Visitors Among Us editor Edward Gross has been involved in a bit of give-and-take over at www.thevisitors.info message boards, and we thought we'd reprint some of those postings here. To begin with, criticism was being raised that the new "V" TV pilot would be more of an allegory to terrorism than the Holocaust, to which "VisitorEd" wrote:
"Although the Holocaust should never be forgotten, my feeling is that when Ken Johnson did the original "V" we were about 40 years post-World War II. This new "V" is coming two and a half decades later. Sad to say, but in a society where it's becoming more apparent that history goes back about as far as a person's birthdate, World War II and the Holocaust is even that much more removed.
While the horror of the Holocaust cannot compare to the loss America experienced on 9/11, terrorists DO represent the modern equivalent of the Nazis. The notion of terrorism -- and the idea that anyone around you could potentially be a Visitor/terrorist --is probably the most relatable threat that the modern day audience can identify with. Besides which, if, like the original, we are witness to a sea of red uniforms, anyone with even the vaguest memory or knowledge of the Nazis and the Holocaust will still get the point.
SciFi is most effective when it serves as a prism through which we're able to look at society. No one knows how "deep" this new "V" is going to be, but for it to have the necessary resonance for the modern viewer there has to be that identification."
This view wasn't entirely embraced, with other posters claiming that "V" without the Holocaust just wouldn't be something of interest. VisitorEd posted the following reply:
"Ken Johnson himself acknowledges that the 'V' concept will have to be updated. Here's a few comments he made to me during interviews: 'They told me they were thinking about doing a remake of the original first. Warner Bros. and I both sort of said, 'Why?' and the NBC brass said it wan't their idea, it was the NBC marketing department; they thought it would be a good idea to do a remake first, and it was not something I was interested in pursuing. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized, 'Look, maybe this is the only way I can get my sequel made. Secondly, maybe there's a way to go back and bring the original up to the 21st century and deal with cell phones and iPods and terrorism and that sort of thing. And still be true to the original story, the original concept, the original characters
'I moved it up a generation from World War II so that the Jewish family who had the grandfather who lost a wife during the Holocaust now was a black family in the remake script, with a grandfather who lost his wife to Aprartheid. So this way I was doing something that I could hold my head up and feel good about.'"