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“Defiance” recap (2.5): Everybody’s Gayliens, Deal With It

I’m sorry I missed recapping last week’s Defiance; if only I had Hermione’s Time-Turner I could write about every awesome TV show in the world. Alas, I do not. But there are only a couple of things you need to know before we hop into last night’s Gayest Episode of Television Possibly Ever.

Last week, Rafe McCawley’s godson and a couple of his Badlands buddies hijacked Mayor Pottinger’s transport and killed everyone but Pottinger and Berlin, a thing that led Rafe to acknowledging how his godson had gone to the Dark Side something fierce, and so he shot him in the back and was kicked out of his house by the E-Rep as a reward. While Pottinger was melting down about getting pissed on by the Badlander and possibly molested by Votans when he was at boarding school, Amanda comforted him with a confession that she, too, had been raped – something that led to her getting pregnant, having an abortion, and never telling her fiance, British Connor who died last season. Datak went full Castithan Old Testament when Stahma asked him to make her his partner in literal crime, and so she had him berated and beaten, publicly, twice. While he was lying on the ground out in the mud after his second walloping, she leaned down and whispered in his ear: “Fives need to listen when a ten is talking.”

Amanda is tripping balls on Blue Devil in the bathtub when the candles go out and creeper noises start echoing in her apartment. She is assailed by a man in a ski mask telling her she’s his and trying to rape her again, but she pushes her attacker out the window. She is fucked up real bad, emotionally, so Nolan promises to find the guy who did this to her and let her push him out a taller window. Amanda doesn’t want any supervision from Tommy or Irisa, but the next day she finally returns to wearing her Braid of Justice because she’s ready to start fighting again.

(It’s loose, though, the Braid; she’s still very undone about Kenya’s death and also drug-addled from all the alien meth.)

Datak’s only friend on earth, Doc Yewll, patches him up after his own thugs beat the shtako out of him. The whole time she’s bandaging his leg he’s reading the Castithan Crazy Scrolls* and talking about how he ought to cut out Stahma’s organs and serve them for supper. Yewll is like, “The patriarchy of your planet makes the patriarchy of this planet – before we destroyed it, obviously – look like fully realized third-wave feminism.” Datak says he’s murdered people for saying the word “feminism” out loud in his presence before and Yewll pats him on the head and goes, “Good, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Now burn your stupid holy book and fix your shit.”

(*TM Meh Yewll)

On her way home, somebody calls out to Yewll, first name-checking her and everything, all, “Meh!” (Which is pronounced “May” and not like the word that means “eh, whatever.”) Who it is is Yewll’s former lady love, Lev, a thing that throws our favorite misanthropic Indogene off her game like we’ve never seen before. She says Lev isn’t welcome and Lev says it’s cool, she won’t stay long, she just dropped by to say she’s dying.

The next day in the market, Amanda is looking ratchet as hell (but still better than me or you on our prettiest days, to be honest), but she spares a minute of time for Nolan, who just wanted to say that he thinks she’s basically the worst and pales in comparison to loving, fiery Kenya in every way. He roughs her up and tells her she’s his and obviously she is hallucinating hardcore, so she hits up Pottinger to ask if maybe his last batch of adreno was laced with magic mushrooms or something. He says nope, she’s just having bad dreams because of the heat. The E-Reppers take her to Rafe’s, which they’re now using as some kind of home base for their Evil Empire shenanigans. Nolan meets her there and says there’s no sign of a struggle or break-in at her apartment, but there’s drug paraphernalia all over the place.

Whoops. Busted.

For the best, though, really.

Tommy and Irisa babysit Amanda while Nolan goes off to do sheriff stuff, but of course Tommy gives her a gun when another one of her hallucinations flares up and she shoots them both. Irisa heals herself on the sly, but lets Tommy bleed for being dumb enough to equip a crazy person with a firearm and also for the petulant little tantrums he keeps throwing about how she left him.

Amanda escapes into the night once she realizes she’s gone on a shooting spree. Nolan blames Pottinger on account of he thinks there’s alien roofies in the Blue Devil he keeps snorting with her.

So Rafe has definitely moved in over at the Tarr’s place and the bathtub is freaking him out, and that’s before Stahma climbs on in there with him giggling about how fast he gets sprung. She’s all coy and head-dippy and our home is your home and Casti women wear clothes in the bath because only men are permitted by Reyatso to be naked (which, sidebar, is ridiculous and makes me think Reyatso must be the blindest god to ever god) and if you lay your grimy hands on my son again, I strangle you with your own cock. That kind of stuff. Martha Stewart hospitality stuff.

Their funtime tubtimes are interrupted by Datak who shows up to perform some kind of Casti penance and gets punched in the head by Raga for his effort. When he’s finally allowed inside, he supplicates himself and makes his hands bleed with power crystals and for some reason it really, truly means he can move back home and watch over the embryo in Christie’s uterus even though he won’t be reinstated as the Head of the Household. Christie is like, “Your gods are so dumb, man.” And Stahma is like, “His gods are not my gods. Beyonce guide me.”

GAY TIME!

Yewll runs a bunch of tests on Lev and determines that she has Televisual Lesbonic Fibrosis, a peculiar stran of human bacteria that afflicts all homosexual women on television. The survival rate is only 7 percent. Lev says she didn’t come here to get cured; she came here to: a) get forgiven, b) get closure, and c) get sexed. She rubs her head against Yewll’s head all alien-seductively and Yewll is like, “You know I still haven’t developed an antidote to my pants catching on fire, so stop that!” They decide to take a walk in the night instead of staying in her lab and bandaging Castithans who keep getting their skulls cracked by their superior wives.

Christie goes looking for Alak at his radio station and finds way more than she bargained for. Like what she bargained for was tracking down her husband and telling him what a dick his dad is, but what she gets is the Diedre, the night porter turned disc jockey. At first Christie gets all weird and proprietary about Alak, but Diedre just laughs that off and they bond over how Datak Tarr is just the fuckin’ worst, what is with that asshole, etc. Christie goes, “No matter how many times I cook their weird food or how hard I try to learn their weird language, they treat me like an outsider.” And Diedre, no joke, is all, “You know what’s better than Castis keeping you on the outside? Letting a human girl inside.” Christie blushes because Diedre means exactly what Christie thinks she means. (What she means is scissoring.)

Mayor Pottinger finds himself on the receiving end of a hallucination that leads him down a dark alley where Connor Lang is waiting for him. Pottinger tries to play it cool, like, “Hey, ghost bro.” But Connor cuts right to the chase. The twisted, gay chase. Turns out little first form Pottinger was deeply, irrevocably in love with sixth form Connor back in boarding school, a crush that turned full-on obsession when Connor held him and promised him nothing would happen when the Votan sacked their school. So what did Pottinger do? Oh, you know: Followed Connor to New York and raped his fiance and stole the hair from his hairbrush. Zombie Connor calls Pottinger a sick little pervert and vanishes into thin air. Yikes, man. Darker than I expected. Way darker than I expected.

But wait! There’s more! Datak swaggers into the Need/Want, face still busted, and kisses this Irathient dude full on the lips talking about how he wants something strange. They go upstairs and Datak says the Irathient guy has a hot bod but weird breath and then sits on his sex swing and talks about how he needs to get in touch with the Votan Collective. ‘Cause this night porter is a spy! And Datak needs his help to get the E-Rep out of here so the only people swinging their dicks around in the streets like lightsabers are him and Rafe McCawley. He still definitely makes monkey with that guy, though.

Up on the rooftops staring out over the city are Yewll and Lev. They rub their heads together some more and Yewll says she’s going to save Lev, dammit. But Lev frowns real sweet-like and strokes Yewll’s face and says she doesn’t remember what really happened because even her giant Slytherclaw brain can’t process grief that huge. See what it was was that Yewll and Lev did all that human disection/biowarfare stuff that screwed up Pottinger (and millions of other people probably) so bad. Lev couldn’t deal with it, so she killed herself. She shows Yewll her spectral wounds to prove it. And then she does that Beautiful Mind thing where she’s like, “But hey! Jump off this roof and we can be together forever!”

Yewll almost does it.

But she doesn’t do it.

Because she’s got a town to save!

Nolan finds Amanda seizuring out at the Need/Want. He rushes her to Yewll’s because he discovers she’s got an ego implant chip in her neck. He’s close to slicing off her head with his clumsy manhands when Yewll runs in and tells him to give her the charge-scalpel. She cuts that thing right out of there. And then, later on, she cuts out Pottinger’s too. Because that fuck is the one who implanted it in Amanda and in himself because apparently he’s going to try to make a hologram recreation of Connor to have sex with or something. That’s why he was collecting both of all their memories.

Yewll had the ego chip too, of course, but she decides to leave hers in for a little while. She’s not ready to let her girlfriend go again, just yet.

Finally, Datak and Rafe have supper and decide to team up to take down the E-Rep. Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Have neither of you learned what it means to not make Stahma a partner? Enjoy your impending ass-stompings, I guess. In the words of her holy book: Who run the world? Girls.

What do you think? Last night’s Defiance: Gayest TV episode of the year so far?

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