Previously on Defiance, Irisa Nyira shocked us all when she became the frontrunner for Best Alien Crush, even though she’s on a show with three perpetual AfterEllen Hot 100 contenders – but we didn’t get to know her very well because the town was under attack by the Volge and then the town was under attack by Ben’s semi-nuclear bomb and Stahma Tarr kept getting naked every other minute and hopping in the bath, and ain’t nobody complainin’ about that. Also, the old mayor kept trying to blow up everybody because she loves them so much.
Irisa is up on a rooftop in Defiance doing a little tai chi when a butterfly flits down and asks if she can have this dance. Irisa accepts, but her attention is drawn away when the Spirit Riders who saved everyone from the Volge in the pilot roll into town to do some shopping. The leader of the pack, a giant Irathient who is dressed like a steampunk muppet, runs up against some trouble in the market when his adopted daughter gets into a scuffle with a fruit and veggies vendor. He tells her, “You break it you buy it.” And she tells him, “Another idea is I’LL BREAK YOUR FACE.” Luckily, Irisa turns up and shuts it down before somebody gets hurt.
While she’s doing her dad’s job of keeping the peace, literal hell is breaking loose on the rest of the town. Some dumbass goes for a run in the woods in his shiny red Adidas and gets slurped down by some Hellbugs. Another dumbass has fallen into love/a bacon-greasy game of S&M with Kenya* and some Hellbugs burst out of his chest, Alien-style. And over at the Tarrs’, Christine has baked a delicious dinner for her soon-to-be in-laws that gets ruined by Datak’s misogyny and also another Hellbug attack. Christine, of course, goes after those demon insects with a fire poker while Alak hides his face in his mother’s bosom because almost-incest is how young Casthian men deal with every stress, apparently. Datak handles it in the end, though. Just him and his teensy-tiny charge blade.
(*Mia Kirshner is always the absolute best. In the brothel kink scene, she’s frying up sausages with one hand smacking around this guy with the other hand and also riding him and casting glances over her shoulder at one of those Kit Cat Clocks with the shifty eyes and wagging tail that is probably some kind of treasure post-Armageddon. Her voice is cooing him but also saturated with boredom and when the guy’s chest literally explodes, her face is just like, “Well, that was a damn waste of my time.”)
Deputy Tommy and Nolan figure out that somebody is rubbing Hellbug pheromones all over the townspeople as a very gross, very clever way to do some murdering.
OK, so that’s the main story this week, but it contains three parallel father-daughter stories inside of it. (Four if you count Mama Hellbug and her criminal gaggle of creepy-crawlies.)
Father/Daughter Pairing #1: One thing that Irisa has been struggling with for a long time, it seems, is that she is sometimes overcome by horrific fragmented visions. Even though they’re worse than ever – like, she keeps seeing this beautiful Irathient family getting hacked to bits on a sunny summer afternoon – she hides it from Nolan because every time she brings it up, he’s like, “Are you having PTSD again? I told you to stop having PTSD!” Steampunk Sukar (the giant Irathient) tells Irisa (the Little Wolf) that she’s not a nutter, but has instead been touched by the gods with the gift of Sight. He performs a hookah-infused ritual with her that grants her full access to the visions that have been haunting her. What she sees is the answer to the question of who’s slinging Hellbug pheromones all around town.
Father/Daughter Pairing #2: Who is slinging Hellbug pheromones all around town is Rynn, Steampunk Sukar’s adopted Irathient daughter. See, because when she was just a little kid, some humans from Defiance stalked her and her family out on their ranch and slaughtered them while they were lounging around in the meadow working on their insect collection. It was brutal and it was traumatizing. The humans murdered the Irathient family so they could steal their land and sell it to the McCrawleys for a pretty penny because it was close to the mines. The two dudes that were killed by Hellbugs at the beginning of the episode were the two dudes that murdered Rynn’s parents years ago. (It sounds pretty straightforward, but there’s some really nuanced race relations tension building here. Shades of atrocities committed against Native Americans, for one thing.)
Father/Daughter Pairing #3: Rafe McCrawley still isn’t feeling this whole Romeo and Juliet thing going down with Christine and Alak. It’s not just that the McCrawleys and the Tarrs are in competition for riches and political favor; it’s also that their cultures are so different. Humans, for example, like to bathe alone. (Which: Ha ha ha! I guess you guys haven’t seen the one zillion lesbians offering to do literally anything to get some bathtime with Stahma Tarr.) But Christine storms into his house in the middle of dinner to tell him Datak saved her ass from the Hellbugs even though she’s a lowly human. Also, Rafe discovers the land he bought from the dead human guys was land that was stolen from the Irathients, and so he thinks maybe he doesn’t truly have the measure of these aliens the way he thought he did.
All of this leads to Irisa and Nolan and Tommy and Sukar dropping 50 stories down an elevator shaft and fighting the Mama Hellbug. It’s straight up video game stuff. Levels, levels, levels, take down the Big Bad. They roll around in Hellbug shit for a while and then realize if they toss the pheromones at Mama Hellbug, her Hellbug babies will eat her alive. Easy enough!
After the town is saved again, Mayor Amanda Rosewater is awesome some more. She gives the Irathients the West Valley as compensation for the land that was taken from them. Rynn has to go to jail for a little while, even though everyone empathizes with why she did what she did, but it was the part where she started attacking innocent citizens out of anger instead of attacking her parents’ murderers out of vengeance that sealed the prison deal. (S’OK, Rynn, you’re halfway to Batman. Just keep plugging along.) And even though Irisa (rightfully) yells at Nolan for making her fear who she really is by confusing her god-given gifts with PTSD, he’s the one who holds her hand in the night when the terror of her real life memories haunt her sleep.
Next week: Syfy tells me it’s a Kirshner-heavy episode, so hopefully that means more sexual shenanigans, more flawless line delivery, and more batshit crazy outfits.
What did you think of this week’s Defiance? Have any of you guys picked up the Defiance video game yet?
