They say everything old is new again. This is particularly true in entertainment, as we now live in the Age of Remakes. Sometimes it feels like every other movie, television series, or song on the radio is something old that has been “reimagined”—a word that can send shivers up your spine if you have fond memories of the original.

I’ll go ahead and reveal that I always view such “reimaginings” with a healthy dose of skepticism. The storyteller in me asks if something was done right the first time, why does a new generation need to muck it up? The businessman in me understands that intellectual property that is already widely recognized has a built-in audience. And the geek in me was going to tune in anyway.

Battlestar Galactica is certainly one example of “reimagining” done well. It took the most basic ideas of the original series and used it as the basis for some amazing storytelling. While fans of the short-lived series cried foul at some of the changes—male characters turned female, human characters turned Cylon, the absence of children or muppet-like alient dogs—most of them were won over by the dark, rich, character-driven tale of the battleworn Galactica and its journey to Earth.

I could tell that the folks on V might have paid attention to the most successful scifi remake thus far, and took it one step farther. The original characters have been completely flushed. Fans of the old don’t even have familiar names to latch onto, only the general idea of alien Visitors who come to our world wearing smiling human faces, only to be revealed as sinister lizards bent on stealing our resources and harvesting us all for food. Some of the archetypes are still around—a journalist, a priest, a troubled teen, a good-guy Visitor, etc.—but their role in the story is so obviously different there is little need for direct comparison.

Before I start to pick nits, I’ll go ahead and answer the first question. Did I enjoy the reimagined V? The answer is an unqualified yes. The one-hour pilot was compelling stuff, had the production values of a feature film, a strong cast, and left me wanting more. And any sci-fi show that reunites Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk is all right by me. But, geek that I am, I’m forced to look at the new V not only on its own merits, but in how it compares to the original story that inspired it. So let’s tackle a few of them.

Too Short. One thing that the pilot suffers from a tight timeframe to tell the story of the arrival of the Visitors (now nicknamed the V’s to my irritation, but more on that in a minute), to establish the primary characters, and to set the scene for the series to come. Everything seems a bit rushed, and moments after the Visitors arrive we flash-forward several weeks to their power and influence spreading all over the planet Earth. Minutes later we learn they are reptilian villains and that our heroes are the ones who must stop them. A two-hour pilot would have been more than justified with such a big story and allowed us build up to some of the big moments.

Reptilian Reveal. Speaking of moments, something that I was really anticipating in the new V really let me down. I’ll never forget the first time we learned the Visitors weren’t like us. Jane Badler opened up her mouth and stuffed in a live guinea pig. That was followed up by a hand-to-hand struggle between Marc Singer and one of the Vistors—whose face was ripped away to reveal green scales underneath. That was a holy crap! moment.

In the reimagined series, we’re told the V’s are reptiles before we see it. So when our FBI agent heroine bashes one upside the head and we see the reptilian flesh beneath it doesn’t carry the same impact. I would have much rather the resistance leader insist on the “test” (wherein flesh was cut away from peoples’ skulls) without explaining why.

The Red Spraypaint. If I had to the one thing that actually bothered me, it would be in how the iconic red logo is used in the story. It carried far more emotional weight in the original incarnation of the story.

The original V was a allegory of the Holocaust, with our alien Visitors standing in for the Nazis. The colors of the alien uniforms, the symbol on their flag that more-than-a-little resembled a swastika, the Visitor Youth recruitment centers, the persecution of specific groups of people (the scientific community), and hidden “processing” of human captives.

Understandably, the new incarnation of V is a post-911 story. Our heroine is an FBI agent who hunts down terrorists. We learn quickly that the Visitors have been hiding among us for years, sleeper agents slowly working on the alien agenda—making the world a less stable place full of confusion and fear so that when the face of Anna (played superbly by Morena Baccarin) the world would look to them as saviors.

As part of the V’s cult of personality, websites are encouraging “tagging” of the V-symbol to help spread their message. So far the Visitors are called V’s and the V itself is their symbol, dark and sinister as it represents deception and oppression.

Another of those iconic moments from the original V was that of the old Jewish Holocaust survivor, Abraham Bernstein chastised some houng hoodlums who were spray painting graffiti over Visitor propaganda posters. He snatched away the can of paint, and as a young boy I assumed the grownup was simply trying to stop them. But instead, the painted a red V himself. V stood for victory, a symbol of hope that evil can be pushed away. It became the symbol of the resistance and represented the struggle of our heroes against foes that seemed completely unstoppable.

We’ve only had one hour of V thus far, and I’m grateful that there is plenty of time to tell the new version of this story. We’re promised that the primary themes and some of most iconic moments of the original will be represented, and you can be sure that I’ll be tuned in to cheer our heroes on, to who else might be revealed to be an alien in disguise, and to see who lives and who gets eaten.

And to see if the good guys can get their logo back.

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See more about Jamie Chambers and what he’s written for the Smart Pop series here.

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In Television, V