V "Fruition" Written by John Wirth and Natalie Chaidez Directed by Bryan Spicer Original air date: May 11, 2010

Anna stages the beating of her daughter and announces the departure of the Visitors from Earth.

Read the detailed episode recap at the V Wiki

Didja Notice?

The episode opens with a sign in an alley that appears to say "We (Heart) V's". Spray-painted over it is a circle with a slash, the universal "No" symbol, in green. Usually this universal "No" is red or black. Perhaps the green color of the paint is a nod to the Visitors' true skin.

After the off-screen beating ordered by Anna herself, we see that Lisa's legs are not just broken, but twisted sickeningly as she lays abandoned in an alley.

Besides the broken legs, bruises, and assorted cuts and scratches, Lisa also has a "V" cut into her face.

As Anna holds her beaten and bruised daughter and looks away from the nearby humans at 6:20 in the episode, her look of motherly concern turns into an evil smirk.

There is some great verbal byplay between Erica and Anna from 6:28-8:14 in the episode. Reading between the lines of each woman's speech, it can be seen that they are taunting each other (though Anna, for now, is a bit more in the dark about Erica's true motivations).

When Anna makes the announcement outside the healing center that she has made the decision to withdraw her people from Earth, a crowd-member carries a sign that says, "The V's are our friends." The similar slogan "The Visitors are our Friends" was used in the original V miniseries in the 1980s as a propaganda poster by the aliens.

A couple of times during the conversation from 15:57-17:29, Hobbes refers to Lisa as the "princess". This seems to imply he knows that Anna has been referred to as the queen among the Visitors' own kind. Is this an early hint that he has more knowledge of them than he lets on to the Fifth Column? 

At 19:30 in the episode, Hobbes tells Erica he's in Chinatown, across the street from the Jade Kitchen on Pell. Chinatown is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan with the highest density of Chinese ethnicity in the western hemisphere. Pell is an actual street in Chinatown, but there is no Jade Kitchen restaurant there.

At 22:07 in the episode, Decker reports on Prime Focus that the Visitors have started to pull out of the cities of Shanghai, London, Moscow, Rio, Xinjang, Havana, and Tehran.

At 23:45 in the episode, Gain Wah restaurant is seen near Dr. Parker's apartment. This is an actual restaurant, but not in Chinatown of Manhattan, rather the Chinatown of Vancouver, Canada where the series was filmed.

Dr. Parker tells Erica that he and some friends, working as an informal think tank, developed an organic compound intended to absorb carbon dioxide and slow down global warming, but it had the unintended side-effect of an algal growth that infected some fish, turtles, and amphibians. In answer to Erica's question about effecting reptiles, he answers "possibly". This may be the introduction of V2000's version of V80's red dust, a hybrid bacteria that was deadly to the Visitors. In the audio commentary for this episode, Scott Rosenbaum says that the intention was to have this compound help the Fifth Column gain some new information about the Visitors, but he wanted to avoid having an organism be the Visitors' downfall.

At 24:40 in the episode, a small bulletin board is seen hanging on the wall of Dr. Parker's cheap hotel room. Pinned onto it are what appear to be postcards, posters, and a calendar. From a distance, the postcards and posters all seem to suggest travel to tropical locations (one poster even clearly says Saint Lucia, an island nation in the Caribbean). Are we supposed to believe this is hotel decor? Has Dr. Parker been to these locations? It seems unlikely he would hang information regarding where he plans to go and thereby tip off any pursuers who discovered his room.

At 25:12 in the episode, Agent Malik looks suspiciously at Erica after her explanation that she received the same tip to Dr. Parker's location as the other FBI agents who have arrived after her. Perhaps the tip "from the restaurant owner across the street" was actually a lead provided by the Visitors and given to Malik personally, putting the lie to Erica's claim.

Erica's research reveals that all of Dr. Parker's associates in his informal think tank have gone missing, indicating that the Visitors have already gotten to them. This may be a subtle homage to the "conspiracy of scientists" propaganda used by the Visitors in the original V miniseries of the 1980s which resulted in scientists disappearing or being apprehended by the Visitors or collaborating Earth authorities.

Although he initially denies her request due to journalistic ethics, Anna continues to try to convince Chad to give her the name of his contact in the Fifth Column, but we don't see whether or not he finally caves in to her questionable logic.

The amassed soldier eggs on the mothership look similar to the egg chamber from the classic 1979 film Alien.

At 37:08 in the episode, a reporter from British World News (BWN) is seen on television. This is a fictitious organization.

The text message on Ryan's cell phone at 38:50 in the episode is from Dr. Pearlman and reads "Val's water just broke." This signals that the hybrid baby is about to be born.

Notes from the audio commentary for this episode by Scott Rosenbaum and Scott Peters on the Blu-ray set

The bird-like objects seen flying in the open atrium of the mothership are drones.