So the new Visitors premiered tonight

[Batman]

and I think I owe the makers an apology, at least so far (three episodes in, a format that will persist at least until next week, or so my TV guide claims).
For the first 20 minutes or so, I thought 'Oh Vee. conspiracy theory shit with aliens thrown in' , and technically, it is-only with the aliens being the ones behind the conspiracy, which I consider tolerably well done on hindsight and makes them slightly more important to the story.
Overall, especially if they keep the 3-episodes-a-night format, I'll be following this with interest.

Things I liked:
- The priest countering the 'We're all God's creatures' with 'So's rattlesnakes, doesn't make them good for us'
-Pilot Guy from Serenity Bad Guy waking up, finally remembering it was his partner who offed him, only to be offed for keeps by a resistance member
-there being a resistance to begin with
-The Priest asking 'why don't they just go ahead and destroy us?'

Things I didn't like:
-Half the people on this board (probably more) know that 'we came for a mineral abundant on your world and water' is so much horseradish for a society with interstellar travel capacity but it's never even mentioned, by anybody
-The motherships are tiny by 'I'll subjugate your world' standards. It's hard to scale with he naked eye but if these things are more than 1.5km x 1km, it's not by much (maybe a factor of 2 and I think that's pushing it). That's barely larger than a Star Destroyer. If you're taking over my planet I want big honking ID4 style citykillers.
-The Shuttles looked like spacegoing city buses, essentially. Granted they were but when you're an interstellar civilization, a little aesthetics can't cost that much (especially as the motherships looked at least marginally aero/hydrodynamic).

Things I didn't understand:
-Their 'We are so sorry for the damage in both property and lives we caused in coming here' would have been a lot more believable if they'd actually done something to avoid it to begin with-like park their ships 2 kilometres up instead of on the rooftops, and maybe call ahead that they were coming. It's not like the eventual commutes would have been impeded as the Visitors provided all of the airlift anyway and most commercial helicopters can make 2000+ metres with little problem
-Okay, they're no ID4 citykillers, but don't tell me nobody saw them coming before they popped up on top of the Empire State Building. What did they do, teleport there?