Hi ya, Gayliens! I apologize for short-shifting you on the Defiance recap last week. There’s so much lez/bi stuff happening on TV this summer – especially on Monday nights – that it’s proving tricky to keep up. Luckily, we didn’t miss any Sapphic shenanigans last week. The real crazytown bananapants stuff with Stahma and Kenya kicks off next week. So, please enjoy these two mini-caps of the last two weeks’ episodes and let’s meet back here next week to process all the feelings we feel.
There is a full plague consuming Defiance, and the townsfolk have started calling it Irath Flu because Irathients are carriers of it but are not affected by it. If you’ve seen one episode of this show, you know what’s coming: The council – including frakkin Datak Tarr now – vote to quarantine the Irathients because they’re all enormous racists and everybody loves to shit all over the knob-headed ones. (Except for Amanda, the lone dissenting vote.) None of the Irathients take the news well, especially not Irisa, and especially because they are all knelt down in prayer petitioning their god on behalf of the humans when Rafe McCawley & Co. show up to cart them away at gunpoint.
Nolan decides the best way to win back Irisa’s trust after he blasted her mentor off the arch a couple of weeks ago is to secure a cure for the plague so he can free all the Irathients. This, after a stand-off where he would have shot everyone in town to save his little girl if she hadn’t told him to put his gun away. Amanda tells Nolan he’s only acting reckless because he wants Irisa to like him again, but he doesn’t have to listen to her wisdom very long because she gets the plague too.
Nolan and Connor Lang, who is still in town and still wearing that hat, drive on out to the Badlands to fetch themselves a cure, even though they have to muscle their way through an Earth Republic contingent to get there. By the time they get back to town, Nolan’s pretty plague-ridden, which makes it’s even easier for a rogue band of Irathients to kidnap him and Connor and the plague meds. The only thing they want is for Defiance to free their brothers and sisters. Unfortunately: a) The brother of the Irath ringleader has already been killed by a jumpy mine worker, and b) Amanda is about five seconds from dying so she can’t really negotiate with them.
Which, of course, means that Stahma orchestrates a grand plan that benefits literally everyone she loves. With one hand, she comforts her son’s ailing fiance, with another hand she tends to the sick the mayor, with another hand she shoves Rafe McCawley – acting mayor while Amanda is down – onto the ground near his daughter to grieve for her impending death, with another hand she answers the mayor’s phone, with another hand she coaxes Datak into pretending to be the mayor and liberating the plague meds from captivity, with another hand she frees the Iranthients, with another hand she writes some poetry and does some Castithan needlework. Like, in five minutes she accomplishes all that. Talk about a six-legged monkey crawl.
Anyway, Datak hotfoots it over to the warehouse where Nolan and Connor are being held hostage. He monologues about how all humans deserve to burn in whatever the alien equivalent of hell is, but then kills all the kidnappers, and also Connor Lang, who just happened to see him begging for his life at one point. It’s no surprise, then, that he announces his candidacy for mayor on his son’s radio station while Stahma mouths the speech along with him, just as soon as the plague is cured.
Oh, and Mayor Nikki gets Luke McCawley to give her the Kaziri after she tells him his mother is alive and she can take him to her. Apparently, Luke’s mom was kind of messed up back in the early days of Defiance and Nikki kept her from killing her kids, for whom Nikki had a bit of affection because she was boning their father.
Moral of the story: Stahma is your god now.
It’s Christie McCawley and Alak Tarr’s wedding episode and if you’re thinking Casithans have the grossest wedding traditions in all the universes, you are correct. For example, there’s the tradition of having public sex in front of all your bros at your bachelor party with someone who looks like your wife. There’s the tradition of the bride wearing a metal mask on her face so she can’t see what the heck is going on at her wedding until her husband decides it’s time for her to “see the light.” Frankly, the only good thing about marrying a Castithan man is there’s apparently a slim chance you might get to take a bath with Jaime Murray.
Luckily, we don’t have to spend too much time with the bachelor party because the dudes find a rotting corpse in the wall when they’re wrasslin’ around. It’s the dead body of Kenya’s husband, Hunter Bell.
So, in one direction, this episode is a murder mystery and everybody’s got a reason they wanted that shtakohead dead. Kenya and Amanda wanted him dead because he was always beating the hell out of Kenya. Datak Tarr wanted him dead because he didn’t respect his rise to power. Rafe McCawley wanted him dead because of something to do with his mines or whatever. In the end it was Mayor Nikki who killed him because – get this crap right here – she is Indogene! I’m not even kidding! Dr. Yewell helped her morph into a human-looking alien so she could take over Defiance so she could find the Kaziri and when Hunter Bell discovered her true identity, she clubbed that wanker over the head! WHAT! That is an awesome reveal! Oh, but it gets better: Dr. Yewell kills Nikki because she’s gone batshit crazy! They keep saying “for the greater good” and trying to outmaneuver each other and then Nikki is just fully dead.
OK, and then there’s the wedding. Rafe finally cottons onto the fact that Datak is only letting his son marry a human because he wants the mines, so he lets Datak know he’s writing Christie out of the will. Datal then calls off the wedding during a heated discussion with Alak, who, by the way, is just wandering around his house wearing a man-diaper. So while Datak storms around town pissing all over the place like an angry pit bull, Rafe and Stahma decide to throw their kids the wedding they deserve. It’s all about the love to them, and Stahma even makes Christie an “old world” veil and sings her a Castithan wedding song and is generally as amazing and seductive and totally fucking terrifying as ever. Datak attends the wedding to save face, even though he is definitely not happy about it and somebody is going to pay.
Stahma Tarr is one of the most fascinating characters I have ever seen in my life. It’s like, yeah, she’s totally this Machiavellian conniver who is willing to do anything to grab power for her family, but also she really is full of so much love, and also definitely kind of believes that entrenched gender stuff from her old planet. She genuinely has an affection for Christie, even though she also is using her to get rich. She genuinely has an affection for Datak, even though she’s starting to think his patriarchy thing is tired and antiquated. She’s sweet, but she’s dangerous. She’s nurturing, but she’s terrifying. At this point, I really don’t even know if I want to make out with her or run from her or just cuddle up in her lap and let her sing to me. It’s very confusing.
But the most important thing about this episode is that Irisa rebuffs Tommy’s attempts to have a relationship with her … right up until the point where she shows up at the wedding looking like some kind of gorgeous Steampunk nightmare and holds his hand and scowls.
Next week: The mayoral race is in full swing and Stahma’s got her hand in every pot and also in other places that belong to Kenya Rosewater.
