The Visitors are Coming: V: The Series: "The Betrayal" (January 18, 1985)

In “The Betrayal,” Willie (Robert Englund) is wounded while attempting to contact another Fifth Columnist, Simon, and Diana (Jane Badler) presses her case for John (Bruce Davison) to impregnate Robin Mawell (Blair Tefkin) for the purpose of creating a second Star Child.

While the Resistance attempts to abduct a Visitor doctor to help Willie, Kyle (Jeff Yagher) learns that Chiang (Aki Aleong) is the real power in Los Angeles now, standing-in for his terminally-wounded father, Nathan Bates (Lane Smith). 

After Nathan is killed in a confrontation at Science Frontiers, and Robin learns she is not pregnant, all-out war comes to the once “Open City.”  

Accordingly, Ham (Michael Ironsides) and Robin makes plans to leave Los Angeles.

The cast massacre that commenced with Elias (Michael Wright) in “The Hero” culminates in “The Betrayal,” as the series loses three main characters and actors: Lane Smith’s Nathan Bates, Blair Tefkin’s Robin Maxwell, and most devastating of all, Michael Ironside’s Ham Tyler.

It’s fascinating that all the “pain” lands on the human side of the equation, but it would have been unthinkable to remove Diana, or Lydia from the format.  Badler's Diana is a series lynchpin (and the break-out character).  And without Lydia (and June Chadwick) the great Jane Badler would have had no one of consequence to play against.

It’s not difficult, perhaps, to see why Tefkin’s Robin gets cut.  She is not a fighter or a doctor, like Julie, and does not possess a unique set of abilities like Elizabeth.  Furthermore, she is not involved in any sort of romantic duo.  

Furthermore, writers have done her character no favors, especially in her last, brutal space in the spotlight.  She is nearly impregnated by a Visitor for a second time in "The Betrayal, and there’s an old saying: fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice…shame on me.  Robin doesn't transmit as either especially likable or especially smart.  She is no longer fits the "Anne Frank" character-type of the mini-series.

The loss of Nathan Bates occurs, I suspect, for pure cost-cutting reasons. I wonder if the producers knew the series was going to be canceled at this point, and so it was necessary to prune the cast.  If the Open City concept was done, there is simply no reason for the unaligned Nathan Bates to be involved in the series.  

The most grievous loss here, is, of course, Ham Tyler: one of the most popular and beloved characters in the V franchise.  

For me, Ham is a dramatic necessity because he often adds a sense of realism to the episode conflicts.  He’s not an idealist, he’s not a hero, and he's not a romantic lead.  He’s just a guy getting things done the best way he can, and trying to avoid layers of moral conflict.

I suspect Tyler was cut loose at this juncture because if you just look at the characters from a distance, he and Kyle serve what could be mistaken for the same purpose.  They each play the role of the guy reluctant to join the group.  If this is your viewpoint then Ham is redundant, especially given Kyle’s importance to Elizabeth.

What’s missed, largely, by the brutal cast/crew massacre of V’s mid-season is that every-time you remove a character of interest, like the morally-ambiguous but dedicated Ham, or the suburban girl grown up and trying to make her way, or the businessman just looking out for his bottom line, you start to subtract from the reality of the program, and often substantially.  Since we also lose Howard K. Smith of the "Freedom Network" in this episode as well, that's another net-minus.  His short news briefs made it feel that there was more to the world war than the action in Los Angeles.

So now -- suddenly -- you have two male action leads, a female lead, the resident alien, and the comic relief…and that’s it.  You don’t even have a person of color, anymore, among the human resistance.  

And so V’s resistance looks a lot less like real America, and more like a traditional Hollywood B-movie.

By subtracting these characters, the producers also removed the sources of almost all inter-character conflict.  Although the Robin-Kyle-Elizabeth love triangle was dropped long before “The Hero” and “The Betrayal,” losing morally ambiguous characters like Nathan Bates, Ham Tyler, and even to a degree Elias, means suddenly that the surviving characters have no one to rub up against, or chafe against.  Kyle can''t battle -- for form alliances with his father.  And Mike and Julie can''t argue a course of action with Ham.

At this point in V: The Series, the dramatic interest and initiative clearly moves to The Visitors, especially in terms of the next several episodes (“The Rescue,” and “The Champion,” especially).  Now the conflicts on the Mothership involving Diana’s ousting from power and (arranged) marriage to Charles become far more compelling than anything that happens on Earth, where everything is sort of…vanilla.

Other than the scenes involving Diana, Lydia and the Visitors, the final episodes of V are generally poor.  The L.A. Resistance seems to consist of five characters riding around Southern California in a van, and that’s it.  It’s just very underwhelming.

In a sense “The Betrayal” is really a betrayal because what V: The Series gains in terms of economy (and in terms of cut-throat drama…) it loses in terms of realism and interesting characters.

And yet this is undeniably a strong episode in context, and one followed by an even stronger one: “The Rescue.”  

The series has short term success here for the next few weeks, and then all the cast/character/budget cuts start to really hurt V in a dramatic fashion.

Next week: The unforgettable marriage of Charles and Diana in “The Rescue."