Defiance‘s season 2 premiere last week wasn’t exactly bad. A lot of things happened, as one might expect in a premiere. But they happened too fast; plots that would have been better served by bridging them over a few episodes were wrapped up in only a few minutes. This week’s episode slows things down, and is all the better for it.
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     Defiance is a show that’s been frustrating to watch from the get-go; the initial preview released online for season 1, which was essentially the first 5-10 minutes of the show, looked great. Nolan and Irisa, driving along in their souped-up apocalypse-mobile, singing a song, there was a real sense that these two cared for each other. Then, they get stopped by a band of aliens roaming the woods, which eventually force them into the city of Defiance. It set things up nicely.

Of course, we eventually learned that Nolan is an unnecessarily violent and cruel vet and Irisa is both crazy and rebellious in that “I’m only doing this stupid thing to further the plot” sort of way. If I only had one sentence to sum up the problems with season 1, it would be that the nominal protagonists are among the least interesting and most frustrating characters on the show. Read more