Cut to Lt. James leading a Visitor patrol through Los Angeles. He’s in a jeep, because as everybody knows, aliens love jeeps, and he tells one of his men to search a van. And this entire clip is reused from a previous episode, “The Rescue”. Which means we’re less than ten minutes in and I’ve already spotted three different uses of stock footage. This is not a good sign.

Cut to the Mothership, where the camera is focused on one of those balls with the static electricity, where you touch it and it generates an arc to your finger. A plasma lamp. These things were used a lot in Space Mutiny. Actually, by this point in the series, V was only slightly less ridiculous than Space Mutiny.

Below the ball, there’s a bubbling bowl of punch. This can only mean one thing: Visitor office party! Yeah, baby!

Lydia is pouring herself a glass of bubbling punch, and apparently she’s quite sloshed on the stuff already. Lydia didn’t appear in the previous episode I recapped, but real quick: she’s a Visitor officer who either worked for Diana, or was Diana’s superior, depending on the week. She’s really just there to be a rival to Diana and shamelessly imitate the Joan Collins/Linda Evans dynamic from Dynasty.

Lydia is played by June Chadwick, who went on to be a regular on Riptide, but her most famous role (other than this show) is when she played Michael McKean’s Yoko-esque girlfriend in This is Spinal Tap.

Both Lydia and Diana are dressed in shiny evening wear, and Diana addresses the party, explaining that they’re here to celebrate Slutor (“the annual perigee of our sun-star”) as well as the completion of the Battlesphere, which will allow the Leader to directly transmit his battle plans and blah blah blah. Frankly, this Battlesphere thing is just the MacGuffin of the Week and it really doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to do.

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