suddenly appeared in the atmosphere of Earth. They came in peace, The Visitors, assured us. They were willing to trade the scientific secrets of their much advanced galactic civilization in return for certain minerals Earth could supply for The Visitors' dying home planet.
But Earthlings soon learned The Visitors' real plan was to quickly and efficiently take control of Earth, impose a military dictatorship, start draining all the oceans of our planet, turn all humans into slaves to do the work of plundering Earth, then put them all into cold storage until they could be eaten by their captors.
Talk about your jolly tricksters! The Visitors all wore realistic human disguises, but underneath they were slimy reptiles. The females loved to swallow small mammals whole and the males especially enjoyed havng sex with Earthwomen, leaving them to give birth to scaly "half breeds."
The first "V" was a blockbuster ratings event for NBC in May of 1983, prompting a three-part sequel called "V--The Final Battle" in May, 1984, also a big ratings performer. That, in turn, inspired the weekly TV series "V," which premiered Oct. 26, 1984, on NBC and tried several different time periods, all on Friday nights, until it finally ran out of gas on July 5, 1985.
Several authorized novels have continued to spin yarns out of the original characters, but now the man who created the TV programs, writer-producer Kenneth Johnson, has picked up the saga himself some 20 years after the original debut of "V" and finished off most of the dangling storylines while pretty much rewriting the later history of the battle between The Visitors and the Earth insurgency.
It's called "V--The Second Generation" (Tor, $14.95) and it comes in a large format, trade paperback edition of 400-plus pages now available online and at most bookstores. Johnson has turned it into a breathlessly-paced sci-fi adventure that I found irresistible and impossible to put down.
Some of the great human characters from the original TV event are back, some of them pretty worse for wear after 20 years of Visitor rule. Former TV cameraman Mike Donovan, played by Marc Singer in the TV programs, returns, but he's been locked up in a dungeon for most of the past two decades, so he's not exactly ready to kick alien butt again. Instead, the leader of the Earth underground is Dr. Julie Parrish, played in the TV show by Faye Grant, but she's having great difficulty rebuilding her underground forces since the Purge of 1999, led by the Commandant of the Visitors, the evil Diana, that rat-swallowing devil who covered up her lizard-like features with the beautiful face and figure of an Earth heart-stopper. (She was played by Jane Badler in the TV series.)
In the original setup, some Visitors who mated with Earth women, became allies of the Earth underground, like simple Willie, whose human wife gave birth to a "breed" baby. In the TV show, Willie was played by Robert Englund, who went on to much greater fame playing a much less benign character in the movies--horror movie icon Freddie "razorfingers" Kreuger in the hugely popular "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie series. Willie's back in the new novel, this time deeply worried about his "breed" son, Ted, who becomes an eager member of the Visitors' version of the Hitler Youth Movement, The Teammates.
Among the most interesting newcomers to the story are Emma, a world-famous black female rock star who's having an affair with the Mayor of San Francisco, which complicates things once she's recruited into The Resistance; Nathan, a reckless and daring human youth who becomes the Luke Skywalker of his generation; and three very special characters--Ayden, Kayta and Bryke--a male and two females of the Zedti race of aliens. These insect-like people are the historical enemies of The Visitors. They join with The Resistance to help overthrow The Visitors' Earth strongholds before attacking the entire Visitor armada with their own space fleet waiting in hiding behind Saturn.
Johnson's portrait of Visitor-occupied Earth is not an appetizing one. San Francisco Bay has been drained of all water and California now has a vast Pacific Desert that stretches all the way to the continental shelf. Puget Sound is now the sandy equivalent of Monument Valley, Utah, with the islands now just dry buttes in what used to be the sea.
Scientists, the most dangerous people on Earth, are the new Jews, forced into ghetto neighborhoods by The Visitors. Rock stars like Emma are used by the visitors to attract millions of youthful human viewers to the propaganda programs of the aliens, which show how beneficial they have been to humankind since they took over.
I really enjoyed catching up on all the old "V" characters that have survived into the next generation while meeting all the new characters, too. Who doesn't love a thriller that revolves around an underground movement to overthrow brutal oppressors?
I salute Kenneth Johnson, a very creative guy I met several times in my TV critic days, and talked with about the many sci-fi shows he helped bring to television, including "Alien Nation," "The Bionic Woman," "The Incredible Hulk" and, of course, "V."
If "Battlestar Galactica" could be re-invented and returned to TV in the 21st century to win a whole new generation of fans, why not bring back "V" with a whole new approach in the much more hip sci-fi universe of today? Turning "V--The Second Generation" into a modern TV event might be a great place to start.
©2008 by Ron Miller. This column first posted March 3, 2008. The photo of Kenneth Johnson and the book cover reproduction are courtesy of Tor Books.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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