['V' - 'Birth Pangs']

Several of the plot points for tonight's episode seemed to come out of left field. It's difficult to tell if these were planned in advance or off the cuff as a method to extend the story lines a little. I'm more inclined to think the latter due to the fact that they smack of poor writing.

There was a lot of concentration on the overall plans of the Visitors and we finally got an explanation as to why the human race isn't being raised as cattle at the moment. It does offer some interesting conjectures regarding the Visitors that I will get to shortly.

It bears repeating: It's an awful big coincidence that Tyler Evans happens to be one of the kids (which, including the ones that died, probably totaled hundreds out of a few billion people) that the Visitor pediatrician had in her care 18 years ago. Ensemble television drama is a small world.

Speaking of, notice how everyone in the Fifth Column global network speaks pretty good English? Even if it was the standard language for the group, there would have had to have been several accents among them.

If there was an explanation regarding how Ryan Nichols survived last week's violence, it escaped me. It's still tough to tell exactly whose side he's on at this point. Given the story line with his daughter, he's obviously going to have more to do soon. Did the writers actually put a hint of romance between Hobbes and Erica? That won't last.

Now we have a detailed explanation regarding the Visitor's motives, but it feels as if that is only part of the story. If the Visitors take DNA from various species, why are they only lizards? Shouldn't they have hints of other species? Perhaps they do and haven't shown it yet. Are they space nomads searching the universe for compatible races to their own? Are they simply raiding other species for DNA? What happened to their home planet exactly? I once hypothesized that they were sterile to a degree and this episode didn't disprove that.



I mentioned how the writing was sloppy. Here are two reasons that jumped out at me. First, this is the first we're learning about the other compatible males. Second, this is the first we learned of the "Queen Egg" back-up plan. These should have been hinted at previously. They seemed to come out of nowhere otherwise.

By giving Diana a communication orb, Lisa gave her a means of regaining her status as the Visitor Queen. She can now communicate with the outside world, including her own people. Chad Decker has also outed himself to Lisa, which could come back to haunt him later, because inevitably whatever Lisa knows, Diana will eventually also know.

It's a pretty good trick to simulate a bunch of different cities from the same studio lot. Kudos to the set designers for that. Even the haircutting equipment on the V ship has a futuristic glow.

Has it ever been explained why the Visitors have human names? Surely they each must have a name in their own language. Tyler is integrating so well with the Visitors that he's even losing his own human emotions.

This week's episode just didn't jump out at me. There were some cool visuals such as the doctor falling out of the window and incinerating, as well as some good CGI, but the story was somewhat flat. Last week's revelations and sudden deaths were more of a shock. The creators have three more episodes to knock some socks off at ABC. What did you think?

'V' airs Tuesdays at 9PM ET on ABC.