An observation on neo-V

[dvandom]

While I may be reading too much into Morena Baccarin's performance as Anna, it seems like she brings a sort of "Wait, I thought I debugged that?" confusion to scenes where people don't swallow her "I'm a friendly alien here to help" act. Where John in the original series brought a sort of blustering politician's BS to things, underlying it was a fairly human set of emotional responses. With Anna, it feels like she's running a human emotion emulator instead, leading to mild confusion and internal bugfixing when it misfires, rather than to an intensification of blathering. A brief pause where she's not quite there in the conversation before she patches her script and starts running it.

Comments

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

Well, she is acting a script (both in reality and in character) so it makes sense that when things don't work according to that script, she momentarily gets thrown off a bit. Plus, there's no way to be sure that the emotional responses of a non-human intellegence match up exactly. They may be roughly the same, but who's to say the exact triggers work in the same way? It might take a minute to think of which response was the appropriate one. You don't want to decapitate something when slapping it would work better socially.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Exactly. It enhances the feeling of alien-ness. The Visitors in the original were basically human under the skin (that was under the fake skin). Some of them were naive (i.e. the one who got drunk, IIRC), but while their motives were sinister their emotions were pretty much human. The neo-Visitors are faking those emotions, their own set being too different from ours to trust.

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

I do wonder if that will be a plot point later. Things like body language, emotional responses, and so on are so variable among real species, the confusion between two different sentient ones, even ones that are good actors, must conflict at some point. Like how some fish flash red to say "Here I am, do you want to follow me?" while the same red flash in a duck can mean "I am going to try to attack you. Run." Heck, even in humans, a guy I knew who was a reporter during the first gulf war was thrown out of a restaurant bodily after he said everything was "OK" and gave the gesture, which they interpreted as the evil eye.

Then later in V we find out that they've been totally honest the entire time, "We are of peace" in their language meaning "You look like food, we're going to eat you." and the visitors have to admit, humanity certainly reacted in a disturbingly friendly way to that pronouncement. Really creeps them out...