Sesame Street is Brought to You by the Letter "V"

I suppose I'd be remiss if I didn't at least mention this in passing. The remake of V, a series that cried out for such treatment ...

At first mention, I couldn't help but yawn. The original stunk on ice, so, oh, boy, let's have another helping! But there I had to consider Battlestar Galactica, didn't I? That original was a honker, too, but the remake threw out almost everything but a general idea and some names, and it turned out pretty good. So I lit the tube and watched some of the new V.

It ain't no Battlestar Galactica revision, folks. (Which, back in the day, we called "Gabblestar Bad-actor-ca.")

Save your neurons.

I dunno how they are gonna wrap it up -- I shut it off after fifteen bilious minutes -- but as I recall the original all those years ago, it had perhaps the worst reason de etra for any alien invasion story ever: The aliens came here to steal our water.

Oh, man, they are gonna steal our water!

Who could blame them? There's not a lot of water in the galaxy, is there? Kind of like a huge Sahara Desert, right? Right?

Sweet Mother Mary chasing Satan on a pogo stick, that is so incredibly stupid as to rank up there with the, Uh-oh-there's-gonna-be-an-eclipse-of-the-galaxy! story.

For those of you who disremember or flunked out of high school chemistry, a short refresher.

The original V(isitors) aliens were, albeit disguised, air breathers. They came across the galaxy in a space ship, which presumes a, you know, basic level of technology somewhat farther along than ours.

So the idea that they somehow missed the fact that Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe seems, I dunno, uh ... stupid? Or that if you take two parts of that most-common element and add one part of one of the main components of air and goose it little, what you get is -- wait for it, wait for it --

Water. And with a lot less energy necessary than fielding star ships.

Duh.

This is what happens when people who don't know any science, and not much about fiction, get turned loose to make science fiction shows. Yeah, yeah, it was an allegory about Nazis and Jews and all, but c'mon!

Skip it. Burn it. Load the ashes onto a rocket and shoot them into the sun, thank you.