"Brian was a very young writer," says Craig Buck, one of the writers involved with Johnson's version of The Final Battle, "and they only gave him a couple of weeks to write the script. Even if he were the greatest writer on the face of the earth, it wasn't enough time to write six hours of script and cut out $5 million. We had spent months working with these characters, interweaving storylines and plotlines and emotional storylines to make sure that everything was consistent. There's no way anyone could tread that in a few weeks. So they had things happening in terms of consistency that didn't make sense. Despite the fact that we were dealing with unreal situations with these characters who were actually lizards, we kept it real. For instance, we came up with the ethereal child that's a combination of the two races, but she ended up with these powers that were unbelievable. What we tried to do was create a character who was a conceivable creature, and what they did was give her powers far beyond those of mortal men.
"People did things for no reason," he continues. "Things happened for no reason. They really went for the effects rather than story or character. I divorced myself from the project so completely that I'm not really sure what they did. I just tuned in for moments at a time, and every time I did, something so out of character was being done that I couldn't watch it. I just don't think they really understood what the orignal was about. My feeling was that they tried to do six hours of television that could have as much action and special effects that they could cram in within their budget. That really meant designing a story around action sequences rather than wrapping action sequences around a story. I think that's reflected in the quality of the subsequent series as well. If you're going to turn 'V' into a series, it should have been more of a soap opera than an action adventure, with people dealing with mixed emotions. It should have been more of an espionage thing rather than an action adventure."
In part three, posting on Monday, Buck discusses the loss of the World War II analogy in "V": The Final Battle.