I usually only say this in the privacy of my own home to my girlfriend who has sworn to love me regardless of my glaring flaws, or when I’m half-drunk to a few trusted friends, but I feel like it’s finally time to declare it out loud for the whole world to hear: I like Defiance way more than I ever liked Battlestar Galactica. And I will be bereft if Syfy decides to forgo a third season so it can throw its money at more Sharknado stuff. The show has never been better that it was for the last two episodes of season two.
It goes like this:
Nolan spends a full hour dragging Tommy, whom Irisa shot right in the chest, back to Defiance. You know Tommy’s a goner because he keeps flashing back to these golden moments with Irisa when he was proposing marriage and she was proposing he stop being such a sentimental sap and take off his pants. Also, Nolan finally begrudgingly admits that Tommy is not a kid, that he’s just a really good dude with a really good heart in a really fucked up incarnation of earth. When Tommy finally dies, Nolan loses it. And so does Berlin when Nolan finally arrives at the stasis net with Tommy’s body in tow. (Berlin just crushes it in these final episodes. We have to keep her.)
Across town, Pottinger cooks Amanda a fancy dinner and then takes her out into the woods for a surprise, which is: Stahma and Datak tied up at the bottom of a silo. Pottinger says they’re the ones who killed Kenya and so how romantic is it that he’s brought Amanda here to exact her revenge on them. He hands her a gun and gaily skips back out into the forest to wait on her. This clown is more psychotic than all the Tarrs combined.
Ah, but gods bless the Tarrs. They start off the episode in bed, post-canoodle. Stahma tells Datak she’s happy to invite him back home as long as she can still run the business, bathe by herself, be the bossest ass bitch you ever even heard of. Datak refuses, of course, because when has the patriarchy ever willingly agreed to give up power. Next thing you know, they’re tied together in the Silo, shouting delightfully about their various offenses against one another. But those crazy kids really do love each other. (In a Frank and Claire Underwood kind of way. If Frank and Claire Underwood were suddenly drugged with some kind of amphetamine that made them have more feelings than a lesbian bee-farming commune in Vermont.)
When Amanda is circling them with a gun, Datak pleads with her to take his life because it was on his orders that Stahma killed Kenya. And, for her part, Stahma confesses that she actually really did love Kenya. That it was more than just an affair. Datak’s face when she says that. He seriously had no idea. (Prick.) But Amanda does worse than killing them; she tells Stahma that Kenya’s gift was knowing what people wanted and needed to hear, that she never, ever, ever loved Stahma back. She saves them because she doesn’t want to give into her Hunger Games instincts, and also because it would cause a crime lord vacuum in Defiance if they left, but to protest Pottingers batshit insane romantic gesture, she walks back to town in like some nine-inch heels.
To celebrate their reconciliation and the fact that they’re still alive, Stahma and Datak obviously murder their inner circle.
Way down under Defiance, Doc Yewll is still on the run with her dead wife’s imaginary ghost. It is amazing. Doc Yewll is so amazing. She fights with Liv about this and that and whatever thing. The food is contaminated with shrill. Liv cheats at cards. One thing they can both agree on is Meh looks awesome in her fur hat. They are forced to go hiking underground to try to find more food, and they ultimately find themselves face-to-face with the Kaziri. The ship hijacks Yewll’s hallucination of her wife, so Liv pleads with Meh to just hop into one of the Kaziri capsules and let her rain down her reckoning on earth and then she’ll bring Liv back to life. Yewll is in charge of her own damn imaginary manifestations, thank you very much, so she pulls out her ego implant – which kills her wife’s ghost – and hops back above ground to try to save the world.
The world, by the way, is getting blown the heck up by Irisa. She’s sitting on a hilltop playing with levitated stones, tapping them and sending them zooming toward this (also levitated) rock, which is causing spaceships in the earth’s orbit to unleash some intergalactic WMDs and propel them toward earth. First stop: New York. Irisa for real wipes it out. Destroys everything with purple lasers and plasma bombs. The music is angels. It’s a fantastic sequence of destruction.
In the finale, that Irathent guy Irisa smooched a couple of weeks ago, the one who was with her on the Kaziri ship a zillion years ago, he’s conveniently in Defiance on business, so Nolan shepherds him around by his neck, convinced that if he puts Mordecai in the same space as Irisa, they can get at least one piece of the Kaziri out of her and back into him and then she’ll stop blowing up planets for giggles. Like what their exact twin ancestors did ages ago to keep the earth from being terraformed into a Hellbug paradise.
Doc Yewll has a different plan that involves shooting Irisa with some magic crystals that will kill her and stop her from exacting genocide on the planet. Amanda, I guess, is the best sniper in town, she so and Pottinger plan to roll out and find Irisa and shut this shit down. Nolan and Amanda spend an hour pointing their guns at each other and locking each other up and breaking free from getting locked up, and finally Nolan is forced to knock out Pottinger and Yewll to make his plan work.
He and Mordecai and Irisa make their way down into the Kaziri and shut it down the same way they shut it down in the flashbacks: by lying side-by-side and opening their mouths and letting the Kaziri shove itself down their throats. Turns out that little Irathent that’s been plaguing Irisa is just the hallucination from ship, and all Irisa has to do is be like, “Shh. Shh. It’s OK.” And that little murderous child just fades away. She should’ve thought of that months ago! But the ship doesn’t give up without a little more emotional torture. Irisa confronts Ghost Tommy, who tells her what Liv told Meh – all Irisa has to do is let the Kaziri carry out her plan and she’ll bring Tommy back from the dead. But Nolan whispers the truth into her ear and she believes him and she brings down the ship.
I mean, for real. She literally breaks the ship into a zillion pieces with her mind and it comes crashing down around her and Nolan’s ears. When it becomes obvious that he can’t save them, he picks her up in his arms and tells her how much he loves her.
Christie and Quentin’s mom, Pilar, doesn’t care about the end of the world. She visits Rafe in jail and promises him that she’s not a fucking psycho anymore, but that is a lie. She spends the entire finale trying to get Christie and Alak to run away with her to a land of imaginary horses, even stopping by the Tarr’s to remind Datak that he used to be a card shark and Stahma used to clean her toilets, before just flat-out kidnapping them. It’s a shame. Datak and Christie were getting along so well after she called him out on smashing Alak’s hand in that record-pressing machine and he called her out on throwing Treasure Doll from the top of the arch. (What? It was a joke! He thought it was funny!)
Once the kidnapping is underway, Stahma and Datak break Rafe out of jail – or, well, they stop a firing squad from gunning down him and Berlin (who showed up to try to stop the firing squad also, but just got lined up next to Rafe like a common criminal and not an E-Rep captain). When the Tarr’s shoot down the E-Rep assholes, they toss Berlin a gun, all, “We need Rafe, though; family emergency.” And she stands out in that field in the middle of the night, drunk as everything, and laughs so loud and hard and long.
To a cover of “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down,” Amanda finally does it with Pottinger; the Tarrs and Rafe chase Pilar and the gang through the countryside; Berlin gives a toast to Tommy; and Nolan and Irisa find themselves trapped in one of those Kaziri cubby-holes, which means they’re actually still alive.
All in all, a great season of a show that gets better and better every week. Season three, please!
What did you think of Defiance‘s second season?
