Yeah, I know the TV reviews have been a little late of late, but as I think I may have mentioned, various issues, chief among them sickness, has waylaid me recently. Anyway, the upside is we had a great episode of Defiance this week (or as it happens, last week) that breaks the sorry trend of every other episode being less than stellar, probably the newest best of the series in fact. I know that's kind of silly to say after only six episodes, but this was the closest I think this series has come to reflecting the sort of grandiosity I've been harping on this show so often for failing to exploit.
Brothers
In Arms is another cliched plot you've seen in a dozen other similar
shows, namely the old friend whose come to town, but has changed and
may not be trustworthy anymore. And yet, the episode subverts
expectations and uses this well worn trope to explore our main
character's past in an interesting way that belies its obvious
premise. Its not as cut and dry as a good guy gone bad or a test of
loyalty, and the implications are perhaps darker for our hero than
for the rough and tumble guest star in the end.
The
primary conflict arises when a Castithan pyromaniac who sets off an
improvised explosive in town is revealed to be one of the planet's
most well known war criminals. Various interested parties are after
him, but not necessarily for the reasons you think, establishing a
deeper tension between the different governmental bodies of this new
Earth than previously realized, leading to the conclusion that war
between humans and aliens might be inevitable. I'd say this character
might have made for an interesting recurring villain, but then the
shocking way in which he exits the episode is worth not having him
come back.
Add
to this that the subplot involving Graham Green, his son, and the
weird golden artifact has actually gotten somewhat interesting, as
apparently its influence is causing the younger of the two to
experience hallucinations of his dead brother telling him to kill.
The allusion to the Scorpius Clone from O'Bannon's previous show
Farscape was a nice touch, and this reveal and the consequences of it
for one minor character was just enough to move a story along that
was up to this point going far too slowly. And if all that wasn't
enough, even one of my favorite side characters, the acerbic town
doctor finally gets some hint of a dark past.
This
episode might just be enough to validate my initial faith in this
show, that despite some early missteps seems to have finally realized
how much room it has to explore the world that's been created for it.
Its still not quite as big as I want it to be, but its clearly
building to something in a way that's more obvious than before, and I
have reason to hope it will only get better from here. Still no
development for those cool Orangutan aliens or the scrunchy-faced
servant class dudes we've so far learned nothing about, and no word
yet on the energy-based aliens Wikipedia tells me are on the planet
somewhere, but at least now I think we might actually have a grand
plan at work here.
But
seriously, they need to have more of those monkey dudes.
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