Defiance, Season 1: Episodes 9, 10 and 11 – “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” “If I Ever Leave This World Alive” and “The Bride Wore Black”
Directed by Allan Kroeker (9 and 10) and Todd Slavkin (11)
Written by Clark Perry (9), Bryan Garcia (10) and Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer (11)
Airs Monday nights at 9 on SyFy
Apologies for major technical issues on my end that made me fall behind on these reviews. Coming back to watch and write about three episodes of Defiance as one unit, though, was a really interesting exercise. As this debut season has gone along, it has felt like Defiance episodes work perfectly fine in their own right as self-contained stories but that they lack that substance that lends itself to more meaningful examination or criticism. When I’ve addressed this in the past, I’ve pointed my finger at the fact that the show is more concerned with world-building than more traditional character development – traditional for TV shows in general, though science-fiction shows tend to lean towards the world-building aspect a lot of the time. That said, there have been great character moments here and there that have made me wonder about how Defiance is trying to tell its narrative to us. Rafe McCawley, for instance, has become somewhat of a moral and emotional center – more so than Nolan – in moments like the one from “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” in which he’s talking to a lost-in-time astronaut from days gone by. If his dialogue is somewhat didactic, it’s the closest time Defiance ever gets to achieving its thematic intents with any clarity, and these moments really work for me even if I take away the fact that I like Graham Greene as an actor.
Those themes are there, embedded somewhere in the infrastructure of the episodes. David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of Game of Thrones have gone on record saying tracing themes in TV shows is a juvenile task akin to the process of writing book reports in school. While I completely disagree with that as a rule, I especially disagree with that with regards to Defiance. That might be because I feel like it’s trying to communicate something to me and falling short some of the time. We talk a lot about how shows can teach you how to watch them, and that’s where I think Defiance is stumbling a bit. It’s calling on some incredibly heavy-hitters in these most recent titles, and titles are a great place to start when looking at through-lines for episodes. “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” is probably my favorite of the songs on The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds and “If I Ever Leave This World Alive” claims the same kind of status for me on Flogging Molly’s Drunken Lullabies. If I sit down and think about what these songs mean on their own and then try to connect that to what’s going on in Defiance, the result isn’t all that far-fetched. The astronaut’s story from episode nine evokes that kind of melancholic tone that The Beach Boys’ song does if pick and choose scenes from that episode. He’s literally not from the “these” times that the show is taking place in, and his physiological differences separate him further into that state of nostalgic isolation that’s inherent in the song lyrics. “If I Ever Leave This World Alive” is a little more tricky because the events of the plague that sweeps Defiance don’t have that same kind of emotional depth and don’t communicate how high those stakes should be. If the writing of that episode focused more on the relationship between Amanda and her ex-boyfriend, not only would that have made the title more appropriate but I might have remembered the guy’s name. That’s where I think Defiance is struggling. With its imagery and titles, it feels like it’s trying to get at certain themes but it’s shoehorning them in with the expectations of them working themselves out. It’s really common for TV episodes to take their titles from songs (True Blood does this, too), but even when those songs are as famous as some of these, that shouldn’t mean that the writing can be lazy and just expect us to make the connections that it’s failing – or fumbling – at making.
All that said, Defiance is still finding ways to keep the entertainment flowing. It was surprising to get to the wedding episode of “The Bride Wore Black” (taken from the film title, but in my mind I equate it to Queensryche’s song “The Lady Wore Black”) and not be annoyed by that part of that plot that has dragged down the story in previous episodes – made all the more surprising by the fact that all wedding episodes this year will just never match up to what Game of Thrones did in its third season. Similarly, Stahma has really grown on me as a character as she’s moved away from just being a bad version of a Lady Macbeth character which was a huge relief given how good Jaime Murray was as a supporting character in Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. There are still relationships that need to be ironed out in Defiance (Nolan and Kenya, Nolan and Amanda and Amanda and any of her fellow politicians), but some of the simpler ones like Irisa and Tommy work really well with just the occasional, two-second moment that says everything it needs to (Irisa entrance into the wedding where she sits down next to Tommy, flashes her knife and holds his hand is the perfect example).
It’s hard to get much out of the villainy going on in Defiance just because it isn’t be made very clear. With the ex-mayor now having bit the dust, the Earth Republic rival of Amanda is still in the mix but is incredibly underdeveloped. And we’re not sure what exactly Doctor Yewll’s motivations are now that we’ve seen some of the darker things she’s been capable of. These things juggled alongside the more macro-level threats of the Volge keep plenty of things on the plate for Defiance, but it doesn’t feel like its first season is moving in any specific direction. That’s hardly a damning thing to say about the first season of a TV series, since that time is meant to write through a lot of story to see what works better than other things, but I’ve felt like several of these episodes have really pushed the season arc heavily without making me feel confident about where any of that is going. So, how do these last two episodes bring that stuff together? Will we be content with another impressive action sequence like the one that was used as the centerpiece for the two-part pilot? Or would we rather see some satisfying turn in some of the character stuff that has only been touched upon? Since character moments haven’t been the focus and since the show has spurned them in favor of tackling issues like discrimination and religion on a general scale and level, it makes more sense that the season should descend into a traditional third-act explosion of action-based scenes. But that means these final episodes have to pick a direction and stick with it rather than reminding us about all the little things it has introduced and expecting us to care about all of them going into the second season. Defiance has probably dug itself too big of a hole in that way, since there’s not satisfying way of concluding all the sub-plots it has introduced, but tying up one loose end effectively takes some focus off the others.