Well just when you thought last week’s episode, The War of Illusions wins hands down as the worst episode of the franchise ever, this week’s episode says “Hold my beer.”

Admittedly The Secret Underground isn’t another “ship in a bottle” episode, meaning it doesn’t rely on recycling clips and stock footage like War of Illusions, but it could well be a “shit in a bottle”, meaning it’s an episode so bad we had to coin a new category for it.

I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions that Faye Grant had an ongoing, yet unsuccessful, campaign to end her run with the series. In interviews Grant later recalls how she would pounce on writers and producers as soon as they arrived on set with various ideas on how to write Julie off the show, to the point they started running and hiding when they saw her coming.

The tenor and direction of the series went towards camp, which made me sad. I would harass Dan Blatt on a weekly basis with new, brilliant ideas to kill Julie off. Sometimes he’d see me coming on the WB lot and run away.

Faye Grant

I love the image of this, and like to picture the petite blonde actress crouching in bushes outside producers’ homes dressed as a ninja, inveigling herself into their children’s birthday parties concealed in a piñata, disguising herself as the rabbi at cousin Bobby’s bah mitzvah and ripping her fake beard off just before the reading of the Torah yelling “How about if Julie got ingested by an intergalactic jellyfish while setting Diana’s hair on fire?”

I digress.

Anyway, I can’t help but feel like The Secret Underground is the producers way of sticking it to Grant for all this constant hassling. Because the plotline for Julie this week is the worst trashing of a character in V we’ve seen for a long time. Because if Faye Grant thought Julie ending up with Donovan made her character look weak (and she did), things are about to get a lot worse. In this episode, Julie can barely concentrate on what’s going on around her, not because she’s suffering ongoing trauma from being converted. No. Because she’s suddenly reunited with some bloke she banged back in college.

This is Julie’s ex: Unremarkable Steve. He’s a proper scientist. He has pictures from the Little Golden Book of Dinosaurs on the wall.

The show is clearly very pleased with itself for making what it thinks is a “feminist statement” because Julie’s character rejected this idiot when he wanted her to be his docile wee wifey. The feminist stance is somewhat undermined by the fact that Julie behaves like a ridiculous little ninny, daydreaming about the time she spent dry-humping this totally unremarkable dude and anticipating a time when she’ll have the honour of cleaning the skid marks out of his undies again, Wow guys, who did you get to write this weeks script? Andrea Dworkin?

The version of Julie in this episode is a mere husk of the kick-ass resistance leader we all know and love. And Faye Grant’s acting is clearly telegraphing just how shit she thinks this is, it’s like they got Cillian Murphy to act from inside the Earl suit in Men in Black. Underneath the cold dead eyes of this hollowed out Julie is an intelligent actress desperate to get out of this show, by any means possible.

Why don’t you tell us how you really feel about the show?

Don’t worry Faye, this will all be over soon.

So remember the *computers* we had in War of Illusions? (And nonsensically the Visitors getting everything done by handing round bits of paper?) Well, we’re back to that because this week’s MacGuffin is a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk. It has some list of something or other on it, I dunno, Carrie Fisher’s phone number or something, who cares? The point is everybody wants it.

The disk starts out in the possession of a dying fifth columnist who manages to somehow run into Philip just so he can tell him on his dying breathe that the disk is “in the volcano”. “I don’t know what you mean!” The Inspector-General tells the dying man. Because there’s no way Philip could possibly make the connection between these cryptic last words and the crappy, yet very hard to miss, volcano sitting in the middle of the “Ramalon” room.

That volcano doesn’t look too well. Not helped by the fact it’s got a Fifth Columnist dying all over it.

I figure Philip is like a lot of men of his station, and doesn’t have a clue what most of the shit he’s got in his house is, but it seems to keep the wife happy. Or maybe Philip has numerous volcanoes decorating numerous rooms in his quarters and it’s hard to know which one the dying man was talking about?

What we can confirm is that Philip has slopey shoulders, meaning if he can get out of doing any work, he will. Because instead of getting off his duff and checking his various volcanoes (anteroom volcano, bedside volcano, urinal volcano) he quickly agrees with Donovan that the only way to find the disk is for Julie and Mike to disguise themselves as lizards and go up to the mothership to look for it for him. Because people who are actually alien reptiles looking for the disk on the mothership would arouse too much suspicion! (Yeah, you heard right.)

It’s during this conversation that we see Julie zone out at the mention of Unremarkable Steve. I don’t blame her. We get a flashback of her and Steve on campus, canoodling by a fountain while we hear Marc Singer and Frank Ashmore’s voices over this imagery. Oh, arty, the show is trying to up it’s production value maybe. Think what endless possibility of soundtrack could be spliced over this flashback?

“Julie! Is your funnel cake delicious?!”

Meanwhile Diana, Lydia and Oswald are jizzing their pants about yet another Visitor holiday, this one is called Ramalon. We’re promised this holiday will be a bathhousesque riot of sex, intoxication and violence but in reality will probably be Badler, Chadwick and Elbling standing round a limp Boston fern, drinking Tang and catching up on the latest episode of Knots Landing.

“Are we awake up there?”

Diana has worked with Oswald to organise “a surprise” for Lydia. We suspect this is very similar to the kind of surprise Stalin arranged for Trotsky when he was in Mexico. I’m pleased that for once we’re acknowledging Diana and Stalin have something in common. They’re both so thoughtful.

The surprise is Lydia’s brother Nigel is here to visit. Apart from the awkwardness this is going to cause at the upcoming orgy, Lydia initially fails to see any issue with her brother being present for Ramalon. Until she realises Nigel is intended to be the blood sacrifice, because it’s tradition. Naturally she is suddenly super attached to Nigel, who we’ve never heard of, she doesn’t remember how old he is and we will likely never hear mention of him again.

Lydia and Nigel are getting a head start on the festivities of Ramalon it seems.

Mike and Julie soon arrive on the mothership, disguised as humans disguised as lizards disguised as humans. Yeah I’m not following this either. Nor am I sure why they wouldn’t just let Grant and Singer sit this one out while other actors with rubber lizard faces did their scenes for them.

They soon meet up with Unremarkable Steve who is working on a virus for Philip because… Oh look time for Julie to zone out and have another flashback. Take us with you!

And now another trip into the inner world of Juliet Parrish.

Anyway Lydia soon approaches Philip and accuses him of being a traitor again to get him on side to save her brother from slaughter at Ramalon. Lydia and Philip sip on some cocktails that the prop master probably thought looked “futuristic” but just come across as “big girl’s blouse”.

“Tell me Lydia, does this cocktail make my hands look bigger?”

Philip agrees that eating your brother isn’t nice. I’m guessing Martin’s corpse is pretty far gone by now and not the freshest. He’s going vote against eating brothers in the next Visitor referendum on the topic which seems to make Lydia happy.

Who wants to see Faye Grant get her kit off! Yeah?! Well bad luck. She only strips down to a boiler suit in this episode, you dirty little bastards. Julie vacillates between take-charge vixen and mooning idiot. In this scene she seduces James because “it’s the only place on the ship they haven’t looked yet”. Honestly? Not even behind Diana’s snake display? Under Lydia’s cockroach jar? In one of Philip’s many volcanoes?

And now for the most arousing annual gas certification visit Lieutenant James has had in his life

But then Diana discovers Julie in James’ quarters and takes her away to interrogate her right next to the Ramalon volcano. Donovan and Unremarkable Steve go all MacGyver and start cooking up some explosives because what could go wrong having pyrotechnics on an alien space ship hovering above Los Angeles?

They use explosives to spring Julie who has now found the floppy disk. The three humans escape back to Earth where Julie becomes cotton-headed again and starts going on about leaving the Resistance for Steve. She’s fortunate she has Unremarkable Steve to mansplain to her why that isn’t a boss-feminist move.

Fuck me! I know it’s the 80s but my god is this the most condescending drivel I’ve seen written for a female character in a long time.

Let’s move on to the brother eating scene! Oh relax no one is getting eaten. This isn’t Yellowjackets. (Although I wonder if Lydia would feel better about things if they gave her first dibs, like they did with Travis and Javi?}

The good news is that Nigel is laid out topless on a glass table held up by what looks like a monument to the Leader’s bollocks. It also looks like someone, probably Oswald, is a big fan of the Joy Division 1977-1980 compilation album. Oswald just went up a notch.

Unfortunately Philip turns up and tells Diana this is going to be a vegan Ramalon this year and she’ll have to make her pavlova with aquafaba instead of eggs. Yeah, it’s true, Philip is a total buzzkill.

Things quickly descend into trading of playground insults as Philip threatens Diana with court martial if she ever calls him a traitor again, something he really shouldn’t act so touchy about if he doesn’t want to draw focus.

Diana backs down and lets Nigel live. Only to flounce out of the room calling him a traitor anyway! And Philip …. does absolutely nothing. What a wasted opportunity!

I don’t know labour laws in the States but this is how we fire people in the UK.

Let’s face it, compared to Martin, Philip is rubbish. At least Martin had a couple of goes at killing Diana. Which I’m now beginning to see might have been the best outcome for Liberation Day.

Martin kills Diana. Mike wakes up and Martin explains he was hit on the head by a pine cone and “it was all a dream” à la Dallas. The two go back to normality the next day and the rest of the show is them driving around LA weighing their genitals on a pair of portable kitchen scales they borrowed from Elias and squabbling about who’s got the biggest balls. It would be far less damaging than the past twenty episodes.

Thank god it’s all going to end soon.