Episode Report Card LuluBates: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Mommy Issues
By LuluBates | Season 2 | Episode 1 | Aired on 01.04.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So… where were we? Oh right: Agent Erica turned Anna's eggs into one heck of an omelet. Anna is sooooooo pissed, because even though they were slimy, they were her babies. Adding insult to injury, Anna is overwrought with dirty human emotions and decides to step up the alien invasion plan, or at least turn the sky red, and not in way that delights sailors.
On earth, the red sky is getting all the humans atwitter. The FBI has their hands full, but Erica is sleeping on the job having bad dreams about Anna's revenge. On the ship, Marcus (a.k.a. Anna's No. 2) tells her that the other ship captains don't appreciate her new maternal instincts and are en route to confront her in person. She bitch slaps them into submission.
Ryan is being kept onboard the ship against his will, but he wants to be near his little babylike lizard. The little tadpole is being kept in a fish bowl, but it's really a prison. Anna does not appreciate Ryan's continued existence, but Ryan doesn't appreciate the fact that she imprisoned him, stole his daughter (it's a girl!), and killed his wife. Anna banishes him to earth. She's keeping the kid and hoping he joins the Fifth Column (not the boy band). Now that she has his offspring, she can yank him back whenever she wants. Naturally, Ryan heads straight to the Fab Four's HQ. Smart!
Chad Decker is still the mouthpiece of the Visitors, but his tone has changed. The Red Sky has made humans less thankful for the healing centers and blue energy orbs. He reports on riots at the Visitors' Visitor Center, gun stockpiles and looting. Making the situation even tenser, Anna has cut herself off from all diplomatic efforts. Agent Erica uses Tyler to gain access to the ship. Good timing, too, because it has started to rain a red bloodlike substance all over earth. After Tyler gets fixed up, Erica hollers at Anna until she tells the earth some bullshit about how Red Sky and Red Rain will reverse global warming. All the stupid, stupid earthlings cheer. Mission accomplished, Erica excuses herself and Anna pimps Lisa to Tyler. She wants another alien-human hybrid, pronto!
Scientists on earth are trying to figure out the cause of the Red Sky. Up on the ship, No. 2 tells Anna that one scientist is close to unraveling it, so naturally Anna arranges a hit on him. Lisa gives Erica his name first and they scoot to the university to get him on their team. The scientist is Sam from Reaper, so I don't mind the addition. The newly improved crime fighting team figures out that the red rain is chock-full of phosphorous, making them perfect baby V incubators. Erica admits that when she was pregnant SHE had abnormally high levels of phosphorous in her blood. She wonders if she and Tyler could be V test subjects?
Chad Decker stops by Father Jack's church, but Father Jack won't give him sanctuary until he confesses that he saw humans being tortured on the V ship. Chad gives Father Jack recordings of his interviews with the human test subjects. Father Jack convinces Chad to join the Fifth Column as a Double Secret Spy.
Up on the ship, Anna kills the remaining offspring that survived the bombing. They were defective and caused emotions. She cries quietly to herself and then goes to see her mommy. Glad to see that mommy issues are the great universal.
Watch a clip from the episode below, discuss it in our forums, then refresh your V-knowledge with our guide to the A to Z of V.
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Melissa Locker a.k.a. Lulu Bates has no phosphorous in her, unless phosphorous is in Pringles. You can follow her on Twitter @woolyknickers.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!So... where were we? Oh right: Aliens landed! They were bee-yoo-ti-ful and wise and kind. Except, of course, that they really weren't. They were slimy-souled and ugly on the inside where it counts. They had healing centers that fixed all the ills that befell the poor weak humans. But those healing centers also acted as distribution centers for creepy alien inventions masquerading as vaccines. The Visitors got themselves a mouthpiece named Chad Decker who was willing to tow the party line for ratings, because, yeah, that's what matters most in life. The priest, Father Jack, tried to set Chad on the right path, but Chad really wanted an exclusive (nudge nudge, wink wink) with Alien Anna because she is one smoking hot alien and wouldn't that be a story to tell the guys at the gym? Father Jack joined the resistance when a parishioner died in his pews. There he met Agent Erica who thought she was tracking terrorists, but in reality she was tracking her partner who was an undercover operative for the Visitors. They also met Ryan, a Visitor with a pregnant fiancée who didn't know she was breeding with the enemy. Eventually bad boy Kyle joined their resistance league and they formed the Fab Four, which sounds like a boy band, but not as much as the Fifth Column, which is the name of the V resistance. I'm hoping that much like the Backstreet Boys and the New Kids On the Block have come to make beautiful music together, soon the Fab Four and the Fifth Column will join forces and really show those aliens what is up. Maybe a few dance steps too. Step step, slide, clap, step back.
The first major action that the Fab Four took was blowing up a warehouse of alien drugs. Then they used a rocket launcher to take down a V shuttle, but they were set up thanks to Chad Decker and the loose-lipped priest. After some bad PR, they had to go even further underground, but with their alien BFF Dr. Joshua up on the ship they still got word of Anna's evil plan to kill them all with baby soldiers. So under the guise of breaking bread with the future in-laws, Agent Erica came aboard the Mothership and with the help of Anna's jealous, attention-seeking older daughter, Lisa, turned Anna's new special baby eggs into Egg Beaters. This ensured that Lisa would always be her mommy's special little angel and that Erica would have a lot of frittatas in her future. While Anna is a cold-hearted snake who normally would have no qualms about eating her young, her human skin is infecting her with all sorts of yucko human emotions and she heads straight to the anger portion of her stages of grief. She is sooooooo pissed about the scrambled eggs that were her babies that she turns the skies red red red. Marcus a.k.a. No.2 tut tuts about this human reaction, but Anna doesn't care. She's already moved on to the "listening to the Cure, drinking wine, and smoking clove cigarettes" stage of grief.
And so it begins. Agent Erica wakes up and finds all other human life is still unconscious. Bodies lie around her, the streets are filled with wrecked cars. It pretty much looks like they just cut-and-pasted the black out scene from that other thumbs-down sci fi drama that tanked on ABC last year. Yes, I mean Flash Forward. Yes, I know that some people were heartbroken at the cancellation, because some people just can't get enough of watching Joseph Fiennes flare his nostrils dramatically as a substitute for actual dramatic acting. Anyway, this scene is identical to the post blackout scene where everyone is passed out on the ground and the highways are littered with destroyed cars. Erica is up and grabs her son Tyler's jacket and runs screaming for him. She finds him sitting alone blaming her for the destruction of the earth. As Erica cradles her son in her arms, his face melts off. First: ew. Second, this is truly the finest acting either Erica or Tyler has done on this show, so kudos! Let's have some more face melting, eh?
Anna appears in the distance and tells Erica that since Erica killed her babies, Anna killed Tyler. Fair's fair, right? Erica wakes up with a start, because even she is surprised that the writers would actually start the second season of a show that is clearly on probation with a DREAM SEQUENCE. What is this, sixth grade creative writing class where ending every story with, "And then I woke. It was all a dream." was considered high art? Come on now. You can do better. So Erica wakes up and she is at her desk at FBI HQ and she is all discombobulated, until she sees a picture of her not-burned-to-a-crisp son Tyler. She heads out to the main room and finds the place in a hubbub. We see on a television screen that it is the fourth day of the red sky and Erica marches up to her boss and demands to know if while she was, you know, sleeping at her desk anyone managed to get a meeting with Anna. Instead of snapping at her for, you know, sleeping at her desk, he tells her that world leaders keep reaching out to Anna, but she won't respond. Erica decides to wade in where world leaders have failed and orders someone, anyone, to take action. Agent Malik who is, of course, actually a Visitor, reminds Erica that there is no proof that the Visitors caused this phenomenon. Erica does the wise thing and doinks her in the forehead, because: DUH.
Up on the ship, Marcus a.k.a. No. 2 reminds Anna that ignoring the puny humans' pleas for open dialogue is bad for business, but Anna does not care. She likes Red Sky and she likes the peace and quiet that complete isolationism gives her. No. 2 gently points out that the longer Red Sky goes on the more likely it is that the humans will figure out what it is. Anna doesn't really care because it's not so much what it is as what it does. No. 2 smiles soothingly at the crazy lady and hands her a memo documenting his efforts to monitor the human scientists' activities and research and there is one guy who is pretty close to uncovering the truth about Red Sky. Anna shrugs and tells him to the kill the scientist. No. 2 nods, which, really, couldn't No. 2 have figured that one out for himself? I mean, the V Human Operations Manual seems to be pretty straightforward in practice: Someone bugging you? Exterminate them. DONE. Anna rolls her eyes at him and turns to go, but No. 2 stops her. Did he forget to mention that the captains of all the ships are on their way to confront her in person? They weren't too happy about her decision to unleash Red Sky early and without warning and they are on their way to have a Human Emotion Intervention for her. She'd better get herself to an Emotions Anonymous meeting right quick. ("My name is Anna and I once had a feeling not based on logic. It's been four days since my last emotion.") Anna glares at No. 2 as he relays the news and then tells him to alert her the second that the captains have arrived because she is going to teach them a few things about feeling. Namely, feeling her hand around their throats. But before Anna can go prepare herself for the meeting, she has one more issue to deal with: Ryan is loose on the ship.
Let's take a little trip down memory lane: Val was taken to the Mothership while she was in labor with her alien-human baby by an alien Soldier. Ryan busted his way onto the ship to try and save her. Anna greeted the family with open arms and saved the baby, but then killed Val, because who needs an ultra whiny human around? No one. Ryan then seemed to succumb to Anna's bliss and while he was still sad about the death of Val, even he had to recognize that she was pretty freaking annoying most of the time and he and his baby would be fine without her. Now we see that Ryan is not happy about his life on board the ship. His baby was taken from him and put in an aquarium. Actually I'm going to out myself as a dork and make a Star Wars comparison: You know in the Empire Strikes Back when Luke is almost frozen to death on Hoth and he gets defrosted in that tank of water? That's what Ryan's baby is being held in. Well, like Empire Strikes Back with a touch of Chinese restaurant aquarium thrown