Bad episode, even by the standards of this show. Anna’s is going after the theological, not artistic, soul. I admit it would be really funny to have her slaughter hundreds of thousands of humans trying to “capture” it, and find absolutely nothing. Might be too daring for ABC though. The trailer for this episode was more interesting than the episode itself.
I’m glad they finally made a point of dealing with the priest’s stupidity in being in a ‘secret’ underground anti-V organization and at the same time being widely outspoken against the Vs. At the same time, the viral video could easily be countered by posting the full unedited footage. Also, this seems to be the first time we’ve seen a V eye unintentionally. Why did the V randomly reveal his eyes?
I still don’t see how they can possibly continue being covert when two of them are known 5th columners and the rest are constantly cavorting around everywhere with them, and the secret base in in the Priest’s own church, and the Vs have surveillance everywhere.
I’m doubting the cliffhanger’s implications. Ryan will pull some kind of trick. Based on the trailers, I’m guessing:
He hedges, by naming the already suspect priest but not the others.
No, it can’t. Chad was an eyewitness, but he doesn’t have access to the full video. Tyler’s the one that recorded that and he turned it over to Anna. Chad going on TV and saying what really happened wouldn’t do much good and it could put his access to Anna at risk.
As for Diana, is she really helping Anna or manipulating her to failure? Who knows this migh all be a normal part of the mother-daughter relationship for Visitors. As soon as the daughter can lay eggs she seizes power from her mother in a coup. Maybe Diana isn’t mad at Anna for seizing power and locking her up; she’s mad at Anna for not killing her like she killed her mother and her mother killed her grandmother and so on.
Oh, and I’m a little disappointed that apparently Agent Malik is indeed a (sterile) female. That could’ve been an interesting moment. Science boy goes on about needing access to a female visitor to examine her reproductive system only for Ryan to reveal that Malik’s actually a male and so is every other visitor save Anna & Lisa (or Diana).
Hey the show has already been using the Obama administration as a model for the PR the Visitors use. Show is aiming at “rea’ American Fam’lies”. They’re not going to feature trannies.
It wasn’t bad. They’re making Anna less and less attractive all the time. So apparently the Vs aren’t really in great shape, their breed is about to die and really Anna doesn’t seem like an effective leader.
I’m still pleased with the rate at which things are being answered. We now know the female V’s are really females, even if they are likely sterile. We know that skinning kills (& painfully at that), presumably since their natural form can’t live in our environment, which explains:
why the V (was it the Alan Tudyk character?) screamed about being skinned last year
why Diana hangs out in the dungeon away from humans, but still with skin
why the baby was in that vat before getting skin
why we never see a full unskinned V (other than FX budget)
why the Red Rain was necessary to change Earth’s environment to be more like theirs
On the other hand, we have dumb science with the broken DNA, dumb character actions, dumb dialog, dumb plotting, as usual.
There’d better be an explanation of why the rabble-rouser at the church and the abductor with the van showed their V eyes, though. If it was just to fill in the viewer, (and Chad) that’s super-dumb, even for this show.
Also, the V’s in general, and Lisa in particular seem pretty oblivious to their own reproductive process. Shouldn’t Anna have told Lisa about this “breeding skin” issue before it happened? what if it happened in front of Tyler? The boy may be clueless and horny, but when a girl has green scales appearing under her skin, it’s kind of a turn off.
And yes, the whole soul thing is the dumbest plot point of all. As a one-shot plot point, sure, I’d let it slide, but it’s shaping up to be a major arc with Joshua, and I don’t see how it can end in any satisfying way. Either they find no souls (and it’s all a waste of time), or they find them (and we’ve left sci-fi for fantasy*.)
note: whether you believe in the existence of souls or not, the whole point of the concept is that a machine would not be able to detect one. A soul-sucking machine works fine on Buffy or Charmed. On V… not so much.
Absolutely. If you don’t believe in souls, such a machine will do nothing. If you do believe in souls, such a machine will still do nothing because the soul is not a physical object.
That said, for an alien culture with no concept of souls to not grasp this and to actually try to capture a soul in a jar, that’s not necessarily a bad idea, provided you’re doing it to make the aliens look more alien by not grasping the concept.
Not that I have any faith in the writers pulling that off, but for now it hasn’t completely become unsalvageable. If Anna runs through her whole stock of lab[del][COLOR=“Black”]rats[/del][/COLOR]humans and never finds jack, that’s okay. If she ever actually comes up with something, then we’re in supernatural Buffy Charmed land.
My take on the whole soul thing is that it demonstrates that Anna really has no understanding of humans at all, despite what she thinks. She thinks she’s super-clever, but she’s actually clueless. She’s trying to find the soul with science! and has absolutely no idea 1> what the soul is, and 2> why she’s going to fail in finding it. The writers are setting her up, I think; her hubris will lead to her downfall.
(If the writers actually make a soul some sort of material object, I will be very very annoyed.)
Also, I’m getting the impression that the V’s have to be parasitic in some way in order to complete their life-cycle/reproduce. From what Diana was saying, it sounded like this wasn’t the first time the V’s have found a planet to do this to.
I wonder if all “workers” are (usually) sterile, or just the females? If workers are generally unable to reproduce, then it’s not a surprise that they’re unfamiliar with how it happens; they don’t need to know. It would also be another explanation why everyone was surprised Val got pregnant, if Ryan was expected to be sterile (in addition to Val not having been “prepped” in any way).
Oh, yeah, if they set it up so that souls aren’t material and can’t be captured, I’d be far less annoyed than I was in last week’s thread. That’s completely opposite of the impression I got last week, though, and this week did nothing but reinforce that impression.
The way they introduced the idea last week, it was clear as day to me that soul-sucking would be the primary Big Bad of at least this season, if not the whole series. Now this week they brought out a soul sucking machine. Yeah, I’m pretty sure that actually, literally sucking souls is exactly what the writers have in mind.
I’ll be relieved if I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it.
ETA: I mean, one of the main characters is a friggin’ Priest, fer chrissakes. I should have seen this whole “battle for the soul” coming a mile away but it didn’t register until last week’s stupidity.
I thought it was a neat episode. You just have to turn off your brain. Why is the Anna mainly dealing with a TV reporter and FBI agent? Where is the president, where are the military officers, where are the UN ambassadors, where are the congressmen?
FBI lady and V-guy go looking for a missing girl and out of a vanload of kidnapped kids she is the only one they see?
The soul thing might be a lose/lose proposition, but I’m guessing they won’t find anything and the machine will be worthless. Sure didn’t take V-medical guy long to design and build it.
But I’ve got to give the show credit, stuff happens fairly rapidly and they do explain things. More than I can say for other shows or movies that drag stuff out and/or do constant flashbacks.
Well she did briefly meet the UN Secretary-General last season (didn’t look like he trusted her) and apparently next episode she makes a trip to the Vatican, but yeah it makes zero sense that the State Department is nowhere to be found. Anna’s repeated habit of speaking directly to Earth’s people and bypassing all world governments shows a complete lack of understanding how human society works (plus there’s the whole “Viewers are Idiots” trope going on). Granted stuff like this went on alot in TOS, but at least in the first miniseries the Vistors conducted their affairs through the UN and national governments until they deposed them and openly occupied the planet.
Might be too daring for ABC though.