So, the hype was big and the advertisements were wide spread. You couldn't visit a website without seeing a banner, watch T.V. without seeing a commercial, or tune far enough away on your radio to not here about ABC's remake of NBC's 1984 mini-series V, which aired 8pm EST Tuesday, November 3rd.

Even if you hadn't seen the original series, you were likely to find out what the hype was all about. If you had seen the original series, like me, you were likely trying not to get too excited like you did for the recent Transformers and G.I. Joe movies, in the attempt to avoid massive disappointment. If you didn't watch tonight's episode, or if you did watch it, but don't know what your own opinion is, I'm about to tell you, and I'll do it without referring to the original series... except for the pictures because they're classic. Also, this will have spoilers.

The story, so far, of V has established several characters that we can assume will frequent our screens, given us our setting and have also shown us turmoil. All of these are necessary for a proper story to be told, and V does it rather well, for television.

For our characters, we have:

A female FBI agent, Erica Evans, who is a single mother of a 17 year-old boy after a recent separation with her husband. Her personality displays great skepticism, but her beliefs are based on logic. She won't believe it until she sees it. As an FBI agent specializing in monitoring terrorist cells, she has a talent for understanding human behavior when in a group, but when coupled with her logic, she shows a lack of compassion and understanding for people on an individual basis. Basically, she's set up to be the the rock-hard pillar static, badass, action hero character of the series.

The character who will be acting out the role of human compassion, confusion and immeasurable sixth sense and/or intuition is Father Jack Landry. Father Jack showed an immediate unwillingness to accept the visitors with such haste as they had revealed themselves and we are to assume it was because of his fear that the visitors might be worshiped as gods.

The conflict of racism will doubtless revolve endlessly around character Ryan Nichols, a visitor disguised as a black man. He knows that the visitors have been around planning to take over Earth for decades and is a traitor to their cause. Ryan wants to help the humans, but because he is a visitor himself, he will definitely be accosted with distrust and blatant, senseless racism from humans, and a distinct lack of compassion from other visitors.

Other important characters, so far, include:

Anna, the leader of the visitors. She has shown herself to be very manipulative and to have a keen understanding of the human race. She knows what humans want and how to get them to like her.

Chad Decker is the television personality who the visitors, mostly Anna, con into becoming their human spokesperson who sacrifices his journalistic integrity and sells out the human race in the hopes of furthering his career by heralding the greatness of the visitors, as Anna sees fit. I expect him to die about the same time he grows a conscious, but before he actually gets to do anything significant against the V's.

Tyler Evans, Erica's son, who, motivated by his uncontrollable teenage sex drive which is manipulated by visitor, Lisa, has joined with the visitors' ambassador program meant to enhance humanity's acceptance of the V's. This will surely become important as our stone-cold action hero will probably risk humanities survival trying to convince her son that the V's are evil.

Valerie Stevens is Ryan's fiance, and her role will probably be to confuse or enhance human opinion concerning Ryan. I wouldn't rule out, however, the possibility that she is also a visitor manipulating Ryan.

There are also several minor characters that will mean as much to the story as turtle shells in any Mario game (essential to make the story what it is, but not dynamic, evolving or even that interesting). One such character is Erica's partner who turns out to be an anti-human visitor, Dale Maddox. Another is Marcus, Anna's right-hand man and obedient visitor servant. Then there's Gorgie Sutton, the leader of the only anti-visitor organization that knows how long the visitors have really been around and what they've been planning. Besides that, there will probably be characters that mean something emotionally to these various main¬-so-main characters that will probably die and/or turn out to be visitors themselves, creating a small amount of conflict within the main characters for us to watch.

The story so far:

Aliens. They're here. They say they're going to help us, cure us, take something, and then leave. Plus, they look hot. Almost everyone in the world wants to give the aliens anything they want and become mindlessly devoted to them, almost instantly. A select few question or just out-rate hate the visitors. Of these select few, the ones the story focuses on are those that meet together in a secret place to discuss what the visitors really are, how to recruit more to resist the aliens and how to militarize a resistance force. This meeting is interrupted, however, and almost everyone is killed, except those characters listed above. Erica's son joins up with the V's. Ryan, an old resistance comrade of leader Gorgie's, saves Gorgie and reveals himself as a traitor to the visitors. Erica looks up into the sky and decides she's going to blast the aliens to hell, after she defended her life against her partner (and, maybe, lover?) who was a visitor spy, and confirms Father Jack's fears that humanity my well be doomed as they are all being manipulated to worship false gods.

The other stuff:

The overall feel of the episode was somewhere between made-for-TV movies and well funded sci-fi programming.

I'd rate the graphics about on par with Farscape, but higher than something like Stargate SG1 or Star Trek: The Next Generation and it's various counterparts. To be fair, however, the visual graphics used in V focus around CGI, whereas those in Farscape focused on set design, make-up and puppets. As far as make-up effects go, V has done well in the first episode, what with fake human flesh ripping away to show reptilian skin, and all, and the integration of CGI into live-action scenes isn't horrible, but it is noticeable.

The music should really be called aura, I suppose, since it barely shows up or enhances anything in the show. Much like other modern sitcoms or prime-time programming, the focus is on the dialog between characters.

I want to say that watching V gives the same feeling as watching Grey's Anatomy minus the sex the audience wants to happen mixed with Bones minus any humor. You're intrigued enough to see where the story goes, the scene transitions and prolonged focus on any character's face as they emote ominously aren't too over-the-top, but there is the same amount of predictability. You know where the story is going and what the characters will likely do, even if you never saw the original series. I'm really hoping to be surprised by some twists and turns, but only time will tell.

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