(V) The visitors are among us...

The premise behind V is that a group of alien visitors arrive on Earth in a fleet of huge, saucer-shaped motherships, which appear over cities across the world.  The visitors reach out to the human race and seeming friends, offering technological and medical advancements in exchange for chemicals and minerals needed to aid their ailing world.

The longer that the aliens are on earth, the more odd things start happening, most notably that scientists are persecuted.  People who did not buy into the visitor propaganda start to die, radically change or disappear.

As things progress, resistance cells are formed.  The mini-series and series followed the resistance cell in Los Angeles, led by Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) and Julie Parrish (Faye Grant).  They find out that the visitors are not what they seem, but actually a lizard species that has been dressed up to look human. (They wear a skin that looks human, and contact lenses to cover their reptilian eyes.)  As it turns out, the reason scientists were persecuted, was because the visitors knew they were the only ones with a chance to develop something to stop them.  This leads us into the second mini-series, in which the scientists do create something.  The Red Dust, is a bacteria that is only harmful to visitors.  By the end of the second mini-series, the visitors had been chased off the planet.  The actual series finds that the visitors only retreated as far as the moon.  Finding that the Red Dust had only lasted so long, the visitors were able to re-occupy earth.

Both mini-series’ and the regular series are 80’s television. Here is when they aired:

V (1983 mini-series) – May 1^st and 2^nd, 1983
V: The Final Battle – May 6^th, 7^th and 8^th, 1984
V: The Series - October 26^th, 1984 (1984-10-26) to March 22^nd, 1985

Originally shown on NBC, 2009 found a new incarnation on ABC. The new series is a reimagining of the original series, not a continuance.

V: The Series (2009) – November 3^rd, 2009 to present

What do you think of these shows?