Defiance Season 3 - If You Write It

The Syfy Channel’s post alien invasion/post apocalyptic tale of a city that used to be known as St. Louis. The first season was basically a Western, with the town getting a new Marshall and fighting off the Indians, only the Indians were a rag tag group of aliens. They are long gone now.

Season 2 saw the Marshall’s daughter turn into a killing machine bent on the destruction of Earth. We abandoned any idea that Defiance might be the last free city in the world and spent a lot of time with massive CGI destruction. A few characters from the first season mysteriously disappeared, I’ll assume they got better jobs somewhere. In the end, things went from bad to worse, but the world wasn’t quite destroyed.

Season 3 is a total surprise because I assumed this old school makeup and melodrama show had gone the way of Eureka and Warehouse 13. Right off the bat several formerly major players are killed off. A race of cannibals, sort of, has moved into the mines. An army of murders with human heads on spikes is rolling toward the town. And countless random people are murdered just for the hell of it. Defiance is a lot more blood soaked than I remember.

None of these changes are good. If I want to see Walking Dead, I’ll watch Walking Dead.

Not that the show was ever about sunshine and lollipops, but these first two hours saw a lot of cold blooded murder and ended with yet another hint that the earth will soon be destroyed, one way or another. And it’s not just the bad guys indiscriminately killing people, our hero the former Marshall blows away a man who has his hands up. There’s also an odd scene where most of the ‘good’ guys rip some skin off the Doctor. I do seem to recall that she was a mass murder or something, but still, it is an odd bit of business.

In short, we now have zero good guys, and while this works well enough for Game of Thrones, Definance is no Game of Thrones.