V “Red Rain” 

Okay, I don’t want to out-of-the-gate pan the season premiere, but I’ve either been away from the show WAY too long, or the rhythms were just a little bit off. The pacing was all over the place, and some of the plot stuff was just awkward, but all in all I was glad to have the show back. Big ups for casting Reaper’s Bret Harrison. I’ll go ahead and say let Erica have a run at him because boyfriend is still ridculously cute.

The Good:

• Badass Erica
• Wiseass Hobbes
• Earthbound Ryan
• The aforementioned casting

The Bad:

• Bi-polar Anna
• Weird staging of the love scene for Tyler and Lisa
• Not enough Jack with the group

We begin with a nightmare as Erica tries to reach Tyler in the middle of a red rain that has felled every one in the city, only to have his face melt off a la Poltergeist when she reaches him. She wakes up at her desk, and it’s later the same day from the finale all those months ago.

The world’s in a dither about Anna’s red sky, and then red rain, but she’s not talking. Onboard the mothership, she’s going ever-so-slightly bonkers, not conferring with her underlings, and threatening Ryan with the safety of his lizard daughter before booting him back to earth. When Marcus suggests Anna speak to the other V heads about her plans, she invites them onboard and then goes apeshit all over them for questioning her, beating one to death with her tail.

Erica ferries Tyler up to the Mothership when a rally goes sideways (under the guise that he’s hurt and they can heal him). Once there, she tries to talk to Lisa, who says she doesn’t know what’s up but will try to find out; she quickly learns the name of a professor and gives that to Erica as they hug goodbye. Erica goes back down to the city and leaves Tyler onboard. At Anna’s behest, Lisa commences wth making up with him while Anna watches from another room (ewwwww) and then praises her “performance of her duties” (again, ewwwwww).

Chad grows a pair and goes to see Jack about becoming a member of the Fifth Column because he’s got hours of video of people talking about their abuse while part of the Live Aboard program. Jack tries to convince him that he needs to stay in Anna’s good graces instead of making himself her enemy.

Erica and Hobbes welcome Ryan back and then take him along to the college where a professor’s been working on the red rain issue, only to find that it’s not a dodgy old prof they’re looking for but a hottie young prof, Sidney Miller (Harrison), who found a V skeleton on a dig and has had him sequetesred away in a lab, running tests and whatnot, and his use of his fellow professor’s computer got him flagged by the Vs. The 5Cs bring him up to speed fairly quickly after dispacthing a V tracker. When he suggests that the phosphorous levels in the red rain indicate V tampering with humans, Erica twigs that maybe she was altered while pregnant with Tyler because she also had high phosophorous levels. Miller says he could test her, so she just cuts her hand open and tells him to do that right now.

Marcus tells Anna that her surviving progeny are failing but could live in a challenged capacity. She mulls that for about a minute before she nukes all of them, shuttting down their life support. Marcus is a bit alarmed and as she turns away from him and back to us, we see that she’s actually terribly upset about it. She heads down to the basement of the ship where Diana (Jane Badler‘s in the HOUSE) emerges in ridiculously high stilettos and a red gown, and Anna calls her “mother.” Mama doesn’t look happy. Oh, and Joshua’s been restored, but he denies any knowledge of his Fifth Colum shenangians, and Lisa’s all “uh oh” after she tries to speak with him and realizes she may have tipped her hand.

And that’s the setup for this season. I’ll be watching for the 5Cs, but the ship stuff was just overly arch. I also don’t want all of Jack’s scenes to be with Chad this year. Get him back in the field. The ratings were so-so. If ABC gets antsy and yanks the rug on it, I hope all 10 episodes still air this spring.