With a title like that, how could you not be excited for this week's V? Finally, we get to meet John May, fabled leader of the resistance, played by that hunk o'sex Michael Trucco, from Battlestar Galactica. Yes, the resistance will crystallize into a fighting force even Anna can't contend with, as we race towards an exciting all-out war between humanity and the evil lizards. I can't wait!
Oh wait, I forgot, this is the show V, where nothing ever happens, and all the hopes and dreams of sci-fi fans are crushed underfoot by plodding scripts and sleepy performances. Yes, we got Mr. Trucco as John May this week. Now, Trucco was never the acting powerhouse of BSG, but he had some muscular charisma and geek cred goes a long way to one's next role, right? Well, not if John May ends up just sitting behind a desk wielding a ball-point pen in flashbacks, set ten years ago. And then he dies. Off-screen. Now, I've read enough comic books to know that Mr. May probably isn't dead and gone forever, and he'll likely return triumphantly later down the line, but that was some pretty pathetic shit. This is the guy the rebel Vs flock to? All he does is tell Ryan that he sees a "glimmer" of humanity in him. Oh, big whoop.
With a title like "John May," you might think this week's episode was about the gang finally going after their big recruitment target. Instead, the mission of the week was to get a glowing marble so they could try and rescue Georgie from the clutches of the Vs. Yeah, Georgie. When is that dude going to die, I screamed at my TV. I've already bid him an un-fond farewell in two of my previous reviews. But the world's whiniest freedom fighter keeps holding on.
Georgie did finally depart us this week for good, but it took a whole episode to get rid of him, and all the characters memorialized him as if he was Nathan fucking Hale. He's been in the show for seven damn episodes, I don't care if he dies! Even Hobbes toasted him, and he's barely met the guy! While our gang scrambled about in Connecticut looking for the magic marble so they could communicate with the mothership, Georgie withstood torture from the "human pain expert," who was brought in off of the Tokyo ship. I'm not making this shit up. The torturer then puts a metal bug into Georgie's eye that crawls around his nervous system and apparently does something to his genitals – I wasn't really listening. Georgie doesn't give anyone up, but I was pretty ready to with shot after shot of his sweaty, freckly chest. They also torture him with images of his wife and kids getting murdered, which was fucked up. Then the Fifth Column doctor dude euthanizes him. Which should have happened at the START of this episode, not the end. What a waste of everyone's time.
The gang's sojurn up to John May's house in Connecticut was boring even by their standards, although it did have one fairly spicy action scene where a lizard sleeper agent tries to take them out and bares some gnarly claws. Hobbes takes her down by — what else — snapping her neck like a breadstick. Television has to stop making that look so easy. It really isn't. Especially if you're a damn lizard, I would think.
Apart from that, John May's snotty stepson James is the focus of everyone's attention, because what V really needed was another whiny teenager crawling around. He seems relatively plugged into the whole "my stepdad's an alien" concept but is scornful because May committed suicide ten years ago. Or so he thinks, right? Well, no, Ryan informs us. After a few un-action-packed flashbacks where John May convinces Ryan to turn traitor, Ryan informs us that he killed John, although he doesn't really tell us why, which is why I'm sure he's not dead and he'll come back. The rest of the gang is rightfully peeved, though, considering they've been focusing on this dude for a few weeks and posting slander like "John May Lives" everywhere.
The Ryan/May flashbacks were really confusing, because it seemed like Ryan beamed down from a spaceship, but all it took for May to lose him was for him to…run into some bushes. Ryan was so bewildered by this evasive maneuver the first time that all he can do is stand and yell that he'll get him sometime. And yet it takes another year for him to find John May, who craftily has ensconced himself in his…home. With his odd Christian wife and stepkid. That crafty revolutionary! Those Fifth Columnists are slippery bastards!
On the spaceship, Anna continues to look incompetent by devising ingenious torture methods for Georgie but not getting a scrap of info out of him. "They win this battle," she allows, but saunters off to a big swimming pool to lay a zillion army eggs as a means of therapy. Like I said last week, the threat further drains from Anna each time she allows herself to be beaten by a bunch of juvenile idiots running around on the surface. Still. That's a lot of eggs she birthed. Maybe we'll see the army and there'll be a big fight! Oh, who am I kidding. That won't be til episode 13, which seems months away at this point.
Also, Tyler and his dad bicker when he finds out dad's not his father, with Lisa stirring the pot. Erica protests that the doctors got their damned blood tests wrong. But I doubt it, I'm sure it'll turn out she was impregnated by Vs or something. Why else would they be running this boring, boring storyline? Is it to saddle the actor playing Tyler with tough, emotional material? Because he's really failing to hit it out of the park. I'll give Elizabeth Mitchell some credit for her weepy scene where her son confronts her with the news. She's doing the best she can on this show.
Oh, and Chad figures out that the Vs are recruiting sad sacks for their live-on-the-spaceship program. "I want those bodies on this ship," snarls Anna. It seems kinda less-than-devious for the Vs to be kidnapping the rejects of humanity. Chad doesn't care either way, leveraging further favors down the road from the aliens for this info. I don't know where he got the stones to play hardball with Anna on anything, but it's nice to see Chad doing something this week.
V has essentially lost me at this point; if next week has another scene of everyone gathering at the church and finishing each other's sentences while they come up with a new lame mission that accomplishes nothing, I think the show may be beyond salvage. I assume Scott Rosenbaum is attempting to build to something big for the sweeps weeks, but it's making the buildup slow as hell, and it might end up dooming the whole shebang.
Stray Observations:
Georgie's torture chair, like everything else on the mothership, looks like weird softcore porn, with a light sheet covering him from the waste down.
One of the sleeper agents was a park ranger dude. Those Vs really have their bases covered.
This week was directed by Jonathan Frakes, who helmed one of the best (and one of the worst) Star Trek movies as well as being Riker for many years. His directing career seems to have fallen asleep as of late.
Erica catches the V sleeper agent using crafty college football trivia. I bet she learned that at FBI school.