V Season 1 Finale: Complex Chess and Red Cloud

V concluded its fine first season yesterday - the welcome news came last week that ABC was bringing back the Visitors for at least another season - with a ratcheting up of the complex, high-level, life-and-death chess game that has become the heart of the series.

Among the highlights -

• Ryan may be back in the V fold.  Devastated over the loss of Valerie - who died not during childbirth (as Ryan now apparently believes) but because Anna killed her - Ryan accepts the "peace" of surrender to Anna and presumably her Visitor agenda.   This is no doubt how the next season will start.  But Ryan's smart, and may soon realize or figure out that Anna killed Valerie (that was his first instinct last night).   In any case, he now is father of a V-human hybrid, which wrapped a loving baby tentacle around Ryan's hand.
• Chad may have finally seen the bad light about the Visitors, after Joshua tells him not only did Anna not cure him, she made Chad sick, and Chad sees what the Visitors are doing to the humans aboard the ship.
• Speaking of Joshua, he insists that Erica shoot him, as a way of preserving Erica's position with an unsuspecting Anna.  But in a last scene, I was glad to see that Joshua isn't dead.   He's one of my favorite characters.
• Erica and Lisa manage to destroy almost all of Anna's hatching army.  Lisa has made her choice - she's now firmly against her mother and with the 5th column.
• Kyle and Marcus are up to something interesting.   Either they're both 5th columnists, or both loyal to the Visitors (I can't believe that about Kyle), or Kyle is 5th columnist and Marcus second in command with the V's.   The last is how it seems - but it's not clear to me what exactly else is going on in the conversations between the two.
• Anna, of all lizards, is beginning to have human emotions.   She's anguished and furious about the loss of her hatchling lizard soldiers.

Which brings us to the ambiguous ending.  Anna causes some kind of red cloud to appear all over Planet Earth.  It's not clear - cloudy to me - what this is or why she did this. Perhaps to make Earth more like the V world.  Marcus asks in a dire voice if she's sure she wanted to do this.

I'm looking forward to seeing through the red cloud, and following the continuing chess game next season.


5-min podcast review of V Season 1 finale

See also V Returns to TV ... V 1.2: The Effects and The Characters ... V 1.3: Multiple Twists and Lizard Visions ... V 1.4: Good Medicine for Television ... V's Back in 1.5 ... V 1.6: Floating Witches ... V 1.7: Ryan's Story ... V 1.8: Is Lisa Becoming 5th Column? ... V 1.9: Moral Complexity and NonStop Action ... V 1.11:  Lisa's Loyalties

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