Hey, what better time to review last week's episode, Pound of Flesh than when this week's is about to air?
Briefly: I liked it better than Welcome to the War but was less impressed than I would like to be.
On the secrets front, Ryan came up with a credible reason for Erica not to tell Tyler what she knows about the V's, but we kept the secret count high by adding a new secret--Tyler's dad is not his biological dad and that has something to do with their split. We don't know yet who his "real" dad is--will it be a science fictiony or a soap-opera-ye secret?
And Ryan is still being an idiot. The line between making a character lovably, believably flawed and making the viewers want to strangle him really isn't that fine, and the show crossed it last episode and has kept on going.
Definitely the best bits in this episode were ship-board as Anna's new program to weed out dissidents began, and it started to look like even non-Fifth Column members might object. There are serious possibilities for plot twists here.
Let's see, other than that: The several month delay is affecting me more than I had expected it to. I'm really not attached to these characters any more, and I expected to be. I'm also feeling like the show is moving at a glacially slow pace, which I think has more to do with the chasm than with the actual pacing of the season as such.
And veering into comparison territory: Tyler, while not nearly as irritating as Robin (original V; he's a pretty close equivalent role-wise, so far), remains an unappealing character. I don't hate him, but it's hard to see why the V's want him so much, or to really fret about his ultimate fate. He's too much the generic American teen (Who is, I may add, vastly more irritating than any actual American teens I have known).
Erica continues to disappoint me, due primarily to my own initial expectations: Since she is an FBI agent, and has shown an ability to fight, I expected her to combine the roles taken by Julie and Ham Tyler in the original V: To be the leader of the Resistance and the expert on guerrilla warfare. Instead, she's actually been less sturdy emotionally than Juliet Parrish was. Juliet went from medical student to leader of a resistance cell. Erica has gone from tough FBI agent to wailing mom: Yes she is entitled to worry about her son; she should worry about him; I wouldn't like her if she didn't care, but these last two episodes that has entirely defined her character, with a little time out for worrying about Ryan and then Georgie. Her FBI skills have been, with one admittedly cool exception (nice of that assassin to tell her right where his heart was), confined to using their database. Not bad, but not enough, not given what I'd hoped.
Father Jack pretty much stayed in the background this ep, so nothing good or bad to say about him.
The Sulky Terrorist (*searches), ok Kyle Hobbes, may well turn out to be a good addition to the show, but I can't say much one way or the other yet. So far, he's done a lot of brooding, some sulking, and a little bit of extra-curricular clandestine activity that may or may not turn out to mean anything interesting. Ham Tyler was much more fun.
Georgie: Got interesting about the time he got caught. We shall see.
Anna: Marvelous, fantastic, super-reptilian, and really scary. Not better-than Diana, but as good as and decidedly more up-to-date in her evil.
So--eh. I'd really like to see this go somewhere; I'd like to see it get another season and develop in strange, new directions and depart from the old V in ways it has yet to do, but will it last long enough? Will I last long enough?
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