Editor’s Note: This review did not appear on schedule last week due solely to technical difficulties.
Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Stegall
V
“Laid Bare”
ABC 9PM, Tuesdays
Written by Gwendolyn M. Parker
Directed by David Barrett
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
“Visitors have a very high threshold for pain.” —Ryan
The Visitors may have a high tolerance for pain, but I don’t. This episode was one of the worst 32 minutes of television I’ve had to endure recently. It was only 32 minutes long because I turned it off about halfway through. There were moments when it was working—such as Chad’s objections to Anna’s “editing” of his interview with Father Jack. Then there moments when it wasn’t, such as Joshua’s calm explanation that he had a machine that could suck the soul out of a human being (news flash, Josh: it’s called television).
This episode focused on a search for information: Anna sends Ryan to “infiltrate” the Resistance, while Erica and her gang try to decide what to do with Agent Malik (Rekha Sharma, The Cult), now revealed as a V. Ryan quickly neutralizes the threat of her tail, and everyone stands around debating what form of torture would be most effective in questioning her. Among those people is Father Jack, who last week was suffering agonies of conscience for having inspired, albeit unwittingly, a suicide bomber. This week he gives an impassioned sermon opposing the use of violence, and does his best to break up a (staged) fight. But then he doesn’t even twitch when Hobbes and Ryan calmly debate whether it would be better to skin Agent Malik now or wait until later. This goes beyond incoherent character development. It’s just plain bad writing.
Meanwhile, Dr. Miller shows Erica the results of his DNA analysis on Tyler, confirming what the audience has known since Tyler first walked onscreen: he’s a mutant. Of course he’s a mutant. And a pretty cold-blooded one at that, since he is now turning against his own mother. But Erica, even though she now knows that her son is not fully human, is still intent on saving him, saving the Resistance, and bringing down the Vs. How convenient, then, that this episode distills all her worries down to one choice: to skin alive another creature (one which Father Jack said last week has a soul), or not.
“Skin her.” —Erica
As Hobbes began cutting the skin off Agent Malik and she began screaming, I reached for the remote. I know that we’re supposed to believe that Malik is a cold-blooded lizard, I know we saw fangs earlier. But what I saw on screen was a woman of color, tied up helplessly in a basement, while a white man tortured her with a knife and other people watched uncaringly. If by that point I was supposed to see Malik as a cold-blooded, bestial lizard (soul or not), the production utterly failed in that intention. Was Eli Roth involved in the production of that scene? Because I don’t care what the writers intended or the director intended or the producers thought they were producing, what I saw was torture porn.
Last season, the producers showed us a scene in which Anna orders one of her minions to be skinned alive. That scene was intended to reinforce her ruthlessness, her cruelty, her cold-blooded disregard of even the lives of her own people, let alone a perceived enemy. It worked—we saw Anna as a dangerous beast after that. What are we supposed to think now, when our “heroine” Erica issues the same order? It’s not just bad writing, it’s stupid writing, blind writing, writing that does not just ignore all previously established story elements but holds the audience in contempt. Because anyone fostering torture porn on an audience can feel nothing but contempt for his fellow human beings.
I did not even bother to look up the ratings for last night’s show, as I really don’t care. Let V die the slow and agonizing death it deserves. I’m outta here.