YMMV / V (1983)

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• Anvilicious: Nazi allegories, including:
  • A Nazi by Any Other Name: The Visitors' plan to wipe out humanity, albeit by turning most of them into food and using a minority for slave labor.
  • Putting on the Reich: The Visitors dress in fascist-inspired uniforms using red and black as dominant colors.
  • What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: The Visitors' logo is just two strokes away from being a swastika. Also there is the Nazi-like propaganda that they employ against scientists.
• Awesome Music:
  • The miniseries' main theme by Joe Harnell, for which the composer was nominated an Emmy Award.
  • The moody main theme from The Final Battle by Barry De Vorzon sounds both alien and fascistic and the same time, reflecting the Visitors' nature as a Reptilian Conspiracy of alien Nazis.
  • Both of the regular series' main themes by Dennis McCarthy. Both feature minor-key synthesizers (representing the Visitors) contrasted with major-key brass instruments (representing the resistance) to epic effect.
• Ass Pull: At the end of V: The Final Battle when the mothership is set to explode resulting in an Earth-Shattering Kaboom, Elizabeth suddenly uses some sort of psychic/magic powers to stop the nuclear meltdown.
• Complete Monster:
  • Diana is the former lover of the Visitors' militaristic Leader and the real power in the invasion force. Diana is the architect of the plot to harvest humans for food after draining Earth's water, dealing with any potential threats via the horrific "conversion procedure" where she personally oversees these tortures, during which the victim is haunted with vivid nightmares until they've either been brainwashed into obedience or rendered a vegetable. Diana delights in performing experiments on her prisoners, organizing the discrediting or murder of any who may pose a threat to the Visitors while performing further painful brainwashing procedures. Nor are humans the only ones who have every reason to fear and loathe her. When cornered, Diana shows no compunction murdering even her own people to escape and survive.
  • The Second Generation, by Kenneth Johnson: The Leader, military dictator of the Visitors, won her place at the head of the Visitors via her charisma, but eventually simply resorted to outright murder and jingoism to keep control. Initiating brutal intergalactic conquests, the Leader approved Diana's cruel schemes and infiltration of Earth with intent to genocide humanity and turn them into food for the Visitors. Arriving on Earth herself, she has one young volunteer to the Visitors murder an alien Zedti POW before trying to use humankind as shields against the Zedti fleet before wiping them out as well.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A prominent V propaganda poster has the tagline, "Friendship is Universal". V was originally broadcast on NBC. In 2004, NBC was merged with Universal entertainment. Three years later, NBC launched an environmental campaign, "Green is Universal."
  • The episode "The Sanction" was obviously inspired by The Karate Kid (1984) (which was just hitting theaters as it was being written) with Klaus being a stand-in for Kreese. The plot of The Karate Kid Part III (released five years later) bears considerable resemblance to this episode.
• Moral Event Horizon: Daniel Bernstein steadily becomes worse as he joins the visitors, using his newfound power for petty acts of cruelty and to threaten other people to get what he wants. He eventually kills Ruby Engels, an old woman who was spying for the resistance in the Visitor Headquarters, in cold blood despite her pleas to him to let her go and how she's known him since he was a kid. That action is portrayed as the point of no return for him; the resistance sets him up to be killed when they raid his house later on.
• Narm: The reptile baby. It's meant to be repulsive and terrifying, but the puppet is so awkward and silly-looking you can't help but laugh.
• Special Effect Failure: The animatronic used to show Diana swallowing a guinea pig whole. It stands out as jarring among otherwise remarkably good effects work for the era (even the above-mentioned lizard baby is oddly endearing in its Narm). At the time, though, audiences didn't notice how fake the effect looked, since they were reacting in shock to Diana swallowing the guinea pig. No one saw that one coming.
• Spiritual Adaptation: Of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. The original idea for the show, titled Storm Warnings, lacked the sci-fi elements and would've been an even more overt adaptation, the villains being a homegrown fascist movement. The producers thought it would be more resonant if it were about a Soviet conquest of America (which later became the plot of another miniseries, Amerika), which Kenneth Johnson thought would defeat the entire point, so he retooled the villains into alien invaders, with heavy focus given to their human collaborators.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The main theme from The Final Battle has been described as sounding like Peter Gabriel's "Rhythm of the Heat" crossed with Brad Fiedel's Terminator theme by way of John Carpenter.
• The Woobie:
  • Willie was a minor part of the original miniseries and The Final Battle, but was so popular with fans they made him a regular on the subsequent television series. He's one of the first of the Visitors to join the Resistance, he speaks broken English ("English is not well to me. I learned Arabic for going there.") and at the end of Final Battle his human girlfriend dies in his arms after she takes a laser gun blast in the chest to save him. He's got a perpetual hangdog look and in the series he wears a bow tie!
  • Elizabeth's scale-skinned twin could have been this, if the puppet had worked better and not made his few appearances look so silly. Born with a deadly infection to the sound of his mother's horrified screams, never given a name, and with no one willing to care for or even touch him except Willie: whatever his looks, the poor kid was screwed from the very start.

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