Well, here's a solution to the health care problem we didn't foresee.

Space aliens will set up clinics around the world and treat everybody for free. I have to admit, it's simple.

But the aliens no doubt have some ulterior motive in mind, probably involving planetary domination. Wait a minute! Isn't this idea really a not-so-sly attack against American health care? Or is it an indictment of the potential abuses of Obamacare? Or is it sliming fantasy-prone tea-baggers who are ranting that President Obama actually is an alien (of some kind)?

Those were a few of the dark theories tossed around at San Diego's Comic Con last summer, when ABC screened "V," the alien-invasion sci-fi series that begins its run this week. Not satisfied that it's just a TV show, merely another twist on the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” theme, fantasy fans were looking for something deeper. What they found no doubt reflected their own political inclinations rather than anything in the script. (“V” launches at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, on KGTV Channel 10)

Maybe they're right, though. Maybe there's more there than meets the eye. Personally, I'm thinking that "V" is just one more old TV plot rising from the dead and staggering clumsily across the landscape like another of George Romero's zombies. Networks have been on a fantasy-revival kick in recent months, usually to their own dismay. "Cupid," an oldie which returned on ABC, couldn't find enough love to keep it on the schedule. NBC took "Knight Rider" out for a ride that proved to be shorter than expected.

"V," (it stands for “visitors”) based on a 1983 miniseries forgotten by all but the most devoted sci-fi freaks, is all about aliens from some unnamed planet who arrive on Planet Earth unannounced, claiming they want naught but peace and friendship. Oh sure.

Their leader is an eerily, enigmatically dishy woman who calls herself Anna, played by sci-fi standby Morena Baccarin (“Firefly,” “Stargate SG-1”). After an alarming overture of falling airplanes, earthquakes and panic in the streets worthy of a Godzilla flick, Anna appears in the skies over New York and other spots around the world simultaneously, speaking in local native languages. France hears her in French, Brazil in Portuguese. (Easy for Baccarin, Brazilian by birth.)

“Don’t be frightened, we mean no harm,” she says with a chilly, impersonal smile. “We're truly anguished by the turmoil our arrival has caused. ... We are at peace, always.”

But her words reveal a stark, even threatening admission, if only by implication. Wherever they came from, she and her followers had to leave because they were starving. They’ve come for food. She doesn’t exactly say so, but she does say: “After we've replenished ourselves and shared with you what we can, we will leave you, hopefully better than we've found you.”

All this is intoned in a voice meant to be reassuring. But she sounds as personal and sincere as “Please stay on the line, your call is important to us.”

Within three weeks, the aliens have set up “healing centers” for the sick, not too different, intentionally or not, from the free clinics doctors have set up from time to time in American cities. When the possibility arises that patients are getting injected with something sinister they hadn’t planned on, so do the questions: Is this part of the plot a criticism of the state of American health care? Or is a warning against President Obama’s health care reform?

In a pilot intent on kick-starting numerous plots and characters, we also meet a priest who greets the visitors with suspicion, even though their arrival has boosted attendance in his dying church. A couple of teenagers who visit the mother ship are soon being invited to join what seems like a creepy cult, an FBI agent finds a dead man in a tunnel, a man in a wheelchair begins to walk, and a TV news anchor is offered a chance to “elevate his career.”

And wouldn’t you know it, a few people turn out to be not what they seem.