Defiance: Welcome back, Everybody! (My thoughts on episode 3x01 “The World We Seize” & episode 3x02 “The Last Unicorns”)

Right off the bat, I have to say that I really enjoyed the two-hour season three premiere of Defiance. However, as you probably noticed in the title of this blog post, while this episode was aired as a two-hour season premiere, it was really just the first two episodes of season three aired back-to-back.

The first episode picked up seven months after the events of the season two finale, and I have to say that I thought the visual and special effects at the beginning of the episode were really impressive. Nolan and Irisa, who were still in the stasis pod that they got into at the end of the season two finale, were removed from the pod by members of the Omec, a new alien race that was introduced in the season premiere, and they were left stranded in a snowy area outside of Defiance. Apparently, the Omec had long since thought to have gone extinct. Personally, I really like the Omec for the most part so far. I think that introducing a new alien race was a great move on the writers’ part, since I’ve always felt that the level diversity of the different alien races on the show was somewhat limited for a science fiction show. That being said, I’d like to go ahead and mention that Conrad Coates who plays T’evgin reminds me a lot of Jessie Lawrence Ferguson and the character he played in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Code of Honor”, Lutan. Honestly, I initially wondered if it was the same actor who had played the two roles, so I decided to look on IMDB to see if I was correct. Obviously, I was wrong, but I just thought that I would mention the fact that I had originally thought it was Conrad Coates who played the two roles.

We were also introduced to a new Castithan, a man named General Rahm Tak, who’s played by Lee Tergesen. I have to say that based on just these two episodes alone, I absolutely love General Rahm Tak. It’s pretty obvious that Lee Tergesen is really enjoying playing the part so far. I’m really hoping that Tergesen will be sticking around for a while.

Nolan seemed to be under the impression that he and Irisa could just return to Defiance like nothing had changed after being in the stasis pod for seven months and after everything that happened last season, which seemed pretty delusional on his part. At least Irisa was able to recognize that she probably wasn’t going to be very popular with the other citizens of Defiance after everything that happened last season. Berlin definitely wasn’t happy to see Irisa again, because she blames Irisa for Tommy’s death. That being said, I love Berlin and I thought that Anna Hopkins did a great job of playing the part last season, so I’m thrilled to see that she’s back for season three as a series regular. Berlin wasn’t the only person who gave Irisa a hard time though; she was also harassed by other people throughout the two episodes.

Pottinger is gone now, and I have to say that the fact that he’s gone is definitely one of my biggest complaints about the season premiere given how much I liked the character and the way season two ended with Amanda and Pottinger hooking up. I don’t know whose decision it was to not have Pottinger/James Murray return for season three, but his exit from the show was handled pretty poorly, if you ask me. If not having Pottinger/James Murray return for season three was a decision that was made purely by the producers, then I think they should have at least had him return for the season three premiere, have him get killed off or have Pottinger leave town and hopefully give him some sense of closure in the process. If the reason James Murray didn’t return for season three was because he didn’t want to, that would still be really disappointing to me, but I might be able to be more understanding of the sloppy manner that his exit from the show was handled with.

Anyway, with Pottinger gone, Amanda isn’t running the Need/Want anymore, and she’s once again the mayor of Defiance. Personally, the way the town of Defiance’s government is run has always baffled me. In the first episode of the series, it was established that Amanda had only been the town’s mayor for three weeks. However, several episodes later I remember them saying that the next mayoral election was coming up soon. Throughout the first season the Earth Republic were also basically described as a potential threat to the town. The Earth Republic came to Defiance in the closing moments of the season one finale pretty much right after Datak had been elected the new mayor of Defiance. The Earth Republic had taken over when season two began, and the season ended without anything happening to suggest that they would be leaving Defiance any time soon. Now, here we are in season three, and the Earth Republic is gone without any real explanation as to how or why they left Defiance.

However, while the Earth Republic is gone now, the writers made it clear throughout these two episodes that the town is still profoundly screwed due to the gulanite shortage. The gulanite mines not being operational has also led to a lot of people in town not having jobs. Personally, while I liked these episodes, I hate that the writers pretty much made the events of the first two seasons seem rather pointless. It has always been a major pet peeve of mine when writers for TV shows make the events of an entire season or in some cases multiple seasons pointless by retconning something in order to accommodate for a storyline that the producers have decided to do, or something being retconned simply due to sloppy writing. In this case, I would definitely say that it was simply sloppy writing.

At one point in the episode, T’evgin’s daughter, Kindzi, was taken hostage by Amanda and the other law enforcement officers in the town. This attracted people’s attention due to the mystery surrounding the Omec, namely the fact that it had previously been believed that the Omec had gone extinct. In the end, Amanda and T’evgin made an agreement with each other to have his daughter be freed and for them to share the gulanite that they would mine using the Omec’s technology. However, Doc Yewl was the one who got completely screwed over in the process. Apparently, T’evgin needed protoform, A.K.A. Indogene skin, in order to save his daughter’s life since the Indogene are a manufactured race, so they cut some of Doc Yewl’s skin off against her will. I have to say that was a really hard scene for me to watch.

Christie and Alak were still with Pilar, who’s still a few crayons short of a full box, at the beginning of the episode. In the seven months that had passed since the end of season two, Christie had given birth to a baby boy that they named Luke. The thing that I liked the most about this particular storyline was definitely Jesse Rath’s acting. I’ve always liked Alak, even when he was behaving like an asshole in the past, especially last season, but I loved the scenes with Alak in these two episodes. I also really enjoyed seeing Datak, Stahma and Rafe work together in order to find Christie, Alak and Pilar. In my opinion, those scenes were very well written and well acted by pretty much everybody involved.

Going into the season premiere, I was really anxious to see which characters were going to get killed off, and I have to say that I was rather surprised that Rafe, Christie and Quentin were the characters that got killed off. The fact that they killed off every member of the McCawley family except for Pilar really left me wondering if the producers decided that they hated the entire McCawley family, so they should just have them all get killed. While none of the McCawleys ever stood out as characters that were favorites for me, I was sad to see them get killed off. Personally, Pilar annoys me, so I’m definitely disappointed that she didn’t die in this episode too. While I often enjoy watching characters on TV shows act crazy, I don’t think Pilar is crazy in a way that I find entertaining to watch. Pilar is just crazy in an annoying way, so I’m really hoping that Linda Hamilton leaves the show soon.

All things considered, I thought that the two-hour season premiere was a decent way to start season three from the standpoint of introducing the storylines and the new characters for the season. With the exception of Linda Hamilton, I really thought that the entire cast gave great performances in both episodes. However, after multiple viewings, I don’t think that these episodes have a great “watchability factor” to them in the sense that I don’t think that I can continue to enjoy them as much as I liked these episodes the first time that I watched them. I think the reason why I liked both of these episodes as much as I did the first time that I watched them was mainly due to the fact that I had been really excited that Defiance was back with new episodes. Upon multiple viewings, I found myself thinking more and more about the things that I disliked about these episodes instead of thinking about the things that I liked about them. I also found myself getting pretty bored each time I watched them in order to work on writing this review.

When it comes to TV networks airing two separate episodes back to back as a two-hour episode, I don’t know who usually makes the decision about whether or not they do something to indicate to the viewers that they are moving on to the second episode, usually either by playing the show’s theme song or by showing the show’s title card again, but since they didn’t do anything to indicate the end of the first episode and the beginning of the second, the two episodes just seemed to blend together. Since the two episodes blended together, I’m just going to give the two episodes one overall score for both episodes.

That being said, my final score for episode 3x01 “The World We Seize” and episode 3x02 “The Last Unicorns” is 5 out of 10.