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“Defiance” recap (1.02): May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor

Previously on Defiance, half a dozen alien species affectionately known as the Votan hopped on some space-arks and fled the destruction of their own solar system only to arrive at earth 5,000 years later and find it occupied. They were like, “Er, hey humans – here, have some small pox-infested blankets. LOL, JK. What do we look like, a bunch of Christopher Columbuses? Let’s share your planet.” That worked for a little while, but then an Apocalyptic war broke out and some terraformers were unleashed and next thing you know, the planet’s ecosystems and land masses and bodies of water were a whole new thing. Nearly everyone was dead, so Han Nolan decided to start The Defiant Few and save some lives. Now he’s the sheriff of Defiance (formerly St. Louis), a town where Julie Benz is a human mayor, Mia Kirshner is a human madam, and Jaime Murray is a Castithan woman who really likes to take baths.

Here’s something you should know if you’re planning to marry Stahma Tarr and convert to Castithan-ism: If, one day, you should find yourself staring down an army of homicidal house-sized mutant aliens with only a handheld laser gun to protect you and you decide to flee for your life, your punishment will be public torture/death. That Castithan guy that bolted from battle last week is now tied up on some kind of stretching rack that allows his friends and neighbors to kill him slowly all day long. Nolan tries to break it up because it’s barbaric and also because Irisa has some serious torture PTSD she’s yet to reveal to us. Amanda agrees that it’s gross, but the last time they tried to legislate a safe thing that went against an alien species’ religion (mandatory vaccinations for kids), they had an uprising on their hands and it wiped out a nearly all of the town’s Irathients.

You can tell Nolan wants to fight about this (and then make up with some smoochies), but Amanda’s old assistant Ben has escaped from the hospital and headed down into one of Rafe McCauley’s mines with some explosives. They figure he’s heading into Old St. Louis – which is Regular St. Louis but underground now because of terraformers – to add his dynamite to a leftover nuclear power plant, the result of which will be: KABOOM! At first, Amanda’s like, “Look, I’ve got my tank top here, and my side-braid like a regular old Katniss Everdeen. I think we’re good.” But then she hears the part about the nuclear explosion, so she’s like, “Hang on a second.” And she adds a hat to her ensemble and that’s how we know everything is going to be OK. She flexes her triceps and sends Nolan and Rafe down into the mines to bring back Ben – “Alive, OK?”

As soon as Ben’s underground, Irisa marches right back to the Castithan town square to put a halt to the public execution. You know how in Skyrim you can loiter around Solitude when you first get there and watch that guy get beheaded or you can jump up on the platform and start hacking and slashing guards so he can get away, but then everyone in the whole town turns on you and attacks you? Yeah, it’s like that. I mean, the Castithan’s are stoning one of their best buddies over tea and biscuits; executing an angry little Irathient is nothing to them. Luckily, Deputy Tommy shows up and fires his gun and says he’s arresting the Castithan traitor for, “Er, loitering?”

Amanda decides  to stand up to Datak and his gang of thugs. She meets him at the jailhouse and says there aren’t going to be any more executions on her watch, and Datak is like, “Sure thing, sweetheart.” And he bounces.

So that traitor is safe for like four more hours.

Down in Old St. Louis, Rafe and Nolan bond over the cannolis or something they used to get before the town was blown all to hell and everyone died. They finally find Ben, and he is not looking good. Probably one of the hardest parts about being Indogene is staying clean. No red Kool-Aid for Indogene kids, I’ll tell you that right now. Rafe wants to kill Ben because Ben killed his son, but Nolan points out that Ben’s son was probably up to no good anyway, so maybe it was better that way. Rafe leans into mercy just as Ben leans into his gun. He’s dead in a second.

Meanwhile, Stahma Tarr is taking another in what is apparently a long series of endless baths in barely-there bath clothes. Datak’s all, “Blah blah blah tradition and blah blah blah money and blah blah blah power.” And, I mean, Jaime Murray is in the bubble bath with you, you twat. Shut the fuck up. You have literally nothing to complain about. Stahma tries to soothe him but I guess she’s not very good at it because she says, “Well, it’s not bad to let go of all tradition, is it? I mean, you were like a Dickensian street urchin before we left home, and you’d have been locked there forever, begging for more porridge, if Armageddon hadn’t come. You remade yourself on earth. Maybe we can remake other parts of our society here too.”

Does that ass listen? No, he does not.

The person who does listen is her son Alak, who just comes slouching into the bath chambers bitching about how Rafe convinced Christie to slow down their wedding plans. Stahma hops up, half-naked, and full body hugs him. Yikes, guys. That’s real weird.

True to her word, Stahma tracks down Christie at her waitressing job and has a lady-to-lady chat with her about how dudes are mostly the worst, but sometimes, just when you least expect it, some asshole guy will open up an an air chamber and flush your lily-livered fiance out into space and that’s how you know that guy is a survivor and you should ally yourself with him while the New World Order sorts itself out. Jaime Murray is pretty amazing in this scene. It’s like she knows she most definitely should not be shit-talking any men because it goes against everything her culture taught her, but she’s doing it anyway and is kind of thrilled by how good it feels. This is going to sound so weird but the giggly-naughty face she makes reminds me of when Dobby the House-Elf could finally talk smack about the Malfoys.

Over a pretty ballsy cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” Datak lets the Castithan traitor have dinner with his family before slitting his throat and depositing him on the steps of the jailhouse. Message: My charge blade is more powerful than your side-braid, Madam Mayor. (False!) Rafe finds a shit-ton of money and some kind of golden alien artifact in his dead son’s room, which means he probably was up to no-good after all. And Amanda leads a memorial service for the 41 people who were killed in battle last week.

I feel really nervous about liking this show so much. Usually when I like a Syfy show while it’s on the air, it’s a total kiss of death. (No one liked Caprica more than me, for example.) (And also, that’s why I watch Lost Girl elsewhere.) But Defiance has set the stage to be an epic sci-fi series. These inter-species struggles aren’t going anywhere, and the overarching mystery about why ex-Mayor Nicky is trying to blow the whole place to smithereens even though she loves the people, and we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of Irisa’s awesomeness, and you know Stahma Tarr is about to break right out of her gender role.

Oh, also, I saw some people last week being like, “Dude, no, I hated Jenny Schecter; I can’t watch this.” But what I didn’t say is that Mia Kirshner isn’t playing awful Jenny in Defiance; she’s playing sexy/crazy season five Jenny, but, like, with a soul.

What did you think of last night’s Defiance?

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