Disgruntled Frank Ashmore fan watches V’s “Liberation Day”

Content warning: The following post contains a lot of swearing, sex and rage. Americans, brace yourselves. Glaswegians… as you were. If it’s all too much for you there is a sanitised version of this I’m posting over on Instagram

Those of you who know V well will already know the well-covered story about the general decline in quality of this television series as we move through various iterations. It is a game of diminishing returns as we move from V: The Original mini-series helmed by Kenneth Johnson to V: The Final Battle, which is the nice but dim younger sibling of the first mini-series. By the time we get to the weekly series we’re dealing with the three-legged dysfunctional pet with no bladder control that is fundamentally stupid but still somehow manages to have the deviousness to secrete a fecal surprise somewhere deeply unpleasant (in your shoe, in the toaster, between the bedclothes right down the bottom by your feet) at least once a week.

I’ve already written at length about the steady drop in quality of the show and the assertion by those among us with taste that the show jumped the shark when [spoiler – though you have to be a moron if you haven’t figured it out by now] Martin died.

I’ve also briefly mentioned the trauma I underwent when I first watched V: The Series which aired in my country in 1989-1990. I literally turned off the television set after that scene, as soon as I realised Martin wasn’t going to be in the show anymore and that I would have to channel my raging hormones into something else (Beverley Hills 90210 in case you were wondering). Apart from a brief foray in 2006 when I first wrote this site (and watched the show through splayed fingers) I haven’t been back.

But, since it has been a while, and since to date I’ve engaged with Liberation Day so little, and since this is the entire premise of this website, I decided I needed to revisit this episode again.

I mean maybe I and all the other V fans who thought this show jumped the shark when Martin died were wrong? Maybe we’ve been unfair? Maybe there are some gems I’ve missed in my pubescent rage over my first crush being destroyed unceremoniously in the first episode of the weekly series?

Yeah right. Not bloody likely. Going back and watching this again thirty years later I realise I have a right to be angry! Usually I don’t condone this sort of thing, but in this case I feel utterly justified to rip into this show like it’s the last packet of double coated Tim Tams in a pantry chock full of disappointing British biscuits.

What follows is sweary, angry and lewd recap of the show by an angry Frank Ashmore fan. But it’s not just about Frank. Frank is just a symptom of a show that is so ill that no amount of clapping on your front doorstep at 8pm on a Thursday can revive it now. What follows is a fair and accurate summary of everything wrong with the series through the lens of this one death in this one episode. Enjoy.

Liberation Day

So before we even start looking at this can we go one step back and look at how V: The Final Battle ended? I feel I can get away with raising this because this is exactly where the weekly series picks up. And. It is also where the entire V franchise lost its marbles.

At the end of V: The Final Battle we see our heroes on the mothership desperately trying to prevent nuclear annihilation. Lorraine and Donovan are trying to decode the nuclear detonator, Martin is trying to get the mothership out of the Earth’s atmosphere and Julie has been left in charge of guarding Diana (was that the best idea?). It looks like we are all doomed when suddenly this happens:

I love that the camera switches to each actor’s face as they like the audience are clearly thinking “what the fuck?!”

This cop-out ending will carry through into the weekly series. The girl’s name may as well be Deus ex machina because whatever peril the Resistance faces from now on can be magicked away with some sparklechild bullshit. It’s the 1980s equivalent of the multiverse where the stakes are so low because there are never any consequences and nothing really matters. The aliens and the Resistance are stuck in a stalemate where no one ever makes any progress, all in service of an episodic action series format that isn’t even that good anyway. The people in the show are just automatons reciting the lines forced into their mouths. The characters themselves don’t matter as they are hollowed out husks of their former selves ready to be killed off like the mere pawns that they are. Paul Verhoeven would be proud. It’s exactly this kind of nihilism that causes the weekly show to nosedive spectacularly into the ground midway through the first season.

Anyway we pick up right after all the smiles and sucking face at the end of The Final Battle when Martin suddenly gets an alert that Diana’s shuttle has left the building. Why this pops up now, I cannot tell you because usually you have to set alerts up first on MS Teams or whatever platform you have so you can strike your colleagues like a ninja as soon as they log in. Maybe Martin set this up while he was flying the spaceship out of the Earth’s atmosphere to save us from nuclear disaster. Which would explain why his efforts weren’t particularly effective. You know I’m beginning to get the impression that maybe the real reason Martin defected was he was a bit shit at his job and he needed to cover up for it before someone noticed and fired him. It would certainly explain why Martin can’t just blow Diana out of the sky with the mothership’s laser blasters given less than half an hour earlier Diana did the very same thing to one of those pretty balloons in The Final Battle.

We can only assume that Martin’s fingers have somehow become disconnected from his brain at this point and that he has forgotten how to fly or shoot or kill the person who has made his life a misery for the last however many years it has been. This must be why Donovan is the one who steps up and pursues Diana in a fighter because … oh hell I don’t know.

Never mind, there has been way too much dialogue in this show now. Will you just look at it all!

I think we can all agree that’s enough exposition, we’ll never get through this whole episode at this rate, let’s crack on so we can get to the cool action scene:

Well. That was worth it.

Next we’re treated to Donovan wrestling with Diana and we’re somehow supposed to believe this is as much of a struggle for Mike as it was with that unmasked Visitor who literally threw him around the room in the original mini-series.

Now I know we’re supposed to believe the difference between male and female Visitors isn’t that much, but the considerable size difference between actors Marc Singer in prime Beastmaster mode and stick thin former beauty queen Jane Badler makes this look more like Donovan is trying to get a particularly uncooperative cat into its carrier to take it to the vet.

Then a pair of hunters (?) happen upon this scene of a male and female in Visitor uniforms frolicking in the dirt and think…

.. oh look it really doesn’t matter what they think. Mike yells “Don’t shoot” which is a harbinger of infuriating character motivations to come. (Did he learn nothing from Saving Private Ryan?) The hunters ignore him and one of them takes aim and who or what they shoot at doesn’t really matter because we cut to a scene of fireworks. Everything fine now. War over. Happy smiling faces. Apparently in the past year there was no devastation to mop up, no millions of displaced persons to revive or attempt to retrieve from the alien planet, no environmental consequences of the Visitors terraforming of the planet.

We now (too) briefly catch up with Elias who has pretty much regressed to huckster only this time he has a better suit. Michael Wright does the best he can with what little he’s given but it’s a disappointing caricature of the Elias we know and love. It’s obvious that Elias is being set up to be the owner of the V equivalent of Rick’s Café as the writers attempt to rip-off, sorry pay homage to Casablanca. (I’ve already argued that Kenneth Johnson did this much more elegantly and economically in the original mini-series but what does he know?)

Willie is apparently working for Elias in his new nightclub. Willie has absolutely no lines in this episode which I have to be honest, I am kind of relieved about because I always thought making fun of Willie’s malapropisms was punching down. I do love how Robert Englund slips in this little side-eye here. It’s as if he’s looked into the abyss that is this show and is telegraphing a warning to the unsuspecting viewer.

Also he looks insanely cute in this shot. I would.

We next cut to the mothership where we meet Juliet’s new boss, Science Frontiers’ CEO Nathan Bates played by Lane Smith, who in all honesty is one of the few highlights of this episode. Apparently the Fifth Column have been totally useless at helping the humans decode the mothership and the government have had to contract the work out to some corporate bastards instead.

One of the more enjoyable little moments of this episode is seeing Bates give Julie a little pat on the bum on national television, followed by the look on Julie’s face as she adds this to the catalogue of things to bring up during #MeToo, and then Mike’s hair rising like the crest of an angry cockatoo as he takes all this in.

The one person watching this scene with complete detachment is Martin who seems to be deep in some sort of “Fuck my life” doom spiral.

You would have thought Martin might be keen to return to his home planet to continue the fight against that evil Leader he was so opposed to. But no, he’s been too busy for that. It’s hard to know what he’s been doing in the intervening year. One can only presume he’s been hanging out in strip joints, doing vast amounts of blow and learning to be a cameraman for local network television. (I honestly don’t know which one of these possibilities is most egregious.)

Cut to Deus ex machina riding a horse. This is literally an “as you know Bob” piece of dialogue as Robyn (Bob 1) says to Robert (Bob 2) that things are different now her daughter saved the world with her magical sparkles. On cue a press helicopter turns up and starts hovering over the little girl before it is repelled by an “unexplained force”. You would have thought maybe the Resistance would have kept that little piece of information about Elizabeth to themselves. But no they had to go off and blab everything. One can only imagine how that press conference went. Also I cannot help but notice that the helicopter is from the same network Mike works for. I guess he doesn’t have enough sway to tell his colleagues to knock it off.

(Fun fact: the actor playing the reporter in the helicopter in this scene is Haunani Minn, Marc Singer’s real-life wife.)

Elizabeth manages to see off the chopper with her mind but the whole thing is clearly very traumatising. Robyn nevertheless decides now is still a good time to get some R&R in Santa Cruz because the writers clearly need Robyn and Elizabeth to be separated for some reason which will inevitably lead to some terrible misunderstanding where Robyn’s heart is once again ripped from her chest and ground into the dust. Something to look forward to in future episodes no doubt.

Back on the mothership Mike tells Martin he’s his best ever assistant in a way that makes it clear Science Frontiers isn’t the only workplace with sexual harassment issues. It also reminds the section of the audience that’s still conscious that actually no. Tony Wah Chong Leonetti was by far the best assistant Mike ever worked with. Do you remember Tony? Isn’t that how Martin and Mike met? Standing over Tony’s mutilated body while mutually vowing to kill Diana?

But never mind that! Don’t indulge in that “remembering” shit. That might lead you to the dangerous conclusion that each of these characters has an identity, backstory and inner world. That way lies madness! And don’t think about the torture and pain that went before. It’s not relevant. No trauma here. Mothership sexy now. See:

There is some hand waving, “don’t worry about that” explanation just before this about how Sean is now chilling (I mean not literally – we’re not talking about that. God no!) in a facility in Ojai being deconverted. Singer and Grant actually get to act in this scene for a full 40 seconds and they are really natural together. It’s nice, for once I actually believe them as a couple. But no we can’t have that! It is not long before it’s back to the entire world apparently orbiting around Mike and his too-tight pants.

Speaking of acting. Hurrah it’s Michael Ironside! In a scene with Lane Smith! This exchange is the best thing to happen in this entire episode. Ham Tyler enters the room and prowls around Bates’s office like a wild tiger being introduced to its new enclosure at the zoo. What follows is some clumsy exposition “why Mr. Tyler you’re a thug with credentials”, “why yes Mr. Bates, you’re a corrupt businessman with far too much lobbying power”.

Ironside is good enough that I can almost accept the faintly ludicrous idea that Bates could convince Tyler to kidnap Diana so that Bates can mine her for information while taking all the credit for the resulting scientific breakthroughs. I find it really difficult to swallow the idea that Tyler was ever motivated by money but the actors and the cinematographers have made this scene compelling so I’ll give this a pass for now.

But just when you think this show is taking a turn for the better we cut to a red sports car containing Mike and Martin talking about Diana’s upcoming trial. There is so much wrong with this script on this point, I don’t know where to begin. Firstly why on earth is Martin not also standing trial with Diana? How totally naïve are these writers to think that he wouldn’t have to defend his case along with all the other Visitor brass left on Earth? At the very least he should be involved in the trial as a witness. It is beyond stupid that he is schlepping around Los Angeles carrying Mike’s sound equipment for him.

Furthermore Mike Donovan (and his son, and his girlfriend, and his last assistant) is one of Diana’s victims. In what universe should he be considered impartial enough to cover this trial? And why isn’t he more angry? What the hell happened to the bond that formed between these two over their shared desire to see Diana dead? This seems to have now been replaced with a mutual love of plaid shirts unbuttoned as far as is acceptable in a smart-casual office dress code setting.

But apparently there is trouble in paradise as the two men strongly disagree about the merit of Diana’s trial. Mike keeps being nonsensically “reasonable” about wanting her to have a fair trial while Martin is all “don’t you come at me with that democracy shite again”. The lines Ashmore is given here are rubbish but he does a really great job at glowering out of the car window in a way most parents of teenage children on a summer holiday drive to Cornwall will be very familiar with.

Then as if to interrupt what is obviously a tired old argument between these guys, Martin’s digital watch chirps and this starts Martin off whining about Big Pharma and the cost of prescriptions. I hope you didn’t zone out during that because everything in this scene is screaming at you to notice that Martin has to take these pills every twelve hours or he will be poisoned by the red dust, and also he’s been uncharacteristically sloppy about refilling his prescription and only has one pill left. Where could this be going?

Meanwhile Robyn is still going through with her plan to go on that ayahuasca retreat in Santa Cruz. To be fair she deserves it, especially when you see what’s coming next for the character. I do like Blair Tefkin in this scene, she’s the right combination of careworn, brittle and youthful.

This is the second scene with the Maxwells and notable for their absence are Polly and Katy. What the hell happened to Robert’s other two daughters? They just disappeared with no explanation. Polly was the most kick-ass younger character in the entire mini-series. That girl was going places. I will not be convinced there is not another version of this show where she is riding shotgun with Ham Tyler, going from town to town blowing up pumping stations and delivering newspapers on their BMXs together. I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.

Well you wanted action so you got it. Diana arrives at her trial wearing a lovely oxygen mask and is buffeted by a “crowd” about the size of any given picket outside any abortion clinic in America (or if you’re British, the queue for the scotch eggs stand in Greenwich Market).

Diana started out being an extremely beautiful and creepy character to be respected and feared but I feel like her trajectory has taken a turn for the cartoonish, and now she’s being written for as if she’s Sly Stallone doing a send up of himself in Judge Dredd, Demolition Man or Guardians of the Galaxy. All the terror is gone and it feels like she’s being wheeled about as the hot sexpot alien to gratify a largely heterosexual male audience who didn’t need that much encouragement to find her desirable in the first place. This will inevitably lead to a show that relies on answering the question “who’s Diana going to bang this week?” for all its dramatic tension. And then everyone wonders why the show became so camp?

Also, they really messed up Badler’s hair. That perm is a travesty.

Moving on…

The show recreates the Jack Ruby hit on Lee Harvey Oswald, this bit is not too bad. This is followed by the wackiest car park prang, which is all just an excuse to get Mike and Martin into a helicopter to pursue the ambulance that now has Diana in it. And yes, it is the same chopper that was hovering above the Deus ex machina at the Maxwell ranch. I guess the production team wanted to make as much use of it as they could.

Thank god Mike is here to tell the audience that they’ve pulled a switcheroo with the ambulance and the truck, and just as well Martin is suddenly very very dim and needs it all explained to him in words of two syllables or less. Basically we’re following a truck containing an ambulance containing a not dead Diana. I mean not undead, that would be a different show. One I’m not entirely opposed to now I think about it.

Back at the Maxwell ranch Robert is involved in some classic 80s style parenting: “don’t bother dad while he’s watching TV”. Someone really needs to tell Elizabeth that she needs to wash her Garmin every day or she will start to get a nasty rash on her wrist under where the watch face sits.

Scratching her wrist has been sufficiently worrying to drag Robert from the television set. Which is impressive as I don’t think even the imminent threat of me turning into a lizard could have pulled my father away from Sunday afternoon rugby. Robert unconvincingly tells Elizabeth that grandpa is going to make it all better as he calls Science Frontiers asking for Juliet Parish with rising panic in his voice. Just as well mommy is off tripping balls or whatever right now when her little girl most needs her eh?

We briefly interrupt this touching scene to bring you Ham Tyler holding the idiot ball as he unloads Diana from the truck. In the distance is the sound of a helicopter and Tyler and his henchman all actually look up at it.

And then just shrug and carry on like it’s nothing!

(I’m starting to get a little irritated with this now, you can make any character you want to be as stupid as you like in aid of the plot or to make Mike Donovan look good, but not Ham Tyler. It’s a cardinal rule.)

Juliet hasn’t wasted any time getting over to Robert Maxwell’s place. Elizabeth’s Garmin rash is now pulsating. But don’t worry, Julie says she was making choux pastry the other night and this is completely normal. Oh wait, right, this is a little girl, not food (which is a plotline we’re still not mentioning). Actually if I’m honest Julie’s bedside reassuring smile needs work.

Back at the cabin we find Diana is really unhappy with her new quarters and she has a point. That does look like the cheapest tent that was available from Target that week. On the bright side she has had the opportunity to freshen her lipstick. Nevertheless Diana is quick to point out her displeasure at her living arrangements to Nathan Bates who she is now meeting for the first time. He responds with something along the lines of “haha capitalism, suck it”. Then he rattles some red dust antidote pills at her in a similar manner to the way I used to rattle the cat biscuit box at my cat to try to get her to do stuff. Much like my cat, Diana ain’t having it.

But now Diana has a vital piece of information about the antidote which I’m sure she won’t have to wait too long to use.

Having laid out his proposition to Diana, Bates leaves the cabin with Tyler who we now discover has a deal with Bates that he can kill her once she proves uncooperative. And he seems pretty confident that she won’t cooperate. This is slightly more palatable than the whole kidnap for cash scenario we were presented with before, but still pretty dumb.

Now.

Let’s play which of these three idiots is most at fault for what happens next?

Because it really is handbags at dawn over who gets the award for culpable idiot. Bates is a greedy idiot who wants power and fame and yet more money. Tyler is a cynical idiot who thinks he can rid the world of Diana through subterfuge. Martin is traumatised idiot who also thinks he can do the world a favour by killing Diana. (The fact that the last two of these have so much in common is the basis of what I hope will be my runaway success spin-off show Eat the Neighbourhood)

In fact now I think about it I am beginning to worry about Martin’s frame of mind. Remember that guy who couldn’t so much as lend Donovan a ballpoint pen for a minute because it was too risky and if the quartermaster found out there’d be hell to pay? Remember the guy who would shit all over any plan the Resistance proposed because it was ill-conceived and would jeopardise his own plans to fuck up the system from the within by, I dunno, giving all the elevators on the mothership a cut-glass British accent thus making everyone on board feel just a little bit inferior?

Fair to say there’s a real lack of character consistency with Martin. (It’s said the writers really didn’t know how to write for him. We can tell.) But hey, maybe a year on earth being Donovan’s bag boy made him snap. Or maybe he’s carrying a lot of trauma from proximity to Diana and all that evil stuff she’s done. Maybe he’s regretting not taking all the opportunities he had before to secrete a cyanide pill into her breakfast gerbil or somehow electrocuting her with her own satin sheets. Who knows?

But at this point there is no past. Only now! And for whatever reason Martin decides this is the time to strike. Outside Bates’s secret cabin Mike is still going on about winning a Pulitzer for filming this. Thankfully Martin puts a swift and final end to this shit knocking out Mike and then one of Bates’s goons in quick succession. But then he screws up and forgets to neutralise goon number two properly before giving Diana a piece of his mind in a way that would make a Bond villain think “gee this is going on a bit”.

I’m sure it’s very cathartic for Martin but was this sick burn really worth it? Especially when you say you’re going to do this quickly and then you start rambling on about whatever petty grievances you had from way back when. Goon number two clearly doesn’t think this is worthwhile and distracts Martin by throwing a petrol can in his general direction.

It seems Visitor relative size and strength is entirely idiosyncratic and only pertinent when convenient. Previously we saw Mike struggling to contain Diana so it stands to reason that as Frank Ashmore is another actor who could clearly benchpress Jane Badler’s full body weight effortlessly, that the bigger Martin would be stronger again. But no. Our goon grabs him and with a little rolling around on the floor causing yet more of his shirt buttons to pop open (not complaining), he is overpowered with relative ease.

Quick as a flash Diana has Martin’s gun and is looming over him and his bared chest telling him “You have something I want”. This seems an awfully strange time for that sort of thing but Diana has always had a strong appetite in that department and the rest of the script makes no sense at all so let’s just go with it.

So I know this looks really bad at this point but not necessarily. Martin and Diana have always had a pretty messed up dynamic and I’m willing to bet that this is not too dissimilar to any given day on the mothership before Martin absconded with Donovan in tow. Relationships can look really bad from the outside but in all honesty this is all very normal and things are perfectly fine.

Right?

Mike comes around to the sight of a burning cabin then out of nowhere a monstrous arm reaches out to grab him. Of course it is Martin but you could be forgiven for forgetting his character is an alien, we’ve forgotten just about everything else about him at this point. It’s a bit unclear what has actually happened to cause his reptilian arm to be exposed or why he is having to drag himself along the ground like that. Perhaps Diana has given him the most tremendous fuck that it has paralysed him from the waist down. Mike as always is willing to overlook all this and takes a now dying Martin into his arms.

Both Ashmore and Singer are theatre actors and it appears they are having a blast casting themselves in Act V scene 3 of King Lear.

Of our three aforementioned idiots, of course Martin is the only one with any sense of a conscience, who is willing to accept responsibility for his actions. Which is why all of this is so deeply unfair. Ashmore is really vulnerable in this scene, depicting a man who is almost dying of regret. (Oh if only he had paid much closer attention to The Wire.) Martin is so upset his sentences are raggedly coming out in fragments. One of these fragments starts with a particularly dramatic “Oh no…”, which is literally flung out to the gallery but on the small screen is hilariously misplaced.

Martin now tells Donovan he must stop Diana who is now making her way to a satellite station to hail the fleet. She’s got twelve hours. This apparently is what he’s crawled all the way out here to tell Donovan on his dying breath. It is the least he could do really, considering the circumstances.

Having kindly moved this stupid, worthless plot along he finally asks. “Mike. You gotta do this for me” Whatever that unfinished thought was we’ll never know as Martin … [choke]… dies in Mike’s arms.

.

Fair to say my heart is not in this anymore. There’s twenty more minutes of this episode, I’m just over halfway through and I really can’t be arsed with it.

To summarise:

Back at the ranch you may have noticed that Juliet’s character has been given short shrift in this episode and that’s not just because I’m a single issue nutter with an obsession about Martin’s death.

Get used to this trend as Julie gets marginalised more and more because the action lends itself more to Singer and Ironside’s strengths, and to make way for the teen drama that is about to ensue. (There are at least another 3000 words one could write about how the treatment of female characters changes between series. Perhaps a separate post of it’s own.)

Julie has bad news for Michael Durrell who is doing his best “well try dammit” acting perhaps because he’s just seen what happened to Frank Ashmore and has been asked to drop by the producer’s office after filming today. Gulp. She can’t do anything for Elizabeth who has now absconded to commune with some snakes in a cave which I thought was totally on track developmentally for her age.

The show is making its intentions clear. Don’t be a young child, a serious woman, an ethnic minority or the same age as the audience’s dad or you’re gone.

Ok let’s wrap this up. At the tracking station, Diana escapes because… blah blah blah.

So after all that the red dust is rendered ineffective anyway for whatever bullshit reasons?!! So why is Martin even dead if the red dust doesn’t even work anymore? What did he die of? Huh?! The only logical options that we can ascertain from events thus far are:

• Smoke inhalation
• Shame
• Rapid onset venereal disease

Why on earth did they have to ruin this character like this?* It’s completely unnecessary! It’s not the what, it’s the how! I’m not even opposed to the idea of him dying, there have been other versions of V where he died in far less ignominious ways. More quotidian ways even. In fact Kenneth Johnson’s original ending of The Final Battle had him sacrificing himself to save the planet from nuclear destruction. This would have been a much more fitting and actually in-character ending for Martin. And a million times better than that stupid sparklechild ending.

I’m absolutely fuming!

Doing this post I now know that recapping is a “difficult and time consuming process”. (Writing about history is much easier). I’m beginning to appreciate how much work Rob Matsushita, who has had some influence on my thinking about V recently, puts into his excellent recaps. Always insightful, funny and to a professional standard, Matsushita just finished recapping V: The Final Battle and V: The Original Mini-series. He’s even hinted he may do the weekly series. I will follow Matsushita many places, maybe even to TikTok, but that I’m not sure about.

Staring at this episode this long for the purpose of this recap has made me angry and sad, but also a more worrying thing has happened. It’s made me grateful for having the chance to notice all the subtle and fleeting acting choices Ashmore makes which I would not have seen otherwise. But in my appreciation of that I’ve started making accommodations. Once you start doing that, once you make concessions gradually but surely you find yourself accepting stuff that you would never have done at the outset. It’s a slippery slope and that’s the whole fucking point of the original mini-series. Don’t compromise!

Under these circumstances, I just can’t continue, not for a while. Maybe I’ll return to the series another time – maybe when Philip turns up. But for now I’m done.

Peace**

*Don’t look at me like that. His character was well and truly trashed before I came along with my shitty blog post.

**Don’t you come at me with that pretanama shite.