humanoid aliens...SNOOORE

As an aspiring scriptwriter, this is very true. Creating a tv series is much harder than people think.

winter is coming.

No it actually isn't insanity. Again, any creature than can survive on our planet would most likely come from a planet with a similar environment. Otherwise the air here would be as poisonous to them as the air on Saturn would be to us.

Would they look exactly like humans, probably not. But similar, sure. And in this show, the human form was camouflage. But their lizard form was still humanoid & resembled earth lizards, which are still a species we are used to. That was my point. To assume that any alien creature that comes here HAS to look complete different from anything we have seen is silly. Sure, some could, but they probably wouldn't survive long in our atmosphere.

Peter Gibbons: "It's not just about me, & my dream of doing nothing!"

Why is it insanity? Given that we're talking about fictional representations and creations here, there are ways to explain why aliens might look like humans, or at least why they might be humanoid or resemble other animals on Earth. A good background myth is that there are direct connections between humans on Earth and aliens on other planets.

Popular sci-fi franchises like Star Trek and Stargate have added backstories involving ancient events where humans were either brought to different planets or an advanced race (or some higher power) seeded many planets with humans or human-like creatures. Is this plausible? Who knows? It's just fiction and it does help to explain why aliens might be humanoid.

There is no hard and fast rule about alien depiction. Even though mathematicians and theoretical astronomers assume that there must be alien life, we haven't discovered any such life to date. So first off, we still can't say conclusively if there is alien life. Then even if there is alien life, we don't have the faintest idea what it looks like or how it operates. Given all that, fiction writers are not bound by strict rules about any such alien life. There are even fewer rules when the intent is not to depict how aliens might look, but to explore social, philosophical and political issues through the genre of science-fiction.


"V" apparently began with the political novel "It Can't Happen Here" about a Huey Long-type character who becomes elected President of the United States and turns the U.S. into a fascist state, similar to Nazi Germany. The title refers to the common belief that dictatorship and authoritarian rule cannot happen in the U.S. because America is somehow unique. (The "City on a Hill" mythology.)

Other alien replacement/human-looking aliens stories like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" played on the real-life fears that American society and government were being infiltrated by Communists and sympathizers/spies for the Soviet Union back in the 1950s. The idea was that Communists could look like anyone else, and so could the aliens in the story.

Is all this realistic to portray? Your guess is as good as mine or any of these writers. Every show or movie involves some artificial elements and a requirement to suspend some disbelief. For example, how can we watch private meetings and conversations anyway? Would there really be a camera in all of these private rooms? This is an artifice in any genre. Then you go on from there, adding more potentially fanciful elements. A writer/producer can go too far and make the story and production too unbelievable. But sometimes it doesn't really matter.