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Review/Recap: V 1.08 “We Can't Win”

Written by Cory Barker
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Email: barkerc65@gmail.com

I hate to be negative again because I really, really want to love this series, but “We Can’t Win” was the second episode in a row that didn’t quite work for me.

Again, I’m having trouble buying into the four person resistance because it seems like they cannot be that effective based on their small stature, but in the same vein, there is barely anything to even begin to buy into because their missions over the past few weeks have been boring and lame.

This week Erica finds out – via her FBI job that she actually has! – that some Fifth Column’ers have been iced, except one. So the team tracks down the remaining member and attempts to use him to draw out some Visitor assassins so they can catch them and do a little “questioning.”

Now, that seems like a legit plan and one that could have been interesting to watch, but the execution didn’t really work yet again. The surviving Fifth Column member was whiny and completely uninteresting to watch on screen. As were the scenes with the team developing a plan via web search and the set final plan set-up at the carnival. It looked cheap, lacked relevance and even if the conclusion – the Visitor assassin ended up being human – was cool, it took too long to get there.

And though I might have been hesitant towards the decision to push Ryan more the front, without him on the mission, the scenes dragged. Father Jack is overly sincere and thus laughable when he says he’s fighting aliens to “save his congregation.” Hobbes is a smart-ass, that’s all we need to know, I guess. And again, Erica has been drained of all interesting qualities in the spring batch of episodes.

Ugh. That plot was so frustrating that even the Tyler-Lisa drama felt a little better. I don’t know if I’ve been lulled in to a false sense of improvement, but the problem with those scenes previously wasn’t Huffman and Vandervort’s chemistry, and so when the writing catches up with them, I’m surprisingly okay with them.

It didn’t hurt that Joshua played some cool mindgames with Lisa by either rigging the emotion test or convincing her she was going to be murdered by her mother or really covering for her as a way to gain a favor. Joshua is one of the series’ better characters and it’s nice to see him go power play on Lisa as a way to get at Anna in some way – and it at least gives us something to look forward to the future among all this dreck.

And over on the only good part of the program, Chad and Anna went on a little vacation together to Geneva, where he seemingly helps her get into an UN-like meeting. Anna is there to get the world to agree to use V Blue Energy – you know, so they can take it away just when humanity needs it most – and for whatever reason, she needs Chad to do that.

When a weather emergency destroys a small island country, the Vs swoop in and save as many people as possible as a way to prove that their Blue Energy works and could help a lot of people. Then Anna does a nice in-house display of Blue Energy for the UNish folks and despite some skepticism that it will wipe out the need for humans in many cases, it looks as though the V’s energy source is a go.

Despite the ridiculousness of the set-up and Chad’s indication that the UN is a bunch of money-hungry mongers because they don’t want to eliminate humanity’s use, the interplay between these two manipulators is damn fun to watch. 

But also, how many V elements are going to be introduced into the world that they’re using to trick humanity into a secure position? We’ve had the ambassador’s program, the health centers, the living in and now Blue Energy. One gets introduced and played with for a couple episodes and then comes another. I’m not sure how they all interact and if they even will, but I’m hopeful – though not sure why.

No need for quick hitters this time around, we’ve discussed this mess enough.

Grade: 2/5

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V returns in March on ABC.