Why did the Visitors want to harvest people for food as opposed to, say, cows (or horses, for that matter)? Yeah, there's more people than cows, but cows are also four times the size of people (and would be far easier to raise for food). Are we just that much more tasty to Visitor palates than beef?
Considering that the Visitors are basically space Nazis, I imagine they want to eat people For the Evulz. Them being repiles, eating humans isn't cannibalism. If all they wanted was just meat, then (as we saw in the first episode), visitors can be satisfied with merely eating rodents. Reducing humans to livestock is just another way of establishing their superiority over us.
And even if so, what about Gorillas or other Great Apes? Surely they must taste similar. Hell pork probably tastes a lot like people given the similarities in our omnivorous diets, natural habitats, and anatomy (people used to get pig hearts transplanted in them). And that's not even going into the question of stealing water from the one place it would be missed - as opposed to, say, melting down Pluto or one of the outer planet's moons. MASSIVE Villain balling going on there.
Well, there aren't more than 6 billion gorillas and apes, and once they have the people, they can round up the cows and other animals without a fight. If they start with the food animals, people will revolt, and it would make imprisoning them more difficult.
And trading what they'd consider obsolete tech for a few million cows would be far easier still. For that matter: simply Zerg Rushing the planet, taking what they want, and zooming off would be easier. Again - Villain Ball.
Having just watched V again, I think we all forgot an important tidbit: The Visitor ships travel at sub-light speed. With that in mind, it would be ridiculous and unnecessarily costly to travel 20 years round trip for a simple raid. The poster above me but one had it right, round up the people (or at least get them under control first) then take what you want. As to the water thing - well, as there here anyway, they might as well grab that too. This is actually an ingenious bit of Fridge Brilliance (assuming you ignore some of the DNDR statements about the preciousness and rarity of water).
Those are some good questions, including the comments about the population of humans out-numbering the gorillas. I don't think I considered that when I first saw the mini-series or the series that followed, but if I had to speculate the concept if it was reality, I think it would make sense to take the humans. Cattle needs to be herded, but humans who think they're going to get to visit another planet will herd themselves to wherever you want them to go.
I know it's mostly just the limited special effects of the 1980's, but looking at it in-universe: how can the Visitors articulate their fake human mouths so well when they can barely move their own jaws judging from how they look when their human faces are ripped off?
And in the same line of thought, why is it that their human heads and hands are larger than their lizard heads and hands?
You can always handwave it by saying that all the Visitors had to undergo some type of plastic surgery in order for their human disguises to fit. Such things could explain their mouths, hands, and (for the females) breasts.
That would be a good explanation, except that most of the lizard faces and hands of the Visitors that are shown on the show are the ones that have previously been shown as passing for humans.
What Happened to the Mouse? Sean runs off to his grandma's house and spills the beans. The very next day the resistance attacks with mortars and weapons. I sure hope he was hiding in a closet or something...
Well, he did appear in the weekly series, so he obviously survived the assault.