A bit disappointing to say the least. The first miniseries blew me away (I watched it recently and had never seen it before), sure some parts have definitely aged, particularly the action scenes but nothing unforgivable. The second miniseries was decent, it was more of the same, however I don't rate it as high as the first one because the ending was almost a Deus Ex Machina.
Either way, I still came into this show blindly hoping the new format would benefit the show in some fashion, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. The show simply has too many goofs and glaring issues that brought it down, not all episodes are bad but you have to make it past the 7th episode for it finally start getting good.
First of all, it's never explained why they needed Diana in order to reverse engineer the Visitor mother-ship when there's plenty of members from the fifth column still around, some of which had ranks almost as high as Diana's such as Martin. On that note, it would have made more sense if Diana had escaped and returned with an entire fleet after adrift for a while, although if she was able to call for backup from Earth why didn't she do it when the resistance boarded the mother-ship on the last episode of the second miniseries?
We never get to see the army fighting and the show implies heavily that most of the fighting is being done by common folks around the world, it is understandable that we don't to see armies fighting in the miniseries since it's established that the whole world is under martial law and in this show LA becomes a demilitarized zone, however this show doesn't just take place in LA and we still don't see any army besides guerrillas and the resistance.
It is never explained why the visitors can talk normally all of a sudden.
It is never explained why the visitors keep disguising themselves as humans when we all know they're lizards. (Maybe it's something to do with resisting the sun's rays, either way it's not the audience's job to explain the show). In all honesty, it feels like a missed opportunity as they could have explored an infiltration story arc, there is an episode where the visitors start attacking common people under the resistance banner and an episode where there's a mole but neither of these are the same thing. Ironically, this show premiered on the same day as Terminator.
There's an episode where Julie and Donovan make contact with other resistance members somewhere in the California coast, turns out these resistance fighters must have lived under a rock in the past years because they don't trust Julie and Donovan because "they don't know who they are", after defeating the visitors the first time one would think that both of them would have on every newspaper, every talk-show on TV and radio and that there would be celebrations and homages in their honor.
There's another episode where in order to get some information out of Donovan they pull a charade where Diana makes him believe she's actually Julie and uses Donovan's son as part of the charade. But in the first miniseries they established that Diana has a very effective truth serum, so why waste time with this charade?
In the final episodes there's a trial by combat between Diana and Lydia that ends up being a huge waste of time because it gets interrupted and voided. And even if it had continued, who were we supposed to cheer for?
Not all episodes were bad, without going into too much detail there's a few episodes where we explore how other humans can be almost as much of a threat as the visitors, we see episodes where humans in collusion with the visitors extort, enslave and betray other humans.
Despite all these issues, I was still bummed out that this show was cancelled on a cliffhanger, I wanted to see more, that final episode made me want to see what the leader looked like as well as Amon and if we were gonna see what the Visitors' planet looked like.
Review by FinFanBlockedParent2017-02-07T13:30:43Z
The original series was great. I loved it then and it is still great. It is a TV classic. Back in the day in was a real event. It really had content that meant something. The continuation was OK to get the story further and in a way to a satisfactory conclusion. It should have ended there because the show was crap. At the end of The Final Battle with the glowing Starchild that should have been the indicator to quit. That was totally 70s. But I watched it in the past. I tried to re-watch it now but I simply could not.
The whole plot is conviniently adjusted to make the show possible at all. The scripts were typical 80s TV show, weak with low content and repetitive. Logical and continuity errors where high. And the re-using of material from the mini series doesn´t even matter at that point. What´s really tiresome is the bitch war between the two Visitors. Dianas typical bragging around and then failing again and again is wearing thin fast, too. Not that other new characters they introduced for the show were a plus. Overall it´s not something I needed to watch again.
So my overall rating is a combination that comes together like this:
Original Series 9/10, The Final Battle 7/10, The Series 4/10. Since the series makes up the most running time I gave it an average 6/10.
But, again - I highly recommend both Mini Series.