The Buzz on Morena Baccarin

The remake of the sci-fi show "V" that premiered on ABC raised many a mystery. One of the biggest: Who is that woman?

Even if you didn't watch the season opener, you may recognize Morena Baccarin from the promos for the show: She's the enormous serene head projected on a hovering spacecraft with a message to earthlings: "We mean no harm."

But don't you believe it. What you can believe is this: The actress is scoring out-of-this-world searches on the Web. Lookups on the rising star soared up an astronomical 4,580% in one-day searches on Yahoo!, making the "V" headliner one of the top five searches on the Web. The buzz is paying off: A whopping 13.9 million viewers tuned in, making it one of the highest-rated new shows this season.

The leggy actress is the head of the V (for visitor) alien invasion, a reptilian species — masquerading as human — that brings health care, technology, and, oh, yeah, a secret plan to take over the planet. (You can catch up with the show and the characters courtesy of the LA Times' roundup.)

Brazilian-born Baccarin is not new to sci-fi. The 30-year-old actor played the role of Inara Serra in Joss Whedon's 2002 space-western series "Firefly," and more recently she played the villainous Adria in "Stargate SG-1."

The original "V" miniseries from the 1980s imagined what would happen if fascism overtook America. The old version's beautiful but evil leader was played by Jane Badler. In the remake, the beautiful but evil leader channels a more modern bad guy: The corporate executive armed with a PR campaign that Enron would have envied.

Check out the opening of "V," where the star's enormous, well-coiffed head is first projected. With that warm smile coupled with chilling plans for world domination, we're betting that resistance to the star — and the show — will be futile.