Category: General Essays

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.

V is a masterwork of science fiction allegory that can inspire us on how to resist the Trump regime.

A government aggressively undermining trust in scientists, journalists, and academics. Propaganda that pushes state-approved ideology with figureheads who spout the party line. Masked men marching in the streets, abducting and shooting people at will.

This is the world of the superb 1983 miniseries V. It is also America under Donald Trump in 2026.

Yes, it’s fascism. Masked federal agents are shooting unarmed American citizens in the streets. That’s about as fascist as it gets. No, we are not helpless against it, and we certainly haven’t fallen as far as the people of Earth have in V.

I’ve thought of V frequently over the past year. My parents saw the miniseries when it came out, and showed it to me later when it was released on DVD. I was in middle school, at a ripe, impressionable age when I was starting to reckon with adult storytelling. V made a deep impression on me, not just for its exciting sci-fi action and the impressive scope of its narrative, but for its message, embodied in the opening dedication:

To the heroism of the Resistance Fighters – past, present, and future – this work is respectfully dedicated

Originally envisioned by writer/director Kenneth Johnson as an adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ anti-fascist novel It Can’t Happen Here, V follows in the best sci-fi tradition of telling an urgent political and social allegory cloaked in genre trappings. Laser guns, aliens, and spaceships are the window dressing for timeless themes of tyranny and resistance. In fact, the sci-fi angle probably helped the story travel farther and reach a wider audience than a straightforward adaptation would have.

During both of Donald Trump’s terms, V and George Orwell’s 1984 prepared me well for the warning signs of fascism: the “alternative facts,” the cultlike worship of the Great Leader, the constant gaslighting to force you to, as Orwell put it, “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.” (The Trump regime’s attempt to recast the January 6^th insurrection as a peaceable assembly may be the most notorious example.) Aside from a few bad matte shots, V holds up brilliantly. Its storytelling is as gripping and powerful as ever. What can it teach us today about how to recognize and fight back against Trump and MAGA?

We open in El Salvador, as freelance journalist Mike Donovan and his assistant Tony document a civil war. Explosions boom, gunshots ping, and helicopters zoom overhead as a revolutionary insists that he’ll keep on fighting until his country is free. There’s the theme, right there in the opening seconds: resistance against tyranny. Donovan films the freedom fighter bravely planting his feet and facing off against a strafing helicopter armed with nothing but a pistol. Remember this image: we’ll come back to it in Part Two.

After Donovan and Tony escape from the war zone, Donovan turns to see – whoa! An alien spacecraft covering half the sky, the first of many strikingly cinematic moments throughout the two-part miniseries.

The next half-hour is a masterclass in tight, efficient storytelling, as we’re introduced to more than 20 named characters, while still following the single narrative thread of the mysterious alien Visitors. After parking their flying saucers over most major cities on Earth, the Visitors make peaceful contact with humanity. They look just like us, with only their electronically modulated voices signaling their extraterrestrial origins. They insist that they’re here just so humanity can help them manufacture certain chemicals they need to run their society. In return, they’ll vastly accelerate our technological development.

The deal is too good to be true, as brilliantly suggested by subtle cues. At a digsite where paleontologists uncover remains of ancient hominins, the scientists watch in wonder as a Visitor spacecraft flies overhead. An ominous shot juxtaposes an ancient skull with the alien vessel, suggesting that these newcomers mean death.

The action generally follows two protagonists: Donovan, as his attempts to investigate the aliens get him branded as a fugitive, and biochemist Julie Parrish, who gradually begins to organize a resistance movement to oppose the Visitor regime. But the brilliance of V is how effectively our sympathies are spread among many characters, established with quick, concise, human moments. The plot defies easy summary. We follow Donovan and Julie, but also several interconnected households of ordinary people in Los Angeles, who show us a spectrum of varied reactions to the onset of fascism:

• Donovan’s mother Eleanor immediately insists that her husband lobby for the Visitors to use his chemical plant. We later see her shamelessly flirt with a Visitor officer. For the scheming Eleanor, ideology doesn’t matter, only proximity to power.
  
  Her mercenary zeal for cozying up to the regime is reminiscent of America’s tech elite: Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and others who obsequiously crowd in the background for group photos of themselves with the Great Leader, in hopes of currying favor for themselves and their companies.
• Donovan’s newscaster colleague and old flame Christine Walsh is recruited by the Visitors to serve as their official spokesperson. (One could also say seduced – a scene between Christine and Visitor leader Diana has strong sexual undertones.) She’s enthusiastic about the job as an “excellent career move,” and when Donovan warns that she may be compromising her objectivity, she brushes off his concerns: “It’s the perfect opportunity to get really inside stuff, exclusive stuff… I’m sure to get a book out of it at the very least.”
  
  Why work for a fascist president? Perhaps because you believe you can control him, use the position as a career stepping-stone, and escape with your objectivity intact, and maybe a book deal to boot. Scores of former Trump staffers such as John Bolton, Cassidy Hutchinson, Kellyanne Conway, Mark Meadows, and more did indeed get their book deals… and the books flopped.
• Daniel Bernstein, a troubled teen boy with a drinking problem who can’t hold down a job, finds meaning by joining the Friends of the Visitors, a youth auxiliary movement with clear parallels to the Hitler Youth. His journey towards becoming a full fascist foot soldier is reminiscent of the ways that young men today are drawn toward the manosphere and vile figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. A movement that promises meaning and direction and whispers in your ear that you have the natural right to dominate others: it’s catnip to insecure and resentful young men.
• Daniel’s grandfather Abraham is a Holocaust survivor who, with every step the Visitors take toward total control, sees more clearly the beginnings of tyranny. Leonardo Cimino is perfectly cast, conveying Abraham’s entire thought process with subtle, wordless shifts of expression. Every time the film cuts to Abraham reacting to another Visitor announcement, you can see that this man knows exactly what’s going on.

The first signs of trouble arrive when the Visitors begin secretly abducting and murdering scientists. In public announcements, they allege the discovery of a “scientist conspiracy,” primarily of anthropologists and biochemists, whose members allegedly sought to seize Visitor motherships. The first step for any fascist regime is to attack sources of independent knowledge production: scientists, journalists, academics, so that the only acceptable truth is the one produced by the state or the Leader. Hence Trump’s relentless attacks for over a decade now on the media, which he has dubbed “the enemy of the people.” In his second term, Trump has also accelerated his assault on research institutions like the Ivy League schools and the University of California, threatening to withhold funds unless they cave to his ideological demands.

The main reason the Visitors target scientists, of course, is that they’re the ones capable of figuring out the truth. The truth that Donovan uncovers while snooping around on a mothership…

They’re lizard people!!

The reveal of Diana and her associate Steven eating guinea pigs and mice is memorably creepy, and the scene where Donovan literally rips the mask off a Visitor to reveal a lizard face still gives me a jolt. It’s thematically appropriate: rip the proverbial mask off a fascist and you’ll find the ugliness inside. But also, it’s just plain cool: a visceral creature-feature shock.

By now, the telltale signs of tyranny are accelerating. The propaganda posters go up. Mass resentment of scientists begins to fester. Fascism requires an “Other” to rally against: a class of people deemed depraved, dirty, evil, even subhuman. Not “one of us.” In V, scientists become the Other, as we see a gang of thugs throw rocks through the window of a paleontologist’s house. In Trump’s regime, immigrants are the Other, as we see J.D. Vance and other Christian Nationalists create new categories of people such as “Heritage Americans” for the purpose of identifying who “we” are and who we are permitted to discriminate against.

And then the armed, masked men start patrolling the streets. Do I even need to spell out the modern-day parallels here?

Though this alien invasion provides the setup, and the film includes many playful references to sci-fi pop culture (a marching band plays the Star Wars theme, two characters play Space Invaders on Atari), for most of Part One, the sci-fi elements fade into the background and we mostly focus on ordinary people in scenes that could refer to any real-life authoritarian regime. Daniel’s parents begin to walk on eggshells around him, no longer certain that he wouldn’t inform on them. Julie, as she sees her scientist colleagues disappear one by one, organizes a resistance meeting. Though it was easier to get off the grid in 1983, the same principle applies today: resistance begins locally, with groups of people building support networks for their own communities. We’ve seen this demonstrated in Minneapolis and Chicago, where local citizens band together to obstruct ICE and warn neighbors of raids.

Part One ends with two gripping dramatic moments. Abraham agrees to shelter a paleontologist, his wife, and three kids in his backyard poolhouse. When his son expresses reservations, Abraham responds with a powerful speech, revealing that “your mother didn’t have a heart attack in the boxcar;” she died in the Nazi gas chambers.

“Perhaps if somebody had given us a place to hide… Don’t you see, Stanley, they have to stay, or else we haven’t learned a thing.”

On the nose? Yes, but it should be. Abraham reminds us of the consequences of demonizing the Other, and the failure to help those in need.

The second moment follows the first resistance action of Julie’s cell. During a raid for medical equipment, Julie’s colleague Ben is mortally wounded by Visitor gunfire. She drives Ben, who’s fading fast, to see his brother Elias one last time. We’ve already seen the strained relationship between the brothers: Ben, the golden boy, the doctor (Elias calls him an “Uncle Tom”), and Elias, the common thief, the street hustler (Ben tells him to “drop the Richard Pryor act”).

As Ben quietly slips away, Michael Wright delivers a heart-wrenching performance. He’s in denial, talking and pacing around frantically, anything to fill the air, anything to distract himself from the awful truth of his dead brother before him. A boombox incongruously pumps out cheerful funk music. But eventually, the truth can’t be denied and Elias breaks right before our eyes. “The doctor cannot die. The other one can die, but…” It’s an acting tour de force that should’ve won an award. And it demonstrates to us another awful truth: Elias thought he could carry on with his life, making money in his side hustles. But under a tyrannical regime, death and sorrow come to you.

Part One of V is mostly about the rise of fascism. But in Part Two, we’ll explore the next step: resistance to fascism. The final scene of Part One points the way forward. Abraham catches a group of kids spray-painting some Visitor propaganda posters. He shows them a new emblem to paint: the letter V, for Victory. It’s right there in the title. In the long run, tyranny always loses. As long as we resist, we will have victory.