V: Mother's Day

The Fifth Column tries to kill Anna and replace her with Diana.

The big season finale of “V” has finally arrived this week and it looks as though, should the show return next year, there are at least a few cast members who won’t be back.

The time has finally arrived for Lisa to mate with Tyler meaning that the Fifth Column and their plan against her must be accelerated.  Erica, Kyle, Chad and Jack stage a kidnapping of Lisa and inform Anna that she must trade herself for her daughter.  To keep up appearances Anna has trackers find where Lisa is being held and she enters only after finding that no one but Lisa is inside.  Lisa is charged with killing her mother but Anna spots her in the reflection on some glass and persuades Lisa that she believes human emotion is not all bad.  Lisa lets her mother live only to watch her kill Diana when she attempts to take her people back.  Ryan tries to escape the ship with his daughter but Amy believes he abandoned her and that Anna is the only person she can really trust.  She kills Ryan before he can get away.  Erica contacts Tyler and tells him the truth about the V’s but he wants to confirm it with Lisa.  Anna traps Lisa in the dungeon and replaces her with her new queen hatchling who she clothes in human skin to look just like Lisa.  This Lisa Mark 2 is sent to mate with Tyler which she does before killing him.  Erica is kidnapped by a man named Lars Tremont (played by one of the stars of the original “V” series Marc Singer) who claims that the Fifth Column is not alone in wanting the V’s destroyed.  Meanwhile Anna decides to bliss humanity which nearly kills her until Amy arrives and volunteers to bliss humanity for her.

With everyone coming together at the end of last week’s episode to get rid of Anna, it looked like the Fifth Column might have really had a shot at getting rid of her or at least dealing an important blow to the Visitors.  Problems plague the plan though and by the end of the episode humanity is left off far worse than they were before.  Should “V” get a third season (which I hope they do) Project Ares will probably be a big help to the small army of the Fifth Column but our original group of heroes have been displaced and in some cases their fate is still unknown to us.  Things will certainly be different.

After being plagued by nightmares where Anna tells Erica she is no better than her, Erica begins to see that she’s lost herself in leading the Fifth Column.  She finally recognizes Jack as the one person who has stayed true to his values throughout this fight and it looked as though Erica would be returning to the more restrained leader we knew her to be before.  I say looked though because Tyler’s death will deal a huge blow to Erica.  First she lost Joe and now Tyler leaving her with no family at all.  With any luck Erica’s new discovery of Project Ares will help to convince her that there is still a reason to fight but things certainly will not be easy for Erica when she finally finds out what’s happened to her son.

Disagreeing with one’s parents is pretty common but being asked to kill them is an entirely different task even when your mother is the one who could destroy humanity.  Lisa ends up being easily manipulated by Anna because she wants to believe that her mother is not all these horrible things.  She was already hesitant to agree to the plan before Anna began telling her how much she loved her knowing it would be difficult to kill Anna even at her worst.  Unfortunately it’s Lisa’s decision not to kill Anna that sends things into a downward spiral resulting in the deaths of Diana, Ryan and Tyler and her own imprisonment.

Though she doesn’t feel them (except maybe anger), Anna has begun to realize the value of emotions in manipulating people.  She has played up her feelings to humans before but this week she does it to make Lisa believe that she is not as cold and distant as Lisa believed.  She convinces her own daughter to put down the gun solely by appealing to the love Lisa wishes she had gotten from her mother.  In the end Anna decides with Marcus that emotions may be her strongest weapon against humanity.

Tyler’s always been somewhat naïve in believing the V’s at their word.  Anna has stopped at nothing to prove to him that she can be trusted while his mother cannot.  Erica and Tyler have reconnected recently meaning that he is at least willing to take her phone call about the dangers of the Visitors but he still isn’t quite willing to believe it.  Any substantial talk with Lisa Mark 2 would have probably revealed her to be a very different person than the original Lisa but she just quickly allays his fears to get on with the breeding.  Tyler’s use to the Visitors was up and he died for it, only realizing in his last seconds that Erica was right all along.

For most of the season Ryan’s been wishy-washy about which side of the fight between Visitors and humans he’s been on.  Anna’s control over his daughter had him betraying his Fifth Column friends only to return to them again after meeting Diana.  At the centre of everything he’s done though has been his daughter and unfortunately that’s the thing that brings him down as well.  Anna’s spent her time with Amy poisoning her mind to believe that Ryan willingly abandoned her and that Anna is the only parent she’ll ever really have.  Amy would do just about anything to help Anna even if that means killing her own father.

As of the end of the episode things aren’t going well for the Fifth Column.  In addition to several deaths on their side and the failed assassination of Anna, Kyle and all the materials at their base go missing.  No one can reach Kyle and as of the end of the episode he’s still missing.  Whether he’s been kidnapped by the V’s or went willingly as per the control they seem to have over his old girlfriend is left for us to speculate about.  Chad is the only person who is displayed prominently in Lisa’s ransom video making him a target.  Both he and Kyle wear masks while telling Anna that she must come alone if she wants to save her daughter but Chad is the only one to talk and even the voice changer is not enough to stop Visitor technology from figuring out who is behind the mask.  Anna’s asked to see Chad but she’s shown many a time before that sometimes killing someone is not the best punishment.  It will be interesting to see what she plans to do to Chad and if she thinks she can get any information on the Fifth Column out of him.

Anna’s control of the Visitors rests strongly on her ability to “bliss” them.  She can make them feel pleasure so strong that they are willing to do whatever she tells them even if it involves killing themselves.  She’s been trying to do the same for humans and has succeeded on a couple of individual occasions but it has not been easy.  Blissing just one person has nearly been enough to kill Anna so when she decides to bliss all humans Marcus is quick to point out that this idea will probably be the death of her.  It’s only Amy’s help that allows humanity to be blissed at all.  Somehow, as a crossbreed between humans and Visitors she has the power to do to humans what Anna cannot.  We’ve seen in the past that Visitors who renounce Anna and her opinions on emotion can resist the effect of bliss but so far it seems that humanity may not be able to do the same.  Jack finds himself outside at the wrong time and subject to the same bliss that the rest of the world is.  The look on his face alone tells us that he may have found a new god in the Visitors and that’s not a good thing.  It may be that you have to be aware of what bliss does in order to avoid it’s effects or perhaps Amy is just stronger than Anna but so far it’s hard to tell.  As for Jack, we’ll see how long the effects of bliss last and hopefully he’ll be returned to his old self soon.  Erica is rapidly running out of Fifth Column soldiers as it is.

The second season of “V” has made for a great 10 episodes of television.  The series has certainly stepped up since last year (that’s not to say that last year was bad because it wasn’t) and I very much hope that we’ll get to see it back again next year.  After all, we don’t want to leave the humanity under the control of the Visitors.  That means the bad guys win.

Andrea

~ by Andrea on March 16, 2011.