The fall finale of V aired last night, and it's safe to say it went out with a whimper.

I realize this is quite the turnaround from my glowing review of the pilot, but the writers haven't managed to maintain the momentum that the pilot delivered. Yes, we found out right away that the Visitors are secretly lizard-things, but have we seen that since then? Not really. Do we have any more idea of what their plan is? Other than being eeeeevil, no.

Even more frustrating is that they've given even more airtime to annoying Tyler, who is such an oblivious brat that I want to change the channel any time he's on screen. The problem is that V is completely predictable: we all know that Tyler will get sucked into the Visitors' plans, but then he'll realize it's all crap and try to take them down, and his lizard girlfriend Lisa will feel torn between her duty to her race and her love of this loser, and eventually love will win out and they'll join the resistance. Yawn! And until then, we have to deal with their relationship, which I don't particularly care about, and with Tyler being an ungrateful, disrespectful brat to his mom, who is TRYING HER BEST, DAMMIT. It's not a storyline I care about because I feel like I already know exactly where it's going and I don't want to wait a whole season for it to get there.

And speaking of storylines anyone could predict, even if you didn't watch the original V series, who didn't know that Valerie would turn out to be pregnant? Memo to TV writers: everybody knows that when a female character claims she "feels like crap," it means she's pregnant. It's not a surprise. Yes, she's unknowingly pregnant with a half-human, half-alien baby (or CREEPY LIZARD TWINS), but you need to come up with better ways to get the story where you're going. If the audience feels like they're smarter than you (and smarter than your supposedly smart characters), then they'll tune out.

Now, since producing the first four episodes of V, ABC has replaced the showrunner, which I hope means the show will get better when it returns after the Olympics. The network brought in former Chuck executive producer Scott Rosenbaum to liven up the show, and from this interview, it seems like he at least understands what V needs to become if it wants to survive:

I’m going to probably do the show a little more visceral, it will be a little more fast-paced, it will be learning more of the mythology and the history of the Vs. In my mind, viewers are very advanced at this point, and I want them to come to “V” and see, A, stuff they can’t see anywhere else, and, B, also feel like they’re getting storytelling that doesn’t feel retread or old, that’s, frankly, exciting... my goal is that in every single episode there will be an “Oh my God, I can’t believe that happened” moment, or a “Wow” moment – at least one – in every single episode. And I think that would not only be a mythology plot reveal, but also a character reveal.