The Bernstein patriarch insisting they protect the Maxwells is certainly very powerful. But his Visitor stormtrooper in training grandson Daniel lives there, there was zero chance he wouldn’t discover them.
So, what's the Headscratcher? Why did he do it anyway? He makes that pretty clear: as a Jewish man who watched his people rounded up by Nazis and lost his wife in a concentration camp, he cannot simply stand by and watch the same thing happen to someone else. And maybe he hoped some pointed reminders about his family history would keep Daniel from becoming Mr. Model Visitor Youth.
Yeah, but why didn't the patriarch explain any of that to his grandson? Even the father didn't know the truth of the family history. I'm guessing Daniel just found out about them too fast?
Why did the Visitors want to harvest people for food as opposed to, say, cows (or horses, for that matter)? Yeah, there's more people than cows, but cows are also four times the size of people (and would be far easier to raise for food). Are we just that much more tasty to Visitor palates than beef?
Considering that the Visitors are basically space Nazis, I imagine they want to eat people For the Evulz. Them being reptiles, eating humans isn't cannibalism. If all they wanted was just meat, then (as we saw in the first episode), visitors can be satisfied with merely eating rodents. Reducing humans to livestock is just another way of establishing their superiority over us.
And even if so, what about Gorillas or other Great Apes? Surely they must taste similar. Hell pork probably tastes a lot like people given the similarities in our omnivorous diets, natural habitats, and anatomy (people used to get pig hearts transplanted in them). And that's not even going into the question of stealing water from the one place it would be missed - as opposed to, say, melting down Pluto or one of the outer planets' moons. MASSIVE Villain Balling going on there.
Well, there aren't more than 6 billion gorillas and apes, and once they have the people, they can round up the cows and other animals without a fight. If they start with the food animals, people will revolt, and it would make imprisoning them more difficult.
And trading what they'd consider obsolete tech for a few million cows would be far easier still. For that matter: simply Zerg Rushing the planet, taking what they want, and zooming off would be easier. Again - Villain Ball.
Having just watched V again, I think we all forgot an important tidbit: The Visitor ships travel at sub-light speed. With that in mind, it would be ridiculous and unnecessarily costly to travel 20 years round trip for a simple raid. The poster above me but one had it right, round up the people (or at least get them under control first) then take what you want. As to the water thing - well, as they're here anyway, they might as well grab that too. This is actually an ingenious bit of Fridge Brilliance (assuming you ignore some of the DNDR statements about the preciousness and rarity of water).
And why start a war with an entrenched humanity on their home turf, who would likely promptly unite in the face of an extraterrestrial aggressor, when you can dismantle them with a little guile and subterfuge? No matter what technological superiority you have, if you want to take and hold ground you need boots on that ground, and it's a lot easier go where you've been invited in peace and friendship then where you have to kick in the door and fight off everyone trying to eject you.
Those are some good questions, including the comments about the population of humans out-numbering the gorillas. I don't think I considered that when I first saw the mini-series or the series that followed, but if I had to speculate the concept if it was reality, I think it would make sense to take the humans. Cattle needs to be herded, but humans who think they're going to get to visit another planet will herd themselves to wherever you want them to go.
I feel like just getting a buttload of rodents would be more practical as they can eat anything, are easily stored and can quickly replenish their numbers. More than likely the creative team made them eat people because it was scarier.
The Visitors are depicted as unhinging their jaws the way snakes do. Snakes need a pretty specific size of prey. Too large, like a cow, and they can't swallow it. Humans would still seem to be far too large, unless the Visitor the spent several weeks or months just lying around digesting, too full to move around much.
The Visitors might like gamey tasting meat, and human probably tastes really gamey, even larger sedentary ones. They might also be planning to eventually colonize Earth considering that other than too much light, it seems quite compatible with their physiology. Their taking over the chemical industries might actually not have been the simple ruse it was described as.
I know it's mostly just the limited special effects of the 1980's, but looking at it in-universe: how can the Visitors articulate their fake human mouths so well when they can barely move their own jaws judging from how they look when their human faces are ripped off?
And in the same line of thought, why is it that their human heads and hands are larger than their lizard heads and hands?
Um, if the human skin was the disguise, you'd expect the human heads and hands to be larger, so they'd fit around the lizard ones. Did you mean to put it the other way 'round?
You can always handwave it by saying that all the Visitors had to undergo some type of plastic surgery in order for their human disguises to fit. Such things could explain their mouths, hands, and (for the females) breasts.
That would be a good explanation, except that most of the lizard faces and hands of the Visitors that are shown on the show are the ones that have previously been shown as passing for humans.
Maybe the visitors made small inroads into Time Lord technology and their costumes are only slightly Bigger on the Inside.
It's also possible that the Visitors don't actually articulate the false face. Maybe the disguise is more than just a simple rubber mask. It could have microtechnology installed inside it that's making the mouth move and stretch.
What Happened to the Mouse? Sean runs off to his grandma's house and spills the beans. The very next day the resistance attacks with mortars and weapons. I sure hope he was hiding in a closet or something...
Well, he did appear in the weekly series, so he obviously survived the assault.
Why did the visitors disguise themselves? I know the in-universe reason is so that we'd trust them but even back then most people knew that aliens wouldn't anything like us, so more than likely that would make us even more suspicious. Plus, if they shown their true appearances right from the get go then we wouldn't be aware that they could disguise themselves like us and thus allow them to infiltrate and undermine our society.
Reptiles Are Abhorrent. Sure, it would be a very freaky (and questionable for those in the know) coincidence that aliens look just like us, but the subconscious ease we would feel interacting with those who look like us would be a powerful tool that wouldn't be available in their natural reptilian state. Depending on how much research they'd done on humanity beforehand, they may have believed humans would never really trust lizard-looking aliens, or even attack outright based solely on "they're so ugly, they must be evil!"
Since The Final Battle ends with our heroes in control the LA Mothership, it's safe to assume that they freed everyone in cryogenic stasis. So why doesn't Sean's mother ever appear again or is mentioned? For that matter, Daniel would've been among them too (assuming he wasn't eaten right away for his apparent betrayal).
Two things about Daniel: 1) Had our heroes found him imprisoned, he would not be worth rescuing; and 2) it actually is implied that he gets eaten right away for his apparent betrayal.
So, Willy was trained in Arabic, presumably to operate somewhere in the Near or Middle East, but was given or chose the name "William" and got a skinsuit that looks like Robert Englund. How bad was that bureaucratic mix-up?
They probably trained au natural and only got issued their human skinsuits shortly before they left the ship. He may have been assigned the name Willie along with the skinsuit.
How does Ham know Daniel killed Ruby? It occurs in a hidden stairway in the mansion that the resistance only barely penetrates. Unless I missed something, my only guess is the idiot Daniel bragged to his supposed girlfriend Maggie about it.
The novelization states that's exactly what Daniel did.
