As you might have gathered from my review of the premiere episode of Defiance, syfy’s first foray into real honest-to-goodness aliens and dystopian future-rich science fiction since 2009, I am mightily impressed with the show.
From almost the first frame, the producers of the show made it clear that they had thought long and hard about the show in its entirety, crafting a detailed post-apocaylptic Earth that, despite its obvious alienness, was inherently believable, and populating it with characters who made sense in that time and place.
There was a palpable sense that you were watching real lives playing out, which is important if you’re going to invest a great deal of time watching a new show.
While we all know we’re watching a fictional story any time we switch on a scripted drama, it still needs to feel real, as if those people could step out of our televisions sets and we could hold a conversation with them.
It’s not easy to pull that level of fictional reality off but Defiance has managed it, and this week’s episode, “The Devil in the Dark” underscored just how well they have done.
Granted the main murder-mystery-by-the-numbers plot line running through the episode wasn’t that innovative, looking right at home as an episode of a possible Defiance spinoff, should syfy ever yearn for one, CSI: Apocalpyse.
Unremarkable though it was, it provided the setting for remarkable character progressions for Irissa (Stephanie Leonidas), and everyone’s favourite motorcycle-riding ne’er-do-well Irathients, The Spirit Riders, particularly their leader Sukar (Noah Danby) who revealed an unexpected spiritual side.
And to a lesser extent it allowed for a deepening of the relationship between Irissa and her adoptive father, Joshua Nolan (Grant Bowler) who belatedly realised that he had been treating Irissa like she was a human, when in fact she is, of course, nothing of the sort.
As you can likely surmise from the frequent mentions of her name, “Devil in the Dark” was, at heart, an Irissa episode.
Increasingly troubled by visions of the murder of two Irathients she didn’t know in a place she had never been to, and battling to suppress both to quiet her troubled emotions and to appease Joshua who assured her that what she was seeing wasn’t real, she found herself growing physically incapacitated by these fractured memories that didn’t belong to her.
It was only when Sukar, fresh from a less-than-successful meeting with Defiance’s mayor, Amanda Rosewater (Julie Benz) where the past reared it’s ugly head into present well-meaning idealism, noticed the emotional and physical pain that “Little Wolf” as he calls Irissa was in, that she understood what was afflicting her.
It turned out, rather handily in terms of solving the case which involved the deaths of two men in separate incidents – one died while jogging in the Woods of Death, as I like to call them, outside Defiance, while the other met his maker during bizarre nappy-wearing, food-fetish sex – that Irissa possesses an ability rare among Irathients called The Sight which gives her the ability to not just see past events but live them out as if she was there.
(Not as handy as seeing the future it should be pointed out given that she can’t interact with anyone and buying stock options, or knowing future sports scores is kind of irrelevant in a terraformed apocalypse.)
You have to wonder, and I am sure Irissa is doing just that, whether possessing The Sight is worth all the emotional turmoil it unleashes.
But troubling though the side effects are, it allowed her to tap into the snatches of memory coursing through her and relive, in a murder-mystery solving way, tragic events of 24 years ago that drove the murderer, a fellow Irathient woman and adoptted family member of Sukar, to commit acts of revengeful murder via the delightfully named Hellbugs.
Yes when a knife or bullet won’t do, every murderer’s weapon of choice, well an Irathient one anyway, are Hellbugs, nasty giant hive-mind creatures that are all muscle and sharp, jagged, chomping teeth.
And poor, very poor, social skills.
While it’s true that the Hellbug threat was dispatched with relative anti-climactic ease, this story thread allowed three very important things to happen.
Irissa was able, thanks to Sukar’s intervention, to tap into her largely-shunned Irathient heritage and discover that while she has an alien adoptive father and is very much at home in a human environment that she is an alien.
Finally making some sort of limited peace with her alienness seemed to cause her equal parts peace and anguish, but it seems like on balance that Irissa, fearful of who she truly is, found some measure of resolution for the bubbling war between two halves that seems to drive much of who she is and does.
All of this embracing of her Irathient heritage did cause some ructions with Nolan, who though sympathetic to, and supportive of the alien cultures on Earth (even as he resents their presence; yes another conflicted, tormented soul with issues to resolve), found it a little hard to grapple with Irissa’s revelatory “gift”.
It prompted this response to Nolan by an angry Irissa:
“I’m not like you, I’m an alien and you made me afraid of that!”
Where it will lead exactly is hard to say but I think it’s safe to say that Nolan and Irissa have got some “getting to know you” coming up in future episodes.
And in a sign of the shows’ storytelling maturity, The Spirit Riders, and principally Sukar were elevated from cartoon-ish villains to well rounded characters with real motivations and personalities.
No one is saying they’re about to feed orphans or rescue kittens from sewer pipes anytime soon, but it was heartening to see them progress from cliche to shades-of-grey flesh-and-blood characters with room to grow.
The only other action in this episode was the continuing Machiavellian manoeuvring of everyone’s favourite scheming Castithan power couple, Datak (Tony Curran) and Stahma Tarr (Jaime Murray) who continued to plot and plan their way up the Defiance social pecking order, via the marriage of their son Alak (Jesse Rath) to Christie McCawley (Nicole Munoz) the daughter of irascible mine operator Rafe McCawley (Graham Greene).
It’s all deliciously Games of Thrones-esque with the couple biding their time till they can do away with Rafe, a man I don’t see going down easily if at all, and take over his operations, and by extension, control of the town.
The only humanising element, if one can use that term with an alien being, is that Stahma, quite apart from helping her husband achieve his nefarious grab for power and influence, does seem to genuinely care for Christie.
It’s a most welcome shading of grey in what could have become, entertaining though it is, a larger-than-life almost Vaudevillian plot line.
A minor thread in an Irissa/Irathient heavy episode maybe but the continuing story of Datak and Stahma, added to the weight charter development for Irissa and the Spirit Riders, has me further convinced that this is one show that knows what it is and wants to achieve, and will entertain and enthrall us mightily as it does so.
And next week on Defiance (Monday 6 May 9/8c)…
Here are the first four minutes of the episode for your enjoyment …