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“Defiance” recap (2.9): Just one, I’m a few.

There are some things you just know are going to survive the apocalypse. Full sets of Harry Potter books. The Princess Bride DVDs and VHS tapes. The music of ’80s and ’90s one-hit-wonders. So it’s no surprise that the song playing when Stahma sees Kenya for the first time after her resurrection is by the 4 Non Blondes. Seriously, man, what’s going on?

Here’s what: Nolan doesn’t give Kenya a moment’s respite when he brings her home to Defiance, interrogating her at full speed while she coughs up details about her kidnapping that include motor homes, dog food, water tanks, and that dude in goggles. She’s pretty sure she’s been gone a couple of weeks, but Nolan drops the bomb that she’s been dead for almost a year. The last thing she remembers is Amanda losing the election to Datak, not a single thing about Stahma luring her out into the woods and singing her to sleep while she died of being poisoned by her alien lady love. It’s Yewll who puts a stop to the questioning, weirdly enough, even though her compassion for humans usually falls somewhere on scale between crocodile and wild boar.

Stahma is hanging out at the Need/Want, goggling that Alak hired a hooker to work his radio station, when Kenya and Amanda arrive on the scene. We have never in all of of our whole dystopian lives seen Stahma Tarr bug out, but honey, she bugs the fuck out. Kenya hugs everybody while Stahma creeps to the shadows and stares so hard her eyes almost pop out of her beautiful head. When Kenya makes eye contact with her, she bolts outside and damn near has a panic attack, gasping for breath like she’s been caught underwater.

Kenya and Amanda cuddle up in bed and remember how they used to do this exact thing when the Pale Wars were going on and their chance of surviving was pretty much zero. But they did make it and Amanda kept things going while Kenya was away this time and but Kenya is back now and sisters are sisters and everything is going to be OK.

Stahma doesn’t feel the same way, even a little bit. She somehow finds the nards to approach Kenya in the market the next morning and when Kenya wraps her up in the biggest embrace and smells her hair like she needs to breath it to survive, Stahma can barely stay upright.

Kenya: Before I disappeared, did we have a thing? Stahma: A thing-multiple things, multiple times-I had never experienced in my 5,000 years of being alive. Is your brain OK? Kenya: Not yet, but I’m going to get all my memories back and when I do, we’re going to have a proper reunion, six-legged monkey crawl-style. Stahma: I think I need to see Doc Yewll. My chest is doing something weird. I think I might be dying. I think I might be on fire inside my stomach.
I told y’all Stahma was in actual love with Kenya, but you didn’t believe me! I mean, whatever. It’s fair. Jaime Murray has chemistry with like random set decorations, so it’s hard to tell. But I knew it. I knew it.

Nolan tries to trigger her memory with more and more PTSD stuff, but mostly all she can remember is drowning. But because he’s Nolan, he thinks the most important thing is how he fits into the picture of her rise from the grave, so he breaks it to her that they’re broken up, even though they had a thing, and now he hooks up with her sister on the regular, so. Kenya couldn’t give less of a fuck. What does give her some anxiety is a hammer she sees on the evidence table. She remembers the goggle mask guy breaking her out of her water tube with it.

Once she’s fully in the flashback she rolls with it. Other humans were hammered out of other water tubes, but the Votanis Collective shot them all in the face. One of them realized Kenya was the ex-mayor’s sister and decided to use her for leverage. One of the dead guys had a three-headed screaming eagle tattoo, a thing that sends Nolan careening across town to tell Berlin to take off her shirt to show Kenya her tattoo to see if it’s a match. Berlin is slightly disappointed a threesome is not on the table, but she does take off her shirt and reveal a similar tattoo. Kenya and Berlin bond over their city/country names, and Nolan is, once again, thwarted by women falling in lesbians with each other. (Just kidding.) (Mostly.)

Stahma and Datak, who are infinitely more amazing together when they hate-love each other, tromp out to the woods where Stahma poisoned Kenya, Datak bitching and whinging the whole time about how he knows Stahma didn’t really kill Kenya, which is fine, whatever, because he only really needed Kenya to be under control. Well, this is news for Stahama and she almost murders Datak on the spot with the fury of her eyeballs. She’s like, “Don’t you fucking tell me I killed the woman I loved because you were having a goddamn temper-tantrum.” And Datak goes, “YOU DIDN’T KILL HER SHE’S NOT DEAD.”

They cross the rise where Stahma says she buried Kenya “with a little patch of flowers” and find the whole thing covered in lavender.

They dig and dig and yell at each other and finally Datak finds Kenya’s skull, which Stahma lovingly, hilariously caresses it and says, “What a tiny, human head.” And Datak goes, “Yes, it’s darling; now let’s bury it and go.” She is offended right down to his core the way he’s treating her bones like dead bones, tossing them around without regard for the fact that they used to be Kenya. I think their whole deal this episode is my favorite acting of this entire series so far. It’s so sad and so sweet and so morbidly ridiculous.

Pottinger drops by Yewll’s lab to ask her WTH w/r/t Kenya being alive, because it’s impossible because he doesn’t want it to be true. Yewll thumps him in the head and tells him to stop acting like such a stupid human and accept that facts are facts. These are the facts: Yewll cloned a Kenya skin suit and wrapped it around an Indogene and implanted Amanda’s memories into her from the ego device that made her go apeshit crazy a couple of episodes ago so that Pottinger could use the clone Kenya to stage a rescue in which she was actually killed, which would make Amanda want to do sex stuff with him? It’s the dumbest plan I have ever heard of and I’ve watched over 100 episodes of Pretty Little Liars, OK? I know a thing or two about dumb plans. Yewll’s got a new plan and it is to wipe Clone!Kenya’s memories clean from her brain, all of them.

It doesn’t work because Clone!Kenya freaks out during the procedure and Amanda shuts it down.

Stahma tries to do maybe the first noble thing of her life. She tracks down Amanda and tells her that Kenya is well and truly dead and so some other thing is masquerading as her. But Amanda is a human and she says a very human thing about how if Stahma says that one more time she’s going to get throttled by the Braid of Justice. Stahma is so sad. A sadness of her own making, obviously, but it’s still a deep sadness. (Shut up! I’m a human too!)

Nolan realizes Clone!Kenya only has Amanda’s memories and Clone!Kenya realizes the same thing. Nolan runs off to tell Amanda and Clone!Kenya just plain runs off. She stops by Yewll’s to get some answers from the good doc and the good mayor and then hops a landcoach to the video game.

Amanda holds a wake and it is sad, but not nearly as sad as Stahma at Kenya’s grave, clutching Kenya’s St. Christopher’s medal next to the tombstone Stahma had made for her. “A kind heart” is what it says.

The final moments of the show reveal Quentin McCawley is the guy in the goggles and mask but who even cares. KENYA, COME BACK.

What did you think of the Clone!Kenya reveal?

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