Recap

For the second episode of V, we start right where we left off, with Erica and Father Landry discussing the need to form a resistance to the Visitors. Erica calls 9-1-1 from a pay phone to anonymously report the massacre that occurred at the end of episode 1, and the Visitors intercept the call and send a probe to kill her and Landry. They manage to escape and destroy the probe. Later, Erica forces her son, Tyler, to promise to quit the Visitor Peace Ambassadorship. He agrees but later is shown to be lying.

Ryan is shown lying in bed with his fiancée. He goes into the bathroom alone to look at his wounded arm, and when he pulls the bandage off, we see lizard skin beneath the wound. He later goes to find a fellow Visitor named Angelo, and they are revealed to be traitors to the Visitors and sympathizers to the humans. Angelo repairs Ryan’s skin but knocks him out, unable to fully trust him. However, he leaves Ryan safely where he is, and Ryan is able to leave when he comes to. Angelo later tries convincing him to cut and run for his safety and the safety of his fiancée. Ryan does not seem to take his advice.

Erica returns to work at the FBI agency in the morning and is interrogated about Dale going missing. While investigating his disappearance, Erica’s superiors become increasingly suspicious of her. When her boss plays back a recording from a wiretap of her 9-1-1 call, she tells him that she believes Dale is involved with the terrorists. She convinces him that she may be on to something.

In the meantime, Father Landry is questioned by the FBI regarding the man who visited him the previous day, bleeding and dying. Wary that his words may get back to Visitors, he does not tell them about the package the man asked him to deliver. He and Erica continue their plans to form a resistance. Erica, later in the episode, acquires a list of every person who had reported an alien incident before the Visitors arrived. She and Landry plan to use the list to recruit members for their resistance.

While Tyler is out “spreading hope” for the Visitors, his friend Brandon gets in a spat with a group of trash-talkers. Tyler punches one of them while Lisa, the Visitor whom Tyler has a crush on, watches disapprovingly. She later tells him that the council is planning on kicking him out of the program because of his poor representation of the Visitors.

Newscaster Chad Decker, upset that the Anna and the Visitors are using him as a pawn, sets up his own interview with skeptics of the Visitors. When he is later discussing the matter with them aboard their ship, he explains that his interview actually helped them and that public approval of the Visitors rose after the broadcast. Soon after, the United States decides to establish diplomatic relations with the Visitors, following in the steps of many other countries that have done the same.

At the end of the show, Ryan is at home with his fiancée. She notices that one of their pictures is upside-down, and when the two go to fix it, they find beneath it a card with a street address and the name “Cyrus.” Ryan tells her that Cyrus is “a guy I used to know.” The show ends with a shot of Dale on a Visitor ship table with renewed skin.

Review

This episode is not particularly good on its own, but it is clearly working to continue setting up the plot and the players. The biggest aspect of it is the thread of Ryan being a traitor Visitor, demonstrating both that the Visitors are not immune from truly falling in love with humans and that there are other traitors among the population. In this way, the show is exhibiting traits reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica. At the same time, with Erica and Landry unable to trust anyone, knowing that the Visitors have infiltrated the population, the show creates an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style of paranoia. At the risk of making too many comparisons, I'll say that the show is demonstrating similarities to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, too, with Erica, a strong, single mother, having to look out for her son who is prone to doing whatever he wants and therefore getting into trouble, all in the face of a potential cataclysm.

It’s difficult to see what the show is going to do with Tyler’s potential ejection from the Peace Ambassador program, but it seems likely to lead, one way or the other, to some sort of further involvement with the Visitors. There is also the possibility that this particular conflict is being set up so that Lisa will defect and join Tyler (at which point the show would really become Sarah Connor-esque). Bottom line: continue watching V for now. It’s not currently doing anything awesome, but the plot points it is setting up have definite potential for a strong payoff.