V "Unholy Alliance" Written by Rockne S. O'Bannon Directed by Dean White Original air date: February 1, 2011

Erica goes after the leader of the radical faction of Fifth Column; Anna is granted an audience in the Vatican.

Read the detailed episode recap at IMDB

Didja Notice?

The three murdered Peace Ambassadors have had their heads covered by rubber alien masks. The face is that of the classic gray Reticulans (alleged to be from Zeta Reticuli, the binary star system in the constellation Reticulum) of alien abduction lore.


Seeing the murdered Peace Ambassador bodies hanging upside-down, Director Kendrick comments that the same thing happened to Mussolini. This is a reference to the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who ruled Italy from 1922-1943 and who was killed and displayed in this manner by the Italian resistance of WWII in 1945.

At 2:52 on the Blu-ray, OOCL (Orient Overseas Container Line), Evergreen, and Triton shipping containers are seen parked near the riverway.

At 6:25 in the episode, Anna's shuttle is seen to have some triangular light panels in a V-orientation.


Erica's new partner, Agent Bolling, comments on Erica's last two partners having disappeared and should he now be worried? She jokingly replies, "Depends. You a Mets fan?" This is a reference to the Major League Baseball team the New York Mets and would imply that Erica is a fan of the local rival, New York Yankees instead.

At 9:51 in the episode, we once again get a glimpse of a USA Today newspaper machine. They must be a sponsor of the show!

The bloody mess Father Jack finds in a box from the radical faction of Fifth Column is flashed on the screen only briefly, but it is a butchered lizard head (looks like a large iguana), symbolic of the killing of Visitors.


At 14:32 in the episode, the news chyron at the bottom of the TV screen reads: "...positively in Anna's statement...Anna reiterates message of..."

Anna asks the V sleeper priest, Father Moreau, "Do you believe the body can exist without the soul?" From this question and her later discussion with Diana, the meaning of the Visitor phrase "Those of the body only" seen in "Hearts and Minds" and "Serpent's Tooth" begins to become clear. It seems that the Visitors have come to believe in the existence of the human soul which gives humanity a sort of eternal life, which the Visitors do not believe they themselves possess; they have no soul to continue after the death of the body. The priest's answer to Anna's question is "...without it (the soul) we would be nothing more than animals." Anna also looks troubled after hearing his answer, perhaps fearing her people's own mortality in comparison to humanity's alleged immortality.

The news headline on the WNT web page on Tyler's laptop is:
ANNA AT THE VATICAN
EXCLUSIVE
REPORTER CHAD DECKER TRAVELLING TO VATICAN WITH ANNA
The text of the article itself is too small to read.

At 18:18 in the episode, a restaurant called Italian Job Pizza is seen. This does not appear to be a real restaurant in New York, but there was one such place in Vancouver, Canada, where the show was filmed. The restaurant is now closed.

Ironically, the first time we see the classic spray-painted V in the current series, it is used by pro-Visitor individuals, not the anti-Visitor resistance. 

The symbol on the statue's hand at 23:07 in the episode appears to be the Hebrew letter Tsadi, which also represents Tsadik, "righteous person".

Father Moreau's ring has a symbol of four triangles forming a larger one.
 

Father Moreau's statement that he will only tell Diana what he's learned is the first time Anna's mother is actually identified by name by a character in the series.

Moreau tells Diana that among all those that they have bred with, the human soul is truly unique. This implies that the V's have bred with a wide number of alien races and they have not previously found themselves to be susceptible to the emotions of those races, as they have been with the humans.

Moreau's statement to Diana about her survival in detention for 15 years seems to imply that by embracing human emotions, the Visitors can develop souls of their own.

At 38:22 in the episode, a world map is seen on a computer monitor in the New York Fifth Column hideout. A number of cities are marked on it and it seems likely that these are meant to indicate the locations of the 29 motherships known to be on Earth (of course there are more, apparently cloaked ones, present since the second fleet's arrival at the end of "Red Sky"). Actually, there are a couple of cities missing if we accept all the mothership locations as depicted in various episodes: Sydney, Australia (as revealed in "Pound of Flesh"), and Florence, Italy (as revealed in "Red Sky"). From all these, it would appear that there are more than 29 motherships hovering over Earth cities; perhaps it is simply that some of the ships have moved around to different cities over the course of the aliens' visitation? The 29 cities on the map in this episode appear to be:
Vancouver, Canada Los Angeles, US New York, US Mexico City, Mexico Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Lima, Peru Santiago, Chile Buenos Aires, Argentina London, England Berlin, Germany Paris, France Madrid, Spain Rome, Italy Moscow, Russia Lagos, Nigeria	Johannesburg, South Africa Nairobi, Kenya Cairo, Egypt Ankara, Turkey Baghdad, Iraq Tehran, Iran Karachi, Pakistan New Delhi, India Bangkok, Thailand Hong Kong, China Shanghai, China Seoul, South Korea Tokyo, Japan Jakarta, Indonesia

At 41:57 in the episode, a bottle of perchloric acid is seen in Cohn's cabin. This is a real world, highly corrosive acid, which was presumably used here to dispose of Malik's reptilian corpse.

At 44:10 in the episode, the news crawl on the TV screen is the same as the one seen earlier at 14:32 and reads: "...the world react positively to Anna's statement...Anna reiterates..."

The title of this episode, "Unholy Alliance", refers to both the Fifth Column's alliance with Eli Cohn and the Vatican's bargain with the Visitors.