desperate times
Defiance Season 3 Premiere Review: A Harsh Winter
I really liked the Season 2 premiere of Defiance, and then the show collapsed into Arkbrain nanobot nonsense and failed to deliver on anything interesting involving the E-Rep as a threat to Defiance. Despite knowing better at this point, I found myself liking the Season 3 premiere of Defiance. How many more times can I be burned by Defiance? Fool me once, Defiance, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
At this point, I feel like I have a pretty firm grip on Defiance's issues. Like with the two-part Season 2 finale, the two-part Season 3 premiere was sort of the best and worst of what the show had to offer. There's an Earth-bound threat to Defiance in the form of the emboldened Votanis Collective led by the Castithan General Rahm Tak (Lee Tergesen, proving he's reliable in just about anything) and there's a big scary outer-space threat represented by the heretofore unmentioned Omecs (at least I'm pretty sure they've never been mentioned before now) in the forms of T'evgin (Conrad Coates) and his daughter Kindzi (Nichole Galicia). I will give you $5 of Tim's money if you can guess which of these threats I'd like to see the show spend the most time exploring.
Did you guess? Good. If you guessed the V.C.'s campaign to destroy Defiance, private message Tim with your address and he'll send you the U.S. paper currency that bears Abraham Lincoln's face.
It made sense that the V.C. would take this opportunity to make inroads in the United States after the destruction of New York City and, presumably, the E-Rep as a governing institution. With Tak at their helm, they're anti-human zealots dedicated to the idea that Earth was their rightful home after fleeing their own star system. The V.C. had largely only existed off-screen, a shadowy counterweight to the E-Rep and nothing that most of the Votans in Defiance seemed all that interested in having involved in their lives.
The whole point of the city of Defiance was its independence from both the E-Rep and the V.C. The E-Rep—and Defiance as a show—fumbled in its attempts to really do anything in Defiance beyond stir up some resentment and neat protest posters. The town had another crisis, and the V.C. was on its way to take advantage of things, though the goal just seemed to be to wipe the town off the map because it's a disgusting haven for interspecies mingling. As motivations go, it's not very interesting, but it still fed into that culture-clash element of the show that I've always wished it would do more with.
After two seasons, I'm tempering my expectations accordingly. The E-Rep never became the antagonistic and totalitarian presence I hoped for last season as Pottinger—whose lack of a presence was shrugged off with a quiet "He's gone."—just became a creepy stalker dude and Mercado never really did anything. I suspect the V.C. won't amount to much more than providing a useful army for when T'evgin and Kindzi awaken their fellow Omec sleeping aboard the Tsuroz. Of course, if Tak was being set up as someone who can see through Datak and Stahma's plotting, maybe he'll be someone to be reckoned with. Then again, I said the same about Pottinger when he blackmailed Stahma last season. So. Yeah.
I have little faith in the Omecs ever becoming truly interesting. They're mining gulanite to restore power to their ship and gathering it into a big glowy sphere, and if I have learned one thing from Defiance across two seasons, it's that big glowy spheres are not things I will be inclined to care about. In fact, that's typically an indication of a plot I'm going to ignore when I watch the show.
That T'evgin wanted to conquer Earth was pretty disappointing, though. It'd be a far more interesting story if he and Kindzi were on a much smaller colony-pod like ship with a much smaller number of Omecs just looking for a new home. It would parallel the situation humanity found itself in as the Votans arrived at Earth, and the struggles that ensued then. Now, the Votans would be the ones being all, "NOPE, DO NOT LET THESE FOLKS ONTO THE PLANET." That the Omecs are already positioned as an invading force threatened to strip away much of T'evgin and Kindzi's potential complexity both as characters and members of a race that the Votan just don't like since they're just harbingers of fresh alien destruction from above.
Which was too bad since it's another example of the culture clash inherent within Defiance's premise that will give way to, well, big glowy spheres of energy and explosions. I'm not exactly sure what to make of the Kindzi's apparent interest in Nolan, but the show was certainly setting her up as a rival for Nolan's attention as this rift between him and Irisa develops. T'evgin was a pretty standard duplicitous warlord and doting father, but Coates did a very nice job of making sure that T'evgin didn't come off as just a brute, so it should at least make for an interesting performance this season.
Consider it burying the lede, but the thing I think I liked most about this pair of episodes was that the world was a much darker and literally colder place for all the show's returning characters. Some of this just didn't have the time to breathe as the episodes had to do a lot to set up the Votanis Collective and the Omecs—Irisa's guilt about the destruction of New York and everything else she did while under the influence of the Arkbrain or the harsh decline of the town, for instance—but there was still plenty of bad times to go around.
First and foremost, the entire McCawley clan was dead save for Pilar, and that right there was pretty shocking. Killing Quentin just felt like board clearing and killing Christie was, frankly, just a good idea as the character had long been a weight on the show. I appreciated that she got one big chance to shine before Stahma slashed the girl's throat. Yelling Castithan curses and being defiant in the face of certain death wasn't really the Christie I remember from the previous seasons at all, but them's the perks of time skips, I guess.
Rafe's death, however, took me by complete surprise. I thought for a moment the show was going to cop out when he turned out to be clinging to life, but I'm happy the show followed through on it. I've always liked Rafe—especially when paired with Datak—but Rafe's death allowed the show to shift away from Pilar and Baby Luke since Alak will have more pressing concerns, like hoping that Tak doesn't kill him if Stahma and Datak suck at softening up Defiance for the V.C. It's a loss for the show on both a character level and an actor level as Graham Greene was great, but it also freed up the show a bit, and I'm pretty okay with that.
Which leaves us with just Defiance itself. I've come to generally loathe time skips as narrative devices because what they skip over tend to be the things I'm most interested in. Defiance being in such dire straits after the gulanite became unavailable was certainly a fresh dynamic for the show, but I would've loved to have seen the town's steady decline and Amanda's struggles to keep things running (the time skip also deprived me of lots of Datak, Stahma, and Rafe moments, which is something I was really looking forward to). I'm sort of letting it slide in Defiance's case in part because I'm just not invested enough in the show to be really and truly annoyed by it and in part because of the lengths Amanda and Nolan went to make sure Defiance had power before the V.C. arrived.
So, yes, Rafe's death was surprising, but Amanda and Nolan skinning Yewll to heal Kindzi? That was shocking. Amanda had just begged her to stay, after all! Killing Rafe was the show being sort of dark, but this was the characters being dark, and I'd much rather see that sort of layering on the characters. I'm also interested in seeing what reasons the show contrives to keep Yewll on the show. I suspect it'll be the impending V.C. raiding party, but I also hope Yewll gets the hell out of Defiance as soon as possible.
CLASSIFIED VOTANIS COLLECTIVE FILES
– That book cover is the absolute worst, most horrible thing, and I love that it is so horrible. I do have questions about who is printing and distributing this book and how it got so popular. When do we get to meet Mordecai Haipern?
– After abandoning the cover songs for the closing episode sequences last season, they came back with a vengeance in the premiere with Queen's "You're My Best Friend." Guess the show didn't cotton to Stalker stealing its idea.
– Had to change the title of the notes section to better reflect the new order of things.
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