Part Two of V features humanity fighting back against the nefarious Visitors, and a protagonist who serves as a model for inspiring leadership.
On another expedition to a Visitor mothership to snoop around and gather information, journalist Mike Donovan makes contact with Martin, a Visitor fifth columnist sympathetic to the humans’ plight. He learns that, on the orders of the mysterious and unseen Visitor Leader, the aliens’ goals are to steal Earth’s water and use its population for food.
Donovan: “How’d someone like that get to be your leader, anyway?”
Martin: “Charisma, circumstances, promises. Not enough of us spoke out to question him until it was too late. It happens on your planet, doesn’t it?”
With this subtle nod to V’s inspiration, the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here, V continues its allegory on fascism so skillfully established in Part One. Just as humanity is now under the thumb of an oppressive regime, so the Visitors themselves are captives to tyranny.
So how do you start to fight back? Part Two provides the answer.
As I write, the occupation of a major American city by armed, masked federal agents appears to be winding down. Peaceful protests and a national backlash against the murders of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti by ICE has taken the wind out of the sails of the Trump regime, at least somewhat. Resistance works. But the regime is still there, and it will keep trying to take more and more freedoms until people push back forcefully enough. So it is with humanity and the Visitors, as our scrappy resistance cell wins its first meaningful victory.
With its theme of resistance, Part Two is more action-packed than Part One, though it has its share of powerful dramatic moments. As before, the narrative largely centers around Donovan and Julie Parrish, former biochemist turned rebel leader. Donovan gets to charge boldly around doing the action hero thing, while Julie begins the hard work of organizing her resistance cell and projecting a confidence she may not feel.
When the two protagonists finally meet, it leads to some interesting scenes where they suss each other out. Donovan wonders: does this kid have the guts to be a real leader? Julie assesses: is this guy really on our side? But the two develop a satisfying mutual respect for each other’s abilities and methods. Donovan recognizes that Julie has an innate strength and a talent for inspiring people, and Julie sees that Donovan does have humanity’s best interests at heart. So when Julie develops a plan to evacuate the resistance’s mountain camp, she’s happy to let Donovan be the lone wolf, sneaking off on his own mission back to the mothership. It’s the healthy, harmonious version of the dynamic between Admiral Holdo and Poe Dameron in The Last Jedi: the strong female commander and the loose cannon male rogue working together.
Julie has the most compelling emotional journey of the miniseries: a normal person who’s forced by circumstance to become extraordinary, and along the way, discovers an inner strength she didn’t know she had. She’s not mean or aggressive or physically strong (she walks with a cane due to a laser gun wound from Part One), but she becomes the resistance leader simply because she’s a firm, calm, reassuring presence who people naturally look up to. Several times, we see her propose an idea, only for the group to look at her expectantly, and her internal struggle as she realizes, “Well, guess it’s got to be me.”
Actress Faye Grant and writer/director Kenneth Johnson sketch a relatable, admirable character who’s easy to root for. In a vulnerable moment with her friend Ruby, Julie confesses:
Julie: “They all look at me like I know what to do…”
Ruby: “And you’re just as lost and scared as we are.”
It’s the essence of leadership.
Another major storyline involves Robert Maxwell, a paleontologist who fled with his family from the Visitor regime in Part One and sought refuge with the Bernsteins. In Part Two, Robert moves his family to the apparent safety of the resistance camps. But when his teenage daughter Robin is abducted by the Visitors and Robert ventures forth to find her, he’s caught and given an agonizing choice: give away the location of the resistance’s mountain camp, where the rest of his family is waiting, or keep quiet and sacrifice Robin.
He sells out the resistance, in exchange for a promise from the Visitor commander to hold their attack until a certain time, so Robert has a chance to get his family out.
Of course, the Visitors betray him. They attack the camp early, and his wife is killed.
In the play adaptation of It Can’t Happen Here, America’s business titans make deals with the new dictator, Buzz Windrip, figuring that if they cozy up to power, they could get some sweet tax breaks or other preferential treatment, exactly the same way that companies today from Apple to CBS are cozying up to Trump so that he’ll approve their corporate mergers. But to the businessmen’s horror, they discover too late that Windrip respects no authority but his own. “I am America!” he declares, and has a major industrialist thrown out of the White House.
The lesson from both V and It Can’t Happen Here: you don’t make deals with these people. Whether it’s a gang of sentient lizards trying to steal your planet’s water or a real estate tycoon trying to seize Greenland, the principle is the same: no will matters but their will to power. And they will turn against you on a dime. I suspect that many a business leader and celebrity will regret their association with Trump when he’s out of power, and we shouldn’t let them forget it.
Robert learns this lesson the hard way, and V pushes the consequences as far as 80s network television could allow, as Robert picks up a gun to shoot himself, only to see at the last moment that his daughters survived the assault. Still, he will have to live with himself, and one flaw of the series going forward is that the story never deals with the emotional fallout of his actions.
Like Part One, there’s a lot going on, making an easy summary difficult. Some other notable moments:
- The series takes its biggest dive into 80s schlockiness when a sexy Visitor rebel named Barbara charges in and insists that Donovan change into her uniform. We’re in so much danger, you see, we must take our clothes off! Gotta get those sexy screenshots for the ads!
- Visitor leader Diana orders a handsome young Visitor soldier to abuse the protective relationship he’s established with Robin to impregnate her as a “medical experiment.” Just in case you forgot these guys are evil.
- Elias, motivated by the death of his brother Ben in Part One, becomes a full-throated resistance member. It’s satisfying to see him join the fray, and the series does a good job for its time showing people of all races, ages, and genders coming together to fight the Visitors.
- Sancho, the Maxwell family’s Mexican-American gardener, goes through one of the miniseries’ most unexpected and epic journeys, as he smuggles the Maxwells through a checkpoint in the back of his pickup truck, gets abducted and tortured by the Visitors, gets rescued by Donovan, and, in a delightful twist, takes control of the laser cannons of Donovan’s shuttle to shoot down Visitor baddies. It’s a straight ripoff / homage of the Millenium Falcon / TIE Fighter shootout from the original Star Wars, and it’s just a wonderful touch to see a Mexican-American gardener play the space hero role a la Luke Skywalker or Han Solo.
But ultimately, we come back to Julie. As the Visitors pummel the mountain camp, Julie freezes in shock and horror, watching the carnage. Buildings on fire. People getting shot. Is this the moment when she’ll crack? But once again, she finds her courage. She rushes out into the crossfire to help some injured comrades, plants her feet, and faces off against a strafing shuttle with nothing but a pistol. It’s a precise visual echo of the scene from Part One with the Salvadoran leader, marking the moment when Julie truly becomes a resistance fighter. The lone rebel standing tall and brave against the overwhelming force of the enemy: it’s the signature image of V and its thematic message in a nutshell. Be Julie: the regular person who finds the courage to stand up to evil.
The situation we face with the Trump regime today is not that extreme. ICE may be a paramilitary menace, but it doesn’t control the country the way the Visitors control the world. Peaceful protest has been enough, and hopefully it will continue to be. But like a lot of great art, V exaggerates to convey an essential truth. Being a Julie may not mean literally picking up a pistol. But it may mean being a Renee Nicole Good or an Alex Pretti: someone who puts their safety on the line to protect their neighbors.
Today, we don’t have a leader like MLK or Gandhi to rally around, someone who has an untarnished reputation and moral authority with a critical mass of people. Perhaps it’s impossible for such a figure to arise in our chaotic social media age, where the most popular platforms encourage snark, hot takes, and pithy takedowns rather than soaring, universal rhetoric. But perhaps this time, we don’t need one. Perhaps what we need are a million Julies, calm but firm, organizing behind the scenes.
Somehow, I have a feeling that the Julies will win.
